Using an iPad for real, part 1 – possibilities
My trials and tribulations using the iPad for work…
So I bought my iPad Pro a year or so ago, complete with Apple keyboard case, and the Apple Pencil.
Given that I went to art college, I thought I might be able to use it a lot more for drawing and sketching etc. Whilst it works really well, and there are plenty of very good applications, both free and paid, the reality is I don’t have enough time (at the moment) to do lots of drawing for pleasure. Sigh. But it is something I want to return to in the future for sure.
In the last month I encountered a new reason to look a my iPad again. My trusty MacBook Pro is now almost years old, and cannot upgrade to macOS Mojave. That’s OK, I can still use it very happily for web browsing, and as a backup laptop. The machine owes me nothing financially. I upgraded it a few years ago – maxed out the memory and replaced the 5,400rpm rotational drive with a 1Tb super fast SSD from Other World Computing https://eshop.macsales.com (who I highly recommend). That laptop has been around the world with me many times, and should have its own Air Miles account.
But now I find my MacBook Air, my current workhorse laptop, has started developing battery / hibernate / wake-up issues. Every now and again it “thinks” it’s got no power and flashes the battery screen. But, plug it in, and it’s 100%. So, looks like this 2012 machine is also reaching the end of its life … but again it has been used for hours almost every day since new.
I’m thinking I will replace the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with a single laptop (probably a top spec large scree MacBook Pro), and use the iPad Pro as my main mobile solution (e.g. when I go to a cafe, or in the evenings with the kids around). I don’t expect to run MAMP or a Moodle development environment of course. But just how much can the iPad Pro do, and how close can I get it to a MacBook Air in reality?
So, I’m going to start using my iPad Pro as a ‘stand in’ and see how much I can really use it instead of a laptop. The question in my mind is “Can I use an iPad instead of a laptop 99% of the time?”
Follow this monthly post to find out what I find…
- H5P periodic table – 8th September 2023
- Moodle 4.0 – 15th May 2022
- Moodle 4.0 other highlights – 14th May 2022
