Small mishaps that come together and form a big problem
First of all, I remember that two important points must be taken into account. First, this is my purely personal experience and therefore I am not saying that iPadOS does not serve as a replacement for macOS inside a laptop. Each person has their needs.
The second point is that none of these features have been directly responsible for my ending up buying a MacBook Air. The cause has been the accumulation of several of them that, together, represented a reduction in productivity that has become too great for what I need. I will list these details.
- The iPad Pro Magic Keyboard no escape key. That forced me to resort to the cursor for certain navigation gestures. I also don’t have the ability to delete text from the left (what we would call ‘Suppress‘), not even with a key combination like I can do on macOS.
- The bluetooth mouse that I used with the iPad Pro (a Logitech MX Anywhere 2S) had too much latency to work well with it. I could use it with a cable, but that already forced me to resort to a USB to USB-C adapter.
- The iPad’s Magic Keyboard trackpad works fine, but on several occasions it would unwanted actions. For example, scrolling to the top of a website with some momentum often caused the website to reload.
- Google Chrome on iPadOS doesn’t support features that I use a lot on macOS, like the search shortcuts from the address bar itself. It’s something I always miss so much when I walk away from my desk.
- iPadOS has good ways to switch between apps, but even using keyboard CMD+TAB I found it more tedious to switch between those apps. The animations lengthened it and the multitask it restricted me in a way that forced me to switch between those apps more frequently. Stage Manager has not convinced me too much knowing that with macOS window management is instantaneous.
- Some apps like Slack wouldn’t let me copy and paste the text of their messages correctly, forcing me to make detours. Selecting that text also took me more time even using a mouse: the cursor doesn’t adapt well to that selection unless the application developer has implemented the system well. Unfortunately it doesn’t usually happen.
- The image edition it was much heavier on iPadOS than it was on macOS. I use Pixelmator on both platforms, but a multi-layered image on iPadOS was very cumbersome to edit because of the interface. This is one of the bottleneck largest I’ve ever had: what in macOS took 3 minutes to finish, in iPadOS it took quietly triple.
- The image management which relies entirely on the Photos app also slowed down my work quite a bit.
- In the Calendaran application that I use as a calendar and that is therefore basic for me, even if I tell it that I want to load all the events in it, it only allows me to locate events from the last two years in the search engine.
- There were some work tasks, like download some videoswhich due to service and platform limitations made it almost impossible for me.
- In iPadOS it is impossible to open web pages with various rendering engines. Chrome, Firefox, Brave and other alternatives are forced to use the Safari engine by Apple’s rules.
- Safari on iPadOS prevents me pin tabs. In macOS I usually have about seven or eight permanently pinned, and I’m one of the colleagues with the fewest pinned tabs.
- In several aspects of the iPad, what in macOS is solved with a drag and drop in iPadOS requires me to navigate through several steps of the Share menu.
- Some services I use to work like pose they have a user experience in iOS that I do not hesitate to consider as terrible. Also, trying to use the web from Safari as an alternative causes it to jump back to the app.
- The use of the applications themselves on the iPad has a lot to improve. Sometimes when a YouTube video is sent to me from Telegram, I have to open it, tap the icon to watch it in Safari, and then tap the button to open it in the native YouTube app. Three app changes to watch a video. It is one of the most frustrating and most homework iPadOS points.
As you can see, there are many little things that add up and together they take up too much time forcing me to do too many detours. When you use the iPad occasionally, you assume it, but when that use rises to more than an hour a day, the time you lose is already unaffordable. And I insist: this is my personal situation, and I have no doubt that for someone else iPadOS may be perfect.
I also want to emphasize that iPadOS has many good things: Siri Shortcuts have successfully covered a number of these tasks for me, and the combination of the touch screen and the Magic Keyboard is a hit. But personally it is no longer enough for me, hence my return to a MacBook with macOS with which I have already noticed a noticeable increase in productivity.
I end by stating very clearly that I’m not going to stop being interested in iPadOS: I’m really looking forward to seeing what Apple has in store for it and how it tries to continue to approach a full desktop experience. We’ll see if he succeeds over the years. At the moment, with me they have a user who has had no choice but to give up.