Where does the iPad fit in?

Matt Birchler sold his iPad to help fund his Vision Pro purchase, which got me thinking about where my iPad fits in for me.

There’ve been a few times in recent memory when I’ve been without my iPad. For example, when I fly for work abroad I often need to keep my tech to a minimum. (Minus my camera gear, of course.) In this situation my iPad is left behind in favour of my Macbook, since the latter is far more functional and lets me get the editing started in Final Cut Pro.

It’s on these occasions that — like Matt — I miss my iPad. In fact, I would be incredibly reluctant to live without one in my life. Yet, the iPad still feels like it’s finding a place as far as work and productivity goes. So which is it? Is it an indispensable tool or is it a toy?

How I get my work done

At work, we have a mixture of a Mac Studio, a Macbook Pro, 27" iMacs and Mac Minis that we use for our production tasks. For example, video editing and live streaming.

These are owned by my company, but because we’re a small business I’m still responsible for running and maintaining them. I consider them “mine” in the sense that I can use them however I wish to get the work done. There’s no IT manager telling me what I can and can’t install, for example.

They’re also effectively communal computers, so I’ll use all of them at various times for different tasks. In the past, these production computers would be personally assigned to members of staff. So whichever computer was “mine” would have all of my emails, calendars, and other admin tools on it too. But when I purchased our Mac Studio, I decided to make them communal so that the person doing the most editing on any given day could use the fastest computer we have available. (As you can imagine, since I run the company, I can quite easily spend a day or two in the office dealing with emails and admin tasks, without even so much as a glance at Final Cut Pro’s icon — let alone opening the app. But when I come to do some video editing, I sure as heck want to use our latest and greatest hardware for it.)

So these computers deal with all of the heavy lifting for my actual work. Some Macs, like the Mac Studio, are permanently installed in the office and are editing machines. Some of our Mac Minis are installed in flight cases along with other equipment for running our live streams (although we also have one permanently in the office that handles our data management). And everything else tends to move about depending on the jobs we’re doing. Our 27" iMacs, for example, often go out on live streaming jobs — we have specially made flight cases for them so that they don’t get damaged in transit.

And for the less exciting work

For handling all of my non-production work, I have a 13" M1 Macbook Air which I take almost everywhere with me. It’s an incredible computer — probably the best Mac I’ve ever owned.

I use this for all of my emails, calendar management, task management, finances, production planning, and pretty much everything else that doesn’t fall under “production work”; although I do use it for video and photo editing when I travel, and it has been used as part of many of my live streaming workflows. Those M1 chips are very capable!

Oh, and I’ll also frequently take it up on cherry pickers and scissors lifts to offload and manage footage from our time-lapse cameras, which we install on construction sites and similar environments. Don’t let the “Air” moniker fool you — these computers are very suitable for professional tasks.

In theory, everything I’ve described above is possible to accomplish on an iPad. But MacOS is simply more reliable and capable. From obvious things, like the variety of software available on the Mac, to less visible things like the way MacOS handles app multitasking, I know that if I take my Mac on a job it will handle whatever gets thrown at it. I simply can’t say that same about my iPad.

iPadOS has a “death by a thousand cuts” issue, where all of the little things it can’t do results in the iPad being unreliable for anything particularly mission critical. On my iPad, if I start uploading a big video file to WeTransfer or Frame.io in Safari, the system will almost certainly boot it from memory before it’s finished the upload unless I keep that Safari tab open in front of me the whole time. (MacOS Safari can be finicky about these things too, but it’s to nowhere near the same level.)

So for now, and the foreseeable future, it’s MacOS all the way for me when it comes to getting serious work done — whether that’s production work, or admin work.

Where the iPhone fits in

I have two iPhones — a work phone and a personal phone.

My work phone is connected up to my emails, and also handles all of the Google Chat, WhatsApp and LinkedIn messages I get from colleagues and clients. I turn it off at weekends, or when I go on holiday, which is fantastic for improving my work-life balance. (I have a very strict rule that none of my colleagues or clients are allowed my personal number!)

My personal phone by contrast is for messaging my friends and family, browsing social media, and also for entertainment — like reading RSS, watching videos on YouTube, and playing Pokémon Go. Basically, normal phone stuff.

Since my son’s birth almost two years ago, I’ve come to rely on my iPhone a lot more for these sorts of tasks. For watching YouTube or streaming TV next to him (with Airpods in) while he falls asleep, or for catching up on my RSS feeds while he naps in the car while my partner goes shopping.

My iPhone is great for those brief moments of screen time, which may be interrupted at any time by the outside world. I can immediately slip it back into my pocket and return to whatever meatspace event needs my attention, which isn’t easy with bigger devices.

The iPhone is a fantastic phone; I’ve had an iPhone since the iPhone 3G came out. But my iPhone is not my favourite device. I like it — but like Matt, I don’t love how small and constrained the device is. It’s not a great experience for most of the things it can be used for.

I recall an episode of Cortex where CGP Grey and Myke Hurley were despairing at the fact that some people only use a smartphone at home, and don’t own an iPad or tablet for doing “couch computing”. And I was right there nodding along with them. My partner is one of those people and I’m always perplexed by why she doesn’t opt for something bigger and nicer to use when she’s not on the go. (She’s got an old iPad Air, but it’s gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.)

The role of the iPad

So where does the iPad fit in with all of this?

My iPad cannot be my production machine. It doesn’t run the full version of Final Cut Pro or Adobe’s apps. It doesn’t run Blackmagic’s ATEM Control or have drivers for Blackmagic Ultrastudio hardware. It doesn’t have enough I/O for all of my hard drives, let alone the ability to run software like CarbonCopyCloner or ChronoSync to manage those drives properly.

But my iPad can be used as a teleprompter with the right accessory for my camera. It can be used for drawing sketches of my tech plans for live streams with an Apple Pencil. It can act as a monitor to allow a presenter to get Q&A questions from Slido, Zoom or Teams during a live stream; far more discretely than a laptop or computer monitor could.

My iPad also cannot be my admin machine. It doesn’t run full, desktop versions of Chrome, Teams, or Zoom. It ejects apps and tabs from memory while tasks like uploads and file transfers are still running. And you can’t be certain that it will work properly with whatever hardware or software you might need it to interface with when you’re out and about — including (but not limited to) projectors and TVs for giving presentations.

But my iPad can be used with cellular, so I don’t need to tether my phone or connect to Wi-Fi everywhere I go. And I can quickly check emails, messages and social media using the same lightweight apps I have on my phone.

In short, my iPad is a big iPhone, but with more room to breathe. It can load desktop-size websites, and put two or more apps next to each other on the same screen. It can be used with a keyboard to make writing long text easier — like emails, proposals, and this very post.

The iPad is a couch computer. It’s also a coffee shop computer, and an airport / train station computer, and a breakfast table computer. It’s a computer for all of the places where using a laptop would feel like too much of a commitment, and when a phone feels limiting.

Steve Jobs explicitly told us this on the day Apple unveiled the device, by demoing the original iPad from an armchair. Yet at some point we started to expect the iPad to become something more.

Perhaps it was a mistake for Apple to have ever made an iPad “Pro”…?