Veteran tech journalist Charles Arthur has found himself forced to try surviving with just an iPad to get through his daily workload:
A couple of weeks ago, I opened my Macbook Pro as usual. The keyboard lit up, as usual. I waited – there’s that pause while the display gathers itself (it’s a 2012 model) and the processor pulls everything together and presents the login window.
Except this time, nothing. The display didn’t light. There was the quiet sound of the fans going, but nothing. Oh dear. [So…] I turned to my iPad Pro.
That was, as I say, a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve been doing everything I’ve done on this iPad – a 12in iPad Pro, with Smart Keyboard. That means email, writing articles for papers, editing chapters for my book, composing The Overspill’s daily Start Up post, and so on.
A few years ago, this would probably have been impossible. I wouldn’t have contemplated it. Now? Getting along fine. In a number of ways, the iPad is preferable – particularly weight and connectivity. In only a couple of ways is it worse (the most notable being “lappability”). […]
I feel his pain, in the light of my recent failure of my Mac. My hardware is a lot more limited – I have an iPad Mini 4 and a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard where he’s using a 12-inch iPad Pro with an Apple Smart Keyboard – but it’s been interesting to read a professional’s take on how to make this work on an iPad. I came across what sounds like the same problem in extracting YouTube embed URLs yesterday when I was posting about black ice skating, so it’s both comforting and daunting to realise that he’s having problems with that issue too.
I suppose the big difference between our respective situations is that Charles Arthur is a journalist and author and he needs to complete his work so he’ll still get paid, whereas my problem is entirely with using my iPad Mini to write this weblog and my income doesn’t hang on making this work. [note]At work, it’s very simple. My iPad Mini simply isn’t allowed access to our work network. I do my work – which doesn’t involve anything web-based more complicated than sending emails to our suppliers pointing them to pages on our web site where they can access the information they’re asking for – with a Windows 10 laptop that still has Internet Explorer set as the default web browser.[/note]