I decided to share this thoughts, cause of purchasing new iPad pro. I was thinking for last few years, do I really need an iPad? I used to think that it’s completely useless device. If I have MacBook as main working machine and iPhone as secondary/helper. I’m going to talk about this device from programmer/manager perspective.

Zoom, right?

MacBook has the shittiest camera on the market, for some of my coworkers it doesn’t sound as disadvantage, because they simply don’t use camera for syncs and meetings. True for programmers who sit in the most dark corner of the room. But for me it’s important to clearly see the person to whom I’m talking to. Hope I’m not only one who has this preferences. iPad has brilliant front camera for that kind of use and you can plug and play it to your zoom or any other conference apps. While you on the meeting via your iPad you can use your main laptop without any losses and slow downs. I hate how zoom opens on MacBook, it crashes time to time, on other hand on iPad I didn’t have such an experience - one tap and you online. If you use g-calendar + zoom, jitsi or any other meeting tools you can jump to the sync with one single tap, by moving your calendar to “Today View”.

This works for family or friends video calls as well. It’s way way better than MacBook video call experience.

Chatting, emails and other irritants.

Once you are trying to focus on your important document or code and build best solution in the world you have quite a few notifications which divert you off from reaching your nirvana. I stopped opening slack on my laptop, so while I’m focusing nothing is disturbing me. Once you need to do a mind break, you just stray in your comfy chair and read slack channels, read some emails or even check GitHub notification (which I really like, but majority of my friends don’t agree with me).

Battery life over performance.

I have quite powerful laptop for my needs, MBP 15 with 6 cores to compile projects, run 10 services in docker and have 3-4 ides opened. Cons of that - you are not able to work even on simple G documents and web surfing for long time on battery life. Powerful hardware drink battery juice in 2-3 hours. On iPad side you have pretty powerful hardware as well. I know few friends who is doing moviemaking and photo editing on iPad. But battery.. You can work with docs and surf in safari forever. I never ran out of battery in the end of the day. So, for tasks such as calendar, docs, web surfing and doing some notes - iPad is my choice. Since its apple, you have nice ecosystem to sync all your stuff to other devices or simply use g-docs.

Ergonomics.

During the lunch or in the evening I would like to watch some news or a series. Bring laptop, unplug all devices such as dongles, keyboard, power adapter etc quite uncomfortable or it even might be without a battery. I started using iPad for that needs. No coolers noise, its not overheating and screen seems to be a bit better. Yes, screen is smaller but if you watch it alone who cares.

Another interesting use case which works for me - watch youtube during doing some routine job - filling some nums to excel or stuff like that, you understood me.. Basically iPad works here as external screen. I even saw app as I remember duet, which can transform your iPad to external screen.

Games.

Do I need to explain anything here? Just try to play on MacBook, lets say Grid… And compare it to iPad. No overheating, no Langs, no super noisy fans. All in all - much smoother experience and luckily external joystick support. To go to next level you can plug tablet to your TV via hdmi.. I started using iPad as my main gaming device. Hearthstone, CoD and a lot of other good releases. Still trying to gather all best iOS games in a single list.

Worth it?

What I wrote above - my thoughts and experience based on my lifestyle and work specific, I found iPad interesting add-on to your main working machine. And before I was thinking about 1-2 years about buying it, iPad seemed useless to me. Because I had first iPad (its still alive) just to read some books and play few dummy games nothing more. Keep in mind that world a bit changed… And now I finally tried it again in a new use cases and wrote down my experience about it. Im super happy that I order it and gave a second try. Hope my thoughts are going to help you with decision.

Not sure if it useful to anyone, but i decided to share it. Photo from @kewal