Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all.

Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply).

I primarily use mine for

* Note taking

* Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible.

* Sketching for construction drawings

But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.

Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting.

It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad.

Also ad blocker support is limited.

Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.

" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me."

Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air?

Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.

The biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around.If you don't need to multitask - iPad is OK.

I tried going all iPad and my husband opted for iPad Pro as personal computer - it is woefully underutilized.

"And that's not just me"

The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?

I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't think doing any meaningful work without access to the filesystem.

Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result.

Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough.

Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS.

Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.

This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only.

And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device.

Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.

I wonder who at mega bank and hedge fund isn't using excel...

My experience at mega bank is that the IT department is often delusional about what business users actually do.

> don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad

This is what everyone I know with both devices does. I still prefer my Mac, but I'm in the minority in the under-fifty crowd.

I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.)

Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).

IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.

> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.

Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen.

You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)

You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails.

It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny.

This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.

>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.

Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?

I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard).

That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.

A few questions since this is a novel thing I haven't really heard of in the business world!

1) What tasks do the people you manage tend to do on their machines?

2) Why replace the laptops with iPads if you expected it to be disruptive for a month?

Why do the support costs go to zero? I would think iPads would bring their own set of problems/hazards that laptops may not have.

Are you talking about second screen as in Sidecar - or just to open the same app that you would use a Macbook for - eg Slack, email?

I think there's a big difference between traveling with an iPad Pro and only having an iPad Pro.

> Two screens are better than one

Seems annoying actually.