Feb 17, 2024

Using the Apple iPad Pro 12.9'' 5th Generation

I used the Apple iPad Pro 12.9'' 5th Generation for a few days to test if I could use it as a daily driver. In general, it is quite astonishing how tight I am used to the desktop concept and only have little interest to change this towards a touch workflow with a touch keyboard only.

The device is really nice, I am using it with the Logitech Slim Folio Pro keyboard, which worked well - once I had the Bluetooth connection established. It has the same layout as the Logitech Combo Touch, but lacks the trackpad.

Instead I had an original Apple Magic Mouse (yes, the one from 2009) around, which also connected well through Bluetooth.

So I did take the full Apple experience.

Onboarding & Privacy

While I could initialize the device without an Apple-ID - you need one to download any app from the App Store. This might change in the future as the Digital markets act (DMA) is decided. One can expect Apple to do the bare minimum it is regulatory required and will set a price tag to the usage of such “alternative app marketplaces” though - so I don’t think that the situation will improve in that regards.

At least I did not have to enter any credit card issues, a phone number and verified e-mail is required for the account creation though.

When opening most of the Apple pre-installed apps for the first time - privacy information banners are shown and have to be accepted - which is in general a good thing and Apple is very transparent in that regards. This also mentions that data is collected to improve a weather service or app store interaction, though I don’t see a reason to trust one corporation more than the other spying/tracking companies.

Browser

Of course, on iOS we only have the option to use Safari as a Browser (or other wrappers from the app store which also can only rely on the Apple WebKit Browser Engine) - therefore not having the option to use extensions in Firefox on iPad.

On my other devices I am using Firefox with two very important Extensions which are:

As we are stuck on Safari, we need to use the Extension Ecosystem there. This includes downloading an application from the AppStore and enabling it as an Extension to Safari. My replacement for the above apps were therefore:

  • Hush - which removes some of the cookie banners
  • AdGuard - which blocks ads - and also has a pro-version with a local DNS resolver VPN as known on Android and a VPN service

This worked in general quite well, though this is a typical example of how closed this ecosystem is.

Yubikey

As already noted, the only Web Browser we can use is Safari - unfortunately, it lacks support for my FIDO2 Yubikey. My 2FA for work is therefore not working on this device and I can not login to my work, which is using Cisco services.

I can therefore not login using the Cisco “Secure” Client VPN which relies on the Web-Browser for the SSO portal. However, it worked for the Cisco Webex App, which somehow has a way to login and use 2FA directly inside the app using the Yubikey. So FIDO2 keys are working in general.

This is also said to be the case for U2F SSH Keys like ed25519-sk. Termius might support these, though one needs a pro version and the trial version does also rely on an account which I did not want to create just for an SSH client application.

Remote access

There are various clients for VNC and RDP on the App Store, I settled with the official Microsoft-Remotedesktop Client after I could not get the Mochasoft RDP Lite client to work. However the Microsoft RDP client did have the problem of having scaling issues, in which the mouse on the screen does move faster than the mouse on the VM, creating an unusable experience - the keyboard worked fine however.

For VMs the best I had was using the proxmox noVNC viewer, which worked reliable, but does not have clipboard access and other convenience features I am used from SPICE. Oh yeah, there is also a SPICE client for iPad - though I did not try it.

SSH worked with termius quite well, I did have the problem of finding the pipe operator | but termius has an on-screen keyboard for extra keys which worked well.

So in general it could work to use the iPad to connect to other devices remotely, but even the Logitech keyboard is quite small and does not have all the keys I’d like to have.

A proper keyboard, video and mouse setup would be quite cool, wouldn’t it?

Desktop Mode

I was in love with the idea of having a single device for all purposes since I heard it. This device should cover the use cases of a smartphone, working on the go and being the main driver for desktop work at the same time. The idea was first introduced to me through Continuum and the Microsoft Lumia 950 in 2015, which is now 9 years ago. Samsung took over the idea in the meantime with Samsung DeX (for Desktop Experience) - which is the best we currently have when trying to use a phone as a desktop - though it is not nearly perfect. However, development has stalled on DeX for 4 years or something.

I revisited the idea in my post about my Fairphone 4 - which I also tried using with Linux. Looking into Ubuntu Touch I stumbled across Convergence - which is the features name there.

On (stock) Android, there is this developer setting “Force desktop mode” which enables a basic desktop mode, without a lot of features too.

iPad docking

I am always testing such features with the Dell WD19 docking station, which has a typical USB-C port and two displays attached. Everything worked out of the box when connecting the iPad - which asked to enable the multi-windows feature called “Stage Manager”.

Using two external monitors is not one of the supported use cases of this feature, as there is only the option to mirror all screens or extend another setup. This leads to a setup where the same is shown on all external screens, while something else can be used on the main ipad screen. Thinking about it - mirroring two screens, while extending the third is not possible on windows or linux desktops typically. So this might also be a weird feature :D This is also the same case for the Stock Android desktop mode, while I think that DeX supports multi window too.

Using a mouse, it is only possible to move from the main screen towards the extended screens by moving the mouse out on the upper side of the main screen, while my monitor sits to the right of the iPad. I did not find a way to configure this differently.

using the iPad in desktop mode

Somehow scrolling gestures did not work for the Apple Magic Mouse for whatever reason. Using my USB mouse, it did scroll inverted, so I had to uncheck the “Natural scrolling” setting on the mouse in General -> Trackpad & Mouse-> Natural Scrolling. The navigation/browsing buttons on my mouse did not work either, I could give these a separate action in the settings, but “Navigate Forward”/“Navigate Back” were none of these.

Most of the typical shortcuts were working quite well, for example to enter the adress bar - though one has to use the cmd key instead of the ctrl key for most shortcuts.

Developing

There are no good free development tools for the iPad.

I tried using PolyGit - which is a Git client which has 3 pushes free per day. Sure. CodeSandbox and CodeSnack IDE both wanted me to create an account first, which I found unsuitable amount of work to test the apps. These apps typically connect to a remote coding environment and allow working in some kind of container.

So I did not try coding on the iPad directly yet, it is much easier to work remotely using JupyterHub or vscode.dev (which only requires the github account)

Conclusion

I don’t think I will understand how one can put the @ key to something like alt+L and have an additional cmd key which makes everything super weird on these Apple devices, but these are rather historic reasons.

The iPad Pro is a very capable device which has very good speakers and a good screen - so it is optimal for watching movies and things like that. The advertisement of Apple is, that one can work on the Pro which is not really the case for me. It might not be the iPad itself, but the way I am used to using computers on multiple screens, working on a typical laptop with a trackpad and without a touchscreen at all. But the lack of Apps, especially free and open-source apps like I am used to on the F-Droid or Debian Ecosystem makes this ecosystem very suboptimal at least.

I want to mention two very positive examples though which are

  • Keepassium - the best Keepass password manager for iOS
  • Nextcloud - the nextcloud ecosystem which is the same free open-source community as on other plattforms

Playing around with the GarageBand app is also a lot of fun, though I don’t have the feeling, that this app changed fundamentaly in the last 10 years or something. Especially for the creative parts - like composing, drawing, cutting, designing - the Apple Ecosystem seems to be matching a lot better.

Furthermore, I did not get very warm with the usage patterns on the iPad and have the feeling that finger and hand movements are much further than on my typical laptop experience.

Eventually the dream of useful convertibles did already end for me without me noticing, as there is not much to optimize in kinds of usability, mobility and performance from my current Laptop setup with an USB-C dock.

This made also very clear to me, that my current workflow of using technology devices is already quite efficient - or eventually, I am becoming stubborn to new things too.