The Apple 12.9-inch iPad M2 Pro, the ultimate workhorse?
A recent family vacation gave me the excuse I needed to be able to purchase myself a 12.9-inch iPad Pro M2, something I have been eyeing for some time since the previous M1 model had come out. I was intrigued by the promise of an external monitor experience that sported both a fully filled out screen, and a well-defined resolution. The question that remained, is the one everyone asks, “Can this replace your laptop?”.
I would say Yes… with some caveats, but I will get to those.
My Desired Experience
I love tech, and I love being able to have it permeate through my work and personal life, bringing value to each of those different realms. I'll be honest, I am firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem when it comes to personal devices (iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Watch etc.), which I get teased about a bit at work, considering I work for Microsoft, that being said I have a reasonable gaming rig as a PC at home for gaming and ahem work, and I use a Surface Laptop when I am in the office.
When I was looking at the idea of the M2 iPad Pro, what I really wanted was that sense of extreme mobility combined with power. I loved the whole ultraportable laptops since I was a Windows product manager, and still do, but I was keen to see how the integration of the iPad as a central point between the Apple services, personal and work could come together and be that device I take everywhere, from coffee shop, working on the device itself, to office working on one of our 34 inch monitors, to back home and pushing an ultra-wide Samsung G9 Odyssey Neo.
My Setup
As I stated I got a hold of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro Wi-Fi/Cellular model with 256 GB of storage. I never even got close to hitting the top of storage on my previous iPad Pro, which was at 256 GB, so didn’t really consider the need to go higher, plus I wanted to invest some of that money into a Magic Keyboard anyway, something that would round out the whole “Pro” experience.
There is a lot that people are saying when it comes to performance on this machine, and I will be honest, I don’t really push this hard. I am not a graphic designer, I don’t do complicated photo editing and what not, but I am a “pro-sumer” and I like having the horsepower “just in case”. What I use this for is three personas, my work persona, my study persona, and my play persona. These are the primary applications I would use for each…
Work Persona: Mostly Microsoft apps, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Remote Desktop, LinkedIn, Edge.
Study Persona: Very similar to work persona, but mostly Edge (online study for MBA), Word, PowerPoint, Excel (for assignments)
Play Persona: Streaming Apps (Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max etc.), YouTube, Apple Music, Marvel Comics, Shopping Apps, and a few games.
With those personas in mind, the setup I have at home is probably the most extreme one, so I will focus the conversation here. What you see below is my desk setup with the iPad connected.
Apart from the caveats, that I cannot take a straight pic, and the very unfortunate cable management below my desk, this is my happy home setup. I will list out the critical components here for the setup, there are some other devices here as well that are in the photo which aren’t necessarily part of the iPad setup, they serve the function for the use of the Windows PC.
Monitor: Samsung G9 Odyssey Neo 49" (https://amzn.to/3WvWVc6)
Speakers: Creative Pebbles connected to monitor (https://amzn.to/3FTunly)
Keyboard: Logitech Mechanical MX Wireless (https://amzn.to/3vlQlJ4)
Mouse: Logitech Vertical Mouse (https://amzn.to/3vu9E2V)
Dock: Razer Dock Thunderbolt 4 (https://amzn.to/3C60JZe)
Cable: Cable Creation USB-C to DisplayPort 6ft (https://amzn.to/3VuWFJ4)
I have put in affiliate links if you feel compelled to purchase, always helps out.
Connections
I’ll be honest, I had a few challenges getting this setup to work just right, and still have some things that are a little sketchy, but that could be me.
The Monitor
One of the things that drives me crazy is the fact that the Odyssey G9 Neo, which is the latest model, feels like it's taken a step backward by going from 2 display ports + 1 HDMI to 1 display port + 2 HDMI, I would rather more display ports any day. Working with that config, my PC was connected via display port to the monitor, and my Razer dock had a USB-C connection to the input device, and the dock was connected from a USB-C output to HDMI. My thought was I could just plug the iPad in to the dock that the MacBook was connected to, and all would be great, until it wasn’t.
The HDMI connection from the dock to the monitor was not giving me the desired experience of a nice clear full resolution experience. I looked at all the settings and everything seemed ok, so I changed the current USB-C cable to higher performance USB-C to HDMI cables, and still it struggled.
My next step was then to switch to USB-C to DisplayPort, and “boom” all working, that nice clear resolution filling up the 49 inches of the monitor.
You may ask, why the need for the dock? Well, the additional benefit of this going through a docking station, is the same as having a laptop connected, I get my charge on the iPad while still outputting the signal to the monitor, and with the speakers plugged in to the monitor, I am getting the audio being passed through correctly, giving me a nice way to control my music touch screen on the iPad in front of me.
Peripherals
With the display output working as required, I moved on to inputs such as keyboards and mice. This is the one thing that I was going to get worried about, with three potential devices being used on the one monitor. Would I need to get a USB switch, and how would that work between PC, MacBook and iPad. Fortunately, in my pursuit of a cleaner desk, I opted to go for a wireless keyboard and mouse setup, and while I was a little dubious about how much a wireless keyboard might impact my gaming experience playing Fortnite with my kids… I also rationalized the fact that I am not a professional gamer.
As stated earlier I opted for the Logitech series of devices, the Mechanical MX keyboard and the vertical mouse, both of which have the feature to switch between three inputs, perfect for the PC, MacBook and iPad combination.
This feature makes it super easy to just flick the input of the monitor and hit the corresponding device option on the mouse and keyboard. My Windows PC being my primary work device, is option 1, my Macbook option 2 and my iPad being option 3. This way I don’t need to switch between different input peripherals for different devices, and ultimately helps to keep a clean setup.
Challenges with this setup
Reality is, there is never going to be a perfect setup, we are close, but when there are so many inputs, outputs and applications you are going to use problems will arise, so here I will share a few of them.
The way iPadOS handles a mouse
Mouse support is great on iPadOS and is essential for this setup, but it feels somewhat imprecise in practice. That super big dot gets a little finicky on certain websites on a large screen monitor, there are times where you feel you are clicking on a link and nothing seems to happen, so you have to adjust where the cursor is ever so slightly to get the right place clicked, even though visually it seems like it's in the right place. I did learn you can increase the pointer size to the point where a second dot appears, but then you have a massive cursor to deal with, and I didn’t like that.
In addition, I didn’t like the sticky feature of the cursor, where it gets sucked into buttons to click or things to do, I found that took control away from some of the more precise motions, so I found that by going into the Accessibility menu and then Pointer Control, and turning off “Pointer Animations”, this gives you a little more precision control on your mouse positioning instead of it being sucked in to a button or option.
AirPlay unavailable when external display connected
This one baffles me, I am no iPad engineer, but I am not sure why AirPlay won't work when I am connected to an external monitor. In my study, I have a sizeable Sonos setup that I enjoy piping music to while I work from my iPhone or from the Sonos app directly, but I would have liked the option to control the music from the Apple Music app and AirPlay it to the Sonos.
The workaround to this was to use the Sonos app on the iPad and have that access the Apple Music library. I guess it works because it accesses the Apple Music library direct from the Sonos. Still… strange limitation.
Collaboration Applications not orienting camera correctly
This one is a strange one, and leads on to the next issue, but for some reason third-party collaboration software seems to get a bit of a raw deal when it comes to the camera. If you use Microsoft Teams or Zoom on the iPad screen, the orientation of your image from the camera is fine, but as soon as you take that application to the main monitor, your image is rotated ninety degrees, as if it's forcing you to have your iPad in portrait mode to use the camera on the screen. I am hoping this is a software bug, but I am not keen to having to change the orientation of my iPad for a simple meeting.
Support for an external webcam
This is one I feel is sorely needed, as you can tell from my setup, my monitor is very low to the desk, and this is due to the research I have done on monitor placement for ergonomics, where your eye line should be at the top of your monitor. Because of this, I cannot exactly have the iPad in a propped-up angle for the webcam to be able to point to me directly during calls.
While I could look at attaching a stand to the side of the desk, it takes up precious office real estate (Singapore apartments are large houses), so I have opted to have it lying slight propped up in front of me. A fantastic solution to this would be the support of an external webcam, or even better the ability to use the Continuity camera feature in iPadOS. This would really help round out the overall experience.
Disconnecting and reconnecting the external display
There is a feature in Windows 11 which I would love to see implemented in iPadOS which is to “Remember windows location based on monitor connected”. I had a heart attack when I disconnected my monitor from the iPad, and then suddenly all the apps I was using looked as if they were closed off with unsaved work. Luckily this wasn’t the case, and they were still there, but I did have to rearrange and set up the display again.
Closing Thoughts
There are those that are going to say that this is a really dumb use case, why spend such a large amount on a big monitor, only to plug an iPad in to it? Well, I will say it is niche… and maybe a little overkill, but it is an interesting use case to try out, and remember I still primarily use the Windows machine to work on most things, and maybe the MacBook for the study. End of the day, it’s a fun experiment to see how you can have this setup fully realize some of the promised capabilities of iPadOS 16.2.
I will follow up this article with the experience for taking the iPad to the office, and the connections to take with me, as a preview, I did struggle with the connecting to a work monitor, and keeping the iPad powered at the same time, but I got that worked out, and a few new connection techniques to try out. If I get the time, I might even take a moment to capture some thoughts on the gaming experience as well.
I just added a new article on my experience on the iPad for gaming on the big 49 inch monitor with an Xbox controller. The experience was very impressive, I have captured all the videos there.
