I want to love and use my iPad Pro…but there are still too many issues!

There’s no denying that the M4 iPad Pro is gorgeous, and in part, that is what continues to draw me back to it.

After all, I’m a gadget man!

Rest assured, this isn’t going to be one of those lame stories where I make a clickbait headline-grabbing statement such as ‘I switched from Mac to iPad for a week’.

Nope, I’m as bored with those as I dare say you are.

So this story is coming from someone who wants to love the iPad Pro and use it heavily.

About this time last week, I reached for it and decided to spend as much of the week as possible using it to see how feasible it would now be after all the improvements that have come to the iPad and iPad Pro to use it as a Mac-like replacement.

I was full of high hopes and expectations, but at the end of the week, I was still left feeling slightly deflated by the iPad Pro and its limitations. But that said, I think I’ve finally worked it out and where it should sit in my working week and best I should think of it!

Oh, and in keeping with recent weeks, I went on another Slow Horses location hunt – this time looking for the church they used at the end of Season 2.

All the pictures in this story were taken with my iPhone 17 Pro Max just around the corner from that church in the shadow of The Bank of England.

M4 iPad Pro, talk to me!

Part of the reason that I decided to give the M4 iPad Pro another go was because I hadn’t given it a proper go since I’d put iPadOS 26 on it.

The little I’d seen of it, and the few times I’d tried casually using it, it seemed as if

some decent improvements had been made, and I wanted to see if they’d trickled down to normal daily use.

I’m not going to fill this story with specs and data. I guess that if you’ve clicked on this story, you probably have an iPad Pro, and it’s quite likely that you’re reading this story on it!

You’ll already know how beautiful it is to hold and use, how good the battery is and how much better it is now having the USB-C port on it. And if you’re using an M4 iPad Pro, then the last thing I need to tell you about is how chuffing brilliant that tandem OLED display is.

All of that is a given.

I’d genuinely hoped that the iPad Pro would suit me perfectly for what I get up to most days. You see, away from video editing and a bit of podcast audio work, the rest of my workflow isn’t that demanding.

There are two apps I use all the time that I’d thought the iPad Pro would gobble up – namely, Ulysses and Lightroom. Although Lightroom can become a little intensive when you start to add masks and presets, from a hardware perspective, the iPad should be more than up to it.

Yet both of those apps threw up problems that I wasn’t expecting, and that ultimately made the iPad Pro a slower working environment for me than the Mac.

Getting down to business

Last week’s story – M4 Pro Mac mini — was it the right choice? – was written and published entirely on my M4 iPad Pro.

On the face of it, I bet you’re probably thinking why I’d even mention it, right? I mean, that’s such a basic task. Well, although the writing part is smooth enough on the iPad Pro, to get the story ready to publish, there are a few things I need to tidy up before I can hit the publish button.

The first of those is adding pictures to the story.

In essence, what I need to do works in precisely the same way on the Mac or iPad Pro, but it’s still so much simpler on a Mac.

I take all my pictures Raw, which means first I need to edit them in Lightroom. For Medium, all that means is adding some colour and possibly cropping the image a bit. That’s it. On the Mac, I then export the photos to my downloads and reduce the file size to something more web-friendly in Photoshop.

Then it’s simply a case of grabbing them from that folder and dropping them into the story. The workflow is super-simple on a Mac. But even though we now have the downloads folder on the iPad and you can quickly create new folders in there, in reality, it remains cumbersome and awkward on the iPad Pro. Somehow and for some reason, it just doesn’t flow.

File management, it turns out, is still not the iPad Pro’s best friend.

The basics

Other than adding the photos as I’m writing, I like to have Grammarly check my spelling, grammar and punctuation.

On a Mac, there is zero friction – it just works. On the iPad, though, it’s bloody fiddly. First, as far as I can tell, I have to detach the iPad from the keyboard (more on that in a bit), and then hit the Globe or Function Key. Doing that will finally pull up the option to run Grammarly.

Although I like the way Grammarly looks, behaves and makes suggestions to me on the iPad, there’s another hidden issue that I came across. As I hadn’t used Grammarly to check a story in Ulysses for a while, for peace of mind, I ran Grammarly on the same piece on one of my Macs.

Guess what? It found numerous other typos that the iPad version didn’t come across. I know this is an app issue and not an iPad problem, but even so, it left me feeling that I couldn’t rely on the iPad.

And then there’s the Magic Keyboard. Now, don’t get me wrong, much like the iPad Pro itself, the keyboard is beautiful and tactile to use. The finish, the trackpad and key travel are perfect, but there is still another niggle I ran into.

I’ll be typing away, and all of a sudden, the return key just stops working. No matter how many times I keep hitting the key, nothing happens. I hardly write in any other apps on the iPad, so again, this may be particular to Ulysses, but these anomalies crop up too often for my liking.

So far, the only way I’ve found to sort the issue is to remove the iPad from the keyboard – again! The irony is that part of the reason for writing in Ulysses is that it’s a markdown writers app, which is supposed to give me a distraction-free writing environment to work in.

But as you can tell, in reality, it’s anything but distraction-free. And this is typical of the kind of problems I faced using the iPad across the board last week.

Light Fantastic

I post a picture every day to the Lightroom community, and to both Instagram and Threads.

I honestly thought that the iPad with its stunning display and Apple Pencil would shine. Whilst the display and pencil are a fantastic combo, once again, it’s the iPad version of Lightroom that I find lacking.

Features like the Landscape mask and point colour are missing, which means I could only get so far in editing a photo before having to hand it back over to the Mac to finish up.

This really surprised me. I was so looking forward to editing in Lightroom on the iPad, but again, the reality didn’t live up to the dream.

The YouTube Studio app is something else I use every day to answer comments, yet that too is slower, clunkier and glitchier on the iPad. If I click through to type and reply to a viewer’s comment, once the comment is posted, the thread of comments greys out. There is no simple way out. I’ve found that the only solution is to close the app and start over.

This solution is too regular for my liking.

I’ve deleted Final Cut from the iPad and stopped paying the sub as well. I’ve proven to myself that I can edit a video on the iPad Pro, but much like Lightroom, it can’t get the job done but not as efficiently. Final Cut works smoothly enough, but again, it’s just a slower way of working.

iPad improvements

As I mentioned earlier, this is the first time that I’ve used the iPad over a sustained period of time since the OS 26 updates landed.

They’ve made huge improvements in working on the iPad without a doubt. I love the Mac-like traffic lights to close or expand an app. The handles at the bottom of the screen to resize the window are neat and smooth, and I love the new windowing feature. The download folder, although not yet a perfect solution, is a big step forward.

Other small Mac-like tweaks, such as the menu bar for apps, are a welcome addition to working on the iPad. Details like that make it feel more intuitive and should help make me want to reach for my iPad Pro more.

And although none of the apps I’ve mentioned come anywhere near pushing the grunt that my 1TB M4 Pro iPad undoubtedly has, it still feels slower and more cumbersome to navigate and use, which, at the end of the day, will stop me from working on it regularly.

Now I get it

Last week was a fascinating look at where we are with the iPad as it stands, and I think I realise now what it is and what its best use case is.

I need to stop trying to make it something it’s not.

I don’t think that the iPad shines as a standalone device – there are still too many drawbacks, and many of those lie at the collective doors of the app developers.

But last week it suddenly dawned on me that using the iPad along with my Macs rather than by itself is how the iPad should be used. Sidecar, extended and mirrored display and Universal Control are perfect examples of when having an iPad on my desk works at its best.

While you could argue it’s a very expensive second display, being part of that workflow brings the iPad to life. Using it as an extended display means I can now use the best display I have to edit photos on, for example, whilst still retaining all of the Mac’s superior app functionality.

Apple have this year made the iPad more of a serious contender and shown it some love, but in my mind it’s still a long way from replacing my Mac.

Possibly it’s because I’m a Mac user first and foremost, but the iPad alone still lets me down and disappoints me too often to let me consider using it by itself regularly.

For instance, I’ll be flying to CES in January, and as it stands, I’m not certain if I’ll even be taking it with me.

That last sentence alone should tell you how I feel about my M4 iPad Pro.

From now on, I’m going to stop thinking of the iPad Pro as a Mac replacement and simply think of it more as part of my Mac workflow.

That way I’ll finally get the most out of it!