iPad Desk Mode
Ever since I upgraded my home office with a new desk, Mac mini, and UltraFine 4K monitor in November 2018, I’ve been working toward a single goal: building a setup that would allow me to use the same external display and keyboard with two different computers and OSes – the Mac mini and iPad Pro. Same desk, two vastly different experiences. It took me a while, but thanks to the improvements in iPadOS 13.4 (and a late realization on my part), I’m happy to say I finally have the “desktop iPad Pro” setup I’ve long desired.
[…]
In practice, the net result of Apple’s pointer efforts is a comprehensive system that lets me fully control the iPadOS UI mirrored on my UltraFine 4K monitor without ever touching the iPad Pro. This has fundamentally altered the ergonomics of my setup and improved how quickly I can get work done with multiple apps in this configuration.
With a native pointer, I can finally select text with higher precision than multitouch without taking my hands off the keyboard and trackpad in front of me.
Previously:
- iPad Pro 2020 and Magic Keyboard With Trackpad
- iPad at 10
- Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
Still got big fat borders on that very expensive screen, clearly not utilising it to the maximum capacity.
It would irate me to have two screens in my FOV showing exactly the same thing.
I'm ready to go all in on an iPad as my main "desktop" driver. But I need Apple to pull it's finger out and make it utilise an external screen in full wide mode, and allow it to run as a seperate desktop much like how you can use the ipad as a sidecare to your MacOS, but in reverse.
While Federico is clearly at the leading edge of pushing the envelope of using i(Pad)OS as a desktop computer, at the end of the day, this, and pretty much everything he does, all looks like kludges on top of kludges.
When you look across the fence at how this sort of thing is handled on a Surface tablet, you can have dual external displays, as well as the Surface's display, the desktop tiles (without letterboxing) across all three, the UI shifts to be desktop-oriented when docked etc. Go look for some of the (dual screen) docking options that mount the Surface vertically on the side of one display - it's the promise Thunderbolt was meant to fulfil, but never really achieved.
Just wish the Surface would adopt the higher screen refresh rate of the iPad Pro, it makes such a noticeable difference when drawing.
