Pros and Cons

Talk about timing.

When iOS 11 public beta launched to the public, we thought, "Hey, why not try it on our iPad mini 3 since we don't really use it as a daily driver. Plus iOS 11 is meant for the iPad rather."

And so we did. Did it with eyes open that there may be crashes, battery drainage, etc.

And what with our timing, after installing the public beta, our iPad usage increased. Not because of the added productivity iOS 11 brings - drag and drop doesn't work with all apps yet and the iPad mini 3 doesn't have split screen - but because of universal apps and choir.

Yeah choir.

We decided to splurge on Notion to create midis of the songs we're learning (as reference to practise our parts), because being able to do it anywhere on the iPad rather than having to do it when we're in front of our PC had a certain appeal. While it took a bit of learning what we can do on Notion and its limitations, we're happy enough to be using it quite a fair bit.

So long as it didn't crash. And if it did, fingers crossed it saved most of our work.

And asides from midis, we've been helping out with photo editing as well. And for that, we have Pixelmator.

(Here we take a moment to really regret installing iOS 11, as we no longer can use Photoshop Touch - our go to app for photo editing on the iPad. Honestly the level of control we had when tracing the outlines of people with a stylus on the iPad was so much better than magnetic tracing using a mouse.)

For the most part, Pixelmator does a great job. Took a lot more figuring out where things were and how it works, but for simple edits it was great. iCloud syncing meant we can work on either iPad, iPhone or on the Mac (we bought the Mac version as well because it was so much more affordable compared to Photoshop!).

And then there's Pages for taking notes. Prettier than Google Docs.

But we're not sure if it's the processing power of the iPad mini 3, or the bugginess of iOS 11, or a combination of both but there were times when doing any sort of work would feel like our iPad isn't able to cope until it resets. And even when it doesn't feel like a memory issue, photo editing can sometimes be a tad...slow.

Such that it's got us itchy for the iPad Pro 10.5".

We've tried the Smart Keyboard and it feels comfortably spaced enough for us to touch type. And there's the Apple Pencil. Both which would be useful.

Overall this adds up to a bill of RM4k which makes us think more than twice actually. Considering we are also curious about the new iPhone 8/iPhone Pro/iPhone Edition which would prob be RM5k++.

We know, if we do consider seriously the iPad Pro, the moment we get it...the choir production will be over and there won't be much heavy use by then -_-"