I had imagined writing this post while on a plane when I first conceived of the experiment. Writing it on a tray table while heading to another continent would have been appropriate, given the size constraints of that space. And it would have offered an air of romance and glamor (so long as you didn’t think too much about the absence of glamor in economy) to boot.
The only reason I'm not is that I have found myself beginning the experiment a good three days sooner than I had expected.
It's probably for the best that I have. Despite this blog's title, it's been a while since my iPad usage truly felt experimental. For several years, almost all of my computing has been done on iPads and it is all but frictionless. The platform is sufficiently mature that no one would be surprised at what I can and will do on a daily basis. And when surprises have occurred, it has been cases of people not knowing there was a good app for that rather than surprise at the iPad’s capabilities.
But there still remains room for experimentation.
It will surprise almost no one that this focus of my experiment is the iPad Mini.
What challenges and benefits will I encounter in using the Mini instead of my iPad Pro?
I want to stress my turn of phrase here. What challenges and benefits. Too often, we try to ask if one device can replace or absorb the role of the other. “Can an iPad replace a laptop?” is the most obvious example of this kind of framework.
The real question is what limitations are you willing to accept so you can take advantage of desired benefits.
And my answer is, and has been since the arrival of the original iPad, that it depends on what you are doing and what set of tradeoffs you are willing to make. I could almost immediately say yes, based on my work’s demands (No special Windows-based programs limited me often enough for it to matter.) and my preference for the form factor.
There were trade offs, of course. Printing was a problem back then but I was willing to email files to my Mac laptop or work desktop to enjoy the device I preferred.
I can already predict some of the challenges with this experiment. I am already encountering some benefits.
What I will not be doing is leaving my iPad Pro at home during this experiment. It is too early in this process and I still have work to do. Some of that work, I may discover, requires going back to the iPad Pro and its Magic Keyboard.
I suspect there will be an entire post on this, but the word keyboard is the biggest conceptual change I will face. This experiment involves me using the Apple Pencil and Scribble as my primary form of textual input.
Spoiler Alert (although this observation is hardly new): Using a stylus and using a keyboard are two different kinds of writing — as a number of studies on retention and student note taking has indicated. The former privileges time to think while the latter privileges speed of input.
So for the next week at least, I plan to use my 6th generation iPad Mini as my daily driver. I’ve already sketched out some posts after a few days of this and suspect there will be more, for those who wish to follow along. I am planning (No promises.) to post a rundown of my 30,000 foot response to the experiment.
I am genuinely curious as to the longer term implications of this in my own work — just as I am curious as to figuring out why I feel the need/desire to conduct this experiment.