Traditionally, I did most of my work on my personal notebook. From coding to project management, most of my tasks either required using my notebook or were simply much more efficiently done using it.
While I did own my iPad for quite some time now, I rarely used it for productivity work outside of my studies. Instead, I always had to get up to fetch my notebook.
If you‘re like me, slapping out a massive notebook can be quite complicated, as working on a train or a more casual place would not necessarily allow for — especially on local trains, where I don’t want to waste precious time surfing TikTok instead.
Now, this is not a long post, more of a personal impression in that sense. But I want to give you a perspective on things that buying the Magic Keyboard has improved:
- I write much more, both professionally as well as in casual projects; that is a great leverage, both for my writing skills as well as career, etc.
- I can do light product work almost everywhere: writing up a new RFC or doing coordination for the next sprint planning does not need a notebook, and I connecting to my phone‘s hotspot is a breeze from my iPad
- Doing research for a new feature can also be done with my iPad in a more comfortable form factor (due to the notebook-style appearance)
Now, this only leaves coding as a task reserved for my notebook. Using GitHub‘s Codespaces could also allow me to use my iPad for this task, but as multitasking is (and probably also still will be) rather complicated on an iPad, using the notebook is still the best place for this. But sure, I‘m maintaining my blog with it, too. It might be a good blog post for the future to follow up on this.
In case you did wonder about my setup: I’m using the 2020 iPad Air together with the second generation Magic Keyboard. It works like a charm.