Two years ago I was in the market for a new drawing tablet. I had been using a Lenovo Miix700 for around 4-5 years prior. At the time, I had a good job that provided me a work laptop, that I could also do much of my work from my Android phone.
I went to Best Buy and tested the pens on the SP that was out at the time, the SB, the SPX, Yogas, etc, along with the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro was the clear winner in drawing experience, and I did very little on my Miix700 other than draw, and since Clip Studio (my main drawing app) was recently released on the iPad, I went with the 12.9 iPad Pro with magic keyboard. I was hoping to make it my daily driver for everything since I did very little other than writing and drawing. This was right before the pandemic, and, as it happens, I was laid off a couple months after.
I then decided to switch careers to become a software developer. Guess what you really can’t do well on an iPad? Write code. At least not at any sort of professional level. And the school I was going to strongly encouraged using MacBooks for the class, so I ended up getting a MBP, and suddenly I was deep in the Appleverse.
Some of my observations with 2 years in now. The file system is terrible across the board, but especially in iPadOS. Using any kind of third party cloud drive is infuriating at times. I had an Office subscription for my wife, and we had extra storage on OneDrive with the subscription, so I have for the past 2 years tried to work with it with the iPad and MacBook. It’s been nonstop frustrating. I’ve had tons of issues with ClipStudio specifically, trying to keep my art saved on OneDrive. It will save there, but it takes 5 steps to first do it, with every piece I create, and, once stored on OneDrive, if I close CSP, it doesn’t store the art, and I have to find it in OneDrive and reimport it, often causing significant lag/delay.
Airdrop is great though. It’s super easy to move art and other files to the MBP from the iPad. And MBPs are pretty great for writing code.
Right now where I’m at, if I had the prescience to see the layoff and my career change, I would still have gotten an IPP, but probably would have gone with the 11" since it wasn’t going to be my “I use this for everything” device, and honestly, even if I wasn’t doing the career change, I would probably still have bought it, but then also got a cheaper Windows laptop. The drawing experience is just so nice. Otherwise, I’d much rather have a SP8.