What I'd like the iPad to be able to do better is basic office work. I can work on it now, but that it could and should be better, definitely.
For starters, the office apps should be at the very least be more stable and possibly (probably) have more functionality. I find too often that the Word and Excel apps are not working well, and the search function in PDF files sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, it depends on the file and I don't know what the criteria is.
Word stutters and is the only app where I see freezes while using the app. The other day any document I would open would be a dark empty screen. I thought there was something wrong with the file maybe, but then when I opened another file and it had the same problem, I knew it was the software on my device so I killed the app an restarted it and it worked. It's a simple enough solution, but still, if I'm going to use the iPad as a very important piece in my office work, it needs to do better than intermittent freezes, blank screens, lags while opening documents etc.
Excel for a certain period of time wouldn't open certain xlsx files, I don't know why. It would simply say that the file can't be opened because it's not the right extension or something, and then all of a sudden it started working a couple of weeks or a month later. I have automatic updates turned on so I assume the app got updated to fix this.
Then the files app. I store all of my files in iCloud Drive so I'll be doing work on my Mac editing a file and then the next day or next week or whatever I'll want to do something on my iPad so I open that file and it says that it's a read-only copy and I need to save a copy to be able to edit it. So I do that and it allows me to edit the document. Other times it will also tell me that the file is an older version and if I want to edit it, I need to save it as a newer file version. Both of these messages show up often and slow me down in my work because in order to start working I have to save the document for some reason, so even more so than slowing me down it's annoying and just seems stupidly unnecessary and poor performance from Apple to be allowing such a big to impede work. Since I already know this will happen, I started saving a copy right away, I'd long press the file and tap Duplicate then opend the newly created duplicate of the file and edit that, it allows me to start editing immediately. Again, however, it's annoying and I'm crowding files this way, creating the risk of deleting the wrong duplicate or even worse sending a client the wrong file so while working I also have to remeber to mop up after myself by deleting all of the uneditable duplicates.
These may not be huge bugs, but they make me laugh at the idea of the iPad being a laptop replacement. The iPad cannot perform basic office work without bugs, crashes, app restarts etc. The other day I was editing a Word document and I was using a pdf document as a reference so I was switching between them constantly (I didn't use split view as I wanted to be using the entire screen). I was doing this for about half an hour or longer and occasionally the Word file would restart. I don't know why because these were the only two apps I was using, it's not like I had five apps in rotation, only Word and Adobe Acrobat Reader and Word would not stay in memory for long. I don't know enough about this so I may be expecting too much, but I think a device with 4GB of RAM should be able to keep two apps in memory.
I have a 2017 10,5 inch iPad Pro that I bought in July 2019, so it's not an underpowered device that can't handle basic office apps. The bugs that I listed above never happen on my MacBook Air. Whenever this talk of the iPad replacing a laptop comes up, I feel like in order to agree with that idea you either have to want to jump on the "What's a computer?" bandwagon or you do a specific type of work that the new pro iPads are customised for (photo and video editing). Since I doubt there are more people who edit photo and video as opposed to the rest of us who edit more basic types of files, it just seems to me like the iPad should be more reliable in this department.
Like I said, if I want to do all of my work on the iPad, I could with some difficulty, provided that it can open the files to begin with. But I simply can't even contemplate having the iPad as my only or even main computing device when I know I run the risk of the software not being able to open certain files, which sadly seems to sometimes include a basic Excel file that I have no problem opening on my Mac or the Windows machine at work. These shortcomings just seem so ridiculous and that's the point of this post - I want iPadOS 14 to straighten this out. I know not all of this is Apple's fault, sometimes the problem is the app, but if Apple did their part better, I know the whole experience would be better, more enjoyable and more hassle free, which is when I'd start to consider the latest iPad Pro as well as investing in a trackpad or the magic keyboard or whatever.
So there it is, for me it's nothing along the lines of the Weather app or the Calculator, just the basics in the Files app and all-around better and more consistent performance when it comes to the most essential office apps.
I'm like a broken record on this calculator as well. There's no bloody reason why a $1000 (CAD) device touted as a computer, is missing a free standard calculator.
If the original Mac 128K can have one, surely an iPad can as well.
The iPad doesn't have it because it doesn't have it, just Apple things. There is no reason for the iPad not to have a calculator other than that it never had one. It's probably the same reason why iOS doesn't allow us to arrange apps on the home screen any way we want, the icons have to go one after the other in a grid. In the beginning I suppose it was to make the software more stable, but now if my iPhone can recognize me looking at it and immediately adjust the volume of the notification, I think it can handle me skipping an app icon spot on the home screen and putting that app icon in the next available spot in the grid. But it doesn't because it doesn't, it's Apple. Maybe in iOS 15 in the next round of revolutionary features, at which point we'll be waiting for iOS 16 and hoping it comes asap.
I don't update iOS or iPad OS anymore, I stopped at 13.3.1. and I'm waiting for iOS 14. Maybe that should be the main thing on the iPad OS 14 wishlist - for Apple to make it so that you don't give up on updates halfway through the year.
I know this post isn't a list of things Apple can add to iPadOS 14, it's actually a bug report, but it is what it is because that's what I want most - a less buggy OS that does basic functionality properly.
