A few weeks ago I wrote about my little nerd-crisis as I prepared to go on a trip. It was largely a trip for fun and I was hoping I could get by with the iPad but I had a few things cooking at the day job that made me ultimately decided to bring the laptop along. I thought I’d report back on that.

I got by just fine with a 9.7 iPad Pro for most of the trip. It’s an excellent computer to use on an airplane and combined with the smart cover, I can type pretty damn fast on it. Moreover, despite my constant grumbling about file management on iOS, I got a significant amount of work done between Microsoft Word, Apple’s Pages, and Numbers. Likewise, the day-to-day management of email and OmniFocus was just fine.

As expected, as I tried to rely on the iPad, I found a few areas that could use automation improvements and the experiment resulted in a couple clever new Workflow recipes.

Overall, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself about not needing the Mac … until the last day. 

On the last day a client contacted me with a new contract that they needed to turn around quickly. In the law game, most contracts are provided to you in Microsoft Word and sometimes even Apple’s Pages. The real rare snowflake is a contract provided to you as a Google document. Lawyers just haven’t adopted Google documents very much. Its track changes features (which Google calls “suggestions”) are fairly recent and still a little clunky. Something I didn’t know until the fateful day is that the Google Docs app for iPad doesn’t include support for Google document change tracking. You can see other people’s suggestions. You can even accept or reject them. You just can’t add your own. If you go to the Google website they explain that the way to suggest an edit on the iPad is to “open a document, spreadsheet, or presentation on your computer.” That’s right. If you want to make suggestions with your iPad the trick is to put it down and open the file on your computer. 

So on the last day of my trip I was forced to pull out the MacBook and do some work. My grand experiment was struck down by Google.

That’s the thing about trying to get by with your iPad alone. It works great until it doesn’t and then it doesn’t work spectacularly. Over the years the percentage of work you can complete and iPad has steadily increased. I’m at about the 90% range. That doesn’t mean I can work just as fast on iPad but I can work on an iPad. The trouble is, however, that last 10%. It’s not a simple problem that Apple can fix with a single software update. In this case, it was Google’s delay in adding a feature that is common on every other platform for their software except the iPad.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to travel that additional 10% but I expect it’s going to be an uphill climb for a while. As much as I’d like to have the freedom of using my iPad only on trips, for the time being I’m still going to have to bring a laptop. That won’t, however, stop me from continuing to try.