Since my Pixel 2 LS Chromebook has not made a miraculous recovery in the last 72 hours (the space bar is still pooched) and is now too damned frustrating to be useful to me or anyone else.

This means that I will have to adjust to using the iPad Pro as my daily driver laptop again.

Moving Back

Moving back to the iPad Pro was less of an adventure than it was the first time around, since I was familiar with using it. So, the last few days have been more about asking myself?

1. What apps do I want to use?
2. How do I want to set up my workflow?

Then, the other night I had an epiphany.

Since I am basically starting over, why not do a factory reset to give me a clean machine. Especially, since I was having a huge problem with the battery life on the iPad Pro, it was almost like there was an App open and sucking the juice down.

So I did.

The next morning everything including the battery worked better. Since then, the battery life is much closer to what I would expect a three-year-old device to be, not great, but good enough. Something was definitely draining the battery before I did the reset. What it was I don’t have a clue.

Setting it up

Doing the factory reset was easy. It is something that I recommend you do for any device that you have used before, put it a way for a while and are going to start using it again. It clears a lot of the crap out of the system and gets rid of legacy stuff that you probably don’t need.

Having to reinstall Apps, then signing back into websites, changing notifications, and redoing settings part of the process was not fun and takes a while to figure everything out. In other words it was a pain in the butt.

However, it was worth it!

Coming back to IOS again, from the Chromebook/Android world was a little counter-intuitive sometimes. Let’s be real it was a pain in the arse.

The differences are not a huge deal for the most part. Finding the appropriate command or setting can take some thinking about where it should be versus where it was hidden. I ended up doing more than a few Internet searches to find where Apple hid something that I couldn’t remember where in Settings the checkbox was located. Then when I got the search results I would inevitably go “oh yeah, that’s where it is.”

What Apps?

I have a mishmash of Apple and Google apps. This is something I will have to do for a while since I still have a Google Pixel 3a phone. Which means in order for me do certain things that sync between my iPad Pro and my phone, I need access to Google Apps on my iPad Pro. Apple doesn’t let its apps play nicely with Android phones. Luckily, Google Apps do well on the iPad, but are not set up quite the same as they are on the Chromebook because they have to meld to the IOS way of doing things.

I am also experimenting with the Ulysses app to see how it works to draft my writing and how useful it would be for other things as well. I will say that It has a learning curve, uses mark-down, but as I am drafting this post on it, I am finding that I focus more on writing than I normally do. Also, I do like the grammar checker and that was the deciding feature for getting me to try it.

Beamdog finally released Never Winter Nights for IOS this summer and of course it was one of the first apps that I bought and downloaded. It looks great and plays almost as good as it does with a mouse – almost.

I am figuring out how I will use the iPad Pro throughout the day (that workflow thing) and not be ruled by the iPad beeping, buzzing and pop-ups. In other words almost all the notifications have been turned off.

What am I learning

That I am going to use an iPad Pro 10.5 as my primary laptop, for at least a few months.

I used it for almost two years before and it worked quite nicely for about 85-90% of what I wanted to accomplish at the time. Well, until the battery got funky and the Bluetooth keyboard I was using wasn’t worth a crap. Now that I seem to have fixed the battery issue, have a different Bluetooth keyboard, when combined with the improvements that have been made in iPad OS and the release of NeverWinter Nights on IOS, I think that is now up to about 95%.

In other words, close enough.

I know that having to use an iPad Pro with a Pixel 3a Android phone will test my patience sometimes. Yet, it is something that I will live with since I got the phone back in January and can’t justify getting a new one anytime soon. Now that I am actively working to limit using the phone as a distraction device it will not be as bad as it could be.

Will I miss my Google Pixel 2 LS Chromebook?

Yep, it was a great laptop for me that did everything I needed, but when the space bar stopped working, it stopped being an asset. Replacing it with another Chromebook is something that I thought seriously about doing when it happened.

I want to see what I really need versus what I want because my computing needs are different now than they were in the past. Especially, the changes I am making around my future writing goals.

The iPad Pro 10.5 is working great and while I do think that I would prefer the 12.9 sized iPad Pro if I was going to stay in IOS, but then I am getting into Mac laptop (something) territory price-wise. That price point brings in other considerations that I want to consider more closely before doing anything.

However, the best part is that I don’t have to do anything right now, which is nice for a change. So, I am getting a different keyboard and keep using my iPad Pro for a while. This will give me time to think a lot more about the direction I need to go next:

1. back to a Chromebook,
2. getting the larger iPad Pro w/keyboard
3. a MacBook Air/Pro
4. Keep using my iPad Pro 10.5 until it dies
5. No, I am not a Windows or Linux fan, so I am not looking in either of those directions.

Keyboards do seem to be the weakest link for me. I have gone through three on the iPad Pro and a couple of Chromebooks have bit the dust for the same reason.

I guess my touch typing ability is closer to bashing and mashing the keyboard typing. So maybe an iPad with replaceable keyboards is a better idea for the way that I type. :-). It is definitely cheaper and easier to replace an iPad style keyboard than sending a laptop in for repairs or attempting to do it myself.

Now to keep working on improving how I use the iPad Pro and tweaking things so it works more like how I want to work. The funny thing is that I am remembering how much I do like the iPad Pro the more that I use it.

Have you recently switched tech silos or gone back to a device that you gave up on too early, if so, how did it go?