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Comment by vrosas | Hacker News Reader

I used some WFH budget on an iPad Air and a pencil thinking it would be great for taking notes and diagramming things but it’s mostly been useless. The UX of mirroring from my laptop to draw things has been a buggy mess in every app I’ve tried. The device has been relegated to a screen for watching movies on during flights.

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Thanks for saying this, I did the same with expensing an 13 inch iPad Pro thinking I could use it as an extended screen when I travel. The fine print is that its a buggy mess that only works if the ipad and macbook are on the same wifi and even then at half resolution for the ipad, even when plugged in together via usb-c. All I wanted was a standard definition extra monitor that could work over usb-c and watch movies on flights, instead I ended up buying a normal travel monitor out of pocket and now leave the ipad pro at home. Its only function ended up being for my spouse to watch real housewives before bed.

> even when plugged in together.

Do you mean via USB ? Because that works flawlessly for me, even with the older lightning-port iPad version. Over wifi is almost always laggy though.

Why are you trying to mirror and not just draw in native apps? Not claiming you're wrong, just wondering what apps/workflow you're using, since "drawing" is pretty good on the iPad.

Not OP: But I've considered getting an iPad+Pencil to use as a digital whiteboard / tablet in meetings. My plan was to either AirPlay the screen to the Mac or use some app like Freeform that syncs sketches in real time and have the Mac app open.

I probably wanna jump quickly between e.g editor / terminal / website and the whiteboard, and sharing the iPad monitor directly by joining the call seems to heavy.

Ah, I would have just joined Zoom twice, once from my MBP, once from the iPad. But, yeah, if you're sharing apps from both devices, that's a bit of a PITA.

I'll have to try it the way you describe sometime just to see how it works for me.

I'll echo what the other reply said. I wanted to use it like a digital whiteboard in meetings, but the flow just isn't there.

Yes, drawing on it in isolation is great, but it hasn't otherwise worked out like I hoped.

I got my wife an iPad to extend her macOS laptop screen to when traveling, and it worked so badly she bought a portable monitor for $75.

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