Tablet-curious: iPad as tablet for Affinity Photo on Mac?

[nickbatz]

Is this possible or sensible? I don't think even the iPad Pro's 16GB of RAM would be enough for me, and I find iPads cumbersome to try and work on in general (that's not what they're good at).

But this seems like it would be a good application for the Apple Pencil.

If not, which tablets do people recommend? 

TIA

[Guest]

You can use an iPad as a second display/tablet from macOS using Sidecar, but my experience with this is that it's best for applications not requiring low-latency (ie: not Photoshop, Affinity Photo/Designer, etc—think Safari, Pages, Keynote, etc.). There's also Luna Display and Astropad Studio, which reduces the latency significantly by using it's own low-latency communication protocol via custom hardware (a dongle) and software. I used this for a couple of years, but eventually just moved to using the iPad directly with iPad versions of Affinity Photo/Designer, along with Procreate, and Adobe Fresco as I found this to be the best experience for me. I do still have a XenceLabs tablet bundle which serves me perfectly well, despite not having a screen, for those few times that I do want to work with a tablet on macOS.

[nickbatz]

Thanks Bryan.

I wonder why screen sharing has noticeable latency. It works fine between Macs even over Wi-Fi, in fact I access my old Windows machines using Microsoft Remote Desktop (but over wired Ethernet).

This wasn't always the case - it used to be very slow. But my KVM switches have been sitting in the garage for years.

[Guest]

I suspect it's the difference between using a mouse and a tablet/stylus, as I always find I notice any latency far easier when using a tablet/stylus. A cursor can move from one side of the screen to the other in an instant and so long as you can see your cursor, you're not too concerned with everything that happened in-between (it doesn't have to draw it). When you're drawing with a stylus you are very much concerned with what is displayed as you move the stylus from one side to the other, and your expectations are that the drawing should always be happening at the tip of your stylus (not lagging behind).

I also find that how much traffic/interference is on the Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth network (the early Bluetooth tablets were awful) makes a big difference. You can use predictive algorithms to help mitigate the latency, but these tend to work better with a mouse as you're really only worried about the current state/position. With a stylus these algorithms don't work as well and often result in straight lines being displayed where a curve was drawn.

[nickbatz]

Well, I can't speak from experience with a stylus, but a Bluetooth mouse is doing the same thing when you're drawing with it, no?

There are other elements - pressure, mainly - but I'm still surprised. After all, MIDI works very well over Wi-Fi, and there are all kinds of real-time things going on.

In any case, you've tried it, I'm just speculating, so chances are good that you know better than I do.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

Well, I can't speak from experience with a stylus, but a Bluetooth mouse is doing the same thing when you're drawing with it, no?

Hmm, good point. I'm going to defer to anyone else with hardware and protocol experience here—me, I just draw pictures and type words. 😃

[MikeTO]

@Klaus Lotz shared Affinity Photo 1.10.5 benchmarks from an iPad Pro with an M1 and 16GB over in the benchmarks thread. You can see the benchmarks in context in this table.

 

[nickbatz]

5 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

@Klaus Lotz shared Affinity Photo 1.10.5 benchmarks from an iPad Pro with an M1 and 16GB over in the benchmarks thread. You can see the benchmarks in context in this table

 

Thanks. The problems are:

1. I personally have absolutely no interest in working on an iPad, for several reasons. Their horsepower is not among them - I'm not worried about that.

2. 16GB is not enough memory for what I do.

I have nothing against iPads, in fact I have two of them that I rarely use. They're just good for different things.