u/guspr

Been running a little bit on tight budget lately but I'm a small business owner so I needed to keep up with hat I had, so I tested my 2018 iPad Pro doing real work this last year and it’s been… fine. Actually better than fine. Most people still assume you need a full computer for anything serious, especially with AI stuff, but I kept feeling like my iPad was half-dead. A super nice screen, with 120hz pretty solid even for today's standars, I added a keyboard case that cost too much, and this low-level guilt that I wasn’t using it properly.

I don’t know, I just had this stubborn feeling that the tools should adapt to how I actually work, not the other way around. Spent twelve months testing a bunch of things, deleting most of them, and slowly figuring out which ones actually stuck without forcing me to change my setup. If you want to check any of these yourself, just copy the whole thing and throw it at whatever LLM you use. You’ll see pretty fast if it fits your own flow.

One that surprised me early on was Fathom. It joins your Zoom, Meet or Teams calls, records everything, transcribes it and spits out a clean summary with action items in like thirty seconds. Before this I was constantly pausing meetings to type notes and I was only half there. Now I just talk and it handles the rest. The summaries are good enough that I forward them without touching them. All browser-based, nothing to install. Free tier is actually useful, not the usual teaser.

Perplexity became my default for anything that needs sources. You ask something and it reads real pages, summarizes and shows you exactly where each part came from. Research used to mean five tabs and hoping I picked the right one. Now it’s one screen and I can check the claims myself. On iPad it feels like having a research assistant who actually shows their notes. Free, or Pro if you want more.

Gamma took over presentations for me. You type what you need or paste a doc and it builds the whole deck with layout, images, everything. PowerPoint on iPad always felt slow and fiddly. This one just makes something that looks decent and I only spend time adjusting small things instead of building from scratch. Used it for client updates and internal stuff. Free tier is generous enough to really test it.

Claude is the one I kept coming back to for writing and digging into long documents. It handles nuance better than most and the context window is huge, so you can throw in a whole report and ask it to find contradictions or rewrite sections. Drafting tricky emails or proposals, the tone actually sounds like something I would send, not generic AI. Web version and the app both feel clean on iPad. Free or twenty bucks a month.

Magnific AI is what I use when I need images for content or ads. It generates, upscales, enhances, and they have this library of copyright-free photos you can use as a base and then improve with AI. Most tools either limit you hard or make you start from zero every time. Being able to grab something clean and royalty-free and then work on top of it removed a lot of friction for me. Plans depend on how much you use it, but it can replace a couple of other tools.

HeyGen handles video translation. You upload something in English, pick a language and it gives you a version with voice that sounds like you and lip movements that match. I have stuff I want to reach other audiences and re-recording was never realistic. This just works. Accuracy is high enough that I actually use the output. Browser on iPad, no drama. Free for a few videos a month, then paid.

Teal made job applications less painful. You paste a job description and it tells you which keywords the ATS is probably looking for, then suggests how to tweak your resume without making it sound fake. Live preview so you see changes immediately. Tracking applications in one place helps too. Job hunting on iPad while manually editing everything was exhausting. This removed most of that. Free or paid upgrade.

Loom replaced a lot of long emails. Record your screen, it adds captions and a summary, and people can comment on specific parts. Explaining something visual over text is always painful. A two-minute Loom with the summary on top does the job and the other person doesn’t even have to watch the whole thing if they’re in a rush. Works smoothly on iPad. Free tier or paid.

Woebot is the one I was most unsure about sharing. It’s a chatbot that uses CBT techniques for stress and anxiety. I was skeptical, but having something structured to use at 11pm when my head is looping on work stuff has helped me pause, name what I’m actually feeling and calm down enough to sleep. It’s not therapy and it says so clearly, but it fills a gap for me. Feels like guided journaling on the iPad. Access is through providers or some free options.

Last one is n8n. It's like Zapier but you can slft-host it so your data doesn't leave your own setup, and AI intergrations are native. The interface is browser-based, so even though the actual server runs somewhere else, I control everything from my iPad. I’ve built flows that take things from my inbox, summarize them with AI and drop them into Notion without paying per task or sending stuff through random third parties. Huge community, lots of templates. Free if you self-host, or cloud option.

After a year with these, what stands out is that none of them asked me to change how I work to fit the tool. They just worked on the iPad the way I actually use it. Still not something you can say about most AI tools out there.