You can share any amount of data without the internet connection. But some Apple users not be satisfied user experiences, due to easy to break the screen, performance when iOS update.
As a social editor, specializing in increasing fans on social media, people download a huge amount of data such as images and videos etc. on multiple devices and upload it many times a day. AirDrop is particularly useful at such times.
Originally AirDrop was introduced in OSX Lion in 2011. MacBooks can now share files with just a few clicks. The iPhone was introduced from iOS 7 in 2013. You can find it in Finder window on MacBook, control center at iPhone.
The few good things about AirDrop.
Apple devices, images, documents, websites, contacts and location information can be transmitted without any internet connection. When using AirDrop with iPhone, you need to turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but this is because Bluetooth detects Apple devices in the vicinity and encrypted between devices using Wi-Fi radio signal. It is to perform P2P communication.
The capacity of the data you want to send is unlimited. The maximum size limit for Gmail is 25MB, even if you use Google Drive, the trouble of uploading and downloading is more troublesome as the capacity gets bigger.
As experienced it will take hours, if the Internet signal is weak. Occasionally Bluetooth does not work well so AirDrop is not perfect.