Apple released new iPads this week, offering up an iPad Air with an M2 chip and a ridiculous iPad Pro with an M4 chip, something that doesn’t even exist in a Mac yet. This type of hardware is nothing short of ludicrous; I have a MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor in it that absolutely screams, and I can’t imagine what an M4 is capable of doing. The problem is that, until it’s in something other than an iPad, we aren’t very likely to find out.
I’m personally a huge iPad fan. I’ve owned 3 different iPads over the years, and I use my current iPad literally every day. I use it more than I use my personal laptop. But for me — and most other people from all the chatter I see online every time new iPads get released — the iPad is primarily a consumption device. I mostly use mine for reading news articles and ebooks (seriously, Apple Books + Standard Ebooks is a great combo), streaming sports and YouTube, looking up things online, and occasionally playing a little Shattered Pixel Dungeon. The only real creation I do on it is updating this website. I have a Logitech Keyboard Case (which is a significantly better deal than the keyboards from Apple) that I’ll occasionally connect the keyboard to and bang out a few posts.
The thing that all of these have in common is that none of them require any beefy hardware. I’m currently using a 10th generation iPad with an A14 Bionic processor. My iPhone 13, for comparison, has an A15 Bionic. But my iPad still works great; you don’t need a ton of hardware to write blog posts in WordPress, flip pages in Apple Books, or stream a baseball game.
In college, my Computer Science friends and I used to laugh at students who would spend $1000 on a MacBook and only ever use it to open Safari and go to Facebook. Spending that much on a machine to go to Facebook was ridiculous (though it made more sense then than it would today considering going to Facebook on your phone wasn’t a thing.) The iPad has shifted that paradigm by offering up machines with insane hardware that can only do those basic tasks. This isn’t, of course, true for every use case. For example, if I was a musician who worked in Logic Pro, I would definitely be interested in springing for a beefy iPad and seeing what I could do. Likewise, looking up articles on apps that allow you to take advantage of the iPad’s hardware will show a lot of examples like this one that show apps for drawing or editing images and video. Maybe those apps do make for a compelling experience on the iPad or maybe they don’t; as someone who doesn’t draw or edit, I wouldn’t know.
What I do know is that for most people who aren’t doing those things, the iPad software is too lacking to take it and make it wholly replace a laptop. For one, file management on the iPad is atrocious… and that’s just when considering local files. When you start to add in files from cloud platforms or external storage things get an order of magnitude more annoying. Even trying to juggle image files that I want to use in blog posts has made me opt to write posts on my laptop before as opposed to my iPad even if my iPad would’ve otherwise been more convenient. As a software developer, there really aren’t any ways to write code on an iPad directly. Things like GitHube Codespaces, Project IDX, and GitPod can be used to code in a browser (though IDX won’t work without 3rd party cookies), but coding in a browser like that is a lackluster experience. All of these solutions are just using VS Code Server… which only makes me realize how much better the experience would be if I was using VS Code locally on a laptop. A slightly less painful route in my experience is to use something like Prompt in order to SSH to a server somewhere and develop that way. This does require proficiency with a CLI editor, but as someone who loves Neovim that’s not a problem for me. The bigger problem is that leaving something like Prompt in the background for too long while trying to searching the web for a problem or reading documentation can cause it to disconnect. Using something like tmux can prevent the loss of a session, but having to reconnect to the server periodically is still annoying.
On one hand, these limitations kind of make sense from Apple. They don’t really want the iPad to replace your laptop because they want people to buy both. Why sell someone just an iPad when you can sell them an iPad and a MacBook? As my good friend McC Wanders pointed out to me, though, younger generations could force Apple’s hand on this. From his experience with his step son, daughter-in-law, and their friends, all of whom are in their early 20’s, none of them own a computer. They do the overwhelming majority of anything on their phones and occasionally use a tablet. Some of them know how to use a computer due to work while others really have no idea. Aside from how astounding that is to me as someone who grew up with computers and the nascent days of the Internet, these are the kind of users who could eventually force Apple to add some of these features to the iPad. If the decision is between iPad and some other tablet, more laptop-like features being available could easily set the iPad ahead. On the other hand, they can probably just keep relying on the fact that anyone who is already in their ecosystem from an iPhone will just naturally get an iPad instead of some Android junk because it’s going to be a better experience on that front alone.
Regardless, with new hardware out and everyone disappointed that the software is still the limiting factor, I’m looking forward to WWDC in a couple of months to see what new and exciting things happen with iPadOS. I’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they announce nothing that I’m wanting, but until then I’ll try to think positively about it.