…which is maybe kinda true? I have no idea if they want to make it a “Pro” device, despite the Pro moniker, because you still have such weird multitasking UI paradigms and so many limitations in terms of pro features. (Audio routing comes to mind. You can’t have Audio Hijack for iOS.)

And the value proposition of a fully loaded iPad with keyboard case is pretty dubious to me compared to just getting a MacBook Air. I know, I know, less apps, not a touch screen…but I can just do so much more with a Mac, and with the ARM transition, I also get the insane battery life of an iPad.

As Apple tells it, they do not foresee merging MacOS and iOS, as the user interface is to different.

Microsoft is more willing to ship products with bad UX, and power through based on their market position, and willingness to stick with it until they get it right.

I cannot see Apple, as it is, releasing something like Windows 8.

The other thing is that iOS is the money maker. Even if iPad doesn’t sell as much as it might, it supports the critical mass of the iOS ecosystem, which is a vulnerability for Apple, due to much smaller market share.

They’re gradually bridging them (Catalyst, and adding cursor support to iPadOS), and speaking as a fan of both product lines I’m glad they’re trying to make them each more powerful without just slapping them into a single UI.

Could they do a better job of supporting external devices on iPad? I imagine so, but there’s such a long road from the extremely-protective/simplistic/sandboxed iOS 1.0 to a full-fledged workstation operating system I have to think it’s not all that easy.

But for the past decade, they haven’t really made any interesting software. iOS is great for iPhones, it’s not great for a laptop replacement. I think OS/x would be a much better fit for the iPad Pro, but perhaps something completely new would be even better? I think the surface book shows us just why that is by the way. If I didn’t personally find windows so terrible, I would leave Apple for one of those in a heartbeat.

I don't know about the need for touch-first, but I can certainly see where the blog post is coming from.

It's not so much about what the iPad can do, it's more about what it cannot do and that there's no technical reason for its limitations.

It's kind of pointless to have two separate device classes when there's no technical difference between them anymore. Before the release of the M1 laptop and Mac Mini it could have been argued that the more traditional machines were more powerful and expandable.

But there's literally no difference between the hardware of a Macbook, Mac Mini, and iPad Pro apart from peripherals (e.g. screen, keyboard, touchpad). Why would a developer even need two devices when the laptop runs the same hardware and is only missing things (modem, touch screen, sensors, cameras)?

Case in point: by the time I add a keyboard case to my 11" iPad Pro, it weighs more than my MacBook Air does and it's not a lot smaller. I think I should just take the MacBook Air with me. That has the same CPU, storage and memory and I can run full stack on it fine.

That is not to denigrate the usefulness of the iPad, which I run a big chunk of my life on, but editing text or code is one place it really doesn't add up.

The killer app I find with my iPad is when you need pen input. For drawing, doing route planning in OS maps and general research and note taking it's an amazing little device.

With M1 Macs being a thing I have no idea what benefits an iPad offers.

Still it could be that they still firmly believe that touch screen on laptops are unnecessary and provides a poor user experience, something that I happen to believe that they would be right in.

An ipad pro with the fancy keyboard cover is basically a laptop in all but name and I know a few non technical people who insist that's all they need. The next obvious move is to bridge the gap between the two software ecosystems; which is something they started doing a few years ago by allowing IOS applications to run on Mac OS. Blurring the line further, an ipad with the keyboard attached a bit more and the ability to run Mac OS software (similar to how chrome os can run linux packages) would not be that much of a stretch.

So, an ARM macbook with a touch screen wouldn't necessarily be that different from an ipad with a keyboard. The hard part is basically all software. Imagine an ipad where you can install your favorite adobe tools, home brew, and an IDE. Probably a lot easier to sell than a macbook that doesn't run most of the software you are used to even though technically they aren't that different in terms of hardware and software.

Also, thinking beyond their current device categories; Apple has not done a lot wit VR/AR and gaming centric experiences so far. They've done a little bit via IOS and Apple TV but they've arguably held back a little bit here.

They benefit way more from selling multiple devices for different purposes than they would from selling "THE" ultimate device.

I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware.

It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience.

It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!).

macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason.

There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)

It honestly wasn't that useful past being a party trick: it's not very ergonomic to touch a laptop screen unless it folds completely like a convertible laptop. A convertible MacBook could be interesting, but that's already the niche the iPad Pro seems to try to fill despite its OS hangups.

And like the article mentions the OS X UI is not at all designed for touch input, touch targets are tiny, lots of precise movements to navigate menus, etc.

Bit by bit more tasks can be done on it as well as some new ones that aren't suited to traditional PCs. Just like we see today with phones, laptops, desktops, mainframes and the like - there are already people who can do all of their computing on just one device.

As for the complaints, everything is fair game, but most of the complaints about the iPad seem to be rooted in what it can't do in comparison to a laptop computer, or more specifically macOS. This is often given with the flimsy validation that the product is labelled "pro".

However it seems clear that it has "pro" in the title because it's far more capable than other iPads, not because it is peers to the Mac Pro computer. I also think it's borderline absurd to base an argument on marketing nomenclature. (Especially as there is an iPhone Pro, Airpods Pro etc.)

It seems clear (to me), that in order to make a thin, light, and performant device, that some compromises would need to be made - otherwise why aren't the laptops similarly thin and light. A cursory review of the specs between an iPad Pro and a MacBook Pro tell the story in better detail.

Perhaps one day iPads will have limitless background processing functionality, but there should be no expectation that the iPad of the day would match the functionality of the laptop or desktop of the day.

But there are lots of hybrid tablets and touchscreen laptops. What makes the iPad an amazing device for me is its outstanding software library (e.g. Procreate) and the Apple Pencil.

I could certainly imagine Apple bringing its Pro apps - notably Final Cut, Logic, and XCode - to the iPad. But I can't imagine Apple opening up iOS any time soon any more than I would imagine Nintendo opening up the Switch.