> It seems possible given an 12.9 inch iPad Pro only weighs 1.4lbs
The iPad Pro's weight jumps up significantly if you have to add a keyboard and trackpad to the mix. Though personally I would welcome a tablet mac with no included keyboard since I use an ergonomic keyboard the vast majority of the time anyway.
> and other manufacturers have entries in that range.
The one that comes to mind is the LG Gram series, of which they make a lot of compromises in order to accomplish their weight goals. Opening up the chassis of the LG Gram 17 and 15 you'll see a lot of empty space and a battery that is much smaller than it could accommodate. I think it'd be doable if apple made a 16 inch variant with the m1 chip in it but I'm not sure that you could without making similar compromises that LG does.
Personally for a 16 inch laptop I'd rather have longer battery life and processing power which I think more closely aligns with people who prefer the larger form factor anyway. Still, it'd be nice to have options!
> Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare.
I think the opposite form factor would make more sense: an iPad Pro that runs macOS. You could have a laptop style dock but allow it to be used in tablet mode too.
4. it's a great second screen in either extend desktop or keyboard/mouse mode
> Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard
No, the keyboard is the case, you have no sense of carrying a second thing. In fact, it's a magnetic dock, you USB-C charge through a port in the hinge, iPad pops on and off mag-safe style.
I was referring to the Surface Pro. Forgot that the laptop even existed. A better keyboard for the Pro would be welcome but not a deal breaker.
The cantilever design iPad keyboards are indeed very heavy to counter the tablet weight. Which brings the total weight of an iPad with the keyboard to almost MB Air weights.
The iPad is really crippled by software. Undoubtedly they cannibalise their own sales by allowing MacOS to run on iPads. But they have purposely killed off their own product categories before. Having that dual mode device is great.
At least on the level of the 13 inch devices, this would absolutely make sense. The Macbook competitors nowadays offer touch and some even pen input, which the Macbook lacks, the iPad has those and plenty of cpu power and is ultralight, has no fan and is more energy efficient. The iPad Pro could replace a laptop for most usages, if were not limited by iOS/iPadOS.
Personally, I would refresh my iPad much more often, without the limitations. And it is not very realistic from Apple to expect people to carry both a laptop and a tablet. So forcing the customers to choose between those device types is not very customer friendly.
Actually, I am currently considering to get the Samsung Galaxy Book S, which seems to be a very interesting, ARM-powered laptop. Of course I would prefer a new iPad Pro, if not for its limitations.
It's so so weird. They have this super beefy iPad Pro, that they've kitted out with a nice keyboard attachement. Seemingly all of this is with the suggestion that this iPad is a laptop replacement. And yet, it cannot be a laptop replacement. Bizarre.
And the odds are good that even that could be scaled up further for a laptop-class part. The iPad Pro is a passively cooled device which is expected to always run on battery power, after all; a laptop would have larger batteries and more thermal margin.
Not that it'd even have to be scaled up by much. The A13 (iPhone 11) already performs comparably to many Intel mobile parts; an -X variant (future iPad Pro) would surely improve upon that.
Well, they have the iPad Pro with keyboard cover already. Who's to say that they couldn't make that into an actual laptop product, replacing their lower-end macOS devices?
Also, none of your quotes mention the impossibility of making an iOS device with yet another different form factor. It merely says that they won't merge the two OSes. Plus, even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the first time that Apple went back on a public statement while rebranding the backtracking as the invention of a whole new computing paradigm.
The fact that the 1TB and 2TB storage versions of the M1 iPad Pro have 16GB of memory is something. Plus Thunderbolt 4. It's an M1 iMac you can carry around.
If there isn't capability to easily use that hardware as a normal person (as in, creating bespoke apps), it'd all be for naught for me.
I'm due for an iPad upgrade, but I'm waiting until WWDC on June 7th before I decide on what I'll get. I won't make a bet and pay more for hardware I'll never be able to easily take advantage of. Though if an iPad Pro can let me do a lot more with a more advanced Window manager, it could just end up being a laptop that's not a laptop for when I don't want to sit at a desk in front of my workstation.
The hardware already exists - it's the iPad Pro 12.9 inch with a Magic Keyboard.
There is very little difference in hardware:
* RAM - 6GB (iPad) vs 8GB base (MacBook Air), although memory chips are tiny and Android phones have 12gb, so I do not see there being a significant limit here.
* Processor - Approximately the same (M1 is basically the A14).
* Connectivity - Both have WiFi only as base, iPad offers 4G.
* Disk size - 128 GB base with options up to 1TB (iPad) vs 256 gb Base with options up to 1 TB (MacBook Air)
* Battery - 10,000 mAh (iPad Pro), and I cannot find the battery of the latest Mac Air but previous models have had 5,500 mah.
So we aren't talking huge differences in spec. In fact it seems that the iPad can fit more in - probably because it doesn't need to include a keyboard which undoubtedly is responsible for a lot of the thickness.
> Building reliable clip/unclip connections would be an interesting problem.
Apple has already solved this for iPad - the Magic Keyboard is brilliant (although not cheap!). Additionally an iPad + Magic Keyboard is actually somewhat thicker than a Macbook pro, which highlights why the Macbook Air is probably thicker than the base iPad (rather than spec).
The counter to this argument is that why is Apple putting so many resources to making a keyboard case for the iPad Pro and adding trackpad support.
Is this some kind of test for when they move to ARM? Or do they want to do what they have done before and cannibalize the Mac platform for non professionals?
> Do software developers really crave a touch-first instrument that is barely more portable than a MBP 13"?
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)?
> I don't think Apple will ever do that, to be honest.
Apple sells lightning->HDMI adapters that could drive a display at 1080p and it’s been possible to pair a keyboard with your iPhone. I know folks that used that setup for writing longer texts while traveling.
Given that a lot of the infrastructure was already there, I wouldn’t be surprised if it trickles in over time.
You can see the same trajectory with iPads: At first they could mirror screens only, but with the recent changes to stage manager, they’re a pretty full-featured laptop if you use a keyboard and trackpad. My 11” pro is capable of driving a huge widescreen.
I appreciate the effort that goes into these products but I find the market position weird.
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.
A more plausible direction, which could have been twisted into this rumor, would be an iPad with a keyboard. It could invade the laptop niche, without the support horrors of introducing an incompatible Mac.
I think I don't want a laptop, but the only thing preventing me from getting the most powerful iPad is Apple policies, you are right, when you put a keyboard on the iPad it weights as much as your MacBook Pro, but then the tablet is on his desk, and the ability to remove it and just use it in the bath to read something, or to hang it to a iron arm and watch a video are not that easy with a MacBook, as soon as iPad supports virtualization and proper development workflow I am sold, I go and never come back to laptops (but I don't have laptops, only the work one)
> and other manufacturers have entries in that range.
The one that comes to mind is the LG Gram series, of which they make a lot of compromises in order to accomplish their weight goals. Opening up the chassis of the LG Gram 17 and 15 you'll see a lot of empty space and a battery that is much smaller than it could accommodate. I think it'd be doable if apple made a 16 inch variant with the m1 chip in it but I'm not sure that you could without making similar compromises that LG does.
Personally for a 16 inch laptop I'd rather have longer battery life and processing power which I think more closely aligns with people who prefer the larger form factor anyway. Still, it'd be nice to have options!
reply