iPad Pro M2 (opens in new tab)

On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and touch pad. I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me.

I've also been CTO at mega bank and hedge funds where we've rolled these out along side laptops. I've found that after initial objections, folks tend to agree. After a month or two, white collars who are not devs generally have switched to carrying the iPads, not laptops. Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.

Users do have to think differently. That's ROUGH. Employees will ask for their old thing back if it changes their workflow, period. (See the book "Who Moved My Cheese?")

If they just use it, they generally find out it's fine. Could even be argued the Office / Teams ecosystem is superior.

Bonus: Letting employees have TWO screens (MacBook + iPad) also gives them two retina class monitors, portable, fantastic for hoteling or remote work or work from home. Two screens are better than one, and two that go with you are amazing. The new keyboard/cursor sharing while each device runs its own apps, with copy paste and drag drop between them is even cooler. In this model, the iPad Pro can become a Teams or Slack device, for instance, while other work stays on Mac, so you just wander off to a meeting with your collaboration tools intact. Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.

I used the iPad Pro for about 2 years for nothing but productivity apps and it was overall pretty great.

It wasn't without issue though, here's what I ran into:

1. I didn't run any dev tools on the iPad. That's insane. I used a laptop running macOS for that.

2. Google Docs updates would always ship with weird bugs, like if I'm editing a cell in a Google Sheet and hit space, the space wouldn't insert.

3. There's loads of issues with drag and drop in most apps. Dragging and dropping a picture from Photos into a document is the most common flow which works in some apps, but not in others.

The plus sides:

1. The built-in cellular connection is amazing. I wish MacBook Airs would ship with built-in cellular.

2. The Apple Pencil (2nd gen) is great if you design software or UX.

> but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted

What would the point of "adding functionality to the OS" be? If they wanted to put macOS on iPads, they'd just put macOS on iPads.

My understanding at Apple's strategy here is that they're simultaneously exploring two different GUI paradigms — almost pitting them against one-another to see which wins (or, if you like, making a hedged bet):

• macOS, for building "Unix pipeline-like" workflows where you point different programs-as-tools at the same document or take one program's output as another's input. Apple encourages macOS developers to make this kind of app.

• iPadOS, for building "all-in-one silo" workflows (think: Photoshop, Garage Band, XCode), where the developer intends to solve fully for a use-case, such that people with that use-case can get by using only their app. In these cases, rather than interacting with other apps, a siloed app will embed whatever other accessory workflows a user might need, either directly (e.g. XCode embedding a terminal console) or through plugins (Photoshop plugins, Garage Band VST support.) The user might use other apps at the same time as this app, but not in a way where the apps are sharing data or interacting in any way; rather merely using each app to "do what it does" — e.g. referencing a design diagram in Miro while implementing that design in XCode, and writing down reminders in some reminders app. (Thus, the iPadOS 16's Stage Manager, which assumes you want several apps on screen at once, but doesn't implement drag-and-drop between apps or any other kind of useful inter-app interaction.)

As a user, as long as each user-story you have has been perfectly addressed by some particular siloed iPadOS app, then iPadOS should work for you. (And there are a lot of people whose user-stories have all been perfectly addressed by these siloed iPadOS apps — mostly, people with boring, predictable, traditional workflows. Novelists; illustrators; business executives; possibly salespeople.)

However, if your workflow is niche or "constantly reinventing itself" enough that nobody's ever going to make a siloed app specifically for your needs, and so you expect to get things done by throwing files between various different tools all day — then iPadOS is never going to work for you. You need a desktop OS designed around that kind of thing.

I don't even understand the advantage of an iPad for non-drawing work. It's just a worse laptop with a too-small keyboard that can fall off and a square screen so it's not good to watch video on and an OS that doesn't do anything well. But Mac laptops are amazing, run all the same software, and don't have any of these problems.

> In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.

If you work in IT with hundreds of staff members, why would you let them pick their own devices with zero guidance? This seems like a recipe for disaster no matter which product is picked. Do you let them do this with laptops / printers / operating systems / etc.?

My daughter is 16 and has used an iPad for school for many years. Latptops are foreign to her. Same for her cohort. They are the next generation of adults and have replaced desktops and laptops with iPads and iPhones.

If they would just allow UTM to run, that would be good enough for me.

https://getutm.app/

It honestly just needs virtualization. They don't care about evolving the product because they are mortified of cannibalizing a revenue stream in an official way.

Only nerds and IT would bother with virtualization and they'd net a new sale.

I've been eyeing an iPad Pro, but it's just a colossal waste as it trends strongly toward only consumption, which is frankly a poor purchase.

Programming on the iPad was OK, in the sense that Blink Shell is a better ssh client than PuTTY, and I don't want to carry my desktop around with me. Eventually I switched back to a Linux 2-in-1 laptop -- it is nice to be able to run GUI applications locally, but it is nowhere near as good a tablet as an iPad despite whatever tweaking I try...

What kills it for me are the apps where you can't copy a single word. e.g. Apple's own Messages app, you're forced to copy the whole message.

Same for the spell checker. For some reason I have ridiculous trouble triggering it in certain apps. I can see the mistake underlined in red but I really struggle to get trigger the correction popup instead of the "copy, lookup, etc" popup.

Maybe it's just me but I don't think I could consider an iPad as laptop replacements without some basic changes to iPadOS.

By design it is never going to be able to replace a "laptop" running desktop OS. If the workplace is not designed to work with iPad, then I doubt anyone really can replace even a MacBook with iPad.

Your "mini test" is invalid because they are allowed to choose, ie intermixing all sort of OSes together. In that case it is very likely any workflow the iPad excels at are not used in the workplace, and vice versa that anyone else' workflow is really traditional (as simple as depending on the file system a lot) that doesn't play well with iPad.

When your mini test doesn't agree with how successful it is (for business to deploy iPad), it just means your mini test is nowhere near the norm.

Eg you mentioned school, that's the best case for the iPad to shine, because everyone are mandated to use iPad, and the IT would have already figure out how to perform all needed tasks. (And bonus is that the students are a blank state with no prior bias on how to do a certain thing.)

I can't speak to how Apple attempts to make deals with schools and workplaces, but their normal consumer marketing seems to pretty clearly highlight the differences between a MacBook and an iPad. If anything they seem to go out of their way to maintain significant differences in the two operating systems (which, ironically, is also a very popular complaint in tech circles).

I have an executive roll and I used an iPad almost exclusively from probably 2013 until about six months ago. It’s eminently doable.

Kids who don’t know better might become accustomed to it and, unless they are power users or interested to become that, they might prefer to scrape by with the iPad.

There is pretty strong evidence that people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems and feel much more comfortable on a slate with a dumbed down UI

I don't think Apple is marketing it as heavily as you think at replacing Workplace laptops, but moreso consumer laptops. iPad is a delightfully simple device for consuming any kind of media, editing photos and videos, light to medium gaming, and doing little creative things.

Without a clear description of what these employees were using their iPads for, it's impossible for anyone else to use this info to determine if their scenario fits yours.

Your ability to use iPad full-time depends heavily on the type of work you do.

It depends on the user.

Execs and task oriented workers are great iPad use cases. In a global org I’m familiar with, they run about 15k iPads, about 5-10% of the IT engaged headcount. Senior execs in large orgs in particular are ideal in the iPad environment.

For schools, I think the iPad sweet spot is grade K-4 for dedicated devices; 4-8 is Chrome and 8+ can be Mac/Chrome/PC. For shared or purpose dedicated devices, iPads fit every level.

Lots of other use case are limited by legacy or enterprise software. Police patrol car, medical point of service and point of sale are examples of use cases where iPads would be the ideal solution, but for the existing software.

Is everything they do web-based? Or did they just not know that it won't run any desktop software and that even if there is an app-store version it's usually cut down to half the features of the desktop version?

I can attest to this, I worked in IT back in 2011 at a school where teachers loved the idea of iPad's over their clunky laptops.

However, in time, they all needed their laptops back and either gave the iPad back or worked 50/50 across both devices.

I have no doubt that today the iPad is more useful for students and teachers, but if you don't have a defined workflow that easily allows for the use of iPads teachers won't use them. We're all too familiar with the way in which Windows works and it integrates well with the networks companies use.

I use the ipad for reading music scores but would never replace it with a laptop. M1 and M2 is overkill for a consumption device that doesn't have a real file system accessible to the user.

We have over 3000 employees with Apple equipment as their primary device, and probably 200 of them are iPad Pro only.

They do serve different niches than laptops, but with a keyboard case in an Office 365 environment, they can be full office/productivity replacements for anyone who prioritizes light travel over running local software.

Either-or obviously desktop. But why either-or not both and an iphone as well. The form factor is so different. And if you develop with lots of internet and book/pdf to reference.

You can ask me to choose TV or ipad or even in reading novel kindle or … obviously not job setting but it is just different tools.

It's a great consumption device though - ever since Google stopped paying attention to the tablet space we have an iPad 9.7 that lays in the kitchen and all my family members only touch it for watching Netflix or YouTube.

Even for browsing it feels very slow compared to Surface tablet or even Firefox on M1 MBP now a days.

If they're competing against Chromebooks, they're maybe better actually.

I don't like how Apple is making the iPad more laptop-y. My ideal is to use a normal desktop computer, and an iPad. No laptop. But if I had to pick only one of course it would be a laptop.

Makes a lot more sense if you consider the idea that "pro" has become a luxury designation rather than the audience they're marketing towards.

It's not just that the OS is crippled, the apps are as well.

Trying to quickly navigate between apps, edit, and copy and paste, is an exercise in frustration.

I have my iPad Pro+Magic Keyboard with me 24/7. I wish I could code on it but that's it. For everything else it's perfect.

> refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.

Is this your opinion or was there any feedback from those 5 users?

ipads (like phones) are appliances... designed for consuming. Much like a microwave or a fridge. they're designed for very specific scenarios. sure you could make it do other things... but it will not be very effective.

Laptops are swiss-army knives. you can create/consume/compute and they're pretty effective at all those things.

My use case for this would be fairly simple: future proofing, to make it unlikely to need a new tablet for 10 years

I personally carry both my ipad pro and macbook pro all the time. They’re just both so useful.

Given how you approached it (zero guidance and support), I'm not surprised all 5 asked for their laptops back.

ProCreate and illustrator aren’t comparable. The former is raster while the latter is a vector app.

I think you meant to or should compare it to Photoshop

Came here to +1 on the likelihood of transition thoughts and the discovery of procreate.

I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.

And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me a great deal with note taking.

I’ll send her your wife’s insta, here is her’s: https://www.instagram.com/yanora_draws/

I bought an iPad in 2020 fully thinking it’s gonna collect dust like all my other tablets over the years.

Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it

Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D

Agreed. Procreate is a masterclass in iPad app design. Everything runs so smoothly, the features are deep but the interface is still beginner-friendly, it's a joy to draw in with the Apple Pencil, and it has really good options available for exporting your work. Plus, it automatically records a timelapse of every project that you can render out at the end, which is a small feature that I absolutely adore. All that for a single-time purchase? Heck yeah.

Similar story here, my girlfriend uses the iPad/pencil/procreate to draw commissions for people. She absolutely loves it, went did an art degree but then went down a different career path and is now getting back into it.

In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.

Adobe purchasing Procreate in 3...2.... ;-)

I can’t believe it’s just a one-time $10 fee instead of the ridiculous and increasing creative cloud monthly/annual fees. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’ll be an annual fee one day but at least the app is worth it.

Procreate is great, but it really doesn't solve the same problems as Illustrator at all. Apples and oranges.

It seems reasonable for "desktop-class" to refer to the basic features that have typically distinguished desktop personal computers from alternatives like smartphones and tablets. What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?

It has always been artificial market segmentation. Their message is clear: don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen. Apple will only sell you oversized phones and regular laptops.

You could actually get a full desktop experience from a tablet back in 2003, with products like the NEC Versa Litepad [1] running Windows XP. With a fully-fledged x86 processor, you could run anything a desktop could run.

It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)

[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nec-versa-litepad-tablet-pc-vlp...

Maybe the "pencil hover experience" will finally allow desktop-style "tool tips". So you can know what a button does before tapping.

I really struggle to find a use case for the iPad over my Macbook Pro from 2014.

- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright - I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing - The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen

If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.

Not sure the desktop has moved beyond that though.

So seems about right.

Well, they can't push it too far because then it would become something too close to an actual laptop/tablet hybrid.

Can you drag the cursor with your finger to a specific character in-text yet, without selecting text? 2018 iPad can't.

> consistent undo and redo

Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)

I was just thinking this myself. I have the 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro and was considering pulling the trigger on this new iPad Pro announced today. But I really have no reason to, my current one runs perfectly and I've even got the floating keyboard case which is backwards compatible with it. It's replaced my laptop entirely, instead I just ssh into my Mac at home and use vim if I feel like writing some code on the road or from bed.

Honestly have no complaints with this 2018 model, it's one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever owned and in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.

>After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking.

OTOH you can buy a whole lot of $3 spiral notebooks for the price of an ipad pro

Bingo. I also have a 2018 11" iPad Pro, and the only things that would even nudge me in the direction of upgrading is a landscape-friendly selfie camera (like the new iPad got), significantly smaller bezels, Touch ID (again, the regular iPad has this), and a better display (11" doesn't have mini-LED).

Serious question, would you recommend buying a refurb 2018 for modest usage over the new iPad 10.9"? It's about 100nits brighter, a bit lighter with a bit larger screen and supports pencil 2. Looks like they are about the same price as well.

That's where I'm at - I keep an eye on new releases because I'm a nerd and I like toys. But realistically I'm not going to shell out for them at least until this one stops getting OS updates.

I don't work-work on it, but it does sit beside me all day. Notes, manuals, calls, music etc. Sharing my screen, pulling up a diagram and the pencil is my favourite way to explain things on calls lately. Then I can just shoot them a pdf when we're done to cut out 'n keep.

I see nothing today that changes this for me - just new toys that I look forward to seeing in a few years.

I (almost) exclusively used “the new iPad” for all my studying and note taking a decade ago. Notability was my go-to app, and I used the touchscreen exclusively. It was a wonderful setup.

You’re right that the 2018 iPads are great. But people buying their first powerful ipad really don’t want a 2018 machine so Apple keeps improving them. Software improves as time goes on.

> There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

Nomad Sculpt. There is no such thing as increased CPU power, often you're dealing with multiple millions of polygons. There is even limitation in the app saying "don't go over X number of polygons" because of CPU limitations. And it's the reason why I'm buying new iPad Pro - to be able to work with more polygons faster.

I assume multicore video encoding makes full use of the CPU?

It seems kind of crazy to say there's nothing that makes full use of the CPU.

Video games are more enjoyable with the increased processing power!

Where the 2018 model struggles at high frame rates, the M1 version enables more fluid gameplay at 95-120fps. The new M2 would likely deliver more consistent 120fps performance given the advertised 15% CPU and 35% GPU uplift.

Hey, they tried really hard with Stage Manager running so poorly it required an M1 iPad in order to run.

They've since walked that back, and while it is being reworked will be coming to a14 models after all, probably sans the external display support.

That’s because apple hasn’t introduced any major new features to the ipad pro hardware since then. A 4 year old iphone is also just as future-proof but it doesn’t feel like that since they’ve added many new features to later models.

What do you use for note taking on an iPad?

I own a 2018 11" and an M1 12.9" and there's plenty of times the 11" has failed to cope with something the 12.9" barely breaks a sweat over. I'm not sure what you do with yours, but it's provably untrue that there is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.

"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*

"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*

Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.

On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.

Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.

Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.

It will be useful until everyone is on 6 GHz…

I was in a meeting the other and one of the participants looked off-center and he said "I joined with my tablet", ah yes was the remark from others

Now, I had joined also from my tablet but samsung put the camera in the center when in landscape mode and got no such remarks and I was just smiling

The camera on the new non-Pro iPad has moved from the side to the top though. Not sure why the inconsistency between models.

Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1

This would be solved if Continuity Camera let your iPad use your iPhone camera. Doesn't seem like it does, though.

You are too close to the camera. (Probably because iOS doesn't have good crop and zoom)

The orientation is just a software problem. No reason Zoom et al can't have an option to crop to the right aspect ratio.

This was the first thing I looked for. iPad is unusable for video calls.

lol - they're all basically the exact same thing with a different display

Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.

The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.

I still find it sad that:

a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.

> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.

I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.

I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices

Right now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!)

Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.

Adobe Lightroom works quite nicely, I use it to edit photos I take on vacation while on vacation.

I would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.

> Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive?

Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)

My compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.

I don't particularly, but I like to watch videos at 3 and 4x and bigger procs have helped. Older iPads stumbled past 2x.

But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.

Civ VI is pretty CPU intensive.

Web browsing is a task you can throw great single-core performance at.

Digital sculpting.

For 99.99% of users, they are 1500 dollar Facebook machines.

I just purchased the iPad Air last week. The model I went for was 720 in my local currency, and after today's shop update is now 850. It looks like the Magic Keyboard also increased from 270 to 330.

The iPad with pencil is really useful for marking up student papers. I bought one during Covid when everything was being turned in online, but some students still prefer to turn in scans rather than paper.

The downside is that Apple doesn't support user accounts, so I won't use anything that everyone in my family shouldn't have access to. Grading only works because it's easy to log out of Canvas. A lot of the nifty features require you to be logged in with your Apple ID, and I'm just not buying an iPad for every family member who might like to use it sometimes.

Maybe it's also because of the cooling capacity of the 12.9" vs the 11" iPad

I keep hearing about the desire for developer tools on an ipad and I just don’t get it. The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work. What is the appeal of doing dev work on a touch based UI with limited access to the file system on a cramped screen? The Mac is perfectly set up for that work.

There are developers tools for iPadOS, they're just not anything you can do professional work with.

The main problem, I think, is most development tools require a relatively low-level of operating system access that Apple has not figured out a way to do given what they want iOS/iPadOS to "be".

My suspicion is they'll eventually find a way to do containers in a manner that's relatively "safe", and they'll lean on Cloud-based build tools that move the hard work off device.

What developer tools? The ability to create and install your own applications like an actual computer? That would circumvent their walled garden.

I wish they'd just ship macOS as an "app" on their iPads

I would assume this would cannibalise mac sales, very doubtful we will ever see compilers on ipad os

I really love the versatility of my iPad as well but this single use case you mentioned I can't understand:

> + I want to play some music (great speakers)

Yes, the speakers are fine for their size and certainly good enough to listen to a podcast or talk-heavy Youtube video but I couldn't imagine listening to any music on it. Any budget bluetooth speaker for less than 100 bucks or headphones will sound much, much better.

As you know (but others may not), the idea is that you get as far as you can get in GarageBand, then move the project to Logic¹. There's also a way to export a "to go" mix from Logic for GarageBand².

You can get surprisingly far with just GarageBand³.

¹ https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/garageband-projects... ² https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/share-a-project-to-... ³ https://www.melodynest.com/hit-songs-produced-on-garageband/

No Logic on iPad and the sunsetting of Music Memos... I sometimes feel like Apple is becoming hostile to musicians.

This! (you mean the Smart Cover though)

Apple is pretending weight doesn't matter. They're all clunkers, even the "Air", once you add the keyboard.

My old 12" iPad Pro with the Smart Cover is still lighter than any of the new combos and yet it's heavy compared to certain Android tablets of the same size.

They're awfully heavy for a device that I treat like a dynamic book.

I really miss that too! Unfortunately iPads now stupidly have a camera bump

Do you have an image or link of which one this is?

> Seriously, they should bring smart folio back. The one that doesn't have the unnecessary backside but only the side and the front cover.

Did they discontinue smart folio keyboard? Magic Keyboard is almost 2x as heavy.

For video chat, you don't need the latest. After the camera on my MacBook stopped working, I started using a 5th gen iPad mini. I use it with a stand on the kitchen table, in landscape mode, and it's fine.

Bigger isn't necessarily better. My wife has a full-size iPad and I find it awkwardly big for most purposes.

But for ease of use for the technically challenged, I think something like a Nest Hub Max might be better, since it will automatically point the camera. Caveats: it's not easy to set up for someone without a cell phone (it's technically unsupported), but once you do it for them, it's easy to make a call. Also, weirdly, the video only works when they call me; if I call them it's audio only. (I ask them to call me back.)

> nice setup with open-back headphones, 60 Hz 1080p camera, nice microphone, low latency screen, the works.

Why do all these niceties go out the window when the alternative is an iPad?

Based on the use case, a simple last-gen iPad should do the job just as well.

I felt like the system that’s in the portal from Facebook would be the ideal vc setup for my parents (i.e. video calling on a tv). Though, there’s no way I’d want to put a camera from Facebook in my parents house. I did try Google duo (I guess it’s call meet now?) with a Google tv, but since it was with a 3rd party web cam, things like autofocus didn’t work as well as I’d like.

Second with what others said, the new standard iPad should fit your bill. It has the ultrawide camera too with people tracking which makes it even better.

It seems like Apple has been embracing the folks who live and die on their iPad full time or mostly full time.

I don't think I could do that now but there seems to be a sizable crowd who works that way and maybe is the future.

> Interestingly the Apple Pencil "hover" feature doesn't require a new generation of Pencil

Yeah, it requires a new ipad.

I'm a bit salty, not gonna lie. This has been basic on wacoms forever.

code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server works fairly well and can be saved to the home screen as a web applet to get rid of the browser URL bar. Their are a few UI issues related to touch but it has served well enough for some light work.

You can also use a remote apps like Rainway/TeamViewer/RDP/VNC somewhat successfully to get a more full desktop experience. Unfortunately they all seem to have their own input caveats that take some getting used to.

I am personally waiting for Parsec to release native iPadOS and tvOS clients as it provides the best experience I have found.

It seems like the gaming oriented remote desktop apps (Rainway https://rainway.com/, Parsec https://parsec.app/) are the best though as the latency on the more traditional ones is somewhat of a hindrance.

USB/Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support tends to work okay, but the simulated touch mouse makes getting used to things tough. If you have not tried using iPad OS with a mouse I suggest you look into before making a purchase as it is a fairly limiting experience.

Yeah actually, it's really good for inference at the edge. You might be thinking of training though which I doubt anyone does

Well, why would any business want to have a standout SKU, and hurt their other SKUs? I guess this could also be a tactic, make one model "best feature/price ratio".

For better or worse, there's not "bang for the buck" iPad model. It really scales linearly. The more you pay, the more you get.

New budget iPad - $450 - Doesn't support Pencil 2. Want that? Upgrade to Air. Weakest processor. iPad Air - $599 - Support Pencil 2. Weaker screen technology. Mid tier processor. iPad Pro - $799 - Best of everything (except for MiniLED, which you need the 13" iPad Pro).

It really depends on how much features you can live with.

Or it could be about profit margins.

I use my tablet about as much as my desktop and laptop. My use cases are:

(1) Personal entertainment device. When relaxing on a chair or in bed, a laptop is too unwieldy. The TV gets fought over. Pretty much all my movie / YouTube watching is done on the iPad with headphones.

(2) eBook reader. Since my iPad is always withing reach, it makes sense to store all my books on it.

(3) Stylish note-taker. Not a significant part of my use, but I occasionally have stand-up meetings, and meetings in awkward locations, where a tablet makes more sense than a laptop.

(4) Signing stuff. It is much easier to store a document to be signed in OneDrive, open it on the iPad and sign it with the stylus than it is to print-sign-scan.

I was on the fence when the iPad Pro M1 was released, it seemed to finally tick off as a laptop replacement for some of my hobbies (photography and music) but unfortunately it is not a desktop OS, not supporting desktop workflows and apps that I'm used to.

If it was a screen-only version of my MBA M1 I could definitely ditch the MBA and use an iPad exclusively, even if it required attaching a keyboard sometimes. The lacking software still makes it much more of a luxury to me than something to actually replace my use cases for a portable computer... I could afford one but see absolutely no usage given that my MBA is already extremely portable and works like I expect.

For me it’s the form factor.

It’s the perfect thing to take travelling. And on the work side, the pen is astonishingly good as is the app ecosystem.

It also functions as a second screen for a macbook.

Is it necessary? No. Have I spent money in worse? Absolutely.

The iPad boots up in just 1 second. I can do 90% of what I do on a computer on it, at a much more adjustable angle, and it's a lot more portable.

A tablet is integrated into my daily routine to a degree a laptop will never be.

I can whip out my iPad when I'm on the train to work and watch streamed or locally downloaded stuff, a laptop is way too cumbersome for that even on a semi-crowded train.

With a keyboard cover I can actually use it for messaging, emails, IM and maybe light writing. Using a stylus, I can either take freeform notes or draw stuff faster than I can with a mouse or touchpad.

And in the pre-M1 days an iPad smoked pretty much every laptop in battery performance.

I bought my iPad (non-pro) mainly to play online chess, to read comic books, and for D&D pdfs at the table. It's also a nice web-browsing and video watching machine. The iPad Pro's are a bit excessive for that sort of "consumer" usage though.

The only great use-case I've seen for the pro is 2d digital art. I have a few artist friends who love the pro+pencil.

Music production on one really interests me, but none of my favorite plugins (effects and instruments) that work MacOS/Windows exist for the ipad. They also don't offer enough storage at the high end Komplete 14 Ultimate is 680GB. Each of the Spitfire sample libraries is near 200GB

There are some nice sequencing apps, but again don't need the pro for that, I just send the MIDI or OSC data to a "real" computer running a "real" DAW.

I know it's very niche and doesn't apply to everybody but I know of a bunch of comic book/comic strip artists that are doing more and more work on the iPad pro and less on their Wacom devices.

Illustrators/sculptors. It's not as good as wacom+workstation, but I like not being bound to one place.

I know alot of tattoo artists, and they all use ipads for their designs.

Is this using an iPad for coding or is this using an iPad as a dumb terminal and using something else for development?

At the end of the day, that’s what makes an iPad unappealing for me as a development machine. If I am going to pay for an iPad and then rent an affordable VPS just to dev on then why not just buy a computer I can develop on locally right away? Sure, LTE is cool but it probably is more cost effective to go the other way and pay for a hotspot plan for your phone and tether your computer that way.

That being said, I do occasionally feel cool doing dev on my laptop remotely from my iPad using a combination of tailscale, tethering from my phone and using iSH to ssh into an emacs session.

Just FYI, it's been called "macOS" for the last eight years. The last OS X was El Capitan.

From Apple's perspective, macOS is a legacy product with the undesirable ability to run software of your choice without giving them a cut.

Wait you couldn't hover over the ipad and it didn't show you a pointer? The galaxy tablets had this since a few generations, why didn't apple do this earlier?

As sibling alluded to, they don't want to pay the per device royalty percentage, especially on high price devices like a MacBook Pro.

Maybe once the apple designed 5g chips are ready. Maybe they’ll be a little more battery friendly. And apple will either have to negotiate something worthwhile with carriers or start their own mobile network to keep the data prices reasonable. None of the current carriers offer data plans suitable for full time laptop use.

I'd wager it's a Qualcomm negotiation thing.

Modern WWAN might be a bit of a nightmare. I'm not super familiar with recent efforts in the space, but if Apple wanted to knock this out of the park, they'd need two things:

- Unlimited data plans, preferably at a non-insane price (sub $50-month would be nice)

- Both 4G LTE and 5G connectivity. Not just one or the other.

Both of these seem technically possible, but I'd assume they'd be incredibly difficult to pull-off from a business negotiation perspective.

I had the first generation iPad Pro. And eventually I gave it to my wife for a lot of the same reasons you list.

Ultimately, Apple will just doesn't want you to separate your data from the app. It's not just that it's a walled garden, it's a wall around you maintaining your data.

My primary tablet usage during the work day is taking notes. With a pen. And I've started organizing my notes into a self-indexed hierarchy of images. And for backup, those images go into S3. I can then just sync any other machine and peruse the images using Digikam which is kind of nice for a free open source app.

Every solution I've found in the iPad just requires you to put your data in some kind of isolated app playground, and then jump hoops to try to move it into any kind of backup system you can access on desktop OSes. I bought a Microsoft Surface, and despite not having worked in Windows in a decade or so, I was able to get my image-based note taking workflow done and set up in a day.

So, this iPad is a beautiful device I will never own. Purely because of their software policies. It's annoying.

> File management is still a sick joke.

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like every time I go to save or open something on my iPad it defaults to iCloud. I don't have a paid iCloud account and find this supremely annoying, especially because the default folder names inside iCloud are the same as in local folders. It's as if they're trying to cause people to accidentally save stuff to iCloud, to get them in the habit of using it (and then paying for it).

> The ridiculous sandboxing between programs that’s supposedly a security feature but just makes for an insufferably inconsistent UI and terrible management of data between programs … I guess that goes with my file management complaint.

I don’t know, I do think that in theory that strong of a sandboxing is superior and would actually like a better implementation of that on even something like linux. Most of my programs absolutely have no reason to read my documents and what not.

I have been, for backend development only. I live most of my life in Blink shell connected to a Linux machine. Works great as a very expensive dumb terminal. https://blink.sh/

Cons:

- Multitasking is weak. You can put two windows next to one another as long as you want them to be in a vertical split. The "pull out" side window feature doesn't work on the home screen for no discernible reason, so if you have Things in the side app then open it from the home screen, it's no longer opened in the side app and you have to manually move it back. (append: I haven't tried Stage Manager yet; maybe it will address some of this)

- Hardware keyboard support is pretty weak. The settings app and shortcuts app are two examples of apps with bad keyboard support. The "full keyboard access" is a very strange modality: it turns tab into a chording key. There's no equivalent to "focus all elements" as there is on desktop, so for example if I press tab from this text box, the "reply button" is not selected; the search at the bottom of the page is.

- Web access is a must. Individual apps might provide offline support, but many have sub-par sync systems, where you'll discovered that your offline files have helpfully been completely deleted and require resyncing, but since you're already on the plane by that point you're out of luck.

All in all: works great as an expensive dumb terminal.

Some things work great on the iPad, and for those things the iPad is absolutely fantastic and I will often prefer to use it.

If you want to infinitely scroll, the iPad is unparalleled. It is great for reading and watching. I like it as a game device. It is great for reading news and I enjoy apple's news widgets. Kindle works well. If you want to consume, the iPad is an amazing tool for consumption.

Additionally in the last year, apple made it really easy to use your iPad as a second screen, either as an iPad or as a literal second screen for your macbook. I found myself doing that more and more.

I bought the apple pencil thinking it can't possibly be worth the money, but it is an enjoyable device to use. Writing text on an iPad is more gimmick than feature (for me), but I find it a pleasurable way to scroll or navigate apps.

That being said, once you want to do a task with a keyboard, there is no replacing a laptop. The iPad is also locked down (no terminal, only safari) such that a laptop is still necessary. The iPad is still very much a luxury device and could not stand on its own. Phones and laptops both have features that the iPad does not have that make them necessary. The iPad offers nothing that makes it necessary unless you consider an ancillary screen for your laptop necessary.

Been using my iPad pro 2017 12.9 since 2015. It's basically my email/web/books/video/social device, but also can do work stuff in a pinch. It's not ideal for work, but it's more practical than my 12 mini if I need to do emergency stuff.

I also use it for presentations, sketch out designs and architecture, etc, but it's harder to clean up documents on the iPad because the editing on it is awkward compared do a laptop. For certain things diction works, but just copying and pasting a couple of rows in excel (or any spreadsheet like thing) is just really bad.

That said, the tool you have with you is the best tool, and it's really portable. It's 7 years old at this point and still going strong. It won't use a bunch of the new features in 16, but since I don't use those anyway I don't care.

If you want to test out an iPad, pick up a 1st or 2nd gen iPad Pro. I have three of them around the house (including mine) and the other two get used all the time for video/games/browsing.

I did for ~5 years but switched to the m2 air, complex tasks and multi tasking are much much easier, as well as dev work which is possible in a very limited way on iPad. I always used it with the keyboard attached and the laptop has a better hinge for screen angle too

I use a 5th gen iPad mini for web, email, telephony, ebooks, photos & video capture, but I use older Intel Macs (MBP 2010 & mini 2012) for local media server, storage, photo and video editing, torrent, file manipulation and transcoding, word processing & desktop publishing, pdf generation & editing, VM & emulation, and all the things that iDevices won't easily or gracefully allow or anything I happen to prefer on macOS. Granted, with effort, one can do nearly everything on iDevice, but it isn't always convenient. But upwards of 90% of the things I use Apple technology for is web browsing, email, and watching a movie or tv show, and this incidentally makes my Macs more secure and less needy of administration. I would like to have a new Mac, but I really can't justify it because I no longer use them for web and email, all the old Mac software can still do what I need it to do, although heavy processing takes longer, because the Macs are really in the background, it doesn't slow me down.

I did with the 2018 11” + Magic Keyboard. I felt very capable of doing most day-to-day tasking with the keyboard and mouse. Video calls sucked because the camera is off to the side when in the Magic Keyboard. Stage Manager might help even more, I found the previous “windowing” features to be lacking.

My brother does, his just broke and has been waiting for the new release. He's a teacher and just uses it for email, grading papers, etc.

Only as an e-reader, mainly because I lost my Kindle between moves. Other than that I don't use it for much.

Or you just prefer the form factor overall to a similarly-priced MacBook. I much prefer my 12.9" iPad Pro (I have a 2nd generation one, from way back in 2017) over a comparable MacBook Air. This new iPad Pro is a tempting upgrade for me, although my 2017 device is still working fine which does make the expense difficult to justify.

There are many lightning charge docks [1]. Maybe something like that could work, if securely mounted to the back of a table, to hide the hanging wire.

Wireless charging pads also have cables. Do you hide them in table surfaces?

1. Random example: https://www.belkin.com/th/chargers/wireless/charging-stands-...

Get a Mac Mini, stick it in a closet and VNC into it, that's what I do.

If you are needing it for web dev, the Inspect browser on iOS works great for that purpose. It is annoying you have to pay $10 for something that should be built in.