Is this the moment that the iPad Pro has been waiting for?

The hardware is here. It’s up to Apple to turn the tablet into a true computer.

When the iPad was originally introduced, I thought it was absurd. I had a 13” MacBook and an iPhone. What on earth would a larger iPhone be useful for? Reading PDFs, maybe. Taking notes in class? Not really, because it didn’t sit flat on the table and there wasn’t even a tab button on the on-screen keyboard.

I ended up buying one despite my misgivings. And it wasn’t very useful.

As the iPad’s operating system has matured, we’ve seen it become more than just a large iPhone or a keyboard-less laptop that only runs phone apps. Developers have created apps designed specifically for the iPad that take advantage of the unique pairing of a large screen and touch capabilities. Some creatives have designed their workflows entirely around the iPad. There are high quality photo, video, and audio editing applications available for the platform and you can find as many YouTube videos extolling the virtues of those apps as your heart desires.

But still, when I see normal people trying to decide if the iPad is the right primary computing choice for them over a MacBook Air, I am hesitant to ever recommend any of the hardware in the iPad line for them because of the limitations of the platform. The only thing that the MacBook Air can’t do that the iPad can is take touch input. The iPad doesn’t even have a fully-featured spreadsheet app.

The MacBook’s shortcoming was a hardware limitation. But the most frustrating thing about the iPad’s failures for normal people as a primary device is that they’re primarily software-based. Sure, there isn’t an iPad out there with 16 GBs of RAM—at least not until the new iPad Pro launches on the 21st—but I don’t need that for an Excel macro. Though there is speculation that this might change in iPadOS 15, as of now, you can’t even create an iPad app on an iPad. Xcode isn’t available for the iPad. If you want to do development on the iPad, you either need to remote in to an actual computer or set up a system accessible in a cloud.

I’ve recently begun to try to learn Python. I downloaded a book called Automate the Boring Stuff and started digging in on my iPad Pro. I quickly downloaded Pythonista, a really solid app for working in Python, to start working through the code examples and problems in the book. So far it’s done what I need. I’m writing short scripts and I’m not trying to import uncommon modules. But I had to download a different app to get something that could emulate a Terminal window for other parts of the book because there is no Terminal on the iPad. And between the book in one window, Pythonista in another, getting into and out of the Terminal emulator that lives in Slide Over is kind of a pain, because it’s always covering up something else. File management is still clunky and so is window management. What I’m trying to do is very simple, but on the iPad it feels like an unnecessary challenge.

I choose to still work this way because one of the things I love most about the iPad is that it reduces distractions. I have notifications reduced and DND turned on all the time so I don’t have notifications pinging constantly and I’m not seeing that Slack window open that tempts me to pop in and check to see if anything interesting has happened in any channels since the last time I looked ten minutes ago. I can focus better on what I’m reading, and being able to annotate the PDF with the Apple Pencil is pretty darn great. But once I graduate from the simple Python stuff, I’ll have to outgrow the iPad too. The iPad can handle the load hardware-wise, but the operating system is still too much iPhone and not enough Mac to allow people to use these powerful devices as true computers.

What I would like to see in iOS 15 isn’t necessarily a full port of macOS. Simple quality of life upgrades like a fully-featured file browser or multiple Spaces or desktops like the Macs have would be worlds better than only having split screens and Slide Over.

I want to see fuller versions of Mac apps move to the iPad, which seems more feasible now that the Pros are looking at eight to 16 GBs of RAM now. I admit that this request isn’t all on Apple, but with the increased memory, I would hope we would see more powerful features from desktop apps make the switch.

One of my own personal challenges with moving more of my creation to the iPad is the Lightroom app. On its own, it’s actually a pretty solid app. I’d say it’s about 85% there when you compare it to desktop LR Classic. The problem—and I’ll give you that this is absolutely Adobe’s choice and not Apple’s—is that I have an entire catalog of photos stored in the Classic app’s file structure on an external drive, and that’s utterly useless on the iPad. Apple’s barebones file browser certainly doesn’t help things, but right now, there’s no way I could really do the first batch culling on the iPad that I feel comfortable doing easily on my laptop.

Folks far smarter than I can tell you how and why the iPad doesn’t have Xcode or any other true development apps, but thankfully for me, you don’t need to have two brain cells to rub together to simply hope that this changes in the next update. I think this particular device format works well for my brain trying to concentrate and that’s a real asset for me when I’m trying to think through a problem. Sometimes when I’m hooked up to my ultra wide monitor for work, I feel like there’s too much screen space and I have trouble staying attached to one task. No danger of that on an 11” screen.

To wrap up this missive succinctly, I want to see Apple come out and definitively answer the big question at WWDC this year: What is the iPad for?

The infamous “what is a computer” ad indicates that the vision is still for it to be a computer replacement, but I still find myself searching for ways to use the device more often than I do reaching for it with a specific purpose in mind. The hardware is exceptional, and has been at least on the Pros since launch. If you’re a “creative”—an artist or podcaster or photographer or videographer—you may still have some workflow adaptations you have to make, but there are a lot of apps out there for the iPad that can work well for you, especially if you’ve embraced the cloud storage life.

I’ve edited a number of podcasts on the iPad and while it wasn’t as easy as I found it to be in Audition, it was still doable and I probably could have sped up my workflow if I edited a few shows in a row on there and got the flow down. Despite my gripes with Lightroom and file management, it’s a splendid app and making local adjustments on photos the iPad is so much easier than doing it on the computer. Premiere Rush is a solid app for simple video editing, and I’ve heard excellent things about LumaFusion for bigger projects.

So the traditional sort of Apple creative is well-supported. But what about everyone else? What about different kinds of creatives? The developers responsible for making the apps that everyone else is using and the Excel wizards who have saved my behind hours and hours of time at my job with insanely complicated formulas and macros? Creativity and creation aren’t limited to the kinds of “artists” we necessarily think of when we first hear the word.

The iPad is a fine consumption device for anyone, but is that the limit of what people can rely on it to be for them? The hampered operating system has long favored one flavor of content creation, but that has left both power users and normal users who need features exclusive to desktop apps echoing the question I posed above. I’d love to see that change in iPadOS 15.