Let’s do the iPad Pro discussion again

It’s still not a computer, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to make it one.

Hey look, it’s someone using the touchscreen functions on an iPad right in front of their laptop. | Photo by Taras Shypka on Unsplash

The first post I wrote on this site was about the iPad Pro all the way back in 2021. Although I’m not sure I mentioned it, this was the first iPad with an M-class chip in it, and just about everyone thought that was a sign that iPadOS was going to be moving into a more desktop-like direction.

In some ways, it has. There’s true external display support now, and multitasking has improved from a split screen UI to a windowed one. We have a cursor that pops up when a mouse or trackpad is connected. You can mount storage drives. Even third-party software has improved since then; Lightroom is a much more mature app than it was back then, and it’s not at all out of the question for me to be able to do most of my edits on an iPad these days.

That said, it still fails to deliver on the most simple things that I ask a computer to be able to do. Some of that isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s down to developers not supporting the features they could. But when I can’t open two Google Sheets files at the same time on the iPad, it’s difficult to take it seriously as an unqualified laptop replacement.

I’m typing this on the new M4 11” iPad Pro. I missed the keynote as I was on vacation and completely forgot about it, but as soon as I saw that it had an OLED screen, I was sold. The thinness was neat, and I was certainly excited about the relocated camera for meetings, but the OLED was what sold me on an upgrade.

I even got the Magic Keyboard, even after having sold the first one because I just wasn’t using it. The function row, escape key, and larger trackpad were intriguing enough for me to at least give it a try, and I like it so far. It’s not a mechanical keyboard, but it does the job it’s meant to do well. The new Pencil Pro has been the most delightful upgrade of the whole bunch¹. The haptic feedback and squeeze functions have been immensely satisfying to encounter, and the hover feature, while not new to the Pencil, was new to me.

So as usual, I’m thrilled with the hardware. Apple usually doesn’t miss on hardware (butterfly keyboard and Magic Mouse charging port being notable recent exceptions). But putting it all together doesn’t give me the device I still wish I had.

I don’t want to rehash all of the things that Federico Viticci wrote in his very nice piece about the state of iPadOS because he’s covered it all very nicely. I do, however, want to expound on why he and many of us are still going to try and force the iPad to do the things Apple doesn’t want it to do.

I hate touchscreen laptops. The screens usually look terrible and if they aren’t bad quality out of the box, they’re certainly going to look bad once you’ve left all your smudgy prints on it. The touchscreen value of a laptop to me is absolutely nothing. I’ve used laptops for most of my life now and have never once felt like I needed to touch the screen to get it to do what I wanted. I do think the mouse interface often falls short in favor of a multi-touch trackpad. But with the ability to pinch and swipe and drag on trackpads, I don’t ever feel the need to interact directly with the screen.

I do often find myself reading something on a computer and wish I could just grab the screen off of it and hold it like a book. I really struggle to take typed notes and feel far more comfortable writing notes by hand. Doing detailed spot editing on photos is downright painful for me on an actual computer, trackpad or no, and I have found using a stylus for that makes the process so much faster and more comfortable.

It doesn’t seem too much to ask for to simply want one device that covers both use cases.

The touchscreen aspect is fully realized. This makes sense—it’s a touchscreen tablet first off. The note taking and the photo retouching and the reading parts of it work better than they ever have due to the better Pencil Pro and lower weight of the device.

It’s the rest of it that’s still such a struggle. But the promise of that perfect unified device beckons to me. It calls me toward a utopia that doesn’t yet exist. And so I continue to search for workarounds and reinforce my VNC infrastructure in my attempt to force the iPad to do what it ought to—what Apple continues to prevent it from doing.

Every year, we see hardware improvements and think to ourselves, “surely this is the year that Apple will set the iPad free and let it fully realize the promise that the hardware creates for this device.” And every year, it doesn’t².

But the touchscreen elements of this device are so outstanding that it continues to make sense for people like me to keep finding new ways to try and coerce this device into being the outstanding laptop it’s got the hardware to be.

I love the ability to use it as a laptop and then pop it off the Magic Keyboard and take meeting notes on it. It feels so magical to interface with this truly beautiful slab of glass in one context and then at a whim be able to use it completely differently. It feels like the future, and there is perhaps nothing more exciting to turbonerds like me than feeling like you’re living in a sci-fi story. Reading Ender’s Game in 2005 and thinking about the “desks” that all the kids were using and then seeing the iPad makes it feel like Orson Scott Card was more visionary than imaginative.

So I keep searching for better ways, because this thing is so close to being perfect. I remote into my Mac devices from the iPad to get them to do the things that the iPad won’t. I uninstall deliberately under-featured apps so that I can use the fully-functioning web services instead³. I refuse to give up on the iPad Pro as the device it can and should be.

1. All that said, I was extremely miffed initially to find out that I had to buy a new Pencil when my original one was working just fine. It is a better experience, and I understand why they had to make a new Pencil for the new hardware, but it’s an extra $150 on top of the price of the iPad itself when you already have a perfectly good one at home.

2. I can’t tell you why this is the case. People say it’s because Apple doesn’t want to see the iPad cannibalize the MacBook product line. I don’t think that’ll happen. There are still things I want a real laptop for. There are plenty of times where I don’t need to have the touchscreen component of a device and I’ll want a larger screen and a larger trackpad and a keyboard that has full-sized dash and tick mark buttons.

I think Apple still wants to keep the iPad Pro in the walled garden the way the iPhone is instead of allowing people to do whatever they want to with it like they have to with Macs. Apple doesn’t like giving exit passes from the garden, so if they manage to get you in there, they’re not going to let you out unless the EU forces them to. Part of it’s financial (30% cut from the App Store) and part of it is probably security-minded (it’s harder to create an exploit for a device that’s running an iOS-based firmware than it is a device that can install apps from anywhere and has a command line program, and a lot of people’s grandparents use iPads as their primary large-screen computing devices), but I think a lot of it is just the old Apple “we know what you need better than you do” arrogance.

3. Seriously Google, I hope whoever made the decision to only allow your office suite apps to open one document at a time stubs their toes every day from now until the time the apps no longer behave this way.