I’m Not Convinced the iPad Pro is Replacing the Laptop
By: Noah Ingram
Tags: Apple, Writing, Mac, iPad Pro, iPad

I’m Not Convinced the iPad Pro is Replacing the Laptop

thoughts on deciding which Apple rabbit hole to jump down

Photo by Xiong Yan on Unsplash

As I write this on Word 365 mobile on my trusty iPad Air, which I bought as a good compromise between processing power and the knowledge I just did not do “Pro” stuff on an iPad, I’m weeks of reading and thousands of hours into watching videos about the glory that is the iPad Pro’s laptop-like capabilities. From a sample pool of one and on this 2019 Air, I can assert in comfortable sitting circumstances it makes for a decent word processor. With a screen substantially larger than the Air, the 12.9’’ Pro has the presence of a compact laptop. And with the roll-out of the iPadOS to give the iPads a more laptop-style feel, Apple threw down a serious challenge to its competitors and possibly to itself.

Except, they didn’t.

At least, not for me. Not yet. Like most Apple watchers, I was excited about integrating a cursor for the iPad. I didn’t even mind it was nested in the accessibility menu. Plugging the cursor in there was less a nefarious attempt at reminding users that iPads are touch first, as if anyone could forget, than expedience of programming. I suspect. Apple wants to court users, especially in the business world, with iPadOS. The productivity enhancements and the cursor, the horsepower under the hood, the heavy marketing about its capabilities compared to most laptops clarified this. Apple was already the brand of creatives. The iPad Pro did the creative things well; there was no doubt.

So, where did that leave me as a writer and low-moderate user?

For reasons I still cannot understand, I have lusted after the last missing piece of my Apple collection for two years now: a Mac. At first, I didn’t care what it was. Mini, iMac, MacBook, it didn’t matter. I wanted to experience the world of Mac just as I had experienced the world of the iPhone, iPad, Watch, Pencil, all of it. I had yet been let down by the ease of interface and intuitive design of these products. My computing life was always a Windows affair. My writing always Word. I wasn’t a man of complex needs. I was also a gamer, and any honest Mac user can admit the gaming world has moved on from Mac and Apple-until recently maybe-hasn’t been interested in this market. Gaming is the one major computing sector where Mac didn’t “just work.” Boot camp and then and then but possibly not…?

I wasn’t deterred, I just figured I was in for a two-state solution. One device for gaming and a Mac for whatever a Mac does. On the surface, Macs and Windows machines do necessarily the same things. (Put your hand down, Linux guy, I know yours is the platinum standard. I also know I’m not brave enough for Linux.) As far as I could tell from across the spectrum of reviews, Macs did it cleaner, more efficiently, with higher quality, and, again, more intuitively. Idiot-proof is a big plus for this big idiot. The gaming device would be a console, my usual solution, or a gaming PC. Eventually, I built my own.

I tried out the suite of tools that would matter most on the Mac on my iPad: iWork. I don’t know if it is mobile optimization or my lack of understanding of the design ethic of Apple fully yet, but I was turned off by Pages. I loved the one-click publish to Apple Books, but I was nowhere near ready for that to become a daily use tool. Word’s ribbon has tools for every flex you can imagine, and most you haven’t, and it can be a beast to navigate, but at least it was all there. And it is by significant degrees the world’s most popular word processing software. I don’t mind it, as I use it to this day as my primary writing interface.

Pages, I’m sure its advocates can tell me, is a full-throated writing tool and just not styled for the Office-wired brain. I agree, it probably isn’t, and the iPad version is perhaps not a great representation of its abilities. But it didn’t help sell the glory of the all-Mac integration I was dreaming of to me. Let me explain.

I like all my stickers to look the same. Although for everything they are not the best choice, I almost bought all ASUS TUF gaming branded PC parts for my recently built gaming rig. Why? Because I wanted my TUF wings logo shining on everything, dammit! Like a not crazy person, I bought compromises between quality and price, though it is an all AMD build.

With Apple, I was committed to the idea that I should 100% integrate into the Apple ecosphere. Frankly, that’s one of their greatest product strengths: their stuff works well together. I wanted my email to be an @icloud account; I wanted my writing to be Pages, browsing to be Safari, and so on. I wanted to divest from the non-Apple world. But on what device should I do this?

Quickly, it was evident that it would be a MacBook. I’d assume that is true for most Mac users. Something I was immediately critical about Apple was their choice to just ever so slightly under power the base models of their product lines. The MacBook Air, which would be my ideal use level, has an i3 and 8 gigs of memory? And it’s a grand? I know they build quality, and the MacOS is efficient as hell, but give me a break. Those are not the specs you put in a premium product. The base model pro, at thirteen hundred, was somewhat less offensive. I was okay with the i5. My last laptop, a Dell Inspiron, had one, and it served me well. But 8 gigs of memory again? Unacceptable.

It became evident that I was looking for at least an i5 and 16GB of memory. Thankfully, due to a reliance on cloud memory and my central hard drive at home, I needed little on-board storage. 128 or 256gigs of SSD storage would be fine. For months, I built and priced. And learned Apple doesn’t do sales. This would be an expensive transition.

Time wore on, and I chose the somewhat more practical iPad Air and a Bluetooth keyboard, then turned my sights on building or buying a gaming PC. That whole sad debacle was another story for another time, but it was July of this year (2020) when it was done in all its glowing glory. I had stopped thinking about the Mac Attack until some moving in our house and arrival of new furniture prompted my family to shift its primary sitting area from our bonus room, where my PC is, to our sunroom, where my PC is not.

I want to be around my family. I also want to write. Constantly. I needed to solve these two problems. I can’t lug the big rig around, so I needed something portable. I’m giving some thought to a foldout table for my iPad, but I’m not sold on that just yet. Thus, my thoughts drifted back to the MacBook. Mostly.

I love writing. But I L O V E video games. Remember what Macs do poorly? Video games. While there was a glimmer of hope in the news earlier in the year that Apple might make a splash back into the gaming world with a high-end gaming MacBook, so far that has not borne out. I think that rumor was likely the first whiffs of what was the ARM announcement at WWDC. I’m not sure of the technical background, but as I understand it, along with moving to ARM processors, or because of it, Apple is easing up game developer headaches for Mac game development. Don’t take my word for that; I may just misunderstand what I’ve read.

So, since I had exhausted my tech play money on the gaming rig, and I’m committed to out of pocket buying, I saved for the laptop. I bounced back and forth between a MacBook and a decent gaming laptop. Something with an AMD chip and a 1660ti GPU would be excellent. The news about the possibilities around the ARM chips had my head spinning again.

With ARM, as I understood it, iOS apps came into play, and Apple products would talk to each other better than ever. Efficiency and performance would rise across the board. Sweet!

This is where I am today. I’ve vetted the iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard or equivalent 3rd party keyboard. Still, I don’t think the iPad Pro is ready for prime time as a laptop yet. It’s coming, but until that cursor works like a mouse, which it does not now, and iPadOS works as close to a laptop as Apple wants us to believe, I need the laptop. As an educator, I can at least take advantage of the Education store discounts, however modest, so that will help me on the path. After doing my Reddit research on r/Mac, who is a reasonably helpful bunch, I am settled on waiting to see if Apple rolls out an ARM-powered Mac in my price range. I still want in the ecosphere, though I’m not as over the top committed to complete integration as I was.

Final Analysis? If I got an iPad Pro today, it would be for a larger screen. But my Air is great for everything I use it for, so shelling out close to a grand for a little more screen real estate seems the height of first world indulgence. I’m okay enough with the 13.3 Mac screens, though I’d prefer something in the 15 or 16-inch range, that it is mostly a non-issue.

Looking forward to writing about my no doubt bumbling transition from PC to Mac later on a new MacBook. I’ll let you know when I get there.