The Solution to All My iPad Pro Issues Is the MacBook Air
I don’t know why I love the iPad Pro so much. But I do. And I keep buying them even when I don’t have a good excuse to do it. Apple is my Lucy. And a professional feature set for the iPad Pro is the football. Apple keeps teasing me with the possibilities. But then snatches it away. I keep kicking, and the ball keeps not being there. Something has to give.
What gives is usually my resolve to keep using the iPad Pro as my primary mobile. I keep running into the same speed-bumps. There continues to be no good third-party solutions. And I keep running back to the Mac for all my mobile needs. That’s pathetic. And it is what just happened again. So I keep writing the same article about how I love the iPad and tried to use it as my primary mobile but keep getting the same paper cuts year after year. I think I have finally had enough. I’m done with the cycle. Do you believe me now? I’m not sure I do either. But I am sure I am back on the MacBook Air train again. Here’s why:
The Form Is a Huge Factor
The iPad Pro 12.9” is a big and heavy glass and metal slab. It gets bigger and heavier when you attach a useable keyboard to it. Due to its form, it will never be an ideal laptop. It will forever be top-heavy. If anyone tried to make a laptop with the dimensions of the iPad plus Magic Keyboard for iPad, they would be laughed out of the industry by the customers to whom they attempted to sell such a monstrosity. The form factor isn’t any better because it is an iPad. We are a long way from an iPad Pro being as thin as the lid of a MacBook Air. And that is exactly what it would take to make the iPad work well as a laptop.
While the size and weight of the iPad plus keyboard is similar to the MacBook Air, it is not the same. The MacBook Air is a true thin and light. The iPad with keyboard is about the same weight. But the distribution of that weight makes it feel chunkier and heavier. After all these years, the MacBook Air still feels like the ultimate thin and light. You pick it up and it feels surprisingly small and light. You pick up the iPad with keyboard and it feels surprisingly thick and heavy. You can call it an illusion. But it is an illusion you will share with anyone who can compare them side by side.
Small Usability Issues
The MacBook Air is one of the most useable computers out of the box I have every used. It doesn’t need to be proper up to cooling or to achieve a good typing angle. Just open it and use it. Speaking of opening it, you can perform this task with one hand, no problem. Good luck managing that with the iPad in any of the popular keyboard cases.
You can lean the lid back on the MacBook as far as you need it. You will find yourself fighting with the limited tilt of the Magic Keyboard for iPad. When you do have the Magic Keyboard tilted back as far as it will go without breaking, you are bound to hit the bottom of the iPad with your fingers as you type. I find this to be crazy-making. With any laptop, you can type as frantically as you wish and never run into such an annoyance.
The Magic keyboard offers the best key feel of any of my keyboards. But that excellent typing action is marred by the lack of function keys for basic things. The MacBook Air has a satisfying and useful function row. The Magic Keyboard has an excellent, but small trackpad. The MacBook Air sports the best and one of the biggest trackpads in the industry. The user experience and satisfaction is not even close.
Let’s spare a moment to talk about the camera. I have no complaints about the performance of the iPad camera. I have much complaining to do about the placement of it. Apple could have given it the best camera in the industry and it would still be one of the worst video chat experiences in the industry because it is on the wrong edge. No Center Stage tricks will defeat that fact. And I never use it because whenever I use it, the people I am talking to see me looking off to the side. The camera on the laptop is correctly placed and will get a lot more use. Even the best tablet is not a good laptop for all the little things I have mentioned, and more.
For Professional Work
It pains me to keep saying this sort of thing. The MacBook Air feels like a computer that is ready to do professional work without excuses or caveats. The iPad Pro still falls short in small ways. One needs to apologize for the iPad Pro, put it in context, and rationalize why it should be considered a professional tool. When it comes to doing my job as a writer, the iPad Pro can get most of it done, but with asterisks. The MacBook Air requires no asterisks. Just give it a job to do and the job will be done.
The web browser on the iPad Pro is excellent for a mobile browser. Did you notice the context? Multitasking on the iPad is so much better than it used to be. The iPad has the most professional and sophisticated apps for a tablet. Mail is almost as good on the iPad as it is on the Mac.
We could talk about why apps on the iPad can’t use as much ram as they can on the Mac. We can talk about why there is only a single resolution on the iPad. We can talk about the file system and why it isn’t up to desktop standards. We can excuse-make for why you can’t do as much with audio on the iPad — why when you want to do a podcast with guests, most people have to switch to a real computer. If you want to know what a real computer is, it is the one where you do your real professional work that involves more than making words.
Apple asks, what’s a computer. A computer is the thing your reach for when you can’t finish the job on the iPad.
Untouchable
I am not on the touchscreen bandwagon. That is probably because I have been using the iPad since the first one released on the first day. They are great touch devices. But when docked on the keyboard, my touching is over. Not only do I not voluntarily reach up and touch the screen when I have it on a keyboard, I am annoyed beyond words when I am forced to do so. I despise having to reach up and adjust the volume or sleep the display. This is not how a laptop or desktop should work. If the iMac had a keyboard that didn’t have a way to use those functions on the keyboard. No one would accept it. If you see volume buttons on an iMac, they blew it.
I am perfectly happy with not needing to reach up and interact with the screen on my laptop. If it had that feature, I would never use it. I am glad the price is not increased by such useless functionality. I get that some people on the Windows side of things really like it. But I am skeptical about how much touchscreens on computers are actually touched. For my narrow-minded part, I hope the screens on Apple laptops remain untouchable. That ensures that every function can be done from the keyboard deck. I believe that is the way it should be. The iPad needs to learn that lesson.
Learning Curve for Enthusiasts
There was a time when the Mac was positioned as the computer for the rest of us. While computer enthusiasts gravitated to the new and shiny, the Mac was never intended for them. It was intended for regular folk who had been disenfranchised from the computing world. The iPad was initially the extension of that idea for touch-based devices. It was not Tablet PC. And it was not a netbook. It was something else, something simpler and driven by design and function. It was not a computer. It was for the generation of people who wanted something different. It was a post-PC device.
Today, the iPad Pro is just another PC without all the features. Before it went pro, it was a product for the rest of us. But somewhere along the way, it tried to be something more, or appeal to people who wanted more. I believe that was a mistake. The brilliance of the iPad is that it is not a laptop. When it tries to be, it fails. Almost all of its pain points rise to the surface when it is being used as something for which it was not originally designed. No amount of silicon will make it a professional device.
The people who can access its full potential are enthusiasts who had to go through a steep learning curve. That is not the formula for being a device for the rest of us. I mentioned that you cannot really do tasks like producing a podcast on the iPad. That is not exactly the case. You can. But you have to bring in other hardware to make it work. It is the kind of thing that only a very technical person could do. That is what Apple has forced the most enthusiastic iPad users to become. When you watch the Steve Jobs presentation of the iPad, there was no room for a Pro version. It was not for professional work. This is something we have grafted onto the platform. And in my estimation, it does not now, and will likely never fit.
I love the iPad, and am guilty of trying to shoehorn it into situations that do not pair well with what it is. That is the source of my frustrations. I suspect this tension is inside of Apple as well. There are likely some teams that want it to mature and evolve into something else, while others want it to be a better version of what it was always intended to be. I don’t want to be an iPad enthusiast. I don’t want to learn another way to do a podcast or record a piece of music or edit a photo or write and publish a blog. I don’t want to use simple tools for complex work. That is why no matter how many iPads I buy and love, I will always need a laptop: a real computer.
Conclusion: It’s Time to Take Apple at Its Word
Apple keeps saying they don’t want to merge iOS and the Mac. They keep showing us their vision of the iPad. We are the ones who can’t accept it. Every year, we say that this is the year for the iPad to finally get its wings. And every year, we a wrong. Even equipped with an M1 and an XDR display, Apple shows no sign of wanting the iPad to have all the capabilities of the Mac. It is time for us to stop wish-casting and start letting the iPad be the iPad and the Mac be the Mac. We all need to stop trying to turn the iPad into a MacBook Air and just buy a MacBook Air. It is everything I need and is less expensive for doing what I need it to do.
I, for one, am going to stop buying high-end iPads to use as my primary mobile work device. It is not good enough at that function. That is not the fault of the device. That is my fault for not realizing soon enough that the product Apple makes for me is a laptop. Now, I will be free to use the iPad for what it was designed at its core to be: a tablet. I will use it that way for a while and report back. In the meantime, it is as it is every year. It is the MBA for work for the win.
David Johnson