(1) The (11-inch) size is fantastic: you get enough screen real estate to see what you’re reading and writing, but it still fits into an arbitrarily small bag and is light enough that you can comfortably walk around all day with it. The death of the original tiny MacBook Air was a huge fail for apple
(2) CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY FOR GOD’S SAKE CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY. Yes, you can always hotspot your phone, however, that’s still not nearly so reliable as a device with its own connectivity, some providers still limit bandwidth there, plus the last thing I need is extra battery drain on my phone when I’m already stressed about it.
TBF, if Apple ever brought back the original MacBook Air with modern specs and with a cellular chip, I would just take gigantic buckets full of money and throw them in the general direction of Cupertino until I got one, like, instantly. And there are definitely still compromises—-as an academic, I’ve been meaning to just write a command line front end to zotero and fling it onto a digital ocean server or something, because its iPad app is so godawful. But on the whole, I still reach for my iPad much much much more than my MacBook, for those two killer features.
Let me do that w/ a MacBook Neo and iPad Air pair which look as if they belong together and which fit nicely into a bag and afford me the option of taking only the iPad Air and Apple Pencil when I want to travel light, and maybe I'll come back to the fold (the last thing I bought from Apple was Mac OS X Public Beta, before that it was OpenSTEP 4.2, and the last thing Apple made which I truly liked wholeheartedly was Snow Leopard).
Oh yeah, make the Apple Pencil work on an iPhone....
Instead, these days, I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360 (two of them, panic-bought a spare when I though the line was being discontinued, it's now up to a Book 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (replacing a first-gen unit) and a Wacom One display connected to a MacBook (purchased by an employer) and more Wacom styluses than I can easily count....
The high watermark of my graphical computing experience was using an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint w/ FutureWave SmartSketch when mobile, and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ --- I've tried pretty much every thing in-between since, but when things were finally getting better, Microsoft did Fall Creator's Update and everything came crashing down....
I'd really like for Apple to make a device trifecta which I would actually be willing to buy.
The part about Procreate is really spot on. If you draw on the iPad, and I do, Procreate just dissolves under your fingers and pencil. It's like working with paper and pencil. Almost. And it has Undo. Tactile feedback would be nice, but I'm not sure what that means. Paper and pencil has great tactile feedback. Trying to describe it with words is an exercise in frustration. If you don't draw, or write with a pen, ever, then I'm at a loss to explain it.
But it's there nonetheless.
We've got a long way to go to really understand UI and UX. A long, long way.
Now, please excuse me while I go and tap dance about architecture for a bit...
1. Make it powerful enough so that it can be sold as equivalent to macOS
2. Keep it locked like iOS, to be sold as secure alternative to computer for your parents and kids (which rules out all the workflow customization pros need)
3. Don’t make it powerful enough for people to stop buying Macs (Tim Cook’s biggest fear is of you not buying another slab of glass - no multiprofile for you, ever)
The intersection of these is an empty set.
I use my 2018 Pro as a great browser and YouTube machine, with zero intent to upgrade until the above situation changes. It’s useless for anything else, and even if I got M4 powerhouse, I wouldn’t be able to take it as a single machine for holiday for emergency Weathergraph hotfix or server debugging.
The iPad is meant to be used in touch mode while in your hands generally. If they were brave they'd stop pretending, strip the iPad back to its roots and make it the best touch-first experience they could.
Trying to make iPad+keyboard case a Mac replacement is an exercise in futility. Similar size/weight to a MacBook at that point, and just not as fluid as MacOS. All the Mac-like stuff (keyboard/trackpad/multitasking/keyboard shortcuts) feels bolted on. All the battery/memory management makes it feel a little flakier and less responsive than a Macbook.
iPhones need desktop mode. Your apps, your data. USB-C screen + Bluetooth keyboard/mouse. Running like iPadOS or even macOS.
Would the iPad still be that days long, cohesive device is another story.. it Apple cannot have their cake and eat it too.
I like that. My recent tools are mostly AI first, and therefore CLI first. I’ve been toying with adding JSON modes to them, and this is undeniably useful, but I think I’ll keep JSON under flags; it’s a way to prioritize human users as well.
The author wants using the iPad to “feel like a finger ballet, your hands swooping and swiping”, but also the author seems to care a lot about emails and Claude Code and writing. Those are fundamentally at odds, and it makes complete sense that they’re very happy with a MacBook Neo instead (but they could have just been using a MacBook Air the whole time).
The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”, and it’s an amazing tool for digital artists and anyone who does lots of hand annotation work. So really overall a product that’s found its niche, and when I see grandpas and grandmas and students at my local cafe using their iPad their hands are effectively swooping and swiping in a finger ballet.
I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air), and for some reason that induces some sort of frustration in them and they feel like things somehow shouldn’t be that way. I guess I get it, the iPad hardware is pretty slick. But yeah, your work makes you a MacBook person, not an iPad person, that’s just how it is. (Apple should make an 11” MacBook again though).
> iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system […] The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps
I don’t know what this obsession with “weird apps” is, but 99.9% of people don’t care about “weird apps” and so that’s not enough to justify a whole device category (and you can find weird apps on all platforms anyways).
Everything about using that app was about trying to make you feel like you could reach out and touch the screen. Now you can. Its user interface was nonsenical at the time. Now a spherical marble is sensible. Tap an object, then tap and hold; use other hand to operate the three-axis arrow control bar that swells up out of the interface into easy to touch controls. When you let go, they pop with a little spray of tri-color paint and a few speckles get left on the user interface.
Seriously, we have done almost nothing with what’s possible because everything is either Word, Letterpress, Tabletop Simulator, or cross-platform port. Meanwhile there’s an engine in there powerful enough to run Bryce with realtime rendering, but everyone wants to emulate a sheet of paper rather than letting me do the most basic things.
We could have painting with a pen and controlling z-depth with a hand at the same time. Path snap to collision avoidance margins on a slider. Negative margins and a setting to define collision handling: do you materials simulate two oils colliding at their spline velocity? Do they intersperse and blend like translucent colored sand? How far after the intersection does the aftertint continue in the brush stream?
Instead, we have, courtesy of AI, U-turned the industry all the way back to text adventure games with sentient potatoes.
Sigh.
Like a product I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.
It's frustating knowing that the ipad _could_ run mac os but won't due to intentional market segmentation by Apple.
I can try:
There's variation, paper to paper, pen to pen, pencil to pencil, they each present slightly differently. Write with a ballpoint on some receipt paper, then write with a fountain pen on some smooth, low absorbancy paper, then whip out one of those green engineering notebooks with a mechanical pencil.
For each task with a physical writing utensil and paper, you get a distinct experience that connects you physically to the task.
Once actually writing, there's a sense of finality, even the erasable pencil leaves a mark. Your movements have consequence.
Then there's the persistence. A piece of paper doesn't timeout to the lock screen. It's there, all the time, using zero energy to continue to exist. You can prop it up on your desk and forget about it until you need to reference it. If you're constantly going between two pages, you can lay them side-by-side without reducing their size.
I've always found writing/drawing on a tablet to be frustrating. It feels like I'm looking down at a notebook through a toilet paper tube, like I can never see the full picture. I used a wacom tablet with a chromebook and Xournal for years to take class notes. Something about disconnecting the stylus from the screen fixed those frustrations for me, like it took the expectations of paper away and provided the expectations of a pointing device.
Indeed - and given LLM's have made the 'command line' great again and voice isn't appropriate in every scenario ( far too public ), hard to see how text input isn't critical.
The two machines solve totally different problems. I never bothered to get the keyboard for the ipad - because typing is something i do on the macbook air. The ipad is incredible for reading pdfs that are meant to be letter/a4 sized.
I have a Surface Book now, that I put Linux on for a while (bad idea, super flaky with Surface Linux). I'd probably recommend the Surface Pro again over the Surface Book, and just put up with Windows (ugh x2). Using the AtlasOS variant at least, so less crappy compared to stock Windows.
I think if the hardware differences really mattered Sidecar wouldn't exist, Mac wouldn't run iOS apps, iPhone wouldn't stream to Mac, and the AVP wouldn't stream/run apps from both platforms.
Would those devices be better if their software was strictly siloed from each other?
> I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air)
Couldn't agree more. I am that person. I spent months deliberating before buying an 11" iPad (with keyboard). Used it for a week for the novelty. But the keyboard, trackpad, and multi-tasking is so janky compared to my Mac that it's sat in a cupboard ever since.
The MacBook Air is so quick and light that it's always just as convenient to get the MacBook out instead.
And that's not even for 'techie' tasks. Basic note-taking, researching, and simple spreadsheets are all easier on the Mac. The only time I reach for the iPad is if I want to watch a video and my girlfriend is already using the TV.
That being said, the iPad mini is a perfect companion if you do want an iPad but already have a decent MacBook. Such a great form-factor and doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement.
Modern Mac trackpads don’t really click, they vibrate upon sensing a certain amount of force, and the sensory illusion is good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
I’m only suggesting this tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps there’ll come a time when the Apple Pencil can micro-vibrate in such a way that is so convincing it will make you feel as if you’re dragging it on paper with configurable roughness.
Totally doable for travel debugging.
I still dream of the day when my computer lives on my wrist, and I just have a few dummy screens in different formats that can connect to it so I can consume media or be productive.
I imagine the surface go 4 with an n200 is probably a good bit better but several times the price; assuming it can run Linux
It always ends up playing videos or the kids playing some silly game.
Yes, yes they would. You would get software actually designed to fully exploit the capabilities of the device. And not, for example, shitty lazy port of mobile apps to MacOS
Technically totally doable, just give me a VS Code + local Linux container (Apple Silicon is great at virtualization) to which it can tunnel.
In practice, impossible with Apple's limitations.
The 2011 Motorola Atrix came with a proprietary dock to connect to. Modern desktop environments can use the USB-C 3.2 DP ports on the phone to provide video out. Lapdock shells are widely available online.
the thing that annoys me is that pretty much everybody in the industry with a decent amount of understanding has known for more than a decade this was absolutely feasible.
and the most infuriating this is that i know for a fact it's not being done purely for a matter of product fragmentation.
the macbook neo is living proof that we could give people a single device (iphone 17 pro/pro max) and have that do pretty much everything. get in the office, hook your phone to a display via usb-c, start working. unplug your phone (which now is fully charged) and go home.
we could have dumb laptop-shaped terminals where we plug our phones, and get a larger display and a keyboard. or tablet-shaped "terminals". or desktop docks at home.
how cool would it be to leave for the office with just your company phone in your pocket ?
but we wouldn't need three separate devices: an iphone, an ipad and a macbook.
something similar would likely also apply to the android world, if android os developers could get their shit together and get a decent implementation working (android occasionally re-launches this, and it usually sucks again).
1) Consumption device People reading, scrolling, watching videos. Nice on the sofa, in bed, whatever. Also this use case has a lot of older users driven by eyesight issues that make a bigger slightly further screen interface better. Also very intuitive to young children (funny how often this elderly/youth overlap rears its head).
2) Creative (not productivity/coding!) device Artists needing pencil & touch interface for precise tactile writing/drawing/editing
Or you would just have a void where that hypothetical software could be, and this is what actually happened to the iPad (and AVP).
You don’t think a non-artist, non-coder can be productive on an iPad?
Some jobs are heavily writing, reading, email/messaging, meetings, etc. Feel link those people can do quite well with an iPad, no?
The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen.
iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system. PushPopPress began to illuminate this path fifteen years ago, and then they got slurped up — like so many other promising, young, talented designers and companies around that time — by Facebook, only to disappear into the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s electric hydrofoil surfboard. Using an iPad should feel like a finger ballet. Your hands should be swooping and swiping and the whole OS should feel like skipping across a taut slackline, a bit bouncy and pleasing and physical but also precise and quick and focused taking you where you need to go, across some creative gulf. There should be no “hard edges” anywhere. iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy. When you pick up one of those magic slabs (and truly, the amount of engineering and power in those thin-as-heck slabs is something else) you should feel giddy, like you’re about to enter a whole ’nother computer-ing universe, one that is all about elegant multitouch tactility, worlds apart from your phone or your laptop.
The MacBook Neo is about six years late. Back in 2020, when the iPad Pro’s 4th generation model — the one with trackpad support — was released, there was a group of us who slapped the new Magic Keyboard with trackpad on it and thought, immediately: Give me this machine with macOS. This feeling had been brewing for a while. iPad Pros had been around since 2015, and it was clear they were more capable than our space-heater, butterfly-cursed, hackneyed singular-port MacBooks. Back then, MacBooks were uninspiring. Used with reluctance and a heaviness of heart. Intel’s laptop processors were at best miserly bridge trolls that enacted a fee of heat and fan noise for not much power. Meanwhile, the iPad Pro was fanless, silent, fast, and had a great screen.
But iPads stank from a software perspective. You couldn’t really do anything “Pro” on them, no matter how much Apple tried to bend the definition. It felt like Apple had bolted a Ferrari engine onto a Honda Super Cub. The Cub was useful and cute for basic tasks, but you weren’t going to haul a ton of wood with it to build a beautiful home, even though the engine could theoretically shoot it to the moon. You could feel that latent power thrumming under the glass each time you woke your iPad to watch YouTube or read the news or play Slay the Spire or whatever else entertainment-focused, low-stakes thing most people out there did (and do) with their iPads. It was a machine with an engine desperately wanting to get out, but hamstrung by the OS and applications. Lightroom on iPad was fun for doing edits and development with a Pencil, but you were encumbered by Adobe’s cloud, by the lack of other basic features like making a duplicate of an image (arguably one of the most fundamental features for people making edits on photographs). These kinds of workflow paper cuts are everywhere on the iPad. In terms of power, that original iPad Pro is still pretty much all the iPad you could ever want or need. I’m sure there are a few of you doing more with your iPads than the original Pro could deliver, but I’m not sure there’re many. Almost anything that doesn’t involve the Apple Pencil (Procreate being one of the true killer apps, the app that may have sold more iPads to creative professionals than anything else) could be done better on a MacBook. Even email feels better on a MacBook.
That lament of MacBooks being left tragically behind didn’t last long. While Apple didn’t give us the iPad Pro with macOS, they did give us an M1 MacBook Pro in November 2020, the same year that the iPad Pro with trackpad support came out. The M1 — here it was! And it was as glorious as we had all assumed it would have been. macOS rocking Apple Silicon. Unburdened from Intel purgatory. Did that machine have anything other than USB-C ports? No, but the ports would come, soon. (Glorious ports in 2021.) For many of us, this marked the moment from which the iPads went from collecting a little dust to collecting all the dust, and we gave up on ever trying to get the machine to live up to its “Pro” title. Today, they sit in the corner. iPadOS simply isn’t an environment for most “serious” work.
This sense of iPad “not working” has only grown in the past two years with the explosion of LLMs and tools like Claude Code. macOS is the place to run the things because macOS is malleable and its constituent parts fungible, it’s able to embody the role of tool by trusting the user to be an adult.
You’d think that Apple would have seen the launch of the M1 as a clear moment to maximally delineate between MacBooks and iPad. But no, Apple got weird. Some kind of internal velocity set in motion perhaps years ago by an errant project manager continued to push the company into fuzzy software spaces. For instead of making iPadOS more iPad-focused — a touch-only wonderland of touch-computing joy — they began to make it more like fake macOS. Adding multitasking that didn’t ever work as fluidly as multitasking on macOS, and windowing that was bizarre at best and infuriating at worst. Ever since the release of M Macs (a real oxygen-at-the-top-of-Mount-Everest-moment, I have to say), I suspect most of us haven’t cared what was happening to iPads or iPadOS. Apple was taking it in the wrong direction — that’s all we intuited from afar, or when we went to watch YouTube on them (though watching YouTube was better on desktop in a browser, more keyboard shortcuts, the ability to hide Shorts, etc.). And each time we’d peek — a few times a year or so — our hearts fell a little in dismay to see how far they’d strayed, how utterly uninteresting it all was, how much it was trying to be “macOS lite” but somehow, mostly, worse.
Slowly, then quickly, those of us on macOS felt squeezed in the opposite direction. First, Settings changed in a worse-for-wear way in Ventura (2022). macOS became ever-so-slightly ever-more locked down. Popups became more and more onerous. And with Tahoe, the direction is clear: in a move straight out of a horror film, Apple is trying to merge macOS and iPadOS (or visionOS, if that’s your angle).
Oh, how far the heart falls when considering this misguided strategy, a strategy clearly devised by someone who doesn’t use iPads or MacBooks, who lives only in the realm of theory, ignoring the terrible praxis of melding these two worlds that so desperately do not want to be melded.
I’m typing this on a MacBook Neo. I’ve been using it daily for two weeks. It’s an outstanding little machine. Cheaper than an iPad with a keyboard. Far, far more capable in almost every way. Bursting with potential, this little machine. It’s the machine we all wanted, in a way, back when the iPad Pro was attempting to be a professional tool. A good keyboard, a fine screen, a solid little processor, and most importantly, an operating system that lets you work and work well, and work well with the coming wave of LLM-related tools. This machine has become what I always wished my iPad could be — a compact, light writing machine that stays out of the way, feels fluid and fluent, integrates easily with services like Dropbox, and syncs with my true Pro machine effortlessly. (I’ve lost untold documents attempting to rely on iCloud Drive and syncing between desktop and mobile versions of apps.)
Rumors have it that touch screens are coming to MacBooks, to macOS. I do not wish to touch my MacBook’s screen. One of the great joys of a MacBook is not touching the screen, is keeping the fingers on the keyboard in a ballet of delightful fluency, flitting between apps, opening apps and documents and assorted files, running tools, doing so at the speed of thought, encumbered only by increasingly slower animations or boneheaded notifications or apps stealing focus as they spin themselves up. Keys are fast, touch is slow, and with all the usability issues appearing in macOS, adding touch seems like one more level of complexity the software teams aren’t yet primed to handle.
Tim Cook is on the way out. John Ternus begins this fall. We know by the numbers that Apple sells a lot of iPads. And they sell an OK number of MacBooks. When Cook came in he streamlined supply chains, but over time, the lineup of devices has grown fat and strange. Perhaps Ternus can streamline once again, on both axes of hardware and software.
Here is the insane business plan of what I would do, the thoughts of some fool on a hill halfway across the world:
No more keyboards or mouse support for iPads. Touch only. Nix half the iPad lineup, simplify simplify simplify. Gut iPadOS and rebuild it around touch fluidity and fluency and focus. Work with Procreate to expand their offerings. What is the Procreate equivalent of every creative tool? Look back to the playfulness of PushPopPress. Now, make a 12" MacBook Air. Get rid of the other Airs. For the MacBook lineup, offer a cheap Neo, an ultra-portable high-spec Air, and powerful, portful Pros. And macOS? No touch. Good god, do not succumb to the siren call of touching MacBook screens. Instead, go into a three year period of major OS refactoring. Speed above all. Mythos harden the OS but increase malleability. What does an LLM-first macOS look like? One you can plug into and automate with ease. Make that. (Plot twist: It turns out it’s the same thing as a user-first OS.) Think about keyboard fluency. Bicycle for the mind the hell out of the thing. Make it absolutely clear about how iPads are used and how MacBooks are used. Think about them as true companions, but with no overlap. Maybe Ternus will usher in parts of this.
I just love the idea that the specificity of our tools should be radically clear. The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps. And MacBooks should be for multitasking, moving information and data around, building evermore powerful tools (tools within tools within tools), all bounded by a keyboard-first universe. Keep the iPad screen covered in the goop of happy fingers and the MacBook keyboards slathered in the smudge of thought. The more separate they are, the more powerful they become.