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iPad as a laptop replacement
- Thread starter Omar Comin' Yo
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I mistakenly gave my current laptop to my sister thinking that my new MacBook Pro order would arrive shortly afterwards. I was mistaken. I am now stuck using my 12.9 M2 iPad Pro as my laptop replacement until the new machine arrives, and, omg, the iPad is rapidly driving me insane. I can see how some folks would love this way of working, but it is just not for me.
Most of my specialized apps don’t exist in iOS, and those that do are ‘dumbed down’. Mouse pointing with the Magic Trackpad is clumsy, and window/app management is bizarre to a relic like me. I can go on and on.
KILL ME.
Most of my specialized apps don’t exist in iOS, and those that do are ‘dumbed down’. Mouse pointing with the Magic Trackpad is clumsy, and window/app management is bizarre to a relic like me. I can go on and on.
KILL ME.
i wish they would give it a mouse pointer, that circle annoys me and hard to see sometimes on certain backgrounds
Welcome to my world! I upgrades from a 10.5 iPad Pro to an M1 iPad pro with Logi combo touch. The aim was to use the iPad as an entertainment device and a productive device. It has failed at the latter.
🤣🤣Where do I begin:
Cursor
Big, clumsy and sometimes behaves illogically. In some apps it remains a circle when hoovering over text, as a result, character or word selection becomes frustratingly imprecise.
Content creation
If you use website builders or content management systems in the Browser. The iPad/mobile version is dumbed down. Alternatively the cursor can’t be used to precesively move objects. If you use the touch screen it might not work well either because the CMS is designed for desktops. If you are lucky you can try to force the desktop view but it’s not always an option, and when it is, the experience is sub-par.
Apps
If you use a creative tool, website builder or CMS, you are sometimes prompted to download an iPad app. Great! It will be optimised? Uhmmm not really. These apps are usually dumped down in features even compared with the mobile website version. More often than not, they are rarely up to date on the latest features. Tasks that take 5-10 seconds on a desktop/laptop, takes a couple minutes of frustration on the iPad.
Overall, my analogy still applies. Using the iPad as a productive tool is a replacing a fork and knife with a spoon for eating stake and chips. Frustrated, you will spend more time and mental energy trying to make things work than getting stuff done.
If you are a student you are far better off buying a refurbished M1 MacBook air than an iPad + keyboard. It will be cheaper and more productive.
I’m keeping my iPad for “light” productivity, planning and reviewing. However I will not replace it with a newer iPad unless it runs MacOS.
I’m all for criticizing the iPad (when it’s valid)… completely aware how limited it is compared to a traditional OS. And most critics seem to lose sight of how many years macOS/Windows has been in the game.
But I find the frustration comes from the lack of understanding what the iPad excels at… for instance, I don’t enter a Mac thread and complain “oh, why can’t I detach the screen” “why doesn’t it support touch” … “where’s the stylus support on this.”
Oh yeah, “is cellular support available on it.” And I keep hammering this point on and on… the iPad and Mac are two different products (I’ve yet to see a commercial comparing them), even Apple markets it so. Asking them to place macOS onto an iPad defeats the purpose of a Mac.
Users have the ability to transform an iPad to a laptop… the Mac cannot be altered to become a tablet. And some people are capable of using the iPad as laptop replacement, which I see far less of those people come into this thread.
But I find the frustration comes from the lack of understanding what the iPad excels at… for instance, I don’t enter a Mac thread and complain “oh, why can’t I detach the screen” “why doesn’t it support touch” … “where’s the stylus support on this.”
Oh yeah, “is cellular support available on it.” And I keep hammering this point on and on… the iPad and Mac are two different products (I’ve yet to see a commercial comparing them), even Apple markets it so. Asking them to place macOS onto an iPad defeats the purpose of a Mac.
Users have the ability to transform an iPad to a laptop… the Mac cannot be altered to become a tablet. And some people are capable of using the iPad as laptop replacement, which I see far less of those people come into this thread.
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So the follow up question becomes, can the vision pro replace a laptop, there are lots people hoping to do just that. 🤣
The answer, as always, is - depends on what you intend to do on it.
Currently, the Vision Pro appears to use some forked version of iPadOS, and I suspect it will be similar to the iPad in terms of functionality and limitations. And because of its form factor, I suspect it will be a case where the AVP proves superior to the laptop in certain use cases, while being more awkward to use for conventional scenarios.
Not at all unlike the iPad.
This sums up the iPad. Hence why businesses have not replaced laptops with iPads. It's slows people don't for getting conventional stuff done like spreadsheet work, designing powerpoint presentations and content management.
It's probably more accurate to say that iPads complement laptops, perhaps due to deliberate design by Apple.
I know when I last met up with insurance agent, he was carrying an iPad Pro issued by his company. He was able to use it to generate the required documents on the spot via the company's website, then get my signature using the Apple Pencil. He will probably still use his company computer back at the office, but so long as you are fairly certain you won't need to do any complicated tasks while outside, I feel the iPad's portability, ease of use and touchscreen is still nothing to sneeze it.
Bravo! You nailed it! This was Apple's original (as stated by Steve Jobs) intention for iPad: a device that sits in-between iPhone and MacBook, and is better at some tasks than either. How cumbersome and awkward it would be to sign insurance documents on a laptop, and how simple and elegant it is to do so on an iPad using Apple Pencil?
This is why the main question of this forum "can an iPad replace a laptop" is bit of a non sequitur. It's like asking "can a Hummer replace a bicycle in the Tour de France?" The answer is: the Hummer doesn't belong there in the first place!
I wholeheartedly agree. You can get a new M1 MBA for $749 on sale or new M2 MBA for $899 on sale. There are exceptions, but for most college students, these will be more than enough for a typical four year bachelors degree. I am not even sure that you would save money buying an iPad, with comparable storage, plus MK. The iPad makes a nice complementary device, but I would be reluctant to go iPad only in college.
Serious question:
With M2 processors and 256+ GB storage, why can’t Apple just release OS-X for iPad users who want it? It would be great to use an iPad Pro as my laptop, with 5G support whenever I go out, and dock it at home to my monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc just like I do with my MacBook.
With M2 processors and 256+ GB storage, why can’t Apple just release OS-X for iPad users who want it? It would be great to use an iPad Pro as my laptop, with 5G support whenever I go out, and dock it at home to my monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc just like I do with my MacBook.
Probably because the intention is never for the iPad to replace the Mac, but instead, to take lessons from the Mac and use it to push the iPad forward.
Because it was never a matter of the hardware being incapable. It was nothing more than a business decision.
I'd settle for iPadOS to work like Samsung's One UI and DeX works on their Galaxy tabs. There will be obvious differences/limitations like the sandboxed filesystem in iPadOS, but it would help make the iPad more of a productivity device.
Even if the iPhone had an M#, Stage Manager wouldn't be particularly good if all the apps are portrait phone versions.
Well duh, because 20 years the family computer was the only way to do anything. Now the phone can do almost everything you would have had a home computer for 20 years ago. So having one today is a luxury, not the need that it was.
Many phone apps do have tablet equivalents. I am not sure how much extra space it would take to store both the phone and tablet versions of an app on your iPhone in preparation for stage manager though.
For example, LumaFusion would load the phone UI on your 15 pro max, but expand to the tablet interface when projected to an external display?
Assuming that not only will Apple let the iPadOS version run on iPhoneOS, but also that developers want to spend the effort and money to qa test and run their tablet apps on a phone. Most developers wont let their iPad apps run on MacOS despite the process being very low-effort.
Well, MacOS would need to be modified to be touch capable, which it is not now. Otherwise, what would be the point of putting it on iPad.
So they’d need to take a device driver that already runs on the processor and Mach kernel and get it to run on the same processor and kernel.
Doesn’t sound like a very major effort.
I would expect there is already a touch-enabled variant of macOS in the Mothership labs...
I agree. Adding an OS isn’t hard, blending the experience so it doesn’t feel restricted and clunky is. They’re probably trying to figure out the smoothest experience when managing and hot-swapping between both OSes.
I wonder how many people would use MacOS if using it heat-throttles the iPad due to a lack of vents (even the MacBook Air has vents in the hinge) and a big heat generating screen on one surface.
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