I think many people get something like Paris Syndrome when they get an iPad to use for work. To remind you Paris Syndrome is the following (from Wikipedia):
In other words, people really believe the marketing. They really believe that iPad = computer. And they get one... And it just isn't.
It's like a laptop. But it's a heavily restricted user experience, for all kinds of reasons. It's like a laptop but under school rules. You're just not allowed to do certain things, either because of technical or design limitations. The rules feel weird and arbitrary if you're used to the freedom of a genuine laptop computer.
Now, some people are absolutely fine with these school rules. It's all down to personality and life expectations, I guess. Maybe age, too? Younger people are more prepared to deal with rules, and have grown-up with the arbitrary nature of computing nowadays where we tend to live in walled gardens.
But many people can't deal with the rules. Right now, an iPad is not a computer. It's not a laptop replacement for most people.
'Most people' would be the larger percentage of the population that just need a computer to access the web, file their taxes + other admin and sort out their digital photos, yes? In what way specifically is an iPad not
as good as a Macbook at these pretty rudimentary tasks for half the cost? You're right in that the iPad is built for customers who are willing to trade some flexibility for a more controlled experience but this is an attraction, not a flaw.
For the record I use an iPad Pro for work. In no particular and in any given week this will include:
- General web browsing
- Filing government documents
- Capturing 4K video of experiments
- Editing said video for academic clients
- LiDAR scanning exterior areas for environmental science/architecture/planning purposes
- On-device photogrammetry of smaller objects to later process in CAD
- Drawing up technical plans for laser cutting, exporting as DXF
- Adding to and chopping down 3D mesh files for direct 3D printing
- Drawing up 3D CAD renders of particular expermental designs
- Reading through research papers and being able to annotate
- Note taking
- Writing and blogging
- General timekeeping and organisation
- Still teaching myself Swift at a very slow pace
- Interfacing with exterior equipment such as air quality monitors and air speed probes where a mobile app is the only one
- Sketching plans for projects, experiments or designing
- Game streaming from xCloud
- Playing my app store backlog. Currently deep into
Hades!
- Putting together presentations
- Taking conference calls
- General document creation/management
True most of these things can be done with any computer. The things in italics though would need an extra $4k worth of kit to create the required data before importing it into a Mac or Windows machine and then going through another tiresome parsing process before it was anything useful. The iPad isn't perfect. It could really do with a disk utility-type app and the general file browser can somehow create zip files but not open them very well (?!) but on the whole its just as good-a-
computer as anything else.
