I think I have an understanding as to why the iPad v. traditional computer rages on. For many of us who use portable computing machines, we are looking for (generally speaking) smaller devices that can do every computing task we can throw at them. If iPad does not enable us to replace altogether the computer we’d normally turn to, that means it’s just an adjunct device. Thirty years of making computers more portable is thrown out the window if we have to contemplate carrying around two machines. The equally unpalatable alternative is that we have to bring a device that doesn’t quite get the job done.
Add two things to the mix. First, the “cool” factor – an iPad is fun to use, it’s not an exaggeration to call it “magical” – it feels that way to me when I’m annotating PDFs on a glass screen with an Apple Pencil or cross-examining a witness while zooming into documents projected wirelessly across the globe in realtime. iPad is also so versatile. You can use it in a variety of configurations (with or without a mouse, without or without a keyboard, with or without an Apple Pencil.) Because of those things, some of us just want to root for it to be the single best general (or special) purpose machine out there, and that we can use it and it alone for everything we want to do.
That’s my theory.
There appear to be four camps when it comes to the iPad vs. Laptop divide. In no particular order, they are the following. (1) iPad can do everything any other computer can, but it may take me a thousand steps to do something I can do in three steps on my Mac, (2) I’d never touch an iPad for anything other than reading a magazine (or insert some other “content consumption” activity), (3) I wish the iPad could do more of the things I need a computer for so I don’t need to have a laptop/desktop/whatever other machine, and (4) the emerging group that sees iPad as an additional tool that one needs/wants to have to accompany their “main” computer.
Some of the comments in this thread, perfectly epitomize all of these camps:
In all candor, I’ve bounced around in all four of these camps. Of late, I find myself in the camp 4 spot because there are a number of tools that I use on my iPad that I can’t use on my Mac, but the iPad doesn’t do everything that I need it to do.
This fall I was able to do an experiment. My MacBook Pro died, so I ordered one of the new ones. It was the most expensive computer I’d ever bought, but did I really need it?
I already had an expensive iPad Pro, so perhaps you won’t fault me for wanting my iPad to be able to serve all my computing needs, allowing me to wash my hands clean of a traditional computer and return my MacBook Pro once it arrived. It was going to take about a month to be delivered, so I conducted an experiment to see just how productive that I could be on the iPad.
I discovered some very interesting things during my experiment, which I will provide more details about in a separate post. One notable thing is that the iPad and iPadOS has come a very long way and it is surprising how much you can do simply and efficiently. What is more, many of the computing things one wants to do are performed differently on an iPad than one would go about doing them on the Mac. Yet, when I timed myself doing these things, it didn’t take me longer to do them on an iPad than it did on my Mac (or the difference was negligible). Thus, for some things, the iPad is on par with the Mac, but it feels alien because we have to employ a different method to get it done than what we are used to. (Note also that I’m not talking about some byzantine Federico Viticci 300-step process that requires you to have 17 different shortcuts and a dedicated remote server running background scripts. I have no patience for such efforts.)
My experiment showed that a lot more of what I rely on my Mac for could be done on an iPad and that it was not terribly difficult to do those things on the iPad. “So,” the patient reader who has gotten this far in my comment might ask, “did you return your fancy new MacBook Pro?” To which I would respond, “not so fast.”
Even after experiencing for a month just how productive I can be on an iPad, when I reach for a computing device to accomplish a task I almost invariably reach for my MacBook. That’s not because the MacBook is the shiny new tech object on my desk.
It just feels, well, freeing to do things on my Mac, less constrained, anything is possible. I don’t think it’s a “muscle memory” issue or old habits dying hard. It’s still easier to get things done on my Mac.
(As as side note, my 10- and 8-year-old boys’ first computing devices were iPads. They got laptops for school last year, and they prefer them over their iPads. Don’t get me wrong, they love their iPads. But the laptop is king to them.)
Some things are easier and better on an iPad. But those are usually one-off tasks. Want to process 300 documents, change the names of a hundred files, manipulate a 5,000 line text file? It’s almost never easy to do those things on an iPad.
Want to consult an app while you’re on a Zoom call? Can’t do that without the camera turning off.
Still, there are places where the iPad outshines the Mac. We can all list tons of examples, so I won’t bore you recounting them here.
The other difficulty with iPad is that the software (stock and 3rd party) does not always work reliably. The Files.app on iPad is pretty great. Alas, I have to reset my iPad regularly when doing a lot of work with files because something unknown to me gums up the works when transferring a file from one place to the other. And the integration between Dropbox and the Files app is miserable.
We can all agree and accept that some people’s workloads allow them to be 100% iPad only. Nevertheless, until the iPad can do all the things we take for granted being able to do on our Macs (or Windows PCs) and can do those things reliably, it can never be a true mainstream replacement.
iPad may get there. It isn’t there yet. Until then, some of us will walk away from iPad, some of us will modify the ways we work to enable us to accomplish our computing tasks solely on an iPad, and some of us will discover that we have needs that require us to invest in both machines and make room in the budget. Good thing Apple makes devices that last a long time.
P.S. I’ve written this all on my Mac. Why do I naturally gravitate to the Mac for something I think I could have done almost as easily on the iPad sitting right next to me?