A warning: these are just some Saturday thoughts on the state of Mac and iPad. No specific question or hard-hitting hot takes, but I’d love to hear how my experience matches up to that of others…
So, here are a 14" MacBook Pro (2021) and a 12.9" iPad Pro (2018) with Magic Keyboard. Their user is someone who works in academia, with eyes aging faster than they should. I spend all day in front of screens. My software life is defined by Bookends, AppleScript, and a huge Zettelkasten of markdown files, to edit in the cool app of the day (these days, you guessed it, that’s Obsidian).
On the day the very first iPad 12.9" was released in November 2015, I bought one. It was meant as a joke to amuse my then-girlfriend now-wife. After all, I had owned and loved the “normal” iPad since its launch back in 2010. I ended up liking the 12.9" and its floppy origami keyboard so much that I was one of the few madmen to go iPad-only, for real (meaning no Mac anywhere), in 2015. It was… difficult. But I was excited by the novelty and I knew my ways around software. The Apple Pencil was, for an annotating PhD student, a revelation.
Between late 2015 and now I had no Mac at all for some stretches, or else I had an iMac to keep at home as a secondary computer. I realize now, in hindsight, that my enthusiasm for the iPad Pro made me completely miss the “dark years” of Apple laptops. I had lost all interest in them: with no cellular, pathetic battery life and puny little 13" screens in 16:10 paired with heavy aluminum bodies, they were clearly failing at being mobile computers. I told myself: iPad is intended to be mobile from the start, and it does mobile well. The Mac is a desktop machine. And maybe that logic wasn’t that wrong, after all, given the struggles Apple went through to make those laptops thin and light and to make them have decent battery life – struggles that have only been overcome by switching to their own silicon.
Then there is the question of those aging eyes. A 13" laptop is almost unthinkable for me, for now: the 12.9" iPad, thanks to its better screen aspect ratio and thanks to the elevation added by the Magic Keyboard, is way more text-friendly than a 13.3" 16:10 panel.
In fact, these photos show that when you align the space bars, the 12.9" iPad Pro holds the screen closer to your eyes and higher up than the 14" MacBook Pro:
The ergonomics of the iPad for working with text documents are simply phenomenal – and that’s even before you factor in the ability to simply peel the iPad off the Magic Keyboard if you need to read something in portrait mode, like a scientific journal article.
And yet, as you can see, despite all my praise for and love of the iPad, here is a shiny new MacBook, whereas the iPad hasn’t been upgraded since its last meaningful update, which was back in 2018. The reason, as everybody knows, is software: as my needs got more specific after graduating, I realized that the academic app I need does not exist – but that, as John Ternus would say, is for another day. This is not a “apps on the Mac are better than on iPad” rant: that’s so obvious it barely needs stating. The fact is that on the Mac you can circumvent the limits of poor software with your own scripts, automations and apps. On the iPad, Shortcuts – though more powerful than some give it credit for – can’t do anywhere near as much.
And in the meantime, Apple has seemingly started caring for the Mac again. Don’t get me wrong – this 14" MacBook Pro is a disaster in some ways: it’s heavy and far too powerful for almost all but a few CPU- and GPU-hungry professionals. I bet you that millions of customers would easily take half the power in return for shedding one pound and a half off this thing. But at least the battery is great: in fact, on that front, the Mac finally beats this 3.5-year-old iPad.
Rumors have it that the next MacBook Air will be light and thin (good) but still 13" (bad). I will probably switch to it anyway, and squint. But I wish that Apple made a 15" MacBook Air. Sadly, if their killing of the 27" consumer level iMac is any indication, they just won’t.
Meanwhile, the Magic Keyboard – easily the most exciting Apple accessory since the Pencil – is made of an unfortunate type of plastic that absorbs grease and gets destroyed by…your wrists in normal use:
Whose idea it was to make this “premium” accessory out of rubber? We’ll never know. I wish it was aluminum on the outside: it already has a metal core, and the weight that goes with it. Why condemn your fanciest tablet accessory to being a covered in stickers by customers ashamed of its smudges?
So here we are again in 2022, almost seven years after the 12.9" iPad Pro first upended my computer world, and the transition is not yet complete. My choice is still one between restrictive software and subpar accessory quality (on iPad’s side) and heavy, cellular-less laptops with screens that sits too far from your face (on the Mac side).
From where I stand, this is the contested ground of mobile computing in Apple land. On the fringes, things are clearer: on the desk, the iMac reigns supreme (until next Friday, at least!), for smaller tasks and casual reading, the 11" iPad Pro is perfect. But in the middle, it’s still messy. And will likely be so for a few more years…
