Let Tablets Be Tablets

It’s kind of funny that with all the talk about “walled gardens” and Apple’s closed ecosystem, it extends to the people talking about Apple. All of the tech journalists feel like this incestuous group who are always going on each other’s podcasts and referencing each other’s videos. That means that once anybody states an opinion with enough force, it becomes A Truth Universally Acknowledged.

One of those is that the iPad is at best languishing, at worst completely failing to live up to its obvious potential. It’s got as much power as a laptop Mac, and the latest M4 models have even more power than Macs, so why does Apple insist on hobbling it by keeping it from being able to do all the things a Mac can do?

With any new iPad release, the first stunt any tech journalist tries to do is use it as a replacement for their laptop. They dutifully report back after a week, or a month, letting us know that it’s not quite there yet. And the limitations are more often than not related to the kinds of things that tech journalists want to do: it’s not good for recording podcasts, or it’s not the best at editing videos for YouTube.

I’ve been guilty of the same thing, repeatedly. I just took it as a given that the iPad was Apple’s vision of the future of computing, the device that would become a successor to the Mac. My biggest complaint is that you can’t do any software development on it1. It’s been a massive bummer, since it’d be perfect for a WYSIWYG HyperCard-like development environment, and/or for making games for the Playdate.

After using the M4 iPad Pro for a while, along with the most recent iPad mini, I believe I’ve been thinking about the iPad all wrong. It finally hit me when I was listening to one of the aforementioned podcasts, and a tech journalist lamented that the iPad-centric announcements at WWDC were such a disappointment. Why does Apple still keep you from being able to do things with your $2000 iPad?

My immediate reaction was: Why would anyone need to be spending $2000 on an iPad?! Sure, Apple will happily sell you a fully-maxed-out iPad for thousands of dollars, but they’re not positioning the iPad as a Mac replacement. So were did everybody get the idea that it was?

Okay, the $300-and-up “Magic Keyboard” might have something to do with it. My previous iPad2 had a “folio” case that included a keyboard, and it was perfect: it added minimal bulk, and it was a solid enough keyboard for doing stuff like writing email or blog posts. I’m baffled as to why they don’t offer this for the newer models, instead pushing a more laptop-style keyboard and trackpad, which by all accounts is excellent, but which doubles the size and weight of the thing. At that point, I’m better off taking my laptop with me. The Magic Keyboard feels as if it’s forcing the iPad to be something it clearly doesn’t want to be.

For the record: when I “upgraded” my iPad, I got the ESR “Rebound” case, which is not only much cheaper than Apple’s equivalent, but includes a flap to keep from losing your Apple Pencil.

Apple has also been muddying the water by adding more Mac-like features to the iPad: the stage manager for multiple-window multitasking (which I have never used, personally); support for external monitors and other devices; and adding Final Cut and Logic, which have been traditionally thought of as “desktop” apps. With the new processors, it’s easy to see why people were expecting to see even more desktop-like features added to iPad OS.

Another complaint about the WWDC announcements was that Apple didn’t add many features that were unique to the iPad. It was basically just adding a calculator app, which is something Apple themselves made fun of. But then they showed off Math Notes using the Apple Pencil, which to me at least, seemed like pure magic. And they showed some AI-assisted editing tools for handwritten text, which seemed like pure magic that I’d actually use!

That’s the part that seemed the most like Apple delivering a mission statement for the iPad: it’s not intended to be a Mac with a touch screen, but a platform entirely designed around touch- and pencil-based interaction.

I’ll admit I’m showing my bias here, since that’s the main way I interact with everything I do on the iPad. My main iPad is used primarily for making “art” for games, and I’ve got a mostly-gratuitous “hey check out Mr. Gottrocks here” iPad mini that I use for taking notes or reading books.3 And it’s with apps like Procreate, GoodNotes, Nomad Sculpt, and Kindle and Marvel Unlimited that the iPad really seems to come into its own as a distinct platform.

As somebody who diligently learned Graffiti for the Palm Pilot, and then more or less ignored handwriting recognition developments for a couple of decades, I was astounded by how good the Scribble feature is on the iPad. I do wonder whether the “Eat Up Martha” jokes stung so bad that Apple has been reluctant to go too public with how good it’s gotten at handwriting recognition, because I hadn’t heard anything about it until it was right there waiting in every text field.

And the more recent developments that let you keep your handwriting as handwriting, but still edit it as if it were text, are even more impressive. It’s still often useful to have a keyboard, and I’d never write something like this long-hand4, but I’ve been running into fewer and fewer times when the keyboard was absolutely essential. All the marketing aside, it really does feel like entering a “post-PC world.”

That’s reinforced by the promised improvements to Siri and the system-wide integration of generative AI. I still have a ton of issues with how the language models are trained, how OpenAI seems like an ethical nightmare, and how the Midjourney-style art everywhere is an abomination. But being able to operate the iPad using primarily natural language — whether it’s voice, handwriting, or typing — goes even farther towards making the keyboard and mouse/trackpad seem irrelevant.

The most cynical take — which is, I believe, also a correct take — is that Apple’s never going to sell you a device to replace your Mac when it’s more profitable to sell you an iPad in addition to a Mac. Any theory about what Apple’s trying to do becomes immediately suspect the second you forget that they’re a computer hardware company eager to sell you more devices.

But their success also gives them the luxury to stay at least a little bit idealistic. I think with stuff like the Vision Pro, the iPad, and even the Watch, there is a genuine desire to push out the boundaries of what computers can do, and how people can use them. Their marketing has been explicit about it, especially with the “what’s a computer” ad. When the iPad was first announced, it was explicitly pitched as a rejection of the hybrid Pen Computing approach that Microsoft was pushing, trying (and mostly failing) to make desktop Windows work with a stylus as well as a mouse with no compromises. I still believe that it’s a worthy goal to stubbornly insist on a platform that has no intention of converging with MacOS, but instead takes full advantage of being a tablet.

Most of the time I wish that the iPad could do something that I can only do on the Mac, what I’m really wishing for is an even thinner and lighter MacBook. It often seems like it’d be ideal (and frankly, more consumer-friendly) to have a hybrid iPad that could boot into “Mac mode” to get the best of both worlds, but that also feels short-sighted. Like taking a platform in the middle of redefining what the personal computer is, and weighing it down with 40 years of legacy.

And I don’t think Apple has found the right balance yet. A lot of the limitations of the iPad don’t feel so much like “holding true to a vision of Future Computing” as they feel arbitrary, or motivated by wanting to keep the platform locked down5. And it does often feel like they’re slow to innovate — a lot of people were hoping for improvements to file management in iPadOS 18, but I’d be much happier to see them come up with some kind of paradigm that makes file management an unnecessary anachronism.

The one Universally Acknowledged Truth that I agree with is that the M4 iPad Pro has a ton of power but seemingly no software to make full use of it.6 What I’m hoping comes out of that is more apps like Nomad Sculpt — I never would’ve thought that 3D modeling would be practical on a mobile device, but after using it for a while, going back to desktop 3D apps feels like banging rocks together. It’s likely that I’m still too much of an amateur to take full advantage of what a desktop app can do, so the simpler iPad interface feels so much more natural and accessible.

Maybe that’s the key to the iPad’s future? The “pro” apps will always have a home on desktop and laptop machines, for the actual professionals who can use them to their fullest. Meanwhile, the iPad will take over the mantle of being the computer for the rest of us.

1
I found out just recently that Swift Playgrounds, which I’d always assumed was just a tutorial environment aimed at first-time programmers, got a lot more powerful in version 4, and you can now develop apps and publish them to the App Store, all from the iPad.

2
According to Wikipedia, the “fourth generation” iPad Pro, before the release of the M1 models

3
And just because I like holding it. I think it’s neat.

4
Even though it might keep me from rambling, come to think of it

5
Which, again, I don’t think is inherently bad, even though it’s often frustrating.

6
The only reason I “upgraded” from my perfectly serviceable 5-year-old iPad was because I wanted to get as much trade-in value as I could out of it.

1 I found out just recently that Swift Playgrounds, which I’d always assumed was just a tutorial environment aimed at first-time programmers, got a lot more powerful in version 4, and you can now develop apps and publish them to the App Store, all from the iPad.

2 According to Wikipedia, the “fourth generation” iPad Pro, before the release of the M1 models

3 And just because I like holding it. I think it’s neat.

4 Even though it might keep me from rambling, come to think of it

5 Which, again, I don’t think is inherently bad, even though it’s often frustrating.

6 The only reason I “upgraded” from my perfectly serviceable 5-year-old iPad was because I wanted to get as much trade-in value as I could out of it.