Gemmell Is Back to Mac
Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs.
In recent years we did get an emergency-use shared/household M2 MacBook Air, which my wife would occasionally take out of the cupboard. Now, that laptop has become my computer.
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I loved the slab of glass, and the Apple Pencils of each generation. I loved that I could rotate it, and write on it, and pinch-zoom it, and connect it to a keyboard, and just figuratively hug the thing. It was most certainly The Future, and very much on track to become everyone’s full-time computer after another few versions of the OS. Then another few versions. Then another few.
I believed in the promise of the form factor and the interaction language, and the human-focused nature of the device, so much that I made iPad-only a part of my identity. And I really was happy. But eventually, without me really noticing, things started to happen.
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iPads are slower than Macs, subjectively, and almost regardless of hardware. I’m most recently comparing an M2 MacBook with an M4 iPad, but the experience is the opposite of what the hardware might naively suggest.
Stories of switching between Macs and iPads are nothing new, but this particular post struck a chord with me—regular readers know that I have had some sort of iPad since the very beginning and there were plenty of stints where the iPad was my primary computer. However, I sold mine last November, not because I disliked the device, but felt that it simply was unnecessary and I was naturally using it less and less.
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Apple has done iPadOS a disservice for way too long—every new first-party app seems to be iPhone-only (Sports, Journal, Invites) and sometimes features come to the iPhone, but not the iPad. This creates an attitude of if Apple doesn’t care about the iPad, why should you? At least the Mac is different enough that you can put up with the inconsistencies and/or rely on some older alternatives. I like a lot of the intentions of iOS to simplify and rethink the computing experience, but way too much either feels incomplete or abandoned.
One of the superpowers of the Mac is that it can do many things at once. Obviously, the iPad has multitasking, but not in the way the Mac does. The basic concept of iPad multitasking is that you need to be able to see an app for it to be reliably working. If you can’t see an app, there is a select list of things it can keep doing in the background, but most things die immediately, and it may be booted from memory at any point.
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There are trade-offs to customization and user control, but this is a fundamental difference between the Mac and iPad that can’t be overstated. As a simple example, there have been many window management apps on the Mac forever, so people who don’t love the built in option have had an embarrassment of riches in terms of options, but if you don’t like Stage Manager on the iPad, your only hope is that Apple updates it to your liking someday.
Previously:
- 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- The State of iPadOS in 2024
- Final Cut Pro 2 and Logic Pro 2 for iPad
- Where iPad Fits In
- A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Permissions Requests
- Mac and iPad Aren’t Meeting in the Middle Yet
Update (2025-02-14): Craig Grannell (Mastodon):
In his post, Matt notes part of the problem with the iPad is that it’s never been strongly defined. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, it was positioned somewhere between a phone and a laptop. Since then, users have argued for it to take over the capabilities of both devices – but especially the latter. However, while the iPad has the power of Apple’s ‘proper’ computers, it lacks the flexibility and, in some cases, utility. All of which is by design.
What some people tend to forget is that Apple is very opinionated on wanting people to buy (at least one) Mac alongside any Apple mobile devices. It’s my ongoing belief that arbitrary barriers have therefore been – at best – left in place for that purpose.
For example, the iPad never got true virtual memory or sideloading, and the Mac never got touch.
Update (2025-02-16): Rui Carmo:
You see, the iPad’s attrition has also been getting to me lately–as a case in point, I haven’t used my iPad Pro for anything other than reading and annotating PDFs in months, and that was before I, too, sort of adopted the Supernote platform as a way to capture my thoughts and early drafts.
I have the excuse of (literally) using all the platforms, but even as I type this on my Mac thanks to effortless Reading List syncing, a lovely keyboard and my grand pair of huge displays, I can’t help but feel that the iPad has been left to languish in a sort of limbo.
Update (2025-03-24): Mac Power Users:
Author Matt Gemmell joins Stephen and David to talk about using an iPad as his only computer for eight and a half years and why he recently switched back to the Mac.
Great discussion about the compromises you have to make to use iPad as a primary computer that you take completely for granted.
From my perspective, I’m really tired of the iPad-as-platonic-ideal-for-unitasking rationalization. If there ever was an overarching goal for iPad, it died with SJ. It’s been 15 years and almost nothing you can do on an iPad is better, easier, or faster than on a Mac. It’s a baby computer with baby apps, where Apple will nanny every thing you do.
iPad is an incredible form-factor trapped in an idealistic tunnel-vision fantasy, that could have been resolved at any point in the past five years with the ability to dual-boot or virtualize macOS. You could give iPadOS fifteen more years of progress at its current rate, and it still wouldn’t be as powerful, flexible, useful as the macOS of today. There’s just no path to fixing this — not with Apple’s resources, not with Apple’s focus on a dozen supposedly-more-important things.
If you look at the amount of people they put on the Car project and on Vision Pro, I don’t see engineering availability as a real constraint for Apple.
I think Apple is allocating resources to products based on estimated growth potential, and when one of their product lines hits maturity / low growth (iPad, aTV, Mac, etc) they shift resources to what they hope could be the Next Big Thing (AR, car, robotics, …).
That’s a management choice though, not a constraint.
mako:
I tried for so long to make the iPad my main computer; just gave up after the million papercuts. The MBA (while needs an 11 or 12” version), is wonderful and the iPad Mini is a wonderful “baby computer” sidekick.
23 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
These reverse-switchers surprise no-one. Other than writing and photo editing never understood why anyone would even attempt to do useful work on iPads. They've always been slow clunky impractical and impossible to live with for productive work involving multiple apps/tasks.
Many of the most flexible and useful apps- terminals, networking, dev tools, Unix stack, file managers, media players, audio routers (Audio Hijack etc) - are either significantly clunkier and more restricted or still don't exist at all after 1 1/2 decades and probably never will.
What is so fundamentally wrong with iPad OS that even with the same specs as a Mac, the iPad still has to terminate background processes, unload tabs in Safari, etc? Like it's technically probably 1,000 times more powerful than my old 2009 MBP, yet 2025 iPads still can't even keep background apps running and fully functional like Macs from 15+ years ago had no problem doing.
I've been happily using the iPad full time since around 2017 and can't imagine going back. I keep a Mac as a media/file server but have had no use for it otherwise.
In reply to Ed, I would simply say that while you and many others may not understand how an iPad can be used for useful work the simple counter-fact this that many of us do, in fact, prefer it for useful work. And I'll go a step further and say that I get more done, faster, than I did on my Mac. There's nothing slow, clunky or impractical about it.
But here's the thing: I don't use a terminal or dev tools nor am I a professional video editor or audio editor (though I've had no problem editing quite a few videos with LumaFusion and a podcast with Ferrite). I've never needed audio routing.
The default Files app has been greatly improved since 2020 and I have no problem managing many hundreds of files and folders across several cloud services, my network drives attached to the Mac and the internal drive of the iPad.
About half of my work as a freelancer is managing 10 or so client websites that were all coded on the iPad. New content is added from the iPad using Textastic and it's built in FTP client.
For the other half I use the Affinity suite: Publisher, Designer and Photo to layout annual reports, newsletters, brochures, flyers, posters, etc. All done with no problem and that includes managing many folders of project assets. And it's worth noting that those projects usually require that I reference any number of apps that contain text or other content sent by a client so I'm usually multitasking between Files, Publisher, Safari, Mail, Notes, Word, etc. No problem. If a particular project needs more screen space I plug into the 15" travel monitor I have for a second display.
One client runs a retreat and I also use Numbers to manage several spreadsheets for him. I have no problem tracking his retreat registrations as well as the related contacts and associated email lists that are also added to his online email newsletter system.
When I'm done with work I'm happy I can detach the keyboard and just use the screen with a stand or kickstand to watch a movie or swipe through my RSS feed.
It's strange that this discussion is ongoing and that there are still people that seem bothered by other people's computer choices. It would never occur to me to care about what you use. Mac, Linux, Windows, desktop, laptop, tablet... you do you. You know what apps you need and what your preferences are. You know what you need to get your job done. Maybe you use a mix of platforms? A lot of tech enthusiasts are flexible and seem to bounce between different devices and platforms. If that's their preference or it's needed to get the job done, cool. I'll not presume to judge what they can or can't do.
I think the far more interesting approach to discussing tech is to not assume we know best. Though I'm happy and content using the iPad I regularly watch videos by folks sharing what they're doing with Linux, Windows and macOS just because I think it's interesting and entertaining to see how they do it.
Regarding tabs in Safari, I think a lot of people using older iPads have not used a new M series iPads with virtual memory. It may not be as well developed as the Mac but I regularly go back to tabs in Safari to find them still there waiting to be used. It's nothing like the reloading of tabs in Safari with an iPad with 3 or 4GB of memory.
And I'll add that this is improved across all the apps I use. I regularly bounce between 8 to 10 apps in a day and content from last use is always waiting when I get back to an app and this includes the Affinity Apps which are much more resource intensive. Of course, in this regard I it's not like a Mac. If I wait long enough and use enough apps before returning, yes, it's possible an app will have shut down and will reload.
This part of Gemmell's account made me raise an eyebrow:
"There’s also the issue that, as a natural consequence of the increased ability to customise and modify things, Macs decay in a way that iPads generally don’t. They need to be nursed to an extent, and conflict-managed, and spring cleaned. The worst I’ve had to do with an iPad is to erase its network settings; on a Mac, a fresh installation every couple of years is beneficial and desirable. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, but there it is nonetheless. [...]
Macs, then, are supremely high-maintenance compared to iPads, by a huge margin."
I find this debatable and, at the very least, extremely subjective. I've had this M2 Pro Mac mini since mid-2023. It came with Mac OS 13.4.1 preinstalled. It's now on 13.7.something. 19 months after my purchase, maintenance has been zero. And I do a lot of stuff on this Mac. I constantly criticise Apple's direction, design choices, and software quality. But Mac hardware is still on another level, and this mini has been, so far, constantly reliable.
My secondary Mac, a 2017 21.5" 4K iMac, still running Mac OS X High Sierra, has seen very minimal maintenance in the past 8 years. The only things I've done have been backups, cloning the internal hard drive on an external SSD that has become the startup disk, and restarting every now and then due to applications and updates that required a restart. And I haven't had any single issue with these two machines.
>I keep a Mac as a media/file server
Denny, macOS is poorly suited to that. You might take a look at TrueNAS for example.
I’m so relieved the iPad-will-replace-the-Mac cult has ended, although my figures suggest most people gave up the day Apple launched those M1 MacBooks. It was always unrealistic, and I know firsthand that if you offer an iPad version of a desktop app, you just catch the brunt of all of iPadOS’s many shortcomings in your inbox. A part of me wishes I hadn’t bothered, but it was the only way to get the bloggers / podcasters to even look at your app through the 2010s. True believers were always relatively few in number though, even when they came from those blogs / podcasts, most went for the Mac app over the iPad version (3x then, and closer to 8x these days). I suspect the phenomenon did a lot of harm to the indie app ecosystem, because it was so much work for so little reward. Well, that and all the other things, of course.
@Riccardo Mori: Still running 10.8 on a 2012 Mac... so I don't agree with that either.
@Michael Tsai: Apple's launching a new "thing" on Wednesday.
Off topic: Gruber's been whining about Tim Cook making up with the current administration. This might explain why. Sounds like the US government will be interfering in TSMC's semiconductor business.
I've had iPads for eBook publishing, and digital art, and for things that are *simple* on a Mac, you're just left pulling your hair out. Editing a URL in Safari's address field - getting a cursor insertion point to go exactly where you want it, it's like jugling sea urchins. Everything about it is coming up against sharp edges where the people who make it, don't do the thing you need to do, and there's no easy ground outside the functional stockade.
Frustrating, that's the primary experience of using an iPad.
I have the feeling users at every skill level would have been much better of if Apple had kept focus on keeping the iPad an easy to use appliance and hadn't bothered to listen to a handful of vocal power users who needed a mac in a tablet form factor.
@Neil I keep thinking about Gruber’s remark that the heaviness of the Mac allows iOS to remain light. I think the reason this kind of broke down is that Apple refused to make Macs with touch screens or convertible form factors. So if you wanted that type of hardware, the only option was to lobby to change iPadOS. They wanted to avoid making toaster-fridge hardware but kind of ended up making it in software.
What I can see from talking to iPad users, they often would be happy with a mac if Apple would offer 10-inch macbook air with a touch screen. I bet that even smaller screen would do, if you can plug VR screen and an external keyboard via thunderbolt and bluetooth.
@Michael Tsai and as anyone who's worked with a Wacom tablet as their primary interface device can attest, macOS is fine as a pen / touch driven system.
The idea that macOS is "designed" for indirect manipulation is a post-hoc justification, painting the bullseye around the bullet holes.
macOS running on an iPad Pro would be a much better machine, than an iPad running iPadOS with a keyboard and mouse.
@Dmitri Yeah, as soon as they announced Apple Silicon, I thought for sure they would make a killer 10- or 11-inch MacBook. Nothing wrong with the 15-inch, but I’m shocked that we got that first. Is this one of those cases, like with the mini iPhones, where the obvious product is not what enough people actually choose to buy?
@Someone I totally agree.
@Bob macOS isn't great as a server or router, but I've yet to find anything superior to an AS Mac Mini for power-performance and flexibility. X86 server hardware with the simple flexibility of a NAS appliance is hard to find without custom software and/or weak overall performance, so you end up going for microserver or mini-PC that have limited expandability and are thermally quite constrained. If Apple added RAID5/6 to their RAID support, updated it for SSDs and supported more external Ethernet hardware for 5Gb and up, I'm pretty sure many more people would seriously consider running a Mini as a NAS. I mean even running Asahi on it from the get go would be a great start. Hopefully more mini-PCs will get TB4/USB4 at minimum going forward and the situation can improve.
The real computer is a Mac with macOS inside. iOS is a toy in comparison. Of course, it depends on your task, but I mean globally; for any computing task. Any.
Apple should release a Mac tablet. iOS is a limited jailed-sandboxed toy without an accesible file system and lacking a full-fledged USB port (not just physical form factor) among other shocking limitations.
I have a few use cases that really make use of the tablet interface, namely using zoom and powerpoint with Apple Pencil are so much better that it is worth it for me to keep buying it. And an iPad beats a laptop for travel.
But a touchscreen laptop or hybrid tablet would work just as well. The only reasons I can imagine for not releasing such an obvious device are either 1) it would cannibalize sales of iPads and Macs and data shows that most people buy both, or 2) presumably such a device would not be closed like the iPad is. Both are pretty bleak reasons from a user perspective.
And as others have said, with just a few barriers broken it would be the ideal machine. Virtual memory, programming tools, and user support are pretty trivial additions that would make it my primary device.
@Michael I agree with your reply. I hadn’t noticed but it seems like the setting to turn off multitasking is back!
The thing with the iPad is that Steve wasn't around long enough to help guide his vision of a device that's better for particular things than either a phone or computer.
The other thing is that computers got better. It's no longer a choice between lugging an Intel laptop or taking an iPad. Including the necessary accessories, the weight is the same and the laptop is more compact since it's all one piece.
For every story of one person who has found mind-bending ways to make the iPad work for them, there are dozens that tried and gave up. Certain niche professions like lawyer or artist who don't actually need to use a computer and just need documents, maybe.
I think the implicit fear and reason computer users get defensive about iPad users, is that we don't want the world to just be OK with iPadOS being what an operating system is. We don't want to give Apple the idea that this is just fine and we don't need general purpose computers anymore.
And a big part of that is the tight control Apple has over iPadOS, even moreso than the Mac. It's restrictive on purpose, and there's no getting around the fact that that's just plain a feature for some and a showstopping bug for others.
There are plenty of technical solutions, but I don't know what contortions Apple wants to do to make those fit in with their business objectives.
