iPadOS Post–MacBook Neo

I really don't understand people who are frustrated with iPad's limitations for work. Why did you get the device, then? It's clearly not a fit for your use case, so get the MacBook Air or Neo. Why does an iPad, which isn't made for your workflow, need to conform to it when there's a different device that already does? Is it the lack of touch screen on the MacBook? Maybe I'm missing something here.

The attempts by Apple to make the iPad more Mac-like with OS 26 have only made things worse, IMO. There are now more gestures to have to memorize, accidental app window manipulations, and generally a more complex experience. This is the opposite of what these portable devices have been about - ease of use, simplicity.

For the things that I require iPad Pro to do, it excels in pretty well. Apple Pencil has great integration with the key apps that use it, and there is a great convenience in the handful of apps that do one thing well that are instantly available. For serial processes, I find the iPad a delight to use and in many ways much easier to work with. For instance, I can record a lecture in which I annotate slides in powerpoint, convert to a video with title screens and overlays, then upload to the cloud; the process is pretty painless and easy to learn. And as consumption device for traveling there still isnt really a comparable experience.

But the second I need anything in parallel the experience becomes awful. Things as simple as copying an image from one document to another are far more complicated, and forget it if you need to do any kind of actual code development. I had hoped that cloud tools like colaboratory would reduce friction points, but in practice I give up in frustration. It is simply too hard to do anything professional.

15 years ago, I could understand a bit of the value proposition, the iPad filled in what the smaller iPhone couldn't. Now I find myself using my iPad less and iPhone more for computing on the go as it has become more capable. I used to think that the solution would be a hybrid mode, in which you could swap between iOS mode and macOS mode. But the Neo runs full macOS! A lot of app functionality already exists with the native support for running apps, or incorporated into better widgets and native apps.

People are catching up to my longstanding comments here that iPadOS is pointless, esp with macOS touch coming.

iPad will forever-suck with text interaction without a built-in keyboard, but if it ran macOS instead of iPadOS at least it wouldn't forever-suck at basic computing.

iOS is complete garbage for productivity and there's no way to fix that. You have exactly 11 ways Apple /allows/ you to background an app. Instead of real windowing, everything launches fullscreen and you're dealing with "size classes" over responsive layout. You don't have a real Desktop. Files are silo'd to apps and file interaction is derpy. Security theatre gimps basic tasks. You're limited to the Crap Store. Using iOS for productivity is like swimming in a straight jacket.

So just ship macOS on iPads. Add a checkbox during device setup labeled "I'm too Boomer to Computer". If you check it and log in, it'll launch iPadOS 26 in a kiosk-mode VM and you can keep using your device like a Boomer without any changes. If you don't check it, you get real macOS.

Kill iPadOS.

If you want macOS on an iPad, the iPad is not the device for you.

It's really astounding how many members of the tech intelligentsia (so-called) utterly fail to understand this fact. They think the world should revolve around them. They are wrong.

What Drew said. Stop trying to turn the iPad into a laptop. It’s not. It’s a tablet. The things it’s great for are not laptop things.

Flip it around to see how silly this is: write an article complaining about how bad the Neo is at touch screen work. Can we attach a touch screen over it? Wow that’s awkward. How about hooking up a Wacom? Well, that’s expensive and clumsy.

The iPad is not a laptop.

@Tom @Total If you like how iPadOS works now, I don’t think anyone is suggesting taking that way from you. What I find strange is the suggestion that nobody should want a desktop OS running on a tablet form factor or touch screen on a laptop form factor. Both of these exist on other platforms, and some people like them. Frankly, both seem less contrived and awkward to me than the state of the art with iPad keyboard cases.

“ What I find strange is the suggestion that nobody should want a desktop OS running on a tablet form factor or touch screen on a laptop form factor”

That’s not what most of your quotes were saying and that’s not what I said. What I said is the iPad is not a laptop. Stop trying to make it one and stop complaining when you can’t. The iPad is not a laptop. A laptop is a laptop.

@Total It seems to me that it’s Apple that’s trying to make the iPad a laptop by building all those keyboard-trackpad cases that give it a laptop form factor. Running actual desktop software—rather than “desktop class” software—on an iPad wouldn’t make it a laptop any more than giving the MacBook Pro a touch screen would make it a tablet.

Apple also said no third party apps for iPhone originally.

@Total I have no idea what your point is. iPad had third-party apps from the start. Apple making the iPad look like a laptop is not trying to make it a laptop? You object to my characterization that you don’t think people should want macOS running on a tablet—because why?

My point is that the iPad is not a laptop.

Very simple. That’s it.

I'm generally very negative on the iPad, too limited and restricted for my taste, but I have found two apps on it that I enjoy using and they are arguably better on the iPad than on the desktop in some ways.

Divici Resolve and Shapr3D

So many people say they want this so iPads become more powerful, when it so obviously is going to work in the other direction and give Apple license to further cripple the Mac. iPads are good for illustrators and very light work that requires a small screen and maybe two apps (but preferably one). I wish people would just accept this and stop trying to make this deal with the devil happen. Love my iPad, also want to keep it as far away as possible from macOS.

I will preface this with the fact that I largely use a MacBook Pro and have gone a few years without having an iPad despite wanting one for personal use due to price/spec mismatching.

My issue with most of these quotes is that they are solely focused on software development. Obviously in nerd circles you're largely going to find those people, but I don't work in that environment. I use TikTok a lot and I see a lot of young people (jesus christ that I'm using that verbiage, time comes for us all) that don't just use their iPad but really do love it. Personal use, school use, art, whatever. I think there's room in the line for the iPad. I know, I know, I KNOW that for many years Apple looked to position it as The Future, but we're far away from that point. The Mac fans mostly won for now. But the iPad does not and should not be all things for all people.

I think rather than expanding its capabilities, the Neo and the upcoming touchscreen Macs are an opportunity to give the iPad a narrower, stronger purpose as a device for fun, art, and office/school productivity. I would kill the Pro and give the Air a higher refresh rate screen and Face ID. Face ID is a decade old and there are OLED monitors out there going well beyond 120 Hz. They can stop acting like either is unobtanium. People can shut up about not being able to execute code or whatever then.

@Total You haven’t said what you mean by laptop. You didn’t like it when I assumed you meant different software, yet that’s what this post is about. What I think you and Drew are missing is that there are cases where macOS on a smaller and less expensive tablet would be useful. There is no “different device that already” addresses that space.

@Billyok I’m sympathetic to that idea, but they already killed macOS’s information density so it’s not like supporting touch would make it any worse—I hope.

@Nick Why would the Mac having a smaller form factor need to interfere with people who want a huge iPhone?

@Michael fair point, though my concern is more in the area of security theater as a means to make macOS more restrictive than it is even now.

“ You haven’t said what you mean by laptop”

Oh come on. We’re down to this? If you need me to define a laptop for you then what are you criticizing the iPad for? Do you not know what you want it to be?

@Total I want iPad hardware with (optionally) different software. You seem to be against that but don’t want to actually say that so you keep hiding behind the word laptop without defining it.

I’m not the one who brought laptop into the discussion and I’m not the one insisting that other people define terms before they’ll continue the discusson.

Hey, so what’s your definition of iPad?

@Total You are the one who brought up laptops. Scroll up.

Your post mention “laptop” 13 times before I said a word. Scroll up.

“Mentions”

Your post mentions “laptop” 13 times before I say anything.

Scroll up.

A lot of this boils down to: keyboard / no keyboard.

I'm typing this on an older iPad Pro right now and I agree that obviously this is just sized up iOS and the limitations are glaring when you try to do anything with it without accessories, like type this sentence in a reasonable amount of time.

And if you do just want something with a big screen to hold and play simple games and look at pictures and videos on and occasionally dictate a sentence, it is better than a Mac.

If you want to do anything but that exact list of things, it's a whole lot worse than a Mac, at least without adding a keyboard and possibly trackpad or mouse and then what are we even doing.

Apple is absolutely the prime example of withholding features through software that the hardware is demonstrably more than capable of.

So to me this says that they should indeed just stop pretending and call it iOS again (though it's a branch it's not nearly different enough to deserve its own name) and use that on lower end iPads. iPad Pros at the very least should have the option.

But to sell any more iPad Pros that can't run macOS is now so clearly ridiculous. However, I wouldn't put it past Apple to simply ignore this fact and continue doing exactly what they're doing. They are also the prime example of not only ignoring but straight up twisting facts about things until the day they decide to change their story.

Got really quiet here, Michael.

I read this entire thing in Unread on my iPad while eating a drippy flingy gooey lunch. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that on anything with a keyboard built-in.

I also like how my iPad doesn’t have a keyboard when I’m using it in the kitchen as a recipe-display device.

I’m glad John Gruber finally figured out he doesn’t like iPads, but I think he’d have a higher (although still not great) chance of finding a niche for the thing if he didn’t assume that having a real keyboard attached to the iPad is a must-have. It’s extraordinarily rare that anything I want to do on an iPad is materially made better by having a keyboard attached; if I want a proper keyboard, then there’s almost certainly something else about the task that makes me want macOS proper (shell scripts, etc.) as well.

I’m also glad that the MacBook Neo pretty much killed Apple’s incentive to define “computer” down to include iPads.

@Total I was out for the evening. The only “laptop” mention in the post that’s talking about the iPad is where STS wrote that it “has been my only ‘laptop.’” I believe he uses it with a keyboard. Nothing in the post was about changing the iPad hardware, and you took issue with my assuming you meant software. I don’t know what else that leaves, and you refuse to clarify. It just doesn’t seem like you’re engaging in good faith.

@bart Yes, the tablet form factor with iOS and no keyboard is obviously very popular and useful. They shouldn’t mess that up. But this does not in any way imply that macOS couldn’t also be useful with that form factor. I personally find that way more interesting than iOS in a laptop form factor.

>think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.

ipadOS is basically iOS now with a few extra (not very good imo) multitasking features. It’s basically a marketing name not really a separate OS from iOS so however they tweak multitasking I don’t see them “discontinuing” ipadOS.

Yes Mac is an older platform but still a much better platform than ipadOS. Really the thought of them merging the two is pretty scary. Not sure if I trust current Apple to try something that ambitious because everything they touch these days software wise seems to turn to shit (have we talked about SwiftUI?) What happens to the menu bar if they redesign it to be gigantic so you can touch menu bar app icons with your fat fingers? The iPad menu bar we have now isn’t such a greatest touch target. I never felt the urge to touch my Mac screen but I know there are a lot of people out there that want to. Maybe they’ll make that toaster fridge after all.

Thanks for the quote / reference @MichaelTsai ;)

I bought an iPad Pro for *work* - proofing EPUB books (which I code as raw HTML on a Mac), and for the pencil in graphics apps - specifically the iPad Pro because the ProMotion screen provides for a noticeably more perfect connection between the pen tip, and the place on screen where the mark is made. On a standard refresh screen, the pen can outrun / outmanoeuvre the ink point on screen.

BUT I simply haven't used it for much (it's basically a FaceTime terminal), even for pen work, because the iPad's entire filing and interapp collaboration paradigm simply isn't strong enough. Everything about iPadOS is walking through a glass-walled maze. You keep hitting limitations - whether it's what can or cannot be copied between apps, the fiddlyness of text selection where it keep trying to grab the whole word, etc.

A really big showstopper is touch as a UI paradigm. I'm sorry app makers, but your interfaces are not as "intuitive" as you think they are. Touch has become a new commandline, where everything is contained in gestures, which have to be rote memorised. Menubars were invented for a reason; so that the entire command and functional structure of an app is browsable without committing any of those commands (to memory).

iPadOS driven with a pencil is less usable than macOS driven with a graphics tablet, and it baffles me how wrong Apple got the "feature" of using an iPad as a tablet for a Mac. Even cabled, it's woefully unresponsive compared to a Wacom tablet. You can just feel the bulk of the software and the connection slowing everything down; it's like the difference between using a Mac directly, and using it through Apple Remote Desktop.

Why Apple didn't include a mode out of the box that was a screenless tablet - just a trackpad and pen with pressure / tilt support, so that all the lag of video transport was cut out again, baffling. I still have an A3 size Wacom tablet from 2005 on my desk that is vastly more responsive than the iPad connected to the Mac.

This is really a systemic problem Apple has, it's part of why the Apple Vision Pro has failed so utterly; Apple makes products that should be *peripherals* for the Mac, but insists on making them standalone platforms at the expense of how they perform as peripherals. An AVP doesn't give your Mac the ability to do VR, an iPad doesn't give your Mac a drawing surface. They don't make your Mac a better computer. Instead you have this constellation of constrained devices, the whole becoming less than the sum of the parts.

To give an example of a workflow I really wanted my iPad Pro to do - mobile photography edits. Well it didn't live up to that, because Capture One is my editing environment, and the iPad version of Capture One is a different mobile product, only available on subscription, with a cut down featureset. Whereas the exact same hardware, when running macOS in a laptop can use my full-fat perpetual licence desktop version of Capture One.

So much of my workflows for file management in photography are based on Hazel and Keyboard Maestro, using ChronoSync for syncing files, which are too large to do with cloud sync. Again, it doesn't matter how good Shortcuts is (it's not), THAT's not my workflow.

Why didn't I just buy a Mac laptop? Because I needed the screen rotation for EPUB testing, and the Mac version of Apple Books was a different app to the iPad version *at the time I bought it*. What would I do today? I might buy a Macbook and a Wacom tablet... but I'm going to wait until the notch is gone before I buy a Macbook (the Neo being too great a memory step down from my curent iPad).

I think it really depends on your use case. I am a private tutor and an education consultant and an iPad Pro with a brydge keyboard has been my main device for almost a decade now. My secondary device is a beefy Mac mini on which I can do things that are difficult to do on the iPad, but that need has been shrinking steadily over time.

The multi app functionality that iPad gained this year has been a game changer for me. Much better than Split View. I don’t think there is a need to shoehorn macOS onto the iPad. Just keep making iPadOS more usable and flexible.

I think iPads are a difficult sell to programmers as the OS does not expose the file system. This makes it tricky to use for app development. Maybe I am wrong here.

However, the iPad is a fantastic device for those who are tech agnostic. Easy to lean and maintain.

It does sound like the touch device with keyboard crowd need a mini computing OS but have less in common with the watching movies in bed crowd who amongst other things find all the window management features additional friction.

So I’m thinking the keyboard will be compatible with pro models only at some point and these will be macOS like, and the keyboard less ones will return to be more iOS like. We’d lose some flexibility in clarity of use. There would be third party keyboards to bridge the gap.

As long as there’s a gap in price between iPad Pro and MacBook Pro then that’s not a problem. The unknown is the air models and what an iPad neo would look like, those seem part of an alternative market positioning.

macOS isn't designed for touch. We don't know if it's possible for that to be implemented well.

I too yearned for a Mac Tablet long before iPhone rumours first surfaced and an Apple Tablet became inevitable.

I'm sure Apple have tried various forms and versions over the years and seem to have concluded you need a specific touch oriented OS for a touch based device.

It's the adaptability of the iPad that is its USP. Some people don't need that adaptability. That's OK.

Also I'm amazed how many people think the only way you can used KB & Trackpad interface with the iPad is the ridiculously overprice magic KB case - just get standalone input devices and bring along or leave at home as you need with an ultra-thin case on the iPad you are not adding unnecessary weight when you use on the road sans KB.

iPad OS should just be an At Ease-like mode on top of MacOS.

I’ve never related to people wanting to work from an iPad. Since the first version, they’ve been a consumption device for me. Way better than an iPhone for reading and watching videos.

I’ve always found multiple windows, spilt screen, and gestures too confusing. They just get in my way. I don’t want macOS on my tablet, and I don’t want touch on macOS. Touch-size targets would be a huge degradation to UX, IMHO.

Over the years, the Mac keeps getting more unusable for me. I gave up my laptop and am much happier with a Mac Studio, 128GB of RAM, and multiple monitors.

@Michael I still think that macOS without a keyboard and mouse is not going to work well. Coming from Windows administration, I hate Surface devices. They are the worst of both worlds. Desktop operating systems do not make good mobile ones and vice versa.

I would rather see them just admit that iPadOS is just a fork of iOS and stop messing around and just make one good mobile OS and one good desktop OS. They are fundamentally different things and fifteen years of trying to kill the desktop has only shown us that it has unique advantages that we will always need and that are mutually exclusive to mobile.

I think the final sentence in the update is correct, the real problem here is the pricing. iPad Pros just don't make sense as a product unless money is not a consideration at all.

Also, who has the money, time, or inclination to buy a new magic keyboard every year or so? That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read. Just use a Mac!

That's the other thing that drives me crazy about the iPad. So many people who clearly have more money than sense making so many posts about how they bend over backwards and come up with crazy workflows and thousands of dollars of accessories all to mostly be able to use an iPad for most things, kind of, just to say they can do it. They seem to spend Mac Pro level money and wind up with an iPad and a bunch of dongles and accessories that can't do what a MacBook Neo can (or MacBook Air before that.)

Or maybe we could believe Apple when they say that the iPad is an iPad, the Mac is a Mac and that they’re very different things.

Apple made trucks
Then they made a lightweight sports car. Very popular. Groundbreaking.
Then they made a medium-weight grand touring coupe. Bigger but it’s great for having fun and you can haul groceries in it.
People said they wanted to haul stuff like a truck with this GT, and so they add a heavy trailer to it. Add some knobby wheels so it can go off-road.
Now complain that this GT sports car with trailer and knobby wheels is not as good as that original truck.

What a weird route we’re taking.

Oh, BTW, Microsoft has a sports car/truck hybrid and has been selling it for over a decade.

I'll weigh in just because I was mentioned, and because there's space to expand here.

There are $300 iPads, and there are $3000 iPads. It's not surprising that those serve two completely different audiences, with different wants and needs. Apple chose to play in this space (we're 11 years in to 'iPad Pro', now), and the work that has gone into expanding iPadOS to fill those (very large) boots benefits everybody (including on the Mac, where half the current system apps wouldn't exist if Apple hadn't been able to reuse their iPad codebases, like the no-man's-land macOS was in the mid 2010s — whether you like Catalyst or not).

Why should iPadOS have its wings clipped just because the Mac exists?

Why should macOS have /its/ wings clipped because iPad exists?

Both platforms should be the best they can be, independent of each other. There are very clear ways to improve iPadOS from where it is today, and the direction vector iPadOS is on indicates that /Apple agrees/. If you want an iPad that's an iPad, simply don't turn on Windowed Apps mode and it's the same as it's always been.

Re 'iPad is my only laptop', I've spoken about this at length for years, so I don't expand on it every time I mention it. I use a desktop Mac, and an iPad portable, and have done so since 2012. I don't have a 'spare laptop'* I work from when I leave the house, I work from the iPad. Including prototyping apps and features in Playgrounds, and editing drone footage with Final Cut Pro for iPad, and photo editing with [now] Pixelmator Pro, and sketching Freeform boards with the Pencil.

It's a form-factor of choice; Apple doesn't offer this form-factor with macOS. There is no Mac that is iPad-shaped, and as enjoyable to use as an iPad. I can't rip the screen off a Mac and walk around with it. There's something about using it with your hands that feels very different to using it with a keyboard, and if your iPad always sits in a keyboard case you can lose sight of that.

I don't want to give all of that up just because I would like to use Xcode when away from my desk, and I certainly shouldn't have to when the iPad Apple offers and I chose to buy is 4x the price of my desktop Mac, and 4x as powerful. I do have the Magic Keyboard, and I use it often, but not exclusively, nor would I want it to be glued permanently to the device. And slapping macOS on the iPad Pro isn't going to give me what I want, either (but it would be a really handy thing to have, when I need it, if the platform supported virtualization…).

I think if you've been living in the $300 iPad world you might just be completely unaware of how close so much of iPadOS is to macOS, at both a user interface and a framework feature level, especially with Liquid Glass and when using an external display. There are very few categories of desktop apps now that can't be built on iPadOS, feature for feature, with every bit the complexity and power. In fact, I would characterize iPadOS 26 on an external display as the first new desktop-class OS from a major provider in decades, and I think that's incredibly exciting. It feels like it's on the cusp of something special, a true inflection point, and all it will take from here is a couple of first-party apps (Xcode, Terminal) and an App Review policy change (enable virtualization apps) to fulfill a decade-long dream. To suggest giving up /now/ makes absolutely no sense.

It's ok if all of that is too much for you, but the Mac would have died long ago if everybody said 'it's good enough as it is' a dozen years into its lifespan. I think the best years for both platforms are ahead of us, even the Mac — 42 years in.

*I did pick up a MacBook Neo in Blush, for special occasions. It has yet to be put to any use, but it has a mirror of my dev environment should disaster ever strike my primary Mac mini

Why doesn’t Apple make a 13” iPad – not Pro, not Air, just iPad. With an ESR keyboard/trackpad (about $90 on Amazon, often cheaper), you’d have a really cheap touchable pseudo-laptop that’d blow most Windows laptops away as well as, if not better than, the Neo. And if you have a desktop Mac, Screens lets you run macOS pretty well.

@nick

> My issue with most of these quotes is that they are solely focused on software development. Obviously in nerd circles you're largely going to find those people, but I don't work in that environment.

I noticed that too. If you want to do software development, just get a MacBook Air! Or a Neo now. It's the same price as an iPad. I don't understand this complaint.

For example, from Steve ST:

> But we’re 16 years on now, and the present of computing is AI, and IDEs, command lines and virtualization, and Python, and git, and scripting and automation.

That is facts without evidence. That may be true for him and some, but for the vast majority of people, it's not. It's watching movies, browsing the internet, and reading books. And maybe some other things.

---

I don't think MacOS will be good on the iPad. I get the complaint that pricing is out of wack - the Magic Keyboard being the most egregious- but Apple has options for both styles. Gruber prefers MacOS? Great get a MacBook Air/Neo. Most people though will prefer not having that type of interface. I know I do. I thought about it and whether I'd like MacOS on my iPad format - and I wouldn't. Because if I did... I'd get a MacBook. But I just want quick access to my RSS reader, my browser, my books, my shows and movies. I don't need a full MacOS interface for that.

Apple now has both options at a good price, but they just need to fix their iPad / Magic Keyboard pricing and everything is great for everyone.