Today, we expect a bag of new products from Apple, with the title of the new iPad professionals. Given the relatively minor shortcomings we got from last year’s iPad Pros, this time we hope to have a more substantial update. In some ways, it looks like Apple will deliver at least an iPad Pro larger than 12.9 inches.
I’m sure the specifications will be impressive. But after the launch of Apple’s first M1 ARM-based silicon MacBooks, there is a strange reversal. Before, we were looking at a MacBook and wondering why it can’t have the power and battery life of an iPad. Now, I think more and more people will join me in looking at the iPad and wondering why it can’t have the flexibility and power of a Mac.
In short, Apple’s silicon not only caught the Mac to the iPad, but catapulted the Mac beyond the iPad. The MacBook Air M1 is fast, responsive, has no fan, runs very fast on any Mac app I run (including Intel apps), and can even run some iPad apps (although the experiment doesn’t work very well). It’s easily the best general purpose laptop I’ve used in half a decade.
That big leap can’t help but reform the iPad’s development over the years. As a single data point, we used both iPad Pro and M1-based MacBooks as a daily work computer, and the MacBook Air has a better battery life. An iPad can take days and days if you only use it for tablet tasks, but plug in all your stuff and run it all day as if you were making your laptop and it will escape for a few hours apart from your MacBook Air.
From a perspective, I think it’s stupid to just compare the iPad and Mac one by one. The iPad is more flexible in terms of its hardware: you can sit on the couch with it, use a stylus with it, attach a keyboard and – get it – touch the screen. When I talk to Apple executives, they express a little of the Mac vs iPad anxiety I see online (and I feel for myself). No one is actually confused between these two devices, they claim, and I think. One of my basic beliefs about consumer technology is that consumers are smarter and smarter than they usually get credit for.
However, this savvy cuts in both directions. Because, from the other perspective, everyone is able to just look at the capabilities of each computer and see that the Mac can do that. More. It’s not really true that the iPad’s functionality is just a subset of Macs, but in the Venn diagram of the two, the circle part of the iPad isn’t too big.
Another way to look at it is this: he used to have preferred the iPad, because the MacBook was fundamentally worse for a few things like speed and battery life. Now that we have MacBooks with Apple Silicon, this list is significantly shorter.
Can iPad Pro jump back through purely hardware specifications? It would be hard. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, iPad Pro should get an “updated processor that is on par with the fastest M1 chip in the latest MacBook Air” There are significant differences between how Apple puts together iOS chips and MacBook chips, but suppose it’s easy to compare and the iPad gets faster. So what? Apple now has the enviable problem of having computers fast enough for the vast majority of people. I don’t know anyone who actually complains about the speed or graphics capabilities of the iPad Pro.
New rooms? Sure. LIDAR? I remain unconvinced that it is a must-see feature for everyone. The only thing that could matter is the rumor, the new Mini LED display technology on the larger iPad Pro. This will make it look more like a state-of-the-art TV, with brighter lights and black and white. One of the best things to do on an iPad is watch videos and therefore might persuade some people to upgrade just for the screen.
In my review of the MacBook Air M1, I called it a “triumph” and seriously considered giving it a perfect score until I saw how stupid the webcam is still. This is a place where the iPad has a much better specification: the front camera of the iPad Pro is excellent. It is also in the wrong place, on the side, when you use it horizontally instead of the top. This is the iPad Pro in a microcosm: amazingly good hardware, with some stupid limitations in how Apple expects it to be used.
The story with the iPad – and especially the iPad Pro – even before the TV ad “What is a computer” in 2018, Apple was the same. Maybe its iOS-based software is open and expanded enough to allow both developers and users to get it to do the things they want. Apple has taken a huge step in this direction with the iPadOS in 2019, but there is still a long way to go.
Today’s iPad pros are likely to be amazing technological feats, but the really important iPad announcement will come to WWDC this summer, when Apple unveils its plans for the iPadOS. Right now, I use the iPad Pro every day, but especially as a Sidecar display for my MacBook. It is much more useful as a screen for Mac than for iPad.