I’ve been sitting on this article for about five years now. There’s been no reason why really, but my journey for the device that did what I envisioned never stopped. I’ve moved twice since this article was drafted and a lot has changed for iPadOS (it was still iOS when this article was written) and the iPad experience thanks to Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. You’ll find my original article and arguments below which chronicle my journey up until today. Needless to say, many of my issues with the iPad experience and trying to find that one piece of hardware that did what I was after rang true until this past year with Apple’s somewhat surprising reimagining of what iPad can do. Here’s the original article, with a few edits, followed by an update on what I ultimately choose in the end.
I’ll never forget when the original iPad released. I was working an overnight at Apple, helping to get the store displays ready for launch, and I vividly remember the feeling of holding the very first iPad. As I slid my finger across the screen to unlock the device, I remember saying aloud, “Well fuck, there goes $500.” To the surprise of no one, I hopped in line at 10am to grab an iPad for a relative and myself. Fast forward to the present and we’ve seen numerous iterations of iPad since and, you have to give Apple credit for making the tablet market what it is today, even if you don’t want to. You can ask my wife, I’ve always liked having an iPad, but I never deeply loved having one. There’s no doubt it can be a premium device and the entire lineup broadly offers the best tablet experience hands-down. Even all these years later.
Throughout the years as I jumped from iPad to iPad generation to generation, I couldn’t help but feel tired of of the experience Apple’s slate of silicon and glass was offering me. If you stop and really think about it, not that much had changed radically since the original that redefined the experience (Edit: boy is that about to change). Sure, you have the overly priced (more on that in a bit) Apple keyboard and the Apple Pencil—the latter which feels incredible to use—but the core experience was largely the same. At the end of the day every iPad I had was a beautiful piece of technology that got faster and thinner but always suffered from the same little gotcha time and time again—fucking iOS (Edit: now spun off as iPadOS). Now to be fair, iOS has improved significantly for iPad users since iOS 11 thanks to the wholly revised Control Center, a significant revamp of how multitasking works, and the additional functionality added to the dock (Edit: wow, I told you I sat on this for about five years). Like I said before, if what you’re after is solely a tablet experience, and you work with one or two apps at any given time, then there’s no other device I’d recommend to you other than an iPad. Apple’s glass slate is the undisputed king with more tablet optimized apps than anyone else, although we’ll see how Google’s Pixel Slate fairs (Edit: LOL).
But if you want a more versatile device, I think the Surface line, and more specifically, the Surface Go, might be the device for you. I’ve tried a few Android tablets and found they haven’t evolved and, more times than not, they offer nothing more than blown-up phone apps (Edit: I’ll talk about strides made in this space with Chrome OS and devices like the HP Duet below). The same can be said for Android apps on Chromebooks, something else I dabbled in for a bit. Chromebooks are great if you live and breathe Google and if you’re okay with Chrome OS’s many shortcomings when it comes to working offline, but I ended up returning mine after two weeks. I think these devices definitely have their place, it just didn’t work with how I use my computer.
Cue in Microsoft’s innovative Surface line. Friends who know me, even the Apple faithful, have heard me say on numerous occasions that I like what Microsoft is doing with their line of 2-in-1 devices. It’s honestly what I wish Apple was doing with iPads, especially the iPad “Pro”. Give me one sexy slim device that can go from tablet to computer replacement with a full desktop OS, or close to it. So far the Surface lines comes closest to this. I can comfortably use it in the kitchen or while laying in bed for things I used to use my iPad for, like browsing the web or watching Hulu or Netflix. Then, when I want to get into some more serious computing, I just connect the Surface Type Cover and I’m getting shit done with just a magnetic snap of the keyboard. The Type Cover is what really transforms this device by offering the most comfortable and usable keyboard for it’s size (including being backlit!) while also throwing in a glass trackpad. What’s even crazier to me is that the type cover comes in cheaper than Apple’s offering (at least for the Go) while providing way more comfortable typing experience with keys that actually have travel, providing function keys, and somehow having room for a usable trackpad. All this while feeling soft to the touch thanks to the alcantara fabric that lines the entirety of the type cover.
The first thing my wife asked me when I showed her my Go was, “Why doesn’t the iPad have a kickstand like that?”. Indeed. Why doesn’t it? Microsoft managed to put in an aesthetically pleasing kickstand that is the width of the device, offering really great stability—admittedly not quite as much on my lap. Lap typing isn’t perfect with the Surface and you obviously can’t put it too far up your legs or you’ll have nothing to support the device, but more times than not the setup hasn’t been an issue for me. There’s also something to be said for having a powerful device that runs a powerful full operating system. I used to trash Windows over the past decade, and for good reason (I’m looking at you Vista and Windows 8) but Microsoft has done a wonderful job with Windows 10 (Edit: and now Windows 11). They took what worked in Windows 8 like live tiles and combined it with what people still want, like the start menu, to create a desktop OS that’s actually not bad to use. I’ve been running Windows 10 across a myriad of devices now and have had no issues to date with any of them. I remember installing AOL Instant Messenger on a freshly installed copy of Windows 2000 and receiving an instant BSOD back in the day.
Wow! Talk about a trip down memory lane! Quite a lot has changed in five years. In that short span of time Apple hardware as well as mobile computing in general have changed in significant ways. The handheld gaming PC space is blowing up thanks to low-power high-performance processors that power pioneering devices from companies like GPD and AYANEO and now Valve’s own Steam Deck. Apple is nearly done it’s two year transition off of Intel chips across their hardware offerings to their own in-house developed Apple Silicon. I was skeptical at first with it’s proprietary nature, but having use Apple Silicon devices across the Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, and now iPad Pro, Apple really deserves high praise here and the hype isn’t a bunch of bullshit. These devices are fast and quiet with quite literally all day battery life. It really is unbelievable. During the time this article was originally written, huge things have happened to iPad and now iPadOS over time:
- iPad now runs iPadOS spun off from iOS with a focus on iPad specific features like multitasking and more
- iPad gained mouse and trackpad support, first as an accessibility feature, but now as a flagship feature
- Apple announced their Mac Catalyst technology to unify codebases across Mac and iPad
- The iPadOS UI started gaining more desktop OS features like sidebars for apps
- Apple released the Magic Keyboard that offers a built-in backlit keyboard based on the tried and true scissor design along with a trackpad (😱)
- Apple released their first Macs with Apple Silicon running full macOS as well as the ability to run select apps from iPad
- The iPad Pro and iPad Air lineup ditched the mobile focused A series chips in favor of the exact same M series chips used in Apple’s laptops and desktops.
This timeline of events, while painfully long, has led me to where I am today—writing this article on an 11” iPad Pro connected to an external display with multiple apps running in their own floating windows spanning the displays of both my iPad and the external display! This is all possible thanks to a feature called Stage Manager, which will undoubtedly become a more integrated part of iPadOS 17 and beyond similar to how keyboard and trackpad/mouse support started as a feature that lead us to this moment. iPadOS 16 marks the shift where the iPad experience has changed focus from being a tablet first experience held back by Apple to an actual legitimate laptop replacement. The iPad, now more than ever, could be the only computing device most people would need. The Stage Manager feature in iPadOS honestly covers most of what I do on a computer from surfing the web to photo editing, something I’ve always preferred doing on iPad since the original. As I type this, I have messages pulled up on my iPad while typing this article out in Craft on my external monitor with proper full screen support as I’m playing Xenoblade 3’s absolutely stellar soundtrack in the background in a Safari tab.
The beta experience this time around has been a wild ride for sure. Rumor has it iPadOS 16’s release could be pushed back another month from September to October and, as someone who has been using it since beta 1, that would not surprise me in the slightest. Generally, iPadOS 16 is fine until you bring an external monitor to the party and open apps on apps on apps. There are Springboard crashes (the system that serves the entire iPad UI) but not nearly as many now as previous betas. I’ve read this could be due to my monitor being ultra wide but more specifically because it’s sub 4K resolution. Either way, each beta adds stability and tweaks the multi window experience for the better, and I’m here for it. After about five years, I think I’ve finally found the experience and device I was looking for—Apple just had to give the people what they want. This is a trend I’m seeing more and more with the departure of Johnny Ive. Let’s go!
