I never felt the need to choose between iPad and Mac. I use and value them both. But over the past few years, it’s started to feel like the Mac and iPad are increasingly constrained by an artificial barrier that Apple has placed between them.
The iPad slowly became more Mac-like without ever really reaching the promised land. The Mac, meanwhile, failed to pick up many features from the iPad.
I admire Apple’s discipline in separating its product lines, but it looks like this move is starting to hurt the future of both products. The Mac and iPad are on a collision course, and I’m afraid they’re both about to hit the brick wall that Apple has erected between them.
Not quite a Mac
In the era of the iPad Pro (that is, over the past eight years), Apple has put a lot of effort into bringing Mac-like features into iPadOS. Rather than simply removing Mac functionality, Apple attempted to reinvent this feature in an iPad context.
Foundry
When it works well, as it did with the addition of cursor support in 2020, it can be a triumph. But too often the additions seem limited or partial in a way that underlines how much more powerful the Mac is. Files is like Finder, but more limited. Stage Manager is like Mac windowing, but more limited. Some fundamentals of iPadOS (like the audio subsystem, which can only play from one app at a time and can’t record system or app audio) were designed to the limited world of the iPhone and have apparently never been revisited.
And, of course, even with full keyboard and trackpad support, the closest iPadOS has been allowed to come to a MacBook with additional accessories like the Magic Keyboard. An iPadOS-based laptop might be worth trying, but it will never exist because it encroaches on Mac territory.
A MacBook, no exceptions
While the iPad has always specialized in soft ergonomics, the design of the MacBook line has been frozen in amber since the early 2010s. You can buy many Windows laptops that experiment with ergonomics in an interesting way that breaks the laptop paradigm of two permanently attached rectangles. While these PCs might be weird, they also offer a level of ergonomic flexibility that the Mac can’t. MacBooks are laptops, and that’s all they’re allowed to be.
Of course, it’s hard to be a convertible laptop if there’s no way to control the device without a keyboard and touchpad. Apple is rumored to finally add a touchscreen to MacBooks in a few years, which would be a life-changing development if PCs haven’t had them for ages now. The addition of the Apple Pencil was another big boost for the iPad, but the Mac can only use one if you connect it to an iPad and draw on the iPad screen.
Foundry
Yet the Mac has all the power and flexibility that the iPad lacks, even the iPad Pro. I can do all aspects of my work on a MacBook Air from virtually anywhere in the world. Podcasting on its own makes it nonsense for the iPad Pro, and there are plenty of other features on the iPad Pro that just aren’t as powerful or flexible as those of macOS.
Let’s explore the environment
Sometimes I think back to all the effort Apple put in with the iPad Pro and wonder if it was worth it. All the Mac-ish feature additions added complexity that’s probably lost on most iPadOS users, and the power users they were intended for are probably well aware of all the ways they don’t quite match Mac functionality. they are. duplication.
I want to see what will happen when the walls come down. Today’s iPad Pro is powered by the same chip found in the MacBook Air. Would it be such a cataclysm if I could just restart this iPad in macOS or run macOS in a virtual machine?
Likewise, what if the Mac had a touchscreen and Apple Pencil support and came in forms that weren’t the traditional laptop? What if the Mac started offering the ergonomic flexibility that iPadOS is so good at? What if I ripped the keyboard off a MacBook and had the option to switch to a touch mode that was essentially iPadOS?
I’m not entirely saying that macOS and iPadOS should merge. But I’m starting to wonder if users would be better served if the iPad Pro looked more like a Mac and the MacBook looked more like an iPad Pro. (Of course, in this scenario, there would still be mainstream laptops running macOS and low-end iPads running iPadOS).
For years, Apple has pushed the iPad Pro into a fish-and-fowl space where, no matter how hard it tries, it can never be a Mac. Meanwhile, the Mac can never be an iPad. It seems like the time has come for the barriers to fall and for Apple to let these two product lines spread their wings. Until the Mac and iPad are allowed to use each other’s strengths, I fear neither will become the best version of themselves.
