I don’t know anybody who’s actually complaining about the iPad Pro’s speed or graphical capabilities.
So what? Apple has the enviable problem right now of having computers that are more than fast enough for the vast majority of people. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, the iPad Pro is supposed to get an “updated processor that is on par with the faster M1 chip in the latest MacBook Air.” There are significant differences between how Apple puts together iOS chips and MacBook chips, but let’s just assume it’s easy to compare and the iPad gets faster. Now that we have MacBooks with Apple Silicon, that list is significantly shorter.Ĭan the iPad Pro jump back ahead through purely hardware specs? It’d be tough. It’s not quite true that the iPad’s functionality is merely a subset of the Mac’s, but in the Venn diagram of the two, the iPad-only part of the circle isn’t very big.Īnother way of looking at it is this: it used to be that you would go for the iPad because the MacBook was just fundamentally worse at a few things like speed and battery life. Because from the other perspective, everybody is capable of just looking at each computer’s capabilities and seeing that the Mac can just do more. One of my core beliefs about consumer technology is that consumers are savvier and smarter than they usually get credit for. Nobody’s actually confused between these two devices, they argue, and I believe it. When I speak to Apple executives, they express little of the Mac versus iPad angst I see online (and feel myself). The iPad is more flexible in its hardware: you can sit on the couch with it, you can use a stylus with it, attach a keyboard, and - get this - touch the screen. But log in to all your stuff and run it all day like you do your laptop, and it’ll conk out a few hours short of the MacBook Air.įrom one perspective, I get that it’s silly to just one-to-one compare the iPad and Mac. An iPad can last for days and days if you just use it for tablet tasks. As just one data point, I’ve used both iPad Pros and M1-based MacBooks as my daily work computer, and the MacBook Air has better battery life. That big of a leap can’t help but recast the iPad’s development over the years. It is easily the best general purpose laptop I’ve used in half a decade. The M1 MacBook Air is fast, responsive, has no fan, runs any Mac app I throw at it (including Intel apps) very quickly, and even can run some iPad apps (though that experiment isn’t going super well).
In short, Apple’s silicon didn’t just catch the Mac up to the iPad it catapulted the Mac beyond the iPad. Now, I think more and more people are going to join me in looking at the iPad and wondering why it can’t have the flexibility and power of a Mac. Before, we’d look at a MacBook and wonder why it can’t have the power and battery life of an iPad.
But after the release of the first MacBooks with Apple’s own M1 Arm-based silicon, there’s a strange inversion happening. In some ways, it seems likely that Apple will deliver, at least with the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Given the relatively minor spec bumps that we got on last year’s iPad Pros, this time around, we’re hoping for a more substantial update. Today, we’re expecting a grab bag of new products from Apple, headlined by new iPad Pros.
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