By Jason Snell
May 6, 2024 3:11 PM PT
The iPad Pro is no longer the future, so what’s next?
It’s hard to believe that it was more than five and a half years ago that I flew home from a New York Apple event, my mind spinning with the announcement of a new iPad Pro at a unique Apple event in Brooklyn.
Now all signs point to a new era in the iPad Pro beginning on Tuesday. It’s made me reflective about what’s happened to the iPad since the fall of 2018.
In hindsight, that event was a bit of a foreshock for the arrival of Apple Silicon. During the event, Apple introduced a new iPad Pro processor—clearly a forerunner of the M series that would power Macs in a couple of years—and boasted about how much more powerful it was than almost every PC laptop being sold. It was the first big brag about Apple’s chip-design prowess that went beyond the iPhone, which had been already running circles around Android phones powered by Qualcomm chips.
But that boast also drew the iPad into direct comparisons with PC laptops, and while its sheer hardware power might have defeated most of those laptops, power isn’t everything. It’s what you do with the power. And in many ways, that’s been the story of the iPad Pro since then: This is a device with computer power, but running a phone-adapted operating system that’s not nearly as capable or flexible as macOS. And thanks to the Apple silicon transition, today’s core iPad Pro hardware is almost indistinguishable from the chips that power a MacBook Air.
If this narrative sounds familiar, it’s because despite it coming up in 2018, it’s never really gone away since then. Apple has evolved iPadOS quite a bit since then, adding Stage Manager and a revamped Files app and even introducing versions of its pro apps, Final Cut and Logic.
But over this same span, it’s become clear to me that Apple no longer views the iPad as the future of personal computing. This is to the Mac’s credit: Now that it’s on Apple silicon itself, the Mac’s battery life can rival the iPad, and it can pick up all the new features and apps that come to the iPhone and iPad thanks to a much more aligned base operating system and platform-smoothing features like Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.
So where does that leave the iPad? More specifically, where does it leave the iPad Pro? What’s the role of a professional iPad, when the Mac is now much more capable of doing professional jobs with similar power and at a similar price?
It comes down to physical attributes. The iPad is something a Mac can basically never be, at its core: a touch-driven tablet that’s thin and light, with literally nothing else attached. From that base, the iPad can be whatever a user wants it to be—just a tablet, or a tablet with a pencil, or a tablet with a laptop-style keyboard and trackpad. It can even be docked to an external display and drive multiple windows.
The iPad’s adaptability takes me back, once again, to 2018. That was the event that introduced the Apple Pencil 2, and in some ways generations of iPad hardware are defined more by their accessories than any other characteristic. The Apple Pencil 2 was a solid update on the original, with a magnetic charging system that’s simple and elegant—a far cry from the approach of the original Pencil, with its Lightning port hiding under a little plastic cap.
(However, one feature of the Pencil 2 was a bit of a flop—I never could get the hang of its subtle, accelerometer-based double tap. It seemed to never trigger when I wanted it to, but would accidentally trigger all the time. I’m hopeful that Tuesday will bring another, improved take on letting Pencil users get some more control while still holding the implement in their hand.)
Still, it’s funny to think that perhaps the most defining accessory of this iPad Pro generation didn’t ship until more than a year later: the Magic Keyboard. That keyboard—now with a trackpad, and proper pointer support on iPadOS for the first time!—made the iPad into a tablet that could truly convert into a laptop. Apple’s first true convertible computer didn’t run macOS, but iPadOS.
But again… that was the problem. I’ve been an iPad Pro user since the beginning, and have spent plenty of time trying to coax the platform into fulfilling all the needs as a creative professional. I’ve been successful far more often than not, but that made the failures all the more frustrating. My standard travel backpack is a microcosm of this storyline: After years of trying to make it work with just the iPad Pro, the advent of Apple silicon has made me go back to traveling with a MacBook Air. It’s small enough, powerful enough, and can do literally everything I need—something the iPad Pro just can’t.
So what’s the way forward for the iPad Pro? I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out what I’d do, if I were one of the people inside Apple with the future of the iPad in my hands. There are no easy answers. For the iPad Pro to be a viable product, it needs to justify its higher price—at this point, the cheaper iPad Air can do everything that 2018 iPad Pro could do. So why buy an iPad Pro at all?
Accessories have to be part of the story—this is the iPad we’re talking about, after all. Reports abound that in addition to that upgraded Apple Pencil, there will be a new Magic Keyboard, one that’s more laptop-like. That’s a good start, because it leans into the idea that the iPad is Apple’s convertible device, a tablet that can be a laptop when you need it to be. If that keyboard is sheathed in aluminum and connects to the iPad Pro less awkwardly, it just reinforces that the iPad Pro can be a laptop when you want it to be.
(As an aside, I’m so tired of the people who come out of the woodwork to ask why people who use the iPad as a laptop don’t just buy a Mac. Let me answer the question one more time: I can’t rip the screen off a Mac and use it as a touch tablet. But I can make an iPad into a laptop when I need it to be. Not everyone needs or wants a convertible computer, but it has advantages that the Mac is incapable of matching.)
It’s funny how the Mac keeps coming back into this, isn’t it? There’s a good reason. The Mac is Apple’s do-it-all computing platform, and thanks to the boost from Apple silicon, it’s really doing better than ever. That mid-2010s malaise when it felt like Apple had no clear idea about the Mac’s future, which coincided with the possibility that the iPad would ultimately replace it, is gone.
Instead, the Mac is a key that can unlock the limitations of Apple’s platforms. One of the best features of the Vision Pro is its ability to connect to a Mac and display the Mac’s interface in a large virtual space. The Vision Pro becomes a stronger product because macOS exists, and integrates with visionOS.
This brings me to the issue I’ve been championing for a while now, which I think is the ultimate solution to the problem of the iPad Pro: the Mac. The iPad Pro is already capable of transforming from a tablet into a laptop, when needed. It’s got the same power as a MacBook Air. Apple’s built virtualization and a hypervisor framework into its products.
iPad Pro buyers already value the product for its flexibility. Imagine how much more flexible it would be if it could run macOS, virtualized, when connected to an external keyboard and trackpad. Apple’s first convertible device would be able to becomes a Mac when it needed to—and exit that mode when it doesn’t. Travelers could invest in the iPad Pro and all its accessories—at a price comparable to a MacBook Air, by the way—and know that they’re getting the best of Apple’s tablet experience and its traditional computer experience.
If Apple were to accept that at the top of the iPad product line, the iPad literally transforms into a Mac, that choice would also take a lot of the pressure off of iPadOS. Does Files in iPadOS really need to keep slowly trudging toward life as an ersatz Finder? And more to the point, does anyone who has used Files over the past five and half years really believe it’ll ever get there? And should it even try, or is that stuffing way too much functionality into a much more basic, iPad-like file manager?
The iPad no longer feels like the future of computing, and that’s fine. The Mac is here to stay, something that didn’t seem like a sure thing five and a half years ago. It feels like it’s time for Apple to accept this state of affairs. macOS isn’t just one of Apple’s platforms—it’s a feature, a secret weapon that it can use to make all its other platforms more powerful when they need to be.
I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.
I still love my iPad Pro. I look forward to Tuesday’s announcements, whatever surprises they might bring.
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