The key sentence here is:

> This is the fundamental difference between the Mac (a platform that basically lets developers and users do anything they want) and the iPad (where if Apple doesn’t specifically allow it, it can’t be done).

Apple (since Lisa/Mac, after Apple II, which had an open architecture) likes appliances and to control the user experience, so the iPad is "more Apple" than Macs are.

Whenever I am waiting at airports, I have to grin at how much stuff people are carrying nowadays: it's not 2, it's 3 full-blown computing devices. First there was the mobile phone (which then just a device to call), then came the laptop, then the mobile phone became a computer with the iPhone and Android, and finally, the iPad appeared to fill a middle position. You'd think depending on the person, they'd travel with EITHER their phone OR their iPad OR their laptop, depending on whether they are private people, non-technical "creatives" or IT/technical/dev folks, but instead, everybody appears to be travelling with ALL THREE devices instead. That's because - as stated in the article - there are known limit, or people are worried that they may need all devices for particular use cases or data kept on them.

At least - thanks to the EU - soon they can all share the same USB-C charger.

I tried working with an iPad (and later iPad Pro) but eventually got back to a Ubuntu Linux laptop (ThinkPad X1 Nano), which at 970 grams is also lighter than my iPad Pro 10".

The iPad software has been lagging behind its hardware for so long now.

My iPad and laptop both have an M1; the laptop has more RAM but they are effectively equally capable on paper. And yet, due to a series of entirely artificial restrictions, my iPad is useless for entire categories of applications. That power sits unavailable for me to ever utilise.

I’m sure the iPad Pro can live up to its name if you’re an artist or designer or maybe even something that involves 3D modelling, but outside of that absolutely not.

It’s a terrible shame because I think there really is value in a computer that fills the space between a phone and a “real” computer. Especially given its modularity (though the obscenely high pricing of Apple’s keyboard cases is another problem).

At this point the thing most holding the iPad back is Apple itself. Anything to do with software development is impossible or involves remotely interfacing with a second computer. The things it does support are tedious and frustrating, like file management (Files.app is hopeless) and multitasking (Stage Manager is a convoluted mess).

What the hell was even the point in splitting iPadOS out if it’s just gonna have the exact same limitations as iOS. I got a good deal on a used iPad Pro but when it comes time to upgrade this thing I’ll just go back to the middle of the road model for a nice, but ultimately unnecessary consumption device.

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape so that it looks like it's on paper, yet remains interactive. Yeah I get it's kind of hamstrung and annoyingly clunky in a way that you'd think apple could resolve, but still think as a device it's pretty remarkable, and still got loads of potential for getting better, somehow.

I think I'm going to try laying out my next book using Affinity Publisher - I used the Mac version to lay out the last one so hope I can do the same while finding benefits for doing so with my little paddy.

One other side benefit is that the iPad somehow seems incongruous - with a laptop out in public you're "working" yet with an iPad you're somehow perceptually not.

Plus, iPad coupled with Library Genesis is awesome. Totally awesome. Yeah I'm a terrible libertarian pirate, but it's just incredible. Better than the libraries I've paid a fortune for as part of my education. Heaps better than the annoying tedium of logging in to various publishers and databases and subscriptions via a library website to then use a locked-down epub in a horrible and further locked down DRM e-reader, every one of which I've ever tried is basically an abomination.

When the iPad first came out, people knocked it as "a big iPod touch".

But…maybe that wasn't a bad thing?

I feel like the iPad, despite alllll the efforts to seemingly make it a pro device, is an iPhone, but bigger. It's great for messages, browsing Facebook, and watching video, and that's just fine. Because that serves a lot of people's needs, and trying to add in a bunch more stuff just overloads the touch interface paradigm. (Ugh, the number of times I activated the split screen thing when they first introduced multitasking…)

Missing from this article: why is he traveling with his iPad at all? He loudly asserts "I’m not leaving my iPad at home" but does not explain why.

From where I'm standing, the iPad is a crappy platform that has no reason to exist. It's a worse Mac. I can maybe see artists using an iPad for the touch screen, but that use case only exists because Apple refuses to give the Mac a touch screen.

This is always on a case-by-case basis. Just because THIS particular person can't work everything on an iPad doesn't mean EVERYONE is the same.

My mother-in-law, for instance, does everything from an iPad. She doesn't own a computer anymore. She does her emails, bills, spreadsheets, printing, reading...etc etc...from her iPad. She has a keyboard she can hook up to it to write long things, and then puts it away when she doesn't need it.

Could I work like this? No. But again, this doesn't mean everyone is like me. It all has to be taken case-by-case. I would suspect that the vast majority of readers to Hacker News can't work like this either, nor could they think of why anyone would want to...so confirmation bias kicks in big time.

This article explains why you can’t travel with only an iPad (and a phone presumably) but doesn’t seem to bother explaining why you can’t just travel with a small laptop and phone.

What does the tablet add that makes it indispensable for travel? Just the media consumption?

I never used a tablet for an extended amount of time so maybe I’m missing something here.

I'm also looking for a two in one, a tablet that can be a laptop. The best I've found is a surface, and I think dell has some two in ones too. The surface feels like the right call because it's just light enough to be a powerful tablet, but not so power hungry that it's stationary. I think they've hit the right balance here.

It's a shame this form factor isn't so common, and what would be perfect for a vacation would be a Chromebook. It's browser centric which is 98% of vacation related activities.