Don’t deny it, folks who prefer the iPad to the Mac or PC: you like the challenge! It was awesome to check out and edit files in my company’s Github repo and make a pull request, all from the iPad. Myke Hurley made an observation on his Analog(ue) podcast that even if you could prove that a given task was easier on the Mac, he’d still rather do it on his iPad because it’s just more fun. I absolutely get that.
Yet there’s an irony here: most of us, especially those of us who are older than 30, became Mac users because we were tired of having to “figure out” how to get work done. When push comes to shove, I’m comfortable using my iPad Pro to replace my MacBook Pro because I still have an iMac.
Steve Jobs famously compared Macs and PCs to trucks and tablets to cars; I argued a few years later that desktop computers were the trucks, laptops were cars, and tablets were motorcycles. John Gruber responded, “Maybe, but I say give it a decade of slow, steady, incremental improvement in post-PC devices and software, a decade for people to gradually adjust their computing habits.” I think that’s probably true, but we have another seven years to go. And today, in 2016, I think about the one-port MacBook: it makes as much of a deliberate statement about when you shouldn’t use it as when you should. So does the iPad, and maybe that won’t change any time soon. Yes, I remember Phil Schiller’s description of the 9.7″ iPad Pro as “the ultimate PC replacement,” and perhaps it can replace a laptop for many people (like me). But Ford still makes trucks.
