I bought a Microsoft Surface on May 9 and have been using it for exactly a month as of today, the first day of WWDC. I bought it in large part because I was frustrated with my iPad. I love the iPad's hardware and physical flexibility, but the software is just never quite what I want to be using. I talked about this on Comfort Zone at length, but I'm lo to find a task that my iPad is best suited for, my iPhone and Mac are just better at everything. I got a Surface Pro because I wanted the touch interface of an iPad with the capabilities of a Mac-like operating system.

In my case, a big use case for this is travel, and I just went on a weekend trip with my Surface and it did totally fine. I was able to work on a coding project in Cursor and edit my photos in Lightroom, both without any compromises. Oh, and I was able to play my Puzzmo dailies with touch and then bust out the physical keyboard for the crossword. I still don't like using Windows, but it's more functional for my use cases, so here we are.

Apple would blow it out of the park if they make it so that the first thing I do after the keynote ends today is go to Microsoft's website and initiate a return for the Surface because something happening with the iPad this year will mean I can use it the way I want. People seem to think there's a substantial iPadOS revamp coming, and that could be cool, but I'm not holding my breath just yet. As we saw with Stage Manager a few years ago, simply adding more windowing options isn't all it takes to elevate the iPad's use for people like me, and I'm worried that this year's changes will be something similar: cool, but ultimately not what I need.

I'll be very specific with what I personally need here: my apps on the iPad without compromise. I don't want an okay code editor, I want Cursor. I don't want the mostly-the-same Lightroom, I want real Lightroom. I want Zen or real Vivaldi. I want to be able to run terminal commands and run local servers for my dev work. I want Mimestream. I want the full Final Cut Pro. I want ScreenFlow and Screen Studio. I want Pastebot and Raycast. If this sounds a lot like I just want my Mac with a touch screen, then you're spot on.