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You Should Make the iPad Your New Laptop

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

Why You Should Ditch Your Laptop For iPad Pro – The Brooks Review

Drawing to Excel — you name it. There used to be limitations with what you could do on an iPad — but those limitations are melting away, the last vestige being iOS developers looking longingly at a better. These are the people you hear from most, because they are the most likely to write a blog about it, while the rest of the world just switches to an iPad without making a thing out of it (burn).

Ben does a great job explaining the many reasons the iPad (Pro) is a great computer.

I also really liked this part:

I look at a MacBook as Slack — sure I can have tons of different stuff open all at once, but I lack context and depth. Things are seen, but not done.

Whereas iPadOS is more like a FaceTime Audio call — clarity, depth, intention, and meaning — there is friction to engage at this level — it isn’t perfect, but it is better.

iPadOS is all about the focus of a singular call, instead of the shotgun of gifs, dopamine, and distraction, of MacBooks.

This is a little facetious, but it is something I’ve struggled to understand as well: why do I feel more productive on my Mac when I actually get more stuff done on my iPad? I genuinely think that part of the clunkiness of handling more than 2 apps at a time makes the iPad be used the way it wants to be used: one thing at a time. For things like app/web development this is a major hindrance, but for basically everything else I do it’s not a problem at all.

To that end: pick up your iPad Pro and do what you need, then put it back down and get back to life. That’s how you use an iPad.

Preach, Ben, preach.