Another day, another rant.

I recently added an M2-powered iPad Pro to my life to go along with the M1 MacBook Pro and I have thoughts.

First thoughts…. Apple went ahead and revamped the iPad lineup shortly after I acquired my M2 iPad with the amazing new M4 processor. One might think that I would be disappointed to have missed the upgrade but the truth is that I am very happy with the one I have even if it’s not equipped with all the new fancy stuff because a) this one was a HELLUVA lot cheaper and b) there is almost no point to having an iPad with that much horsepower because there are so few apps that can even take advantage of it because iPadOS is garbage.

I already have to wonder when or if I will be able to really put the M2 to any serious use. It seems a damn shame that the faster of my two daily drivers is the iPad, not the Mac.

I could try to use the iPad for “serious” work, except, well, that’s pretty much impossible. Audio production? The apps and plugins I have used for years are all available on Mac OS but iPadOS? Nope. Ditto with video editing and production. I would LOVE to use Topaz Video AI on the M2 instead of the M1 but it’s not available for iPadOS. What about photography? Software development? Any serious productivity based work? No, no, no.

The iPad is not a serious computing platform because iPadOS is not a serious operating system. The iPad is an incredibly powerful piece of hardware that, when paired with a Magic Keyboard, is essentially the most capable laptop I own in terms of horsepower, but you simply cannot do real work with one unless you can accept tons of compromises and limited versions of software.

I’ve owned iPads for as long as there have been iPads. I have always enjoyed them for reading comic books, I love the iPad version of Garageband for doing quick demos and playing around with musical ideas, I love drawing on the iPad, it’s a great casual email and web surfing machine, but when I want to get anything legitimate done, I put the iPad away and I reach for a real computer. The iPad is a device, the Mac is a computer. The difference is the software. I am far from the first person to make this observation (Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right)
but I’ll tell you, it’s a serious missed opportunity. An M4 powered machine with a touch screen and actual serious professional applications (sorry Apple, but your Final Cut and Logic options only highlight the problem by being alone in their categories…) would be amazing.

As it is, I am sitting here feeling like the potential of even my M2 iPad is 99 percent wasted because I can’t find anything more challenging to do with it than I could with the old iPad that it replaced. Comics and ebooks reader, light productivity and journaling, a few cool virtual instrument apps, nothing serious. Nothing I can use do actually accomplish much of anything.

Also, the operating system itself is incredibly half-baked in so many ways. File management and multi-tasking are stuck in the stone age, there is no window management worth mentioning (the split screen thing doesn’t even work for a lot of apps)…. I would argue that iPadOS, from a purely user-friendliness perspective, is not only worse than MacOS, it’s worse than Windows, it’s worse than most Linux distros, it’s worse than Android. It’s my least favorite operating system, the one that annoys me the most often, the one that limits what I can do with my computer more than any other. My phone runs Android and I don’t love it but I ask very little of it, it’s a smartphone, I don’t like smartphones much and as long as I can use it as a casual camera, GPS, and phone, I don’t much care about the OS. Mac, Windows, and the various Linux desktops all have mature and capable and well understood ways of getting just about anything done that a user might desire. Only iPadOS, the bastard offspring of MacOS and iOS that can’t decide what the hell it’s supposed to be, only iPadOS goes out of it’s way to frustrate me, limit me, and neuter the potential of the very device it is designed to run on.

The iPad could and should be the touchable Mac. It should and could be the best touchscreen-centric personal computer in the world instead of just being an App Store limited, disposable, hamstrung, awkward “device”. It has all the power, but thanks to iPadOS, the worst operating system currently on the market, most of the power doesn’t matter a bit.