Oh, no… Can I even call myself a Mac user anymore?

Looking back on six months of using an iPad Pro as my main computer.

Back in May, I got the new 13-inch M4 iPad Pro and embarked on a summer project to use an iPad as my primary computer. Because I work as a Mac admin, I’ll never entirely get away from the Mac, but 90% of my computing life for half a year now has been on iPadOS instead of macOS.

Earlier this week, I embarked on trying to write up what that six months has been like, and what’s next. I got pretty deep into an essay only to realize that I wrote a lot of the same things (and probably wrote them better!) a week after I began my project, and I would encourage you to give that piece a read if it’s been a while, or if you haven’t read it yet.

What I can definitely tell you now is that after half a year on an iPad, I have no intention of daily driving a Mac again anytime soon. I absolutely love the experience of computing on iPadOS, even though it still has a lot of room for improvement for the small (but growing) number of us who are computing with an iPad.

Just to name a few things I’d like to see from Apple at WWDC 2025: More Mac-like memory management on iPadOS. My iPad Pro is more powerful than the current MacBook Air, but it still treats RAM as a desperately scarce resource. This made sense a decade ago, but the performance under the hood of the iPad Pro has made enormous leaps since then. Additionally, give me better screenshot support. I rely on the ability to take quick screenshots every day, but the experience is incredibly painful on iPadOS when using an external display and keyboard/mouse. You can only edit screenshots on the iPad’s primary display, not the external display, and it always takes a screenshot of both screens. Let me draw a box around the area of either display that I want to get a screenshot of. Finally, continue to refine the Files app. It shouldn’t look and feel just like the macOS Finder, but it should be as stable and flexible as the Finder is. As it stands now, it’s one of the flakier apps on iPadOS.

“OK, John,” I hear you saying. “You’ve given up the ability to use more than one external display, you’re putting up with all of the limitations you listed above, and you’re using an operating system that is an afterthought to most app developers. Why exactly do you love using iPadOS so much?”

This is actually a harder question to answer than you might think. And honestly, so is trying to explain to a PC user why you like the Mac more than Windows. Oh, sure, you could list some specific things, but on some level, there’s an unconscious emotional connection you form with your computer operating system that is hard to put into words. iPadOS in 2024 gives me some of the same feelings that using Mac OS X did in 2001. The Mac operating system was raw and in need of lots of refinements and additional features back then, and iPadOS feels like that now. iPadOS is beautiful, even more beautiful than macOS to me, and there’s a wonderful simplicity to the way you interact with everything on this platform. I think that beautiful simplicity can be retained while still adding more and more Mac-like features to iPadOS, and I hope Apple is working on making those improvements now as we’ve hit the halfway point between WWDC 2024 and WWDC 2025.

Long term, I still think a lot more people are going to eventually replace a Mac or PC with an iPad running iPadOS. I’ve been excited about that prospect for years now, and the harvest is beginning to ripen. Here’s to six more months (at least) typing these columns on an iPad (via a mechanical keyboard, of course).