One week into using my iPad Pro as my only computer: I may never go back to the Mac again

Plus a review of the new iPad Pro hardware and Magic Keyboard

Just to recap my position on the iPad Pro as a replacement to the Mac from my last piece:

For years, I’ve been passionate about the iPad and iPadOS, and the potential of that hardware/software combination to truly be a new paradigm for daily computing. Several years ago I likened working on the iPad to jogging in waste deep water. Things that I could do on a Mac were either not possible or required more tedious steps to accomplish. Over the last several years, Apple has been slowly lowering the water level, and “running” has gotten more and more effortless.

I’ve been using the new M4 iPad Pro for a little over a week now as my sole computer, and it’s actually going much better than I even expected it to. I knew that the addition of Stage Manager was the biggest game-changer that would make the iPad Pro work for me as a Mac replacement. Though its original implementation in iPadOS 16 was rocky, I never took the doom-and-gloom approach to it than many Apple commentators did. Indeed, the improvements to Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 make it a really great way to manage windows on an iPad. And now that I have an iPad Pro that can run Stage Manager on an external display, I’m off to the races.

As an Apple-focused IT administrator, I mostly live in Safari, Teams, Mail, Calendar, and Jira for my day-to-day work. I write the initial draft of all of my long-form content in Apple Notes. All of those apps work great in iPadOS. I keep Safari and X in one stage. Teams, Mail, and Calendar in another. Jira all by itself. NetNewsWire and Apple News in another. By day I’m living entirely on that external display, leaving my iPad Pro below it in the Magic Keyboard simply displaying a grid of useful widgets. I don’t care to keep icons anywhere but the Dock, so I hide all of them. I also hide the cluttered “Recent Apps” Stage Manager view that by default lives on the left side of the display. I like how Stage Manager gives you flexibility with how you arrange and resize your windows while also making sure everything is neatly aligned. On macOS I’m way too OCD about trying to get adjacent windows resized so they’re perfectly the same height, or with exactly the right spacing between the window edges and the edges of the display. iPadOS solves that problem for me very effectively.

I use my Magic Mouse, and my external mechanical keyboard: the Keychron/OnePlus Keyboard 81 Pro. Not only do these work great with iPadOS, but my keyboard actually works much better here than it does in macOS. I’ve experienced Bluetooth keyboard problems in macOS since Ventura where multiple times throughout the day the Bluetooth card in my Mac will just lock up for several seconds. I haven’t had that happen even once on my iPad Pro. Right now the biggest regular bug I experience is that at least once per day the iPad will lose its connection to the external display, and will take a few seconds to reconnect. That’s annoying, but not a deal-breaker.

I’m used to using two external displays with my MacBook Pro, with the Mac typically in clamshell mode. So it’s definitely a functionality loss to go down to a single external display. Having said that, it’s not as big of a deal as I feared it would be, precisely because Stage Manager is so great, and I actually appreciate the space-savings on my desk of only having one big display.

The new iPad Pro hardware itself is the best it’s ever been. The thinner/lighter design makes it easier to carry around, and makes using the 13-inch iPad Pro much more viable for tablet use, though I don’t actually take it out of the Magic Keyboard very often. Presumably Apple could have retained the thicker housing and put in a bigger battery. They absolutely made the right series of tradeoffs by prioritizing the overall size and weight reductions they achieved. The OLED display is absolutely amazing. By far the nicest display Apple has ever shipped with any product. The camera and Face ID array are now on the long edge of the display, meaning you’re looking right at the person you’re talking to on Zoom for FaceTime, and because I mostly use the iPad in landscape mode, I never accidentally cover up the Face ID sensor, something that would happen all the time on my old iPad Pro.

When the original Magic Keyboard was announced in 2020, it was already a fantastic version 1.0 device. The new Magic Keyboard comes pretty close to perfecting the concept. It’s very nice to have a row of function keys instead of having to use hardware buttons or frequently visit Control Center. The trackpad is larger, and now uses haptic feedback. Using an Apple haptic trackpad feels downright magical, and the haptics on this feel just as good as a Mac’s keyboard. The aluminum palm rests make this feel much more like a Mac laptop than the old model’s rubbery material. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the Magic Keyboard is still the biggest problem: If you’re using it on your lap it’s so top-heavy that the whole unit wants to fall backwards away from your body. You get used to this quickly, and I can still type effectively on it on my lap, but you do need to be mindful of this so that your iPad Pro doesn’t tumble off of your lap onto a hard surface.

I’ll have a post on how I’d like to see Apple improve iPadOS as we get closer to WWDC, but what I can confidently tell you is that I can very comfortably live my life in 2024 with an iPad Pro as my main computer. As a Mac admin I do have some work tasks that absolutely must be done on a Mac, like application package-building and configuration testing. But for all of my general computing tasks, I’m never finding myself needing to run back to the Mac as a crutch.

Maybe an iPad Pro can’t replace a Mac for you. But I’m encountering more and more people who already have moved to an iPad-first or iPad-only computing life. It’s finally possible, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.