Jason Snell wants the iPad to be able to be a Mac:
The iPad no longer feels like the future of computing, and that’s fine. The Mac is here to stay, something that didn’t seem like a sure thing five and a half years ago. It feels like it’s time for Apple to accept this state of affairs. macOS isn’t just one of Apple’s platforms—it’s a feature, a secret weapon that it can use to make all its other platforms more powerful when they need to be.
I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.
I was a big iPad Pro user for quite a while, and a proponent of its simplified but powerful operating system. There are plenty of apps on the iPad which are brilliant, and developers have done a lot with the platform.
Since I got an M2 MacBook Air, though, my use of the iPad Pro has fallen away almost to nothing. While Apple has long billed the iPad Pro as its most versatile computer, capable of being a tablet, a laptop, or whatever, when it comes to the most important thing of all – software – the iPad isn't versatile enough.
I can't install another browser which uses a different rendering engine. All browser plugins have to be installed via an app store. I can't get software of any kind from anywhere except an app store. Although the file system has improved, it's still limited compared to that of a more open platform like the Mac.
And of course, if I ever decided I wanted to take my expensive piece of hardware and install a completely different operating system on it, well… tough.
When people talk about wanting the iPad to be a Mac, what they're ultimately saying is they want the platform to be more open because all of the decisions that Apple has made which lead to it being inferior to the Mac are about keeping it more closed. And I'm going to hazard a guess, given the way Apple has had to be dragged through a legal process just to open up a little, that's not on the company's agenda.
But I would love to be proved wrong.
