iPad Pros and MacBooks: Next week will reveal where Apple’s mobile computing strategy is headed

“While there are a number of large and small announcements expected at Apple’s event next week, there’s one big-picture issue that cuts across at least two of the company’s product lines: the future of its mobile computing devices,” Dan Moren writes for Macworld.
“Convergence is a dirty word to many consumers of Apple products, conjuring up images of toaster fridges and Microsoft Surfaces,” Moren writes. “But it’s undeniable that the iPad Pro and the MacBook are, if not converging, then certainly on a collision course. The real question is whether both can survive.”
“Stack a 12.9-inch iPad Pro up against a 12-inch MacBook, and you wouldn’t be wrong to wonder why Apple has two products that seem to occupy the same place in the line-up,” Moren writes. “Especially when you add the iPad’s clear advantages, like a touchscreen and the ability to convert between tablet and laptop form factors… Certainly most of us don’t need both an iPad Pro and a MacBook in our lives, and so the likelihood is that people are choosing to go one way or the other.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The turning point was iOS 11. iOS 12 just improves on that. As we wrote back in August 2017, “Since its inception, iPad has always been the future of personal computing for the masses, it just really needed what iOS 11 will soon deliver to fulfill its promise!”
For the vast majority of current Mac users and PC sufferers, Apple’s iPad Pro truly could be their next personal computer..
Listen, we want new MacBooks. We’re Mac users. We love Macs. We’ll be getting them (to replace our beloved 11-inch MacBook Airs). But, we won’t need them on the road anymore as soon as iOS 11 is loaded onto our new iPad Pros.
In fact, the new MacBooks might be the last Mac notebooks we ever buy. About that, of course, we’ll be a little sad, but we believe that the iPad is the portable Mac of the future. And, as Mac users, we like to push forward. As always, we have no respect for the status quo. — MacDailyNews, June 21, 2017
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What’s more natural than dragging and dropping with your finger? It’s certainly more natural than doing so with a mouse. With iOS 11, many people’s biggest conundrum for their next road machines went from MacBook vs. MacBook Pro to 10.5-inch iPad Pro vs. 12.9-inch iPad Pro. — MacDailyNews, June 9, 2017
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iPad Pro. The future of computing is here (or will be, as soon as iOS 11 is released this autumn). — MacDailyNews, June 23, 2017
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We find that there are many older users longing to make iPad work like a laptop, because that’s what they know.
Take a look at a twelve-year-old who’s only really ever used an iPad for personal computing. It’s an eyeopener. It’s like looking into the future.
The answer isn’t to try to make the iPad into a MacBook. The answer is to provide all the tools possible in iOS for developers to make robust apps that can take advantage of the multi-touch paradigm. — MacDailyNews, May 16, 2017
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iPad Pro can replace the vast majority of people’s MacBooks because people never had an alternative to a MacBook to accomplish what they use a personal computer for: Web browsing, email, light word processing, music-video-photo storage and playback, and maybe some messaging (but they do most or all of that on their iPhones or iPhone wannabes).
Note: Obviously, we are not talking about our readership which skews heavily toward techies who use their Macs for far more than the vast majority of current personal computer users.
For the vast majority of people even a crappy low-end Windows laptop is vast overkill for what they do. Therefore, the headroom for iPad remains virtually limitless, especially as Apple’s A-Series chips, iOS and iPad apps become ever more powerful.
This “iPad pause” will not last forever. — MacDailyNews, November 11, 2015