This past summer I was faced with a dilemma. I needed to replace my aging 9.7″ iPad Pro. There were two options: get another iPad Pro or a Macbook Air. Both had Apple silicon and cost roughly the same after adding accessories. Not surprisingly, I am a Mac user more than an iPad user and so part of me wanted to ditch the iPad entirely. I didn’t though, for three¹ reasons:

1. Center Stage seemed like a killer feature, especially to this father who attends weekly FaceTime and Zoom calls with grandparents.
2. The iPad’s simplicity made it ideal as a secondary device that I could use for personal stuff while at work.
3. While I had my frustrations with the platform, my old iPad Pro had been terribly slow for months. I wasn’t sure how much of my frustration stemmed from that lack of performance. Similarly, the 9.7″ screen always felt cramped to me and I had long yearned to try the larger 12.9″ model.

People love their iPads and I wanted to give this next iPad the best shot at winning my affection, and so I order a new 12.9″ iPad Pro with the M1 processor.

Almost six months in, and I can happily report that all my reasoning was sound. Center Stage is a killer feature, the iPad remains an ideal secondary device, and many of my frustrations did have to do with performance or screen size. All in all, I am happy with this new iPad… but I still don’t love it.

As with my prior iPad Pro, my remaining issues lie with the software. Last year I wrote about the iPad’s poor multitasking, calling it a broken paradigm. Since then, iPadOS 15 has improved multitasking by doing the most obvious things: window controls, floating windows, rudimentary window management². I don’t mean “obvious” in the complimentary “in hindsight…” kind of way, but in the “how in the hell did it take Apple this long to add things they’ve been doing for almost 40 years” kind of way.

I’ve heard others speculate that there’s been a debate within Apple between whether to keep the iPad simple or make it more complex. I think there’s something to that, but I think behind that hypothetical debate is a fundamental question: Is the iPad a computer?

A spiritual difference between Mac and iOS is that the former was designed with a mindset that the computer was part of the solution whereas the latter was designed with a mindset that the computer was part of the problem. Macs are proudly computers, and they’re great. iPhones are computers that don’t feel like computers, and they’re great. The original iPad was another computer that didn’t feel like a computer, and it truly was great until people wanted to do computer-y things with it.

For a long time, it seemed Apple tried to support those computer-y things while also keeping the iPad from feeling like a computer. This explains why the platform has advanced at such a sluggish pace. Anything deemed too computer-y was kiboshed or replaced with something worse before reluctantly being added later. Why was there no way to manage files? Managing files was too computer-y. Why was multitasking weirdly gesture based for so long? Window controls were too computer-y. Why is there a menu bar tucked away in a command key that most iPad users don’t even have? Menu bars are too computer-y.

Finally adding window controls, some basic windowing, and a hidden menu bar are why multitasking in iPadOS 15 was so well received, but I would argue that any celebration wasn’t because of those UI elements alone. They really aren’t that great, and I’ll probably trade in this iPad for a MacBook Air if they’re still all we have in iPadOS 16. What people are celebrating and why I might stick with this iPad a bit longer is that these features signal that Apple recognizes something we’ve known for a long time, that the iPad is a computer.