They are good for ageing parents and grandparents though, my mother in law loves hers and we like not having to deal with PC issues.
Being able to read PDFs at native size, Procreate with the Pencil, even just endlessly scrolling Twitter with a flick of the stylus, watching video, it's great.
I also agree with TFA about discoverability, I was annoyed to have to relearn how to get the search bar, and the multi-app gestures seem half-baked. As a developer I'm used to having to research how things work, but it's got to be a pain for more casual users.
IMHO the Pro iPad is on the verge of being a better computer for most people's use cases. iPadOS, as distinct from iOS, is fairly new software, and I'm hoping the recent issues are just growing pains.
Isn’t this just marketing bullshit from Apple? The number of new features in iPadOS that aren’t supported on all iOS devices is comparable to previous major iOS releases. I have found it to be especially buggy at launch compared to those previous releases though.
For videos I don’t always want to sit in front of my TV and web browsing on the higher end ipads I actually find more enjoyable than on a laptop.
Sure it’s an expensive device for such niche uses but I’m willing to pay the premium. The hardware’s also specced to be competitive for quite a few years.
IMO, tablets are still a decent choice for people who think that 13" is too big for a laptop, although iPads may not work well for that because you're stuck with the default OS.
You hardly see a Chromebook anywhere in most consumer shops, and when they appear, it looks like testing waters, followed by endless promotions to try to get rid of them.
It is all about Windows 10 over here.
If you're willing to pretend like it's 2000 and tinker a bit, they make fantastic general-purpose Linux laptops. I like the $200 10" Asus ones with 360-degree hinges; the ARM ones have amazing battery life. And some of the ones that are designed for schools are almost indestructible.
ChromeOS isn't great, but the hardware offers a great mix of performance with low size and cost. The push to get them into educational environments also means that they often prioritize things like spill-proof keyboards and shock-proof chasses. And they also usually have fairly good physical security; most of them have a screw on the motherboard that you have to open the device and remove to reflash the boot firmware.
Like I said, the main difficulty with iPads is that you don't get many options for what you run on them.
And as for performance, I use mine for development and EDA, and speed has never been a huge concern over the years. I even get a reasonable 40fps when I'm working on my toy 3D game engine. Just because they ship with bloatware doesn't mean they aren't real computers...