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Comment by redelbee | Hacker News Reader

I have an iPad Pro with keyboard and a 15-inch MacBook Pro I got when my previous MacBook Air couldn’t handle the video editing I was dabbling in.

I desperately want one machine (and probably in the iPad form factor) but I don’t know if Apple is ever going to get me there.

What say you HN? Is there a future where I can have a single machine? Any other suggestions for what I can do about it today? I’ve test driven Surface computers in various flavors from friends of mine and I really can’t get down with Windows. Am I doomed to carry two machines with me all the time?

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What is stopping you from selling your iPad and having a single machine right now?

I have personally avoided laptops for years because I hate managing more than one machine. The one time a year I need my laptop, it's out of commission for a day while updates install or whatever. For that reason, I have a desktop and take an iPad Pro when I'm going to be away from home. The iPad is no computer replacement, but it can SSH places and can do enough work to justify not owning a laptop. More importantly, it can't have any configuration done to it. But if you already have a laptop, I would just skip the iPad entirely. The laptop is your "one device".

(Would I want a mobile processor as my primary means of doing work? Absolutely not. But, people seem to make it work... at the cost of being blown away by a new processor that's slower than HEDTs they could have been using for a few years ;)

That’s a good question.

I use the iPad for some work (editing photos, email, etc) but mostly I use it for entertainment. I’m using it now for web browsing, I watch TV/movies on it as I don’t have a TV and don’t always want to use my projector/screen setup, and I do some light gaming on it occasionally.

The laptop is for work, which is photo editing (again) video editing, design work, word processing, light web development, and various other business needs (accounting, spreadsheets, etc).

I’ve tried to switch to iPad only so I don’t have to cut out entertainment completely but almost everything work related is slower and more annoying on the iPad. So I end up with both.

As another commenter above mentioned if the iPad ran OSX I would probably just have the iPad, but here we are.

I remember how disappointed I was when the iPad 1 came out and it didn’t run OS X...some of us have wanted an OS X tablet for 20+ years...

I really do think that a 13 or 15 inch MacBook Pro 2 in 1 like the Dell xps would sell pretty well...

[edit] fixed spell check

Agreed! I seem to remember a company that was hacking up MacBooks to make them into touch screens at one point and I totally thought that was the inevitable future we’d be living in. Maybe it’s still in the future, but I’m tired of waiting.

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