Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life.
Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro.
Apple needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat to pull the iPad ahead again.
Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).
I wish they would add a touch screen and pen input to their laptops.
Why would they do that when it would remove the incentive for their customers to buy one of each?
Give the iPad range Mac features, and it'd cannibalize Macbook sales from the bottom up. Give the Macbook a touchscreen, 5G, and the ability to run iPadOS apps, and it'd cannibalize iPad Pro sales from the top down. Neither of these are in Apple's commercial best interests.
(E.g. search Eve Energy in the Mac App Store and the iPhone/iPad apps tab becomes visible.)
Combine it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, hook it up to an external display, and it's hard to distinguish from any other desktop computer. Remove everything, and it's the optimal size to consume books and video on the couch. Combine it with a Pen, it's perfect for photo editing or drawing. Connect it to your guitar or midi instrument, and it's perfect for making music.
Funny thing is, i'm starting to use the ipad as a keyboard alternative more and more, text dictation often feels more convenient than typing.
Sure, for programming you'll probably want to ssh into another machine (using blink, which also provides visual studio code on the ipad), but that's maybe 5% of my home use of a computer.
This is more of a PEBKAC problem than you realize, iPads are only "faster" because they do a better job of managing background tasks.
Besides whoever is in charge of designing MacOS.
Ive was Chief Design Officer. Now check Apple's Leadership page (https://www.apple.com/leadership/). Design is nowhere to be found on it. It had temporarily been assigned to HR chief Deirdre O'Brien, no more, and Design co-chiefs Alan Dye and Evans Hankey report to the COO Jeff Williams, a.k.a. the Department of Everything Else. It's not a surprise both Dye and Hankey are leaving the company.
While I think Ive was mostly harmful to the company once the strong guiding hand of Steve Jobs that kept him on the straight and narrow went, it's not good to have this level of instability in the critical function of design either. Expect years of mediocre product design and stagnation ahead. On the plus side, no more butterfly keyboards, cables that fray if you look at them funny, or portless Macs either.
Guess that means I shouldn't be in the Apple ecosystem, which is fine by me I suppose.
There’s a rumor that was because Intel promised every year 10nm chips, which they ultimately postponed every year. MacBooks chassis were designed for the promised thermal advantages which have never been delivered.