They’ll need something to justify those prices. I bought a 12.9” in 2018 and wouldn’t do it again even at the old price.
There's no better mobile daily driver computer value for dollar available today.
My muscle memory is tied to keyboards and multiple windows so I just couldn’t get productive on an iPad and found the 12.9 a bit heavy and awkward for a couch computer. I see where the money went: M2, amazing screen but it’s not my first choice. Curious about your usage. eg how do you use the (janky imho) windowing and multitasking?
For multi-tasking, use Stage Manager to have thumbs of screens along the left side of the screen, and use the window affordances to resize windows with overlaps to have 2 or 3 applications open at the same time per thumbnail (a thumbnail isn't an app, it's a space or desktop).
Windows can 1/2 overlap the thumbs, so it doesn't take much screen space, and you can also overlap or leave showing the dock across the bottom.
This also works with a second monitor which can extend the desktop space instead of mirroring to it, then you can have a half dozen apps open at once.
Of course the killer feature is 5G, all day battery, and paper-notebook level of portability.
Maybe the magic keyboard is better built, but that's another $350 on top of an expensive tablet. My bad experience with the cheaper (but still $200) keyboard accessory has probably had an outsized effect on how I feel about the product as a whole.
If you want to draw and watch movies and read emails it's great for that. I've given up on using it much for productivity, where its most powerful function is having a remote desktop client if I need to connect to a real computer.
Personally I spent the extra money thinking "I could do some real work on this" but unless your work is mostly marking up PDFs (it's really great for that) and sending plaintext emails I can't recommend it. The only work tasks I use mine for regularly anymore are quick sketches/markups (synced via OneNote and screenshot into an email that I'm writing on the computer) and quickly flipping through my inbox to either deleting or flag new messages, again for me to actually deal with on the computer.
So, Blender runs on on them, unlike on IPads. :/
That being said, I haven't used a Surface tablet in years so I have no idea if they're still as good as they used to be.
For the last class I taught, I ended up using both the Surface and an iPad Pro (10"). The Surface was used in situations where I needed a full OS (as it turned out running VM's was part of that) and the iPad got used during lecture as it was simply superior for presenting slides with sketched overlays in real time.
If you could only pick a single tablet instead of being able to use two, which one would you have gone with?
Has always felt like a stretch to me for a device I'm not allowed to run my own code on.
And you can run a C compiler (or anything) inside https://ish.app/ too.
>There's no better mobile daily driver computer value for dollar available today.
I experimented with using an iPad as a daily driver (web browser plus mosh/ssh sessions) some years ago, and iOS constantly unloading apps (even when briefly switching away from them), and not restoring state exactly, drove me nuts. Has iOS improved on this?
Although my 2018 model has 4 GB of memory while the 2022 is now 8 (or 16 if you buy 1 or 2 TB version). So maybe that helps.
There’s a special entitlement for apps to request additional RAM so I would hope that having more memory means more apps can stay resident, since most apps aren’t going to request extra RAM. But iOS seems really aggressive about this even when you wouldn’t think it should be a problem so I half expect it to know you have 12 GB available and still kill recently used apps.
Here's the issue in bugzilla: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260722
Outside of that, I love using it and actively prefer it over a regular desktop OS for all tasks outside of software development (and with the bug fixed even that would be better)