I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux.
Pedantry: To my knowledge, there was no M3 iPad.
And since people keep bringing up the M4 as the yardstick in discussions on generic X86 and Qualcomm chips, then my productivity metric for comparison was also meant in a global generic way, as in the general purpose compute chips like x86 and Nvidia have unlocked new innovations and improvements to our lives over decades being able to run code from specialty aerospace, CAD, earthquake prediction, to protein folding for vaccines and medical use because you could run anything on those chips from YouTube to Fortnite to mainframes and supercomputers. What similar improvements to humanity does the M4 iPad bring when it can only run apps off the AppStore compared to M3, most used iPAd apps being YouTube and Netflix?
As long as the most cutting edge MX chips are restricted to running only Apple approved AppStore apps because Apple is addicted to the 30% AppStore tax that they can't charge on their laptops running MacOS/Linux with the same chips, then they're relatively useless chips for humanity in the grand scheme of things in comparisons with X86 and Arm who make the world go round, power research and innovation because they can run anything you can think of despite scoring a bit lower benchmarks.
> The question was whether the M4 makes you more productive on the iPad vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was
Nonetheless, tech must and is advancing, regardless. Every platform is releasing newer and faster versions, and only a tiny fraction will make use of that power year over year.
As to the rest of your comment, I see what you're saying, but those are your opinions. However, the vast majority of the user base would probably disagree with you, because they are not technical people.
They are productive on these closed platforms. they have different workflows than you or I. I'm not very productive on these platforms. These are consumption devices for me. I need things like a development toolchain and a command-line interface to be productive.
By and large, non-technical people are Apple's target audience, not technical people. In raw numbers, these people outnumber technical people by an order of magnitude.
This dinosaur (me) recognizes that what constitutes a computer has evolved and shifted away from what I think of as a computer. And this shift will further continue.
Hardly. Or rather to a much lesser extent, at least pro/power users benefit a lot more from performance improvements on open general purpose platforms.. since well.. you can actually do stuff on them. What (performance sensitive) use cases does the iPad even have? I guess video/image editing to an extent but pretty much all of those apps on iOS are severely crippled and there are other limitations (storage and extremely low memory capacity).
I never said otherwise, I asked what's the point of commenters bringing up the M4 performance in comparisons with X86/Qualcomm when due to the open vs closed nature of the platforms they're not directly comparable because the M4 is much more restricted in the iPad vs the other chips.
That's like comparing a Ferrari to a van saying how much faster Ferraris are. Sure, a Fierari will always be faster than a van, but you can do a lot more things with a van than with a faster Ferrari, and just like M4 iPad Pros, Ferraris are lot less relevant to the function of society than vans which deliver your food, medicine, kids to school, etc. Is the M4 good for you and an improvement for your own workflow? Good for you, just don't compare it to X86 until it can run the same app as those chips.
Like you said, it's mostly a consumption device, and as such, the M4 is mostly wasted in that, until they bring it into a device with a more open OS that can run the same SW as the other X86/ARM platforms, which Apple delays intentionally because they're trying to nudge users off the open Mac platform towards the closed iPads OS platform for that sweet 30% AppStore cut they can't get on their devices running MacOS/Linux.
Except that they're not. You can install apps from the open web or run Asahi Linux on Apple's machines.
Why is that? Because of different UI? Guessing, since you're comparing hardware(Mac/iPad) with operating systems (Linux distributions)...