My sister in law has used an iPad as here primary compute device for school. Frankly, it works absolutely fine for her. 95% of her need is reading, email, and writing papers (in Google Drive).
Sure, it's great for that kind of (computationally) light work, but then what's the point of putting a monster like the M5 chip in it?
You put a bigger chip in so you can run it at lower power consumption levels. Essentially, there are two ways this can pan out:
* Overall utilization can remain lower, keeping it in a more power efficient band.
* Expensive actions complete faster, thus using less power (since they run for less time).
From an overall business perspective, there also doesn't really seem to be a reason to _not_ standardize the lineup on a single chip. I have to imagine is less overhead from a manufacturing standpoint and it's not like there's a particularly meaningful difference in manufacturing costs of these chips.
Terrible battery life by comparison. Worse display. Not as swift at video playback. And with LLMs on the rise, less locally capable.
Anyway my point isn't that people shouldn't buy iPads, my point is that it's silly that Apple has hardware that is incredibly capable and is held back entirely by terrible software policies.
If you use one program at a time, do not need an actual file system, have no need to install software from a variety of places (Github, Vendor sites, etc), have no problem installing multiple "apps" that only work behind paywalls or not at all and you don't care about replacing a functional device whenever Apple obsoletes it... iOS is the best thing since sliced bread.
If you need anything outside of iOS's limited list of abilities, its a trash operating system that has crippled amazing hardware.