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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

For the haters here - Apple sells roughly 2x as many iPads as Macs (including MacBooks). Roughly as many iPad Pros as laptops.

I've cycled through using an iPad Pro as my main device on and off over the years - particularly the cellular modem has been a draw. For coding, they're terrible, as they are for longer form writing. I've ultimately shrunk down to the small size and use it as a kindle/gaming replacement. I think with a foldable iPhone I'd probably skip buying one.

All that said there's a large market for them. I use mine enough that every two cycles I update just for battery reasons.

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I didn't believe this at first, but it seems valid.

Apple earnings on Mac and iPads are in the same ballpark and if iPads cost half of a Mac its indeed a 2x.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/01/apple-2q-2025-earnings/

To me it makes a lot of sense.

iPads have way more common with phones than laptops. They are more prone to damage and many people treat them like fashion accessories, promptly buying new devices upon launch even if the old one is perfectly fine.

My wife uses the previous gen iPad Pro 11 inch for all her computing. Yes, her use is lightweight, and she rarely uses the file system.

It think one of the points of popularity for the iPad is that it's the same (in most respects) as an iPhone, but bigger. The smartphone has become the default computing and communication device for billions of people. My wife can certainly use her iPhone, but she almost never does; the iPad fulfills that need for her. She plays Balatro, Simon's Cat, and Angry Birds, reads and writes email, reads, browses the web, watches video on her iPad.

I didn't take the iPad seriously until my mother made it her default mode of internet access (while having a 15" MacBook Pro of the same era).

>the iPad fulfills that need for her

This was it, entirely.

My mother (75) is on her fourth ipad now. They are amazing devices for non technical users. My father bought her a laptop (some cheap windows thing) before she got her first ipad and asked here "are you happy with it". And she went "it's just a computer". She's not a gamer. Computers were for boring admin and banking stuff in her mind. Something that lives on a desk far away from the living room. Having to go there to browse the internet wasn't fun. She just had no interest in the whole thing. So he brought it back to the store and got an ipad instead. Life changing event.

Key feature: she can sit on the couch and use it. She does that all the time. It's a much more approachable device. She does everything on it. She plays a lot of bridge both on the ipad and in real life. So, she's even playing online games. Really fun when she randomly starts swearing at some dumb witted random co-player on the internet.

I'm not into IOS myself but I appreciate it for what it is and does. Steve Jobs nailed that one. I have a mac book pro but I have an Android phone. For me a phone is dumb read only device. Typing on it sucks. The screen is to clumsy and tiny for properly enjoying content, the camera is alright but I don't use that a lot. It's a device for reading hacker news and a few other things. I actually take most calls via my laptop. It even fails its primary job as a communication device for me.

Anyway, the key thing with this ipad is the built in apple phone chips. No more qualcomm. They can just put this thing in any device now. I'm not sure what's holding them back with their laptops. I'm guessing there's some Qualcomm IP and patents that might make that a bit expensive. But it's 2025. Why can't my laptop not connect to 5G networks without dongles, thethering, or other nonsense? The key blocker was always Qualcomm. Problem solved you'd think. Apparently, they are not going there yet. Maybe next year.

The most common use case I typically see for iPads is serving as a PoS system for a lot of local businesses in my area. So, I wonder how many are purchased for personal usage vs. some sort of functional purpose, e.g., business, education, etc..

I wouldn't call myself a hater, just disappointed. The hardware is incredibly powerful, but it's being held back but an OS that's locked down beyond reason. Maybe they just don't want to cannibalize Mac sales or something.

I thought that too until I turned on the window mode on the new iPadOS. Blech. I gave it a month; I really just didn't want it, even though I thought I did.

I would like a full screen shell that's got a reasonable unix variant underneath it. But I do find other uses for it.

Yes, yet I doubt 90% of those users will care about Metal 4 real time raytracing capabilities, for example.

Leaving the 10% for those that actually play such games, assuming they happen to land.

I mean, that makes sense given what the "haters" are saying, and indeed what you yourself admit. If this is just a device for passive consumption of entertainment, then ultimately it's a consumer-facing use case, and there are MANY MANY MANY more consumers than there are creators, whether that creation is a photo or a line of code. So of course more devices are sold, because you need a laptop (due to mostly software, rather than hardware reasons) to do most forms of creativity, from writing code to editing photos.

It could be a great device for certain types of creation also.

I use mine for editing photos. But, I still have to start and end the process with Lightroom classic on my Mac because of stupid decisions by Adobe to rent-seek with cloud storage, offering no local-stroage workflow option with the iPad app (and deliberately leaving out some features only available in LR Classic).

Likewise, I would love to do all of my photoshop work on the iPad. It's a great immersive experience with the Apple Pencil vs. sitting down with a mouse and keyboard on a computer, but yet again, Adobe cripples the iPad app compared to the desktop app.

And those particular use cases aren't Apple's fault. I'm less and less frustrated with iPad OS as a whole, particularly with windowing in 26 (though it could use some polish). It's got external display support, a file manager, access to external storage, audio input select now, etc. But Adobe (and others) are still making crippled mobile applications for it instead of just doing work to port over the full desktop experience on a device that is now just as capable.

Sure you can't code on it (very well), but I feel like Apple should start putting some pressure on Adobe and the other creative-suite of software companies to beef up the iPad experience, maybe offer some incentive or something.

Even on the laptop, Lightroom Classic is missing capabilities and has poor UX for common workflows. I've used Lightroom for 15 years, and at this point I primarily use DXO Photo Lab for editing, I only use Lightroom as a digital library management tool. I can't even fathom using the current Adobe products on iOS to try to do my workflow. That's mostly due to software, but also because I can't connect a high performance CF Xpress reader to a tablet, given the port performance limitations. I have a TB4/USB4 reader and high speed cards for my camera.

I'll be honest I haven't tried DXO Photo Lab yet. I've tried CaptureOne but could never get used to it, although I do prefer it's far more advanced color tools. Lightroom is really basic in comparison.

But I'm going to end up with a subscription anyway because of Photoshop so I've just always stuck with LR. That, and I used a LUT I built using Davinci Resolve, blended with the Camera Standard profile that I use as a slider in Lightroom (Classic) and I haven't found a way to do something similar in any other program yet (you can create these creative profiles in photoshop too but Davinci's color grading tools are so far superior). It's a key part of my look.

Also FWIW M1 and newer iPad Pros have thunderbolt 4

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