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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

The moment apple ship MacOS on their iPads, sales for their macbooks will all but collapse.

Will they though? They would capture more windows users. They already have the Neo actually. iPad still has another job mainly around simpler tasks. I’ve not yet got to love the Macosy windows management.

That's what I thought when they announced the folding phone, but iPad sales

Have you ever tried to do serious work on a tablet?

Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.

Have you ever connected an iPad to an external display, mouse, and keyboard? I agree with you that laptop sales would continue, but I bet they would decline. Apple could do the MS Surface much better than MS did.

I’m not so sure personally. A MacBook Air is not that much less portable than an iPad, but is far more useful for work when not docked than an iPad because it still has a keyboard and a precision pointing device. And it can still be docked when you need a bigger screen.

The areas where the iPad beats the MacBook are still (imo) the same as the day it launched: web browsing, watching video, and reading. Workloads that are heavy on the Apple Pencil too, but that’s a fairly narrow slice compared to anything else you might do on a computer.

I mean my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard case has fully replaced my Mac for everything. I haven’t touched my Mac in months. I literally do all of my work via GitHub Codespaces (soon to be self-hosted Coder). Yes it’s not all on device but it works (for me).

I don’t see anything in my use case that I’d gain from a MacBook over this setup.

Let’s just ignore the price comparison though lol

Yeah I used a Magic Keyboard myself for a while but I found it significantly impacted what I liked about the iPad. It doubled the weight, and removed the ability to hold it in my hand or in portrait (still the most common orientation I use mine). Sure you can take it out any time, but I found it just added a lot of extra friction to a device that previously had very little (iPadOS aside). Glad it’s working well for you though.

What are you talking about?

A MacBook is optimized for a larger screen and comes with a better keyboard and trackpad.

I use both my MacBook and iPad all the time, because their hardware form factors are better for different things.

I don't want to read books on my MacBook and I don't want to do development or writing on my iPad.

I briefly tried using my iPad as a Mac through the screen sharing. It's not as useful as you are imagining.

and increase power usage?

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