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Comment by john_alan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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