Can A Laptop Really Replace Your iPad?

We’ve been asking the wrong people the wrong question

With the release of the first iPad Pro in 2015, Apple began making the argument that for many people, an iPad was now powerful and capable enough to replace a laptop/PC. Since then, practically every review and article written or recorded about new iPads has addressed this question of whether an iPad could be a legitimate laptop replacement.

This was almost entirely based on the all-important metric of whether a person could do “real work” on an iPad, and nearly every reviewer found the iPad wanting for a number of logical, completely sensible reasons, and dinged new iPads commensurately. This iPad ≥ laptop debate was further enflamed when Apple released an ad following a young girl as she used her iPad Pro throughout a day for a number of activities — including drawing, talking to friends, reading a comic book, and doing homework — ending with her asking the now infamous question “What’s a computer?” So this debate was not a case of the tech press engaging in a straw man argument based on a misinterpretation of what Apple was saying or not saying about their products. Apple is really the one who started all this.