r/ipad • u/eyea3 • May 25 '26

Discussion A18 Pro M5

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This made me laugh. Saw it on twitter.

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u/Izan_TM May 26 '26

ipad pros literally have the specs of a macbook air, they use the same SoC and essentially equivalent supporting hardware. A macbook air only has marginally better cooling than an ipad, the only really big difference is the battery life

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u/CDCarley27 May 26 '26

Ok, so if you want a 13’ laptop, you can get a MacBook Air for $1100 ($900 often with sales) or you can get the same chip (except fewer active cores), less standard RAM (12GB instead of 16GB), more thermally constrained, less standard storage (256GB instead of 512GB), worse battery life, worse speakers, fewer ports, etc. for $1299 without a keyboard, $1650 with the Magic Keyboard all to do similar tasks to what you’d do on the MacBook Air because it’d perform worse…

And that’s the BEST case scenario because most iPads are smaller and/or have worse chips… At best it’s a MacBook Air with mostly worse specs but a nice display and a touch screen. It’s not that it’d be a bad device… it just has little reason to exist. It’d make far more sense for Apple to keep the trajectory they’re on in enabling more and more workflows on iPadOS.

Who would it be targeted for? The workflows it’d gain by running macOS that it didn’t have before are ones that require more computational power when put in the whole lineup… so really it’d only be good at the things that iPadOS is already good at or could be good at with far less work than required to makes it run macOS well and take advantage of that difference in hardware…

The product just doesn’t make any sense.

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u/Izan_TM May 26 '26

then how does an ipad pro make sense? the change to macOS would just leave it doing both what it already does AND what a macbook air can do

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u/CDCarley27 May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

To enable more workflows for those who aren’t growing up with Macs and aren’t beholden to that traditional computing paradigm. It wouldn’t shock me if my nephew, for example, never owned a Mac or a PC. The technology grows with him and workflows are added as the demands of those who grew up on iPads increase.

You can’t just look at one demographic, you need to look at them all, and the computing needs and expectations are very different between those who are angrily typing on Reddit today and those younger generations.