The iPad May Be the Perfect Computer (Premium)

With the introduction of iPadOS 26, Apple has instantly erased over a decade of neglect of the product that was supposed to deliver our post-PC future. In one sense, this transformation of the iPad is the opposite of Apple Intelligence, in that it under-promises and over-delivers, a skill Apple briefly seemed to have lost. But this is much bigger than that, I think, though itwill have similarly long-lasting implications.
⏱️ How we got here
I’ve written a lot about the iPad, but especially in the past year or so as my frustration grew with Apple’s ongoing inability to deliver the experience Steve Jobs had promised 15 years earlier. I made my case for this evolution over a year ago, ahead of Apple’s ‘25 OS reveals at WWDC 2025. But so, too, did others who believed that the key to success for the iPad as a computer somehow required Apple to shoehorn macOS into the product, an incredibly short-sighted and wrong-headed idea.

Not that it mattered. Weeks later, Apple announced iPadOS 18, without a single improvement to the core productivity and multitasking experiences.

This proved to be an expensive time for me regarding the iPad. In need of a new iPad in early 2024, I had splurged on a 13-inch iPad Air M2 ahead of WWDC in the vain hope that Apple would at least take a baby-step in the right direction. But it was far too big and heavy for day-to-day tablet use, so I ended up getting the latest Apple Mini several months later. Only to discover in a weird Goldilocks moment that the Mini was, wait for it, too small. So I gave up on the two extremes and bought an 11-inch iPad Air M3 this past April.

Maybe I should have waited for WWDC 2026.

As everyone now knows, Apple surprised the world with Liquid Glass, sure, but also with iPadOS 26, a release that will literally address every issue I have with this platform when used as a computer. Given the past disappointments, I doubted what I was seeing. But when I tried the first iPadOS 26 developer beta, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: Apple had done it. And so I grabbed a Magic Keyboard for my iPad Air to get the full experience. It was a little small because of the 11-inch iPad form factor. But also surprisingly good

Since then, I was curious whether I could just use the iPad with the Magic Keyboard day-to-day, as I had been using every iPad I’d ever owned, dating back to the 2010 original, mostly in portrait mode, and mostly to read. But the Magic Keyboard only works in landscape, and I wasn’t super-interested in attaching and detaching the expensive iPad from the peripheral throughout each day if I moved back and forth between reading and writing and other work. And so I used it in this configuration for a few days back in Pennsylvania, and then I brought the iPad to Mexico with the Magic Keyboard, and I've used it that way ever since, so for over a month.

This article is not about the fact that I’ve pretty much adjusted to using the iPad this way, though that it's worth at...