Reviewer questions new iPad’s back-to-school appeal
Laptop or iPad? Back-toschool decisions have gotten more complicated since the days I had to choose a Trapper Keeper and No. 2 pencil set. Computers are now the most important classroom tools. But in 2019, what even counts as a computer?
This fall, iPads are making their strongest appeal yet to shed a lightweight image and earn the job of full-on computer. Apple now sells a very speedy iPad, the 10.5-inch iPad Air, with a keyboard case for $660. And even the $330 basic models are about to get a productivity boost from Apple’s first dedicated tablet software update, called iPadOS. Some colleges, including Ohio State and the University of Kentucky, are equipping all freshmen not with Macs, but iPads.
Is it time to think differently? First, ask yourself if you’ll be able to do more and better work — and be ready for whatever life might throw your way — with a laptop. Students and even professionals ought to maximize their money with a computer that can do it all.
But the definition of “all” is fast changing. You can now do many remarkably laptopy things with an iPad, including proper text editing, organizing files and plugging in external drives. We’ve reached an inflection point: For many common computing tasks, the divide between iPads and laptops is more generational than functional.
For a recent week, I worked and lived primarily off a public beta version of iPadOS, which Apple will make available in a few weeks to iPads stretching back to 2014’s iPad Air 2. My experiment went better than when I’ve tried it with past-generation iPads.
Still, there was a learning curve. Without a mouse or trackpad, iPadOS invents some not-always-intuitive finger moves to complete computer tasks. Call it iPad yoga: Breathe deeply before you try the threefinger double pinch required to “cut.”
Over the past decade, tech reviewers like me — usually, people whose first computers came with a mouse — have been complaining that iPads can’t replace laptops. Meanwhile, iPads have outsold Mac computers since 2013. Critic Jonathan Kim recently wrote that we’ve been asking the wrong question. He suggests a better one: Why would anybody who’s grown up using an iPad want a laptop?
The iPad’s appeal starts with portability. Most weigh about 1 pound. The slimmest new MacBook is 2.75 pounds.
And then there’s price: Compare the $500 iPad Air plus $160 keyboard offer to Apple’s entry-level laptop, the $1,100 MacBook Air. You could spend hundreds less on a Chromebook or Windows laptop, but for many students a cheaper Apple computer that automatically syncs up with an iPhone is a draw.
For the Ohio and Kentucky officials who are going all-in on iPads, there was another impor
tant appeal: technology that a wide range of students already know how to use. Everyone is already expert in operating a touch-screen smartphone. “The iPad levels the playing field,” Kirsten Turner, Kentucky’s associate provost for academic and student affairs, told me. “This is how our students interact and acquire information.”
For the past few years, the albatross around the iPad’s neck has been software that treated a powerful device like an oversized iPhone. iPadOS breaking off from iOS signals an important fork in the road. It comes with a zillion tweaks: a spot for informational widgets on the home screen, a keyboard you can resize and move around, and support for custom fonts.
A few of these changes raised the bar for the kind of work I could get done with my iPad:
• Safari, Apple’s web browser, is no longer a feeble “mobile” experience that defaults to scaled-down versions of sites. It now loads the version of sites you’d get on a laptop, replacing your mouse pointer with your finger. This is a big deal for people who use web applications.
• Files, the iPad’s equivalent to the Finder on a Mac, finally lives up to its name. It’s not quite as intuitive as a “Desktop” and “Trash” can, but a section called “On My iPad” lets you add, nest and move around folders and files to your heart’s content. It can even zip and unzip compressed files.
• Multitasking, which iPads have had for a few years, loses some past limitations. Now you can run two of the same app side by side, which is helpful for doing research and writing.
• iPads can also do some creative things that laptops cannot. Adobe showed me a preview of its coming made-fortouchscreens painting software called Fresco. With the swipe of an Apple Pencil, Fresco lets you make marks reminiscent of an oil paint brush, then switch to watercolor all on the same canvas.
So what’s not to love about iPads? Despite Apple’s best efforts, iPadOS is still mobile software.
Apple is better than most companies at the subtle art of not ruining the thing we already know by adding new functions.
For my money, a laptop is still a better choice than an iPad. So far, more schools and parents have taken my point of view. According to the Consumer Technology Association, 75 percent of parents of middle and high school students report that their children use laptops at least once per week for education, likely Chromebooks in many schools.