Matt Gemmell went iPad-only in 2016, but he's made the move Back to Mac

[The Mac is] satisfying in the conventional way, in that it meets needs without drama or acrobatics. It works in the sense that it directs its resources firmly in the direction of service, rather than theatre. It’s flexible not as a shape-shifting device of modularity and digital magic, but in the unassuming and reliable way that its answer is invariably yes.

It’s a good piece by Gemmell, who has spent most of the last decade being iPad-only. He does a rather exhaustive explanation of the reasons the switch was right for him.

I found his impressions of the Mac after all this time to be very interesting.

Presumably because of the legacy and the architecture of iPadOS, many activities simply fail if not kept frontmost. Take Final Cut Pro, for example

This is one that really bothers me to this day. One of the superpowers of the Mac is that it can do many things at once. Obviously, the iPad has multitasking, but not in the way the Mac does. The basic concept of iPad multitasking is that you need to be able to see an app for it to be reliably working. If you can’t see an app, there is a select list of things it can keep doing in the background, but most things die immediately, and it may be booted from memory at any point. The Final Cut example is a good one, but I often have apps doing extended workflows on my Mac when they’re not visible on screen because I’d doing other things: video exports, audio transcriptions, code compiling, terminal functions, video uploads…the list goes on.

I loved that I could rotate [the iPad], and write on it, and pinch-zoom it, and connect it to a keyboard, and just figuratively hug the thing. It was most certainly The Future, and very much on track to become everyone’s full-time computer after another few versions of the OS. Then another few versions. Then another few.

A lot of iPad fans I talk to mention this as one of the first things they love about the iPad as well. The physical flexibility of a screen that can be a portable screen, a laptop, or a desktop is hugely compelling. I agree, and it’s a main reason I think that touch Macs won’t just be laptops with a digitizer in the screen, it will be a radically new form factor for the Mac platform. It will likely look a lot more like an iPad Pro than a MacBook Pro. Until then, this is undoubtedly an advantage of iPads.

Apple likes to present the iPad as the first computer that’s designed to suit the user, but of course the exact opposite is also true: in every respect, the user must adapt to the iPad’s way of doing things.

1,000% this! If you mesh well with the iPad, then it can be great! If you don’t, well then buddy you’re out of luck. I wrote about this concept as well last year, and I’ll just quote myself:

With macOS, there is more likely to be a built-in setting you can change to tweak the behavior, or there will be a third party app that you can easily install to get the feature or behavior that you need. With iPadOS, typically the answer is, “hope Apple adds it at WWDC next year.”

There are trade-offs to customization and user control, but this is a fundamental difference between the Mac and iPad that can’t be overstated. As a simple example, there have been many window management apps on the Mac forever, so people who don’t love the built in option have had an embarrassment of riches in terms of options, but if you don’t like Stage Manager on the iPad, your only hope is that Apple updates it to your liking someday.

The second thing that struck me is how much more needy macOS is, not just compared to iPadOS, but compared to its own past selves. In the process of adding some apps and some utilities[…] I quickly lost count of the number of notifications telling me that something had been installed somewhere, or that a login item had been added, or that something was asking for permission to do something, and I could go and approve it or change it somewhere else.

I’ve spoken about this as well, and he’s absolutely right that it is frustrating, although I would add two caveats. The first is that these alerts are terrible the first couple days with a new macOS install, and then they basically never happen again, so this pain will fade. The second is that the reason the iPad doesn’t have these alerts is because the iPad literally can’t do these things in the first place. I feel like this is similar to people praising the simplicity of Lightning compared to USB-C when Lightning just didn’t do shit, so it avoided complexity by not supporting anything new in over a decade.

Safari needs micro-managed

Yes, Safari is crazy and I haven’t used it for many years because of this.

There’s also the issue that, as a natural consequence of the increased ability to customise and modify things, Macs decay in a way that iPads generally don’t. They need to be nursed to an extent, and conflict-managed, and spring cleaned. The worst I’ve had to do with an iPad is to erase its network settings; on a Mac, a fresh installation every couple of years is beneficial and desirable.

This one stood out to me because it really does sound like something someone would say if they haven’t used a Mac in a decade. My personal Mac is on a 3 year old install and my work Mac is approaching 5 years and they both work great. And let's be real, I use these computers hard so it's not like I'm babying these things. This idea that you need to do a fresh install every couple of years is basically like saying you need to defrag your hard drive every few months or you need to force close all your apps so they don’t “all run in the background.”

I did want to take this as an opportunity to make a request: if people are dropping the Mac and moving all in on the iPad and writing about it, please share those posts so I can check them out! I feel like we get a few notable posts like this every year with iPad enthusiasts returning to the Mac, but if there are similar posts of Mac enthusiasts moving to the iPad, they’re not coming across my feeds.