David Pierce writing at The Verge:

I’ve been using the latest Pro as my go-to laptop for a few weeks now, just to see what all this change adds up to, and I’m shocked at how close this thing is to a truly all-purpose computer. There are the obvious things, like built-in cellular connectivity and the Apple Pencil, that give the Pro powers the Mac doesn’t have. The mix of touch and trackpad is genuinely great, too; I’m constantly back and forth to the screen, scrolling or swiping with the trackpad but doing finer and more complex things with my hands. And there’s just no replacing the fact that you can turn on a movie, pick up the screen, and flop back on the couch. Add in the solid speakers, good camera, and great battery life, and there’s a lot I like about life with the iPad. If you do creative work of any kind — and more and more people do — it’s a uniquely useful device.

Which makes it all the more annoying every time you run into some totally unnecessary system limitation. There are still a lot of those. Apple’s laptops are allowed to run any app, not just the ones in the App Store. They can interact with more accessories. They can access virtually everything about the system through the Terminal. They can run better browsers. Utility apps I rely on to make my computing life easier, like Raycast and Better Touch Tool, just don’t exist the same way on the iPad. There’s almost nothing the Mac straight-up won’t let you do, but the iPad is full of limitations. They’ve been there for so long, and are so glaring, that we’ve been mad about them in reviews since at least 2018. Apple saw them as a feature, not a bug.

Even with iPadOS 26, I still find multitasking with the iPad hugely cumbersome, and I just think to myself “ugh, I should just grab my Mac.” I have a iPad Air with the A14 SoC, the last iPad Air before the transition to M-series chips. 5+ years later, it’s fine. It does the multi-tasking things in iPad OS 26. However, in the last 6 months, I’ve found myself reliably just using my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Perhaps it’s for the larger real estate; perhaps it’s that the M1 Pro has held up better than the A14 over time. In any case, the I just consistently feel that I’m hitting walls on that iPad.