Traveling with the iPad Pro, 10 years on

It’s the milestone 10th anniversary of the iPad Pro. iPadOS 26 has dramatically improved the iPad’s power-user functionality. And the new M5 iPad Pro has brought unprecedented power to the platform. With all that in mind, I decided to revisit one of my old experiments and travel (to London, for a week) with only an iPad Pro and without my Mac.

The result of the week says a lot about where the iPad Pro is, ten years on, and why it’s incumbent on Apple to figure out where it goes next.

Productivity capability

The truth is that, outfitted with a Magic Keyboard, my iPad Pro was able to do pretty much everything I wanted to do with it while I spent a few days working in Myke Hurley’s London studio.

Being in Myke’s studio means I didn’t need to bring any recording equipment with me, but iPadOS 26’s support for local recording means that I could’ve brought a microphone along and recorded podcasts on my own without any issues. As it was, after recording the Six Colors podcast on Myke’s Mac, I AirDropped the files to my iPad and edited the whole thing by hand in Ferrite Recording Studio. Uploading the final files and getting the podcast out took a little longer than it does at home, but that’s mostly down to my having built automations on the Mac that I haven’t bothered building on my iPad.

I was also able to use the iPad to do something that the Mac just can’t do: record a multi-camera project via Final Cut Camera from right within Final Cut Pro. Strangely, after a year and a half, that’s still an iPad-only feature. After having produced the video version of Upgrade that we shot in a Memphis hotel room in September, I was confident that I could edit the show on my iPad pretty easily, and I did. Exporting 90 minutes of 4K video did take a while, though—that was the moment when I missed the power of my M4 Max MacBook Pro.

There were a few side effects, though. We shot the entire thing using the standard camera settings—which meant 4K HDR. In Memphis, I was dissatisfied with how Final Cut Pro for iPad had exported my project in non-HDR format, so I decided to export it in HDR this time. In hindsight, that was a mistake—video versions of podcasts do not need that level of dynamic range, and YouTube viewers thought it was too bright. I also had the audio volume set a bit too low in the export. But given how long it took to export the file, I was reluctant to give it a second pass—and so we suffered with a less-than-ideal export. That wouldn’t have happened on a Mac, I think.

(Also, impossibly, Apple has still not updated Final Cut Pro to support background exports using the new feature in iPadOS 26 that was seemingly built specifically for Final Cut Pro. Myke and I spent quite a while just staring at the progress bar on my iPad as it churned through the export.)

I also needed to make an edit in the podcast after the fact, due to a portion of the show we decided to remove late in the process. You can use YouTube’s editing tools to make those sorts of edits, but those tools are on YouTube’s website, and while they’re accessible in Safari on an iPad, it felt very much like I was fighting Safari the entire way through the process.

In terms of writing on the go, though, the iPad Pro continues to be a dream—especially now that I can pop in and out of multi-window mode and write in one window while having a Safari or Preview window open for reference. I wrote a link post in the waiting area at Heathrow. I wrote an entire Macworld column sitting at Myke’s spare desk. That level of versatility and lightweight productivity is one of the reasons I enjoy using the iPad Pro to get work done.

Back in the day, those of us who tried to get work done with the iPad would end up hitting the proverbial brick wall—there were just some tasks that could simply never, ever be done on the iPad, and once you hit one, you had to give up or find a nearby Mac. (I was surprised on this trip to find that a specific charting feature in Numbers doesn’t seem to be available on the iPad—the first time I’ve hit a wall on the iPad in quite some time.)

Most of the brick walls are gone now: I can pretty much do anything on an iPad that I can do on a Mac. Unfortunately, many tasks just take longer on the iPad. In my lowest moments, it felt like I was operating machinery while wearing a pair of mittens. A lot of operations that feel like a single step on a Mac took multiple steps on the iPad. I’ll grant you, some of them might fall into line if I only ever used an iPad and optimized my workflow, but a lot of them are just the consequence of a more limited pool of software and more limited apps.

A few years back, Apple boasted about how it was bringing desktop-class browsing to Safari on iPad. And in many ways, today’s Safari is much more usable than it used to be. I uploaded a 40GB video file to YouTube via Safari, and it just worked! But when it comes to running web apps, too often Safari reveals itself to still behave more like the limited, weird version of Safari from the iPhone, rather than the one I expect on my Mac. Safari may be better now, but when the iPad is as capable as the modern iPad Pro is, the browser should be just as capable.

You’ve reached the base. What now?

The other day, David Pierce of The Verge wrote a think piece about the iPad Pro after a decade. The headline is kind of brutal (“a decade of unrealized potential”), but I share a lot of his sentiment. Thanks to iPadOS 26, we’ve reached the point where we can stop talking about Apple’s software letting down its hardware. It shouldn’t have taken a whole decade, and during a lot of that period, it felt like Apple had no idea what it was doing with the iPad, but it’s in a much better place now.

Still, that place is not the end state of the iPad: it’s the starting point. The iPad Pro has reached a functional, complete state, complete with background tasks and true multi-window support and support for local audio recording and all sorts of other esoteric stuff. So… what now?

As Pierce wrote:

The hardware, the operating system, the accessory ecosystem — everything is in place for this to be not just a full-fledged computer, but maybe the best computer Apple makes. Now Apple just needs to finally let it act like it.

This is the challenge the iPad Pro faces over the next decade. What is the purpose of this device? Is it just to be a more expensive version of the iPad Air that appeals to those who prefer to pay more to get a nicer product? Is it to continue down the path of being more Mac-like? (And how would that manifest?) Is it to be content filling certain niches that it’s very good at, while ignoring others that the Mac serves best?

I don’t know where Apple and the iPad Pro go from here. I’m sure there will be some tinkering and refinement around the edges—a “clamshell” mode that allows you to run the iPad attached to an external monitor without also needing to keep the main iPad display open seems like the next step—but unless Apple’s App store model changes dramatically (which, let’s face it, will require lots of legal intervention), things probably won’t change dramatically.

Maybe that’s okay. The iPad Pro is great for artists and writers, and even for podcast editors and many other professionals. It doesn’t need to be the equivalent of the Mac, just as the Mac doesn’t need to be the equivalent of the iPad. That all seems healthy, other than the fact that when I travel for work, it means I’ve got to bring both devices with me.