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iPad Pro vs. MacBook: The Great Apple Laptop Trade-Off

Apple’s latest iPad Pro is superior to a Mac in many ways. Yet a Mac beats the iPad on the most important thing—software.

By Joanna Stern | Photographs by David Hall/The Wall Street Journal

May 13, 2024 5:03 pm ET

A guy walks into an Apple Store in search of the perfect laptop: a big bright touch screen, a blazing fast processor, an operating system that runs fully featured apps and a top-notch keyboard and trackpad. He walks out with a…

A: $999-and-up MacBook Air or Pro

B: $999-and-up iPad Pro plus a separately sold Magic Keyboard

C: Second mortgage so he can buy both

C is correct! Welcome to Apple’s you-can’t-have-it-all computer lineup.

The new 13-inch iPad Pro I’ve been testing is an engineering feat. Thinner than two Kraft Singles, the M4-powered tablet can be faster than the MacBook Air, and even some MacBook Pro models. With the new Magic Keyboard, it feels like typing on a Mac, too.

Yet using the iPad Pro is like driving a Ferrari on a golf course. So much power and capability hampered by an operating system originally designed for phones. It’s no MacOS.

So quit your complaining and go buy a MacBook, right? Well, a Mac doesn’t have this glorious OLED touch screen or other modern-day features of this new iPad.

“We don’t see them as competing devices. We see them as complementary devices,” Tom Boger, Apple’s vice president of iPad and Mac product marketing, told me in an interview. The iPad, he said, “has always been a touch-first device” while the Mac is for “indirect manipulation”—aka using a keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad. 

The iPad Pro is a great buy for creative professionals who regularly use a stylus to sketch or edit photos. But plenty of people are looking for a single tablet-laptop device that doesn’t require giving up so much—or switching to Windows. Many readers told me as much this past week.

So I ditched my $1,800 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro for an $1,800 13-inch M4 iPad Pro, which can cost that much when you add the cellular connection and Magic Keyboard. My goal: to understand the difference—and the trade-offs.

What’s better about an iPad Pro

Portability. The 5.1mm-thick tablet feels more like a lunch tray than a computer. Yet there’s an entire computer—processor, storage, battery—inside that screen. The new $349 Magic Keyboard roughly doubles the thickness, but it’s still easier to whip out on the train than my MacBook.

Sometimes, to see just how thin a 5.1mm iPad is, you have to get a little cheesy.

Touch screen. And this isn’t just any touch screen: It’s an Ultra Retina XDR, Tandem OLED screen. Run that through the Apple-to-human translator: “a really crisp and bright screen.”

Touch is great for all your typical iPad stuff: scrolling through long documents or webpages, zooming in on photos, navigating through videos. But I like touch even when I use the iPad like a laptop.

Steve Jobs famously said “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical” and “after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.” Sure, but I don’t use it for extended periods. When I finished typing a paragraph on the spacious keyboard, I dragged this document to the left half of the display with my finger, then used the trackpad to highlight text.

Pencil. All I have to show of my testing of the $129 Apple Pencil Pro is a stick figure and a signed PDF. But for the artistically inclined, it unlocks a world of sketching, animating and creative control that a Mac can’t match.

Touch, pen, keyboard and trackpad. Take your pick of how you would like to interact with the iPad Pro.

5G connectivity. Most mornings, I’m on the train playing matchmaker between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone’s 5G personal hotspot. The iPad Pro, with its speedy built-in cellular, is connected when I turn it on.

Face ID. Call me lazy, but I love not having to lift a finger—literally. Unlike Touch ID on MacBooks, the iPad Pro just needs a good view of your face to unlock the device, access password-protected apps or authorize Apple Pay.

What’s better about a Mac

Ports. The iPad Pro has one USB-C port. That’s it. Not even a measly headphone jack. The MacBook Air has two USB-C ports, MagSafe for charging and a headphone jack. And it’s port-a-palooza on the MacBook Pro: all that the Air has plus an extra USB-C, an SD card slot and an HDMI port.

Software. Here’s where the iPad-as-laptop dream goes to die. Over the years, iPadOS has gotten a lot of Mac-like features. Split View lets you put two apps side by side. Stage Manager gives you overlapping windows, if you can figure it out. Instead of a basic file manager, there’s the Files app, which shows what’s local and in the cloud. These are all more touch friendly than MacOS, but they’re also more confusing.

iPadOS’s Stage Manager allows you to use windows like a Mac, but organizing them isn’t intuitive. PHOTO: DAVID HALL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Many popular iPad apps are either enlarged iPhone apps or stripped-down Mac apps. Some readers told me Microsoft’s iPad apps are so limited, they often switch to computers. One, D.E. Billingsley of Tallahassee, Fla., complained that he can’t figure out how to print envelopes using Word for iPad. (I couldn’t either.) Google’s apps are similarly streamlined. The Docs app is unusable for real writing or editing. I end up using Docs in the Safari browser.

Not all iPad apps are disappointing. Boger pointed me to Procreate, a digital art and graphics platform, and Apple’s own Final Cut Pro video editing software. They were designed for the iPad and it shows.

Multiple display support. I was able to hook the iPad up to my 27-inch work monitor. But even with all that screen real estate, you’re still battling Stage Manager’s wonky way of handling multiple windows.

Battery life. Apple says the MacBook Pro and Air get as many as 15 hours of wireless web. The iPad Pro is rated for as many as 10. I never get that in real life. The iPad Pro lasted about five hours. My MacBook Pro goes about seven. Both run longer if you’re just watching video.

What’s better for us  

This iPad has a Mac-level chip, Mac-level keyboard and Mac-level screen. Heck, according to some tests, its raw performance rivals my 14-inch MacBook Pro. 

Why not just let this thing run MacOS—or at least Mac apps? Or why not give a MacBook a touch screen?

Steve Jobs was right, reaching out and touching a laptop screen will tire your arm. But Joanna doesn’t do this for extended periods. PHOTO: DAVID HALL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Like a toddler hoping for a different answer, I repeatedly asked Boger variations of the question.

He remained firm: iPads are for touch, Macs are not. “MacOS is for a very different paradigm of computing,” he said. He explained that many customers have both types of devices and think of the iPad as a way to “extend” work from a Mac. Apple’s Continuity easily allows you to work across devices, he said.

So there you have it, Apple wants you to buy…both? If you pick one, you live with the trade-offs. I did ask Boger if Apple would ever change its mind on the touch-screen situation.

“Oh, I can’t say we never change our mind,” he said. One can only hope.

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Write to Joanna Stern at joanna.stern@wsj.com