Did you think that iPad should be the next computer ? Or it should still have to be an iPad ?

An iPad has some applications if you're fine with Apple's walled iOS garden in the first place. Like, pure media consumption, or stock keeping, or filling digital checklists e.g. in medicare.

Otherwise, no, a tablet is not a replacement for a laptop. That hype cycle is long through and was fuelled by analysts who failed to understand the difference between the then-new tablet vs. a saturated computer market.

An iPad is good for light usage and travel where you don't need any excessive compute.

It has its place but it's far from being a laptop or even a PC replacement.

If you only use it for browsers and a handful of apps, then it'll probably suffice.

Programming on tablets is awful, soo no.

Anything that needs a keyboard or a mouse is awful on tablets. It works, but it is far from being useful like a laptop.

And i'm speaking for all tablets not just ipad, for example my Samsung tablet has a Dex mode, which is far more like a desktop os, but still the apps running on it will never replace the software we have on laptops.

@jonas-w That's because interface design for programming is based around line editing though. I think you could construct a series of micro-actions such as "define function", "new assignment operation", "new function call" etc. such that the user basically never has to resort to the virtual keyboard. Especially if you combine this with a statically typed language and only list options that match the desired type by default. That requires thinking about the code in a different way because you'd write the top AST node of an expression tree first, but I'd tried writing really long programs in MIT scratch in high school and this wasn't a notable issue.

@lbfalvy That's e.g. how National Instruments' Labview works, and it's rather awful. There is a reason why programming is still line based, and it's not that nobody has come up with alternatives.

@Fast-Nop I was thinking more a line editor with a lot of syntax-aware macros, I'm unfamiliar with NI LabView

The™️ New™️ iPad™️ is a computer. But to make it the computer, it would have to become a desktop PC running Gentoo.

The Apple eco system is like an absolute monarchy: You might till the land and eat its fruits, but it still is the land and the fruits of the king. You own nothing. So no Gentoo on The™️ New™️ iPad™️. And it would never be as beefy as the real thing anyways.

There is a way though: You could use The™️ New™️ iPad™️ as a thin client for accessing a real desktop PC...

Touch UIs in general are god awful for anything that is not consumption or drawing/painting. I fucking hate them.