The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen.

iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system. PushPopPress began to illuminate this path fifteen years ago, and then they got slurped up — like so many other promising, young, talented designers and companies around that time — by Facebook, only to disappear into the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s electric hydrofoil surfboard. Using an iPad should feel like a finger ballet. Your hands should be swooping and swiping and the whole OS should feel like skipping across a taut slackline, a bit bouncy and pleasing and physical but also precise and quick and focused taking you where you need to go, across some creative gulf. There should be no “hard edges” anywhere. iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy. When you pick up one of those magic slabs (and truly, the amount of engineering and power in those thin-as-heck slabs is something else) you should feel giddy, like you’re about to enter a whole ’nother computer-ing universe, one that is all about elegant multitouch tactility, worlds apart from your phone or your laptop.

The MacBook Neo is about six years late. Back in 2020, when the iPad Pro’s 4th generation model — the one with trackpad support — was released, there was a group of us who slapped the new Magic Keyboard with trackpad on it and thought, immediately: Give me this machine with macOS. This feeling had been brewing for a while. iPad Pros had been around since 2015, and it was clear they were more capable than our space-heater, butterfly-cursed, hackneyed singular-port MacBooks. Back then, MacBooks were uninspiring. Used with reluctance and a heaviness of heart. Intel’s laptop processors were at best miserly bridge trolls that enacted a fee of heat and fan noise for not much power. Meanwhile, the iPad Pro was fanless, silent, fast, and had a great screen.

But iPads stank from a software perspective. You couldn’t really do anything “Pro” on them, no matter how much Apple tried to bend the definition. It felt like Apple had bolted a Ferrari engine onto a Honda Super Cub. The Cub was useful and cute for basic tasks, but you weren’t going to haul a ton of wood with it to build a beautiful home, even though the engine could theoretically shoot it to the moon. You could feel that latent power thrumming under the glass each time you woke your iPad to watch YouTube or read the news or play Slay the Spire or whatever else entertainment-focused, low-stakes thing most people out there did (and do) with their iPads. It was a machine with an engine desperately wanting to get out, but hamstrung by the OS and applications. Lightroom on iPad was fun for doing edits and development with a Pencil, but you were encumbered by Adobe’s cloud, by the lack of other basic features like making a duplicate of an image (arguably one of the most fundamental features for people making edits on photographs). These kinds of workflow paper cuts are everywhere on the iPad. In terms of power, that original iPad Pro is still pretty much all the iPad you could ever want or need. I’m sure there are a few of you doing more with your iPads than the original Pro could deliver, but I’m not sure there’re many. Almost anything that doesn’t involve the Apple Pencil (Procreate being one of the true killer apps, the app that may have sold more iPads to creative professionals than anything else) could be done better on a MacBook. Even email feels better on a MacBook.

That lament of MacBooks being left tragically behind didn’t last long. While Apple didn’t give us the iPad Pro with macOS, they did give us an M1 MacBook Pro in November 2020, the same year that the iPad Pro with trackpad support came out. The M1 — here it was! And it was as glorious as we had all assumed it would have been. macOS rocking Apple Silicon. Unburdened from Intel purgatory. Did that machine have anything other than USB-C ports? No, but the ports would come, soon. (Glorious ports in 2021.) For many of us, this marked the moment from which the iPads went from collecting a little dust to collecting all the dust, and we gave up on ever trying to get the machine to live up to its “Pro” title. Today, they sit in the corner. iPadOS simply isn’t an environment for most “serious” work.

This sense of iPad “not working” has only grown in the past two years with the explosion of LLMs and tools like Claude Code. macOS is the place to run the things because macOS is malleable and its constituent parts fungible, it’s able to embody the role of tool by trusting the user to be an adult.

You’d think that Apple would have seen the launch of the M1 as a clear moment to maximally delineate between MacBooks and iPad. But no, Apple got weird. Some kind of internal velocity set in motion perhaps years ago by an errant project manager continued to push the company into fuzzy software spaces. For instead of making iPadOS more iPad-focused — a touch-only wonderland of touch-computing joy — they began to make it more like fake macOS. Adding multitasking that didn’t ever work as fluidly as multitasking on macOS, and windowing that was bizarre at best and infuriating at worst. Ever since the release of M Macs (a real oxygen-at-the-top-of-Mount-Everest-moment, I have to say), I suspect most of us haven’t cared what was happening to iPads or iPadOS. Apple was taking it in the wrong direction — that’s all we intuited from afar, or when we went to watch YouTube on them (though watching YouTube was better on desktop in a browser, more keyboard shortcuts, the ability to hide Shorts, etc.). And each time we’d peek — a few times a year or so — our hearts fell a little in dismay to see how far they’d strayed, how utterly uninteresting it all was, how much it was trying to be “macOS lite” but somehow, mostly, worse.

Slowly, then quickly, those of us on macOS felt squeezed in the opposite direction. First, Settings changed in a worse-for-wear way in Ventura (2022). macOS became ever-so-slightly ever-more locked down. Popups became more and more onerous. And with Tahoe, the direction is clear: in a move straight out of a horror film, Apple is trying to merge macOS and iPadOS (or visionOS, if that’s your angle).

Oh, how far the heart falls when considering this misguided strategy, a strategy clearly devised by someone who doesn’t use iPads or MacBooks, who lives only in the realm of theory, ignoring the terrible praxis of melding these two worlds that so desperately do not want to be melded.

I’m typing this on a MacBook Neo. I’ve been using it daily for two weeks. It’s an outstanding little machine. Cheaper than an iPad with a keyboard. Far, far more capable in almost every way. Bursting with potential, this little machine. It’s the machine we all wanted, in a way, back when the iPad Pro was attempting to be a professional tool. A good keyboard, a fine screen, a solid little processor, and most importantly, an operating system that lets you work and work well, and work well with the coming wave of LLM-related tools. This machine has become what I always wished my iPad could be — a compact, light writing machine that stays out of the way, feels fluid and fluent, integrates easily with services like Dropbox, and syncs with my true Pro machine effortlessly. (I’ve lost untold documents attempting to rely on iCloud Drive and syncing between desktop and mobile versions of apps.)

Rumors have it that touch screens are coming to MacBooks, to macOS. I do not wish to touch my MacBook’s screen. One of the great joys of a MacBook is not touching the screen, is keeping the fingers on the keyboard in a ballet of delightful fluency, flitting between apps, opening apps and documents and assorted files, running tools, doing so at the speed of thought, encumbered only by increasingly slower animations or boneheaded notifications or apps stealing focus as they spin themselves up. Keys are fast, touch is slow, and with all the usability issues appearing in macOS, adding touch seems like one more level of complexity the software teams aren’t yet primed to handle.

Tim Cook is on the way out. John Ternus begins this fall. We know by the numbers that Apple sells a lot of iPads. And they sell an OK number of MacBooks. When Cook came in he streamlined supply chains, but over time, the lineup of devices has grown fat and strange. Perhaps Ternus can streamline once again, on both axes of hardware and software.

Here is the insane business plan of what I would do, the thoughts of some fool on a hill halfway across the world:

No more keyboards or mouse support for iPads. Touch only. Nix half the iPad lineup, simplify simplify simplify. Gut iPadOS and rebuild it around touch fluidity and fluency and focus. Work with Procreate to expand their offerings. What is the Procreate equivalent of every creative tool? Look back to the playfulness of PushPopPress. Now, make a 12" MacBook Air. Get rid of the other Airs. For the MacBook lineup, offer a cheap Neo, an ultra-portable high-spec Air, and powerful, portful Pros. And macOS? No touch. Good god, do not succumb to the siren call of touching MacBook screens. Instead, go into a three year period of major OS refactoring. Speed above all. Mythos harden the OS but increase malleability. What does an LLM-first macOS look like? One you can plug into and automate with ease. Make that. (Plot twist: It turns out it’s the same thing as a user-first OS.) Think about keyboard fluency. Bicycle for the mind the hell out of the thing. Make it absolutely clear about how iPads are used and how MacBooks are used. Think about them as true companions, but with no overlap. Maybe Ternus will usher in parts of this.

I just love the idea that the specificity of our tools should be radically clear. The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps. And MacBooks should be for multitasking, moving information and data around, building evermore powerful tools (tools within tools within tools), all bounded by a keyboard-first universe. Keep the iPad screen covered in the goop of happy fingers and the MacBook keyboards slathered in the smudge of thought. The more separate they are, the more powerful they become.