iPad Pro with M5 chip

My sister in law has used an iPad as here primary compute device for school. Frankly, it works absolutely fine for her. 95% of her need is reading, email, and writing papers (in Google Drive).

This. I've started thinking of it like this — the iPad, in my case, has an absolutely abysmal cost to usage ratio. On the far other end of the spectrum (and in a similar form factor if you squint) is probably my Kindle.

That being said, _some_ people I know consistently seem to get lots of work use out of their tablets, and I can't quite put my finger on where we differ.

This may be a controversial statement, but: you don't have to replace things that you're not using.

Every iPad I've bought was going to be "the one where I find a use case that uses it" but every time it ends up being a YouTube machine.

Sounds like you don't have a tablet specific use case though, you just want to use it as a glorified laptop, so why not just use a laptop?

A tablet specific use case would be as portable writing machine on the go, for illustration, for audio units, or something like that, all the way to flight maps for recreational flying.

What’s wrong with the iPad being a pure consumption device? It’s really great at this. Granted, you don’t need an iPad Pro for consumption, but you could always go for an iPad or iPad Air, no?

I have a 2017 iPad Pro and once the battery finally dies will replace it with a non-Pro iPad.

I'm still on an older 12.9" Pro but will definitely upgrade at some point—and may not bother with another (personal—work-supplied is another matter) MacBook when my M1 starts to get long in the tooth in a couple years, now that Preview is available on iPads.

It beats the hell out of either laptops or phones, for me, for these tasks:

- Music. Excellent as a sheet music display; can record and edit midi quite well; play tutorial videos; act as a tuner, tone generator, or metronome (my phone beats it on that front due to portability, but still, if I already have the iPad out on the stand...); plenty good enough at audio recording and editing for my extremely-amateur purposes, plus its ability to play loops and beats and such.

- Reading. It's especially amazing for comic books (in landscape mode a 12.9 incher is almost the same size as an open comic book! You can read two-page side-by-side on it, no problem) and PDFs. I prefer iPad mini sized devices for prose books in ordinary ebook formats, but the 12.9" pro is damn near perfect for those two things. Laptops and desktop computers also work for comic books and PDFs, but are a pretty big downgrade, UX-wise.

- Drawing. Obviously.

- Long-form writing. Laptops work great for this too, of course, but you still need a separate keyboard if you want decent ergonomics. iPad doesn't have an attached keyboard taking up space that I could instead use for a separate keyboard.

It's also just as good as a laptop (to me) as a remote SSH terminal, VNC terminal, video/music player, web browser et c. I can't really think of much I do on my (personal! Not work-supplied) laptop that I can't do just as well on an iPad, maybe supplemented by a headless RPi hanging off my router, or a cheap VM rental (or just the Linux server in an old desktop workstation tower that I already have anyway).

You could consider getting into drawing/design. They compete incredibly well against the display-based tablets made by wacom, especially these days where you can also do 3d and animation in procreate.

I have a M1 iPad Pro and I'm open to doing a trade-in for a new M5 iPad Pro: however the problem is the accessories. I rely on the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil and they would have to be repurchased since they are not compatable, which upps the total price too much.

I didn't believe this at first, but it seems valid.

Apple earnings on Mac and iPads are in the same ballpark and if iPads cost half of a Mac its indeed a 2x.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/01/apple-2q-2025-earnings/

I mean, that makes sense given what the "haters" are saying, and indeed what you yourself admit. If this is just a device for passive consumption of entertainment, then ultimately it's a consumer-facing use case, and there are MANY MANY MANY more consumers than there are creators, whether that creation is a photo or a line of code. So of course more devices are sold, because you need a laptop (due to mostly software, rather than hardware reasons) to do most forms of creativity, from writing code to editing photos.

So they can ruin this beautiful hardware with shitty and locked down software. For most people, games are the only kind of software that comes close to actually utilizing all this power, but dedicated game consoles are cheaper. So what’s the point any more?

For watching YouTube you just need the cheapest iPad not a Pro.

People keep saying their iPad is a YT consumption device, but without ad blocking, how do you stay sane? I'm assuming if you're consuming that much YT content you've moved to a premium account or something? I don't use my tablet primarily for YT content, so it's rather jolting when I click a link somewhere and see the hell that is unblocked YT