I needed a personal laptop, and Apple’s “pro” tablet wasn’t cutting it.

I know a good number of people fully locked into their iPad Pros. When I bought mine, I picked up the Magic Keyboard immediately, one of Apple’s most beautifully designed accessories in memory. It transforms the powerful slate into a competent laptop replacement for the masses, and it’s the setup I recommend to almost anyone not leveraging their machine as a dedicated work tool.

My iPad Pro is the older M1 model (2021), but it’s incredibly similar to the current M2 generation in almost every way. The Magic Keyboard, too, hasn’t changed — and that’s why a comparison to Apple’s newest laptop remains valid. (It’s also valid because they’re what I know and have to compare. Shhhh.)

The word “love” has been ground into meaningless with electronics.

I like my iPad. It’s impressively powerful and versatile, especially when contextualized against the state of tablets when I bought my first iPad Air back in 2013. A decade of development has genuinely transformed the category and cemented the iPad as the only tablet worth serious consideration. In spite of all that, I don’t love my iPad (or, on a related note, my iPhone 15 Pro — more about that here).

I love the MacBook Air 15.

The word “love” has been ground into meaninglessness with electronics. I don’t love almost any gadget in my life. Expressing earnest adoration for a product implies a deeply subjective relationship with it. Something that is not easily recreated for any other individual because it escapes the simplistic bulleting of pros and cons and specs and features. For example, I love my LED backlighting strip that uses a little camera to sync its colors to what’s on my TV screen. Objectively, it’s clunky as hell. The connectivity is wonky, it sometimes resets for no reason, and properly calibrating it is basically impossible. But when I’m watching a movie or show I’m deeply engaged with, the aesthetic enhancement of immersion it provides is all I care about, and I’d never own a TV without one again. It was a game-changer, and I can’t really explain why. You’ve just got to see it.

The MacBook Air 15 isn’t groundbreaking in almost any way. It’s quite literally a MacBook Air 13 that’s been put through a taffy puller. (In seriousness: It has two more speakers, two more GPU “cores,” and the implicitly larger display and battery (here’s my favorite MacBook power bank) — the differences are definitionally marginal.) But as soon as it passed my bag-fit test, I knew it was the machine for me. As James May of Top Gear famously puts it when he’s found the right car: It gave me “the fizz.”

Am I romanticizing a personal purchase? Absolutely. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that there is some specifically arcane quality to a MacBook Air 15. It is an Apple laptop, running the same Apple laptop operating system and using the same Apple silicon processor as other, very similar Apple laptops. It is not synthesized in a lab from the metallicized essence of unicorn.

It’s a laptop that seems to have crossed that imperceptible threshold into effortlessness of portability — while maintaining deep usability.

I’ve long struggled with the portliness of 15-inch notebooks, they’re so damn heavy, and even the MacBook Pro 15 is just thick enough to outfox my little Peak Design messenger bag’s sleeve. 13-inch laptops, on the other hand, feel too petite. Workspaces develop the visual quality of transporting a floor lamp in my Mazda Miata — possible, but vaguely ridiculous to behold. The MacBook Air 15 feels spacious; a Subaru Outback of backlit canvas. It’s a little under 20% lighter and more than 20% thinner than the MacBook Pro 15, which makes a far bigger difference in its subjective bulkiness than mere figures suggest. It slots comfortably into my messenger bag and sits on my lap without feeling unwieldy. The keyboard is uncramped and the trackpad is massive. Altogether, it’s a “big” laptop that seems to have crossed the imperceptible threshold into effortlessness of portability.

Unlike the ultraportable 15-inch Windows laptops of the past (and present), you’re not giving up anything with the Air 15. For my own workflows, I would struggle to imagine a use case for which the Air 15 is unsuited. No, it’s not going to be very good for video editing, but I don’t edit videos. It can run Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom (without obliterating the battery), and Safari is by far the most power-economical web browser. But what about the iPad? Where did it really fall down? After all, it does all of this stuff.

My little iPad Pro (the 11″ model, not the larger 12.9″) has been a workhorse. I’ve drafted articles, emails, and browsed the web far and wide on its compact screen. I’ve even played games and drawn some things (the Apple Pencil remains revelatory in its precision and ease of use). But the moment I want to move content between applications or even do something as seemingly trivial as highlight text to copy, the invisible barriers of iOS rebuff me like a Star Trek force field. Because iOS was designed intentionally as a unitasking OS, switching between activities and focuses is… wonky. And if that makes absolutely no sense to you, I empathize. I’ve tried to explain this to so many people over the years that I’ve largely given up. Something about the inherent delays, unreliable focus states (i.e., what UI activity the OS says is foregrounded at a given moment), and slow task switching makes operating in iOS feel like using a computer from 10 feet across the room with a half-second delay. It is exceedingly, needlingly clear to me that I am using a computer that was never truly designed for a keyboard and mouse. Some people seem not to mind this at all, and these people are very lucky. I, though, am a broken soul.

With the Magic Keyboard affixed, the iPad Pro is a laptop out of a parallel universe, where tablets and mobile operating systems came before notebooks.

The ergonomic limitations of the iPad are far less nebulous to convey. The Magic Keyboard is cramped, the trackpad is tiny, and the top-heavy weight distribution of the assembled system makes it very challenging to use as an on-your-lap laptop. It works well on a table, but I like sitting in a chair with my screen nestled between my knees! And the iPad Pro is straightforwardly lamentable in such a position. It wiggles and sways as the comparably hefty tablet destabilizes the base on which it sits, and the constant movement and need to balance the thing throws me out of my flow state. Combine these physical challenges with the software eccentricities of the iPad in keyboard and mouse mode — the cursor will randomly fly to the bottom of the screen and has done this for years — and it just never feels quite right. With the Magic Keyboard affixed, the iPad Pro is a laptop out of a parallel universe where tablets and mobile operating systems came before notebooks. And that’s a universe I very much do not want to live in.

The iPad also doesn’t do almost anything meaningfully better. Unless having a touchscreen or stylus somehow enhances a specific app’s interactivity or workflow (rare in my use), the iPad will almost always be a slower, less flexible tool for the job. Take Gmail: the iPad app is qualitatively worse in seriously impactful ways. “Undo” send is not supported, switching between folders and labels is agonizingly slow, and text formatting is incredibly limited. You can pop open the web version of Gmail in Safari for iOS and get the desktop browsing experience, but at that point, you’re just getting a less responsive, clunkier, more cramped version of Gmail on a desktop OS. Say what you will about the larger state of the responsive web in 2023, but very few web productivity tools are actually pleasant to use on an iPad. Try pulling up Google Slides (again, the app version has notable feature gaps) in Safari for the iPad and you’ll be wishing for a proper desktop OS before the deck finishes loading. Which, that will take a while.

Using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement is like replacing your stove with an Instant Pot. It is absolutely viable for someone who’s never really needed a stove. But even knowing that the flexibility of a cooking range (i.e., a laptop) exists is enough to make the experiment a non-starter for me. Choosing to limit yourself is not something I’d judge anyone for — there is an elegance to the “single pot” solution of the iPad Pro. There are surprisingly few things it definitively cannot do. But there are an appreciable number of those things it cannot do very well. And that’s what finally led me back to a proper laptop.