Almost exactly 12 years ago, I flew to Berlin to attend IFA, Europe’s big gadget trade show. Naturally, I took my MacBook Air. But I also brought my iPad 2, which I’d recently equipped with a laptop-style keyboard case called the ZaggFolio. Once I was at the show, I made an unexpected discovery: The iPad was all I needed to cover the show. I ended up leaving the MacBook in my hotel room’s safe.

Back home, the iPad/ZaggFolio’s many virtues—small size, long battery life, built-in cellular wireless, streamlined apps—continued to grow on me. Later that year, I wrote a piece explaining how the iPad 2 became my favorite computer. It caught some people by surprise. After all, many pundits were still helpfully explaining why Apple’s tablet was fine for content consumption but insufficient for, you know, creating stuff.

Now I’m writing this newsletter on the plane to Berlin, where I’m heading to attend IFA for the first time since 2011. The only computer I’m toting is my 11″ iPad Pro, along with Apple’s Magic Keyboard. That’s because the epiphany I had a dozen years ago stuck, and I’ve been iPad-first ever since.

In the intervening years, I’ve done something like 95% of my writing for publication on an iPad. I’ve also used the tablet for copious amounts of drawing, programming, web development, video editing, reading, and more. In other words, the iPad remains my favorite computer, and I have no plans to cease spending most of my computing hours with it. (Full disclosure: I recently bought a 15″ MacBook Air and prefer it for certain tasks, such as using Photoshop and performing heavy-duty file wrangling. But it plays a secondary role in my life and has never left my home.)

For all the iPad’s lovable qualities, there’s something bittersweet about the platform, at least if you hope the iPad Pro will get ever more professional. My friend Jason Snell, who certainly has a deep appreciation for the platform’s virtues, recently wrote that he’d given up on traveling with an iPad as his sole computer, in part because it’s still limiting for a podcaster such as himself. Jason should use whatever device serves him best, but his decision is a reminder that the iPad bears the burden of great potential, and has yet to live up to all of it.

All along, we’ve known that Apple wants the iPad to be capable but distinctly different from the Mac. Yet, as the iPad gets more powerful and the Mac gets more modern, it isn’t clear that even Apple has a coherent view of where that leaves the iPad. The company’s legendary dedication to making what Steve Jobs called “the whole widget” usually results in deeply integrated experiences; the iPad, however, has gotten that benefit only in fits and starts. And lately, it’s felt like the platform is stuck somewhere between its past and its future.

In 2021, for example, Apple gave the iPad Pro an M1 processor—the same potent chip as in a MacBook—and, in the tablet’s highest-end version, a cavernous 16 GB of RAM. Many people, including me, took it as a sign that the iPad’s software was about to take some great leap forward to make the most of all that new computational muscle. It didn’t. Even two years later, when Apple released the first iPad versions of two of its industrial-strength Mac apps—Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro—they weren’t all that advanced.

Then there’s Stage Manager, a feature introduced in last year’s iPadOS 16, which brings floating windows to the iPad interface for the first time. Instead of building on the existing iPad multitasking features, it’s a wholly new interface but disabled by default, as if Apple doesn’t have much confidence in its own creation. Though it remains a work in progress, I still find that it muddles the iPad experience far more than it improves it, with the possible exception of when I use it on an external monitor. It’s the old multitasking—which, thank heavens, I can still use—that feels iPad-native.

Another troubling development: The difference between a MacBook and an iPad is less dramatic than it once was, but most of the recent change has been in the Mac’s favor. That began in 2020 with the introduction of the first Mac models that ditched Intel chips for ones Apple designed itself. The first Apple-silicon Macs were blazing fast, turned on instantly (just like an iPad!), had remarkable battery life (better than an iPad), and were able to run a sizable collection of iPad apps. Newer models, such as my 15″ MacBook Air, have built on that strong start.

The fact that the Mac has done so much evolving and improving in one clear direction, all within just a few years, makes the iPad’s lack of a smooth trajectory to a better place all the more obvious. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting that even faster iPad Pro models with an improved Magic Keyboard will arrive next year; I’m already worried that they’ll tilt even further in the direction of hardware that is far more advanced than the software it runs.

I don’t mean to be overly gloomy. I’ve often written about how the iPad has improved my productivity; everything I’ve ever said remains true, which is why I’m not rehashing it here. And good things do come to iPad users who wait. For example, I’m giddy over the news that iPadOS 17, due out shortly, will finally support external webcams, such as my trusty Logitech.

Still, the fact that something as mundane as webcam support is coming five years after the first iPads with USB-C underlines how lackadaisical the platform’s progress can be. There’s a long list of other things I’d like my iPad Pro to do—and I hope I don’t have to wait forever to get them.