The last post I did for this blog was after my father passed away from Pancreatic Cancer, however, lately I’ve been feeling the urge to write in the blog. Some of my friends used to say I have a knack for writing, that is slightly ironic considering I am a dyslexic kid. That being said, I do have writers in my family and I do enjoy sharing my thoughts. Perhaps I will soon restart my market thoughts, yes I still am very active in markets.
It is not secret that I am an Apple fan boy and I have been a shareholder on and off in Apple since more or less 2013. This year I went on a bit of a tech revamp – I bought a fairly maxed out MacBook Pro 16 inch, that was over 4,000 EUR and I went for an upgrade of my iPad Pro M1 to the new iPad Pro M4.
To get to the point, the MacBook Pro is absolutely unbelievably good. While, the whole world goes crazy over everything Apple does including iPhone, and generally considers the iPhone the best product they have, I would argue the MacBook is Apple’s best product and probably the best laptop out there, simply due to the insane battery life pair with great performance it has. The trackpad as we know is just the best out there, the keyboard is excellent, there really is nothing to complain about the device outside of the price point. Nonetheless, whenever I saw how thin the new iPad Pro 13 inch was I had the compulsion to upgrade. There is no reason for the upgrade though, the new iPad does the same as the old iPad. There is still nothing to take full advantage of the M4 chip. Yet, the compulsion was there? Why?
Because, the iPad has this promise, to be your Notebook replacement, your Laptop replacement, your real daily driver. There is something particularly romantic, especially as business person, to have a device that you can take to take notes during a meeting, to use for brainstorming, for media, for reading the news and for work all coming in a package of a magical sheet of glass with amazing battery life. I will admit the new package is absolutely unbelievable. The new Magic Keyboard with the new iPad Pro being as thin as it is, is literally like you are holding a notebook. The aluminum keyboard is the same height as the iPad Pro and it looks and feels so aesthetic and perfect when paired. You get a dBrand leather skin on the bad boy, and well the above dream is a reality.
Yet, as good as it is, it is still just an iPad limited to iPad OS. However, after I upgraded to the M4 iPad Pro I found myself to want to do and to do everything almost exclusively on my iPad. I really did put my MacBook Pro aside outside of the need of real Excel spreadsheet work. This got me thinking, what is the real use case of an iPad and why is there no real full OS on it and hence came my realisation. Apple is absolutely correct in not putting MacOS on the iPad Pro’s. The iPad achieves all of the above I described and it has something that due to its insane specs and cellular internet does often better than competition – remote desktop work.
Due to the way I have structured my business, I have real-time remote desktop access to my MacBook and two different Windows servers that have virtualised Windows access to them. These machines have real desktop OS’s on them and when I remote from my iPad, everything works out of the box magically. Thus, what I would argue is the iPad is in a great spot and while iPad OS needs improvement, especially the Files app, the direction Apple could go instead of offering MacOS for these devices is to offer some sort of an easy – always on – always works remote desktop access to our Mac’s. This is a good business decision for them – they keep us buying both devices – and the devices don’t cannibalize the sales of each other. Additionally, I am 100% sure that if Apple puts its mind to it, their way to do a remote desktop environment will be par above anything else.
That being said, remote desktop is not entirely perfect – obviously latency of the network can make it a lot less desirable experience that an on-device experience, but when it comes to working on a virtualised terminal server, well that experience always tends to be near flawless. Apple, there is no reason for this post outside of me feeling like sharing my thoughts like I am a tech reviewer, but hey, why not consider it?
G.S.'s Blog 
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