I’ve been using iOS 11 beta3. Surprisingly, there actually exist some clear advantages over most laptops:
Physical Hardware Advantages over laptops (not over surface pro):
- More cameras (e.g., an extra 12MP camera on back); you can easily snap a picture or shoot video.
- The iPad 10.5 weighs 1 pound, which is way less than most notebooks; it is EXTREMELY portable.
- Portrait mode (i.e., rotate screen) with no keyboard, which is useful, e.g., for reading pages of technical documentation.
- No trackpad, so the keyboard/bottom takes up much less space, meaning you can fit easily in more places (e.g., cramped airplanes).
- The keyboard doesn’t get dust/crumbs under the keys, since they are sealed.
There are also some advantages over my other laptop, which is a 2.2 pound Macbook 12:
- The iPad has LTE, which works very well to provide internet without wifi.
- Surprisingly, the iPad 10.5 “SmartKeyboard” from Apple has a vastly better mechanical feel than the Macbook 12 (2016).
Of course, the real annoyance of the iPad is the software, because the hardware itself is very good, whereas the software is intentionally crippled for reasons of control/security/arrogance/vision. This is a much bigger can of worms...
> Decent PC or Mac with SSD is much faster than iPad
Yes, but speed isn't latency and hardware speed is irrelevant.
My DOS-based 286-12 had better latency than my Surface Book and MacBook Air do, mainly because DOS has no (or very little) multitasking. My iPhone also has excellent latency as it limits the APIs available to background tasks, stopping the typical 'Windows Search Service' (or any other random background executable) killing foreground performance.
The ipad is not magical. Were you to run actual dev workloads on the machine itself it would be sluggish with terrible battery life.