> biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around

First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

iPad Pro in its landscape dock provides split screen with adjustable ratio, as well as left and right floats, along with swipe between desktops, as well as push to view and pick a diff app. One app wide, one app narrow, tends to put the narrow app in iPhone UI, which is pretty ideal, better than desktop where windows refuse to get narrow.

You can drive iPad with a magic touch pad beautifully. I suspect this workflow management is behind some of the gesture convergence in Ventura and iOS 16.

IMO productivity users are mostly lemmings. MacOS has plenty of good tooling built in to manage windows and desktop environments. A tiling window manager makes a lot of sense with cli based tools but for gui based tools imo becomes annoying fast. Especially when most websites these days will serve you a mobile website depending on the dimensions of your viewport.

> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

Interesting point of view, but I must either live in a parallel universe or know no "productivity users" (whatever that is supposed to mean) then. Windows' window management features cut it for 99.9% of Windows users, and the rest use PowerToys Fancy Zones or something of that sort.

And iPadOS window mgmt features cut it for 99.9% of users so… even stevens?

> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

Well... OK. I'm clearly not a "productivity user".

I'll prefer better optimized workflows on my phone and flexibility and speed of a full sized keyboard with a mouse. Every few years I fall into this "this looks cool, lets try" iPad thing - to only go back to a mouse.

I use cascaded windows. It doesn't need a window manager and it's more useful & productive for me than tiled layouts. It looks like this:

  +--+--+--+--------------------+
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  +--|  |  |                    |
     +--|  |                    |
        +--|                    |
           +--------------------+

I generally put terminals and my note taking app towards the left (smaller windows), my IDEs in the middle (enough for split pane editing when needed), and my browsers on the right, where they are in square / portrait aspect ratio more suited to reading.