I'm an hobby artist and have played with various drawing programs on the ipad (and gone through a few mid-level wacom tablets before that) and Procreate is simply amazing. It's an app that couldn't exist without the ipad and it massively increases its usefulness. Procreate is good enough that I don't feel the need to bring any further art supplies (even a sketchbook and pencils) when traveling.
Using the Apple Pencil with either app gives me the benefits of analogue work and the benefits of digital work. Handwriting helps me remember things, but since the product is digital, it's trivial to move/undo/etc.
And Procreate + Apple Pencil is way better than any other art solution I've found for digital art. Granted I've never tried a drawing tablet with a screen, but an extremely cheap option is still $200. For one that works as well as the AP + iPad you'd probably be looking at near the same price point.
Another thing that IMO is way better on iPad/Pencil is PDF editing and annotation. I happily pay for a subscription to PDF Expert[0] and I just use it for school.
And given that it was a non-pricy one-time purchase, and not a subscription, why would they regret it? The cost per hour of usage is only going to keep decreasing over time for them, as long as they keep using it in some capacity occasionally.
I don’t regret it because I can see that what I paid for is worth the value of the app despite not using it as much.
You're just hugely mistaken. iPad has several killer apps, but the one that is probably the most important is Safari, followed by Mail, followed by Maps (and Google Earth), followed by a combination of Camera and Photos, followed by a tossup between Contacts and Calendar, then Books, Reminders, etc. That these applications are not original doesn't matter. The tablet form-factor and iPadOS platform makes them all earth-shattering for anyone who has previously been tied to a desktop or laptop with a conventional OS. Prior to iPhone, it was as it is today in that most computer users were not power users. They used web, email, and consumed media. iPad does all that better than anything that came before. It's annoying for more complicated tasks, but it does web, personal email and displays media better really than anything else available.
Software keyboards suck for writing longer texts.
I played a bit with an old chromebook we bought for our kid’s school a while ago, and the browsing experience is definitely better than on my iPad Pro. Having actual arbitrary window management, tabs don’t get lost between the instances, video can actually play in the background, extensions work. The list just goes on and on.
I still prefer the iPad for reading long form and comics, but as the Kindle app is crippled, the overall experience isn’t that far either.
None of those are killer apps.
A killer app is an application that is so unique and so useful that it sells the hardware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
Web browsers, mail clients, maps / navigation, camera software, photo software, contacts management, calendaring, ebooks, and todo list / reminders software are available on iOS, MacOS, Android phones and tablets, Windows desktops and tablets, and even Linux desktop environments.
Are you really saying that the iPadOS version of those applications is so superior to any of the other competitors that people buy iPads just to use the iPadOS versions?
Safari on a 12.9” iPad is like having an ergonomic MacBook browser. It’s powerful enough to render almost everything the web has (save for chrome specific experiments).
But as mentioned above the killer application isn’t software, it’s the form factor. While I have a decent TV, most of the video content I watch is on my iPad. It’s just more convenient.
To add one more, iOS is powerful but simple enough that I’ve recommended an iPad to most older people I know. They can do almost everything they need on it, and neither of us have to worry about it getting into a bad state like a desktop PC can.
And for most of them, the main thing they use on it is the browser.
It isn't just these applications providing all too common functionality, it is the application centric iPadOS that makes them more than the sum of their parts, also. Apple's implementation of iPadOS and their tablet implementations of these common applications cause each to rise to the level of killer app, and, definitely, beyond all doubt, massively drive sales of the hardware just to use those particular yet common apps in Apple's implementations of them on a tablet. There's no great reason Android on third-party tablet, or whatever is running on Amazon's tablets, can't achieve the same, but they simply haven't. Android more or less sucks. Apple sucks, but with iPadOS + tablet app implementations, much much less.
MacBook does all these better and the rest of your list too with the exception of Camera, which the iPhone does better.
And they added an incredibly dumb limitation: You cannot use any pen tablet (e.g. a wacom tablet) on Freeform for OS X. Drawing with a pen is only supported on iOS.
If it's free-from-Apple, the software is there to drive or enhance hardware sales.
I understand that a mouse or trackpad are not the best tools for drawing but many of us have used them for that since the original MacPaint app in 1984. Why remove this feature from the Mac version? Let alone for someone with a pen-based tablet.
It does have a killer app: The form factor.
Lots of devices do lots of things that the iPad does. But they all have screens that are too small, or keyboards, or other things that make them too thick.
ipadOS apps aren't as powerful as computer programs, but they're good enough. And when combined with the iPad's form factor and simplicity, there's a reason that — according to Wikipedia — Apple's sold a half-billion of them.
There is no comfortable position to use an iPad in. In bed you're craning your head over, or propping it on your raised thighs. The keyboard cases are flimsy or super heavy.
I love the user interface on the iPad, it looks the best of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. But a MacBook is so much more ergonomic than an iPad.. :(
I suggest that it’s even deeper than that. By dragging the iPad kicking and screaming in to the “pro” demographic, Apple has killed the very thing that made it compelling for “killer apps” in the first place: it’s focus on your app.
“When you open an app it becomes [whatever that app tells it to]” - My very rough paraphrasing of Steve Jobs during the original iPad era
When was the last time you could use an iPad for a single task without having to be precious about multi-touch gestures, and without notifications interrupting you? What ‘killer app’ can serve the now-fragmented demographics while also competing with everything else trying to steal your attention while you’re using it?
My personal opinion is this is unlikely to work and that the reason iPad lacks a “killer app” is largely because the app ecosystem is too dysfunctional for one to emerge organically from third party ecosystems. Because the iPad is a more powerful platform than iPhone, and (especially) because people’s “session times” tend to be longer on iPad vs iPhone, you need to invest more to make a good iPad app. On the iPhone it’s enough to save people a little time vs the web and connect them more readily to a service while mobile (Uber, Instagram, Amazon, etc)
iPad offers the chance to do something much deeper. But there is so much more risk — will people pay higher prices (App Store price expectations are lower than desktop), will Apple approve the app, will it get noticed in the store amid all the crap. Are the APIs powerful enough to make what you want to make. Etc.