There are definitely ways to leverage the horsepower natively. Having toured with musicians pretty recently though, I'd be lying if I said I saw a single person using an iPad for performance purposes. Everyone uses a laptop, and I don't think Logic Pro on iPad would have changed much. People want Ableton Live and Omnisphere with deep audio hardware support in the drivers and a proper file manager. The iPad makes a valiant attempt at supporting class-compliant MIDI and audio hardware, but it's enormously outclassed in capability by Mac and Windows.

It feels like even if Apple's DAW utopia came to pass, the iPad would still be an imperfect and less powerful option compared to a similarly specced Mac.

I’m not surprised that you haven’t seen iPads on tour, but I think it’s coming. The software ecosystem is here now.

If you music, have an iPad, and can spare the cost of a couple restaurant dinners, I recommend picking up the USB adapter and an app like AUM ($22). There are a ton of workhorse tools available like BIAS FX 2, and a ton of apps which are just fun, like Gauss Field Looper ($7). The price/performance of this kind of setup is just out of this world. I don’t think it’s replacing the DAW any time soon, despite the arrival of Logic/Cubasis/Reason/etc, but it’s giving pedalboards a run for their money.

I'm not exactly at the highest levels of industry. I generally agree with you- I much prefer hardware or a laptop.

However, as a musician, I wouldn't perform with one, but I use forescore literally every day.

As an sound tech, I've mixed a while lot of shows on glass both as a monitor engineer and FOH for smaller stuff. My iPad is a great tool for that work. They are pretty ubiquitous amound sound techs, at least at the levels I work at.

It's all CoreAudio/CoreMIDI under the hood, in both iPadOS and MacOS. I don't think MacOS does anything "deeper" but there is some 3rd party stuff like PT HDX/UAD, etc.

The limiting factor is the performance software (Mainstage and Live) aren't on iPadOS, yet. Live has some bigger lifting to do to get there.

Yep. There's a lot of guitar player youtubers who use iPads for amp modeling and effects. Seems to work pretty well.

I think there's a sentiment that "it can't do coding therefore it has zero use" in this thread.

I'm a software engineer and I daily drive a 12.9in iPad pro at home...because I don't code at home (and have a work M1 for that). I originally bought the 12.9 so I could read sheet and use it as an all in one piano learning companion.

It was great for that! I did give up on Piano unfortunately and now i mainly use it as a very expensive content consumption device - which actually is still great vs lugging a 15in "work" laptop when I travel just so I can watch netflix.

It is similar to the one that only UNIX folks are developers.

Also - people assume everyone on here is a developer of some sort.