I'll play devils advocate though I mostly agree with you, as there are occasions where I find consumption on an iPad to be "superior" in the sense that it fits into a certain situation better at a certain time.

If I'm traveling, an iPad is great to watch movies in my hotel room while my partner is sleeping rather than blast the room with extra light and noise. This same scenario can also play out at home! I want to be near my partner but that doesn't mean I need to take over the entire room. We have technology that enables that dynamic now. And my argument against using a laptop in this scenario is largely focused on ergonomics. It's really easy to prop an iPad on my lap and watch Netflix for 3 hours instead of worrying about my laptop overheating on the duvet or needing to be plugged in.

Reading books is also another great consumption medium that is personal to me, even if yes, technically I can read an epub on any computer (and I have read many comics online at a desktop!).

It's not that the PC is incapable of playing back the same media, it's that the form factor of an iPad is often _better_ for any number of scenarios with the tradeoffs of weight/bulk being a more deciding factor in the moment. Sometimes I just want to watch The Office in a comfy chair at a cafe with a latte and an iPad is an extremely convenient medium to fulfill that goal.

With that example of watching movies in a hotel room while your partner is sleeping or a show at a cafe, what makes the iPad much better than a laptop in those instances? If anything, I tend to prefer the laptop as it inherently has a built-in stand with a nice solid platform.

About the only place I find a tablet a better form factor for watching movies is on a cramped airplane seat.

Heat and weight mostly. While the laptop is more "stable" that only applies if you have it standing on it's own. If you want it more in your lap, then that isn't really applicable.

For consumption see my neighbouring post. iPad is also better for users that use the Pencil – artists, notetakers, etc

Laptops have a screen and a keyboard. Only the screen is needed for consumption and the keyboard gets in the way in several environments, for example a bed. It's both the extra space and the screen orientations that it forces. When all we had were laptops they were great, then we had tablets and laptops didn't look so great anymore for some purposes.

Keyboard can be helpful in consumption scenario, simply because you can set up correct angle for a display. IPad cases I uses typically have just a single position.

That said, iPad is more convenient when in a bed because you can more easily put it away when you get sleepy, you can read sideways, it's more resilient if in a good case, etc. I never carry laptop to bed, while iPad is part of my go-to-sleep routine since v1.

> What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do?

You can more easily use it on your bed, sofa and toilet.

> What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do?

I can easily put my iPad on the handle bars of my exercise bike, but not a laptop, much less a desktop.

For me what makes tablet different is the distance you use them. And I think that's also why many people feel that touch doesn't work on laptops when they're comfortable with it on tablets.

If you're reading a book, holding it in your hands works a lot better than looking at it at twice the distance. Same way checking a map at arms length and pinch/zoom right there.

Long movies benefit less from the form factor, but youtube for instance works better.

For what it's worth, 2in1 computers are IMHO pretty good these days. The hinges improved a lot they give the best of both world.

> that most loathesome of words, "consumption"

Amen, brother!!

And yet the majority of the sibling comments are happily chatting about consuming content. Is it a generational thing?

It's simply the further debasement of the language: "content" and "consume", "fleece" meaning a piece of plastic (and "lamb" being used for both lamb and mutton), "elite" meaning "better", "gift" as a verb, excessive and gratuitous use of intensifiers (the physical manifestation is standing ovations after any public performance) the content-free of useful words like "freedom" and "patriot" and so on.

Languages constantly change and that's delightful. But there is a class of changes that are deliberate manipulation for commercial or propaganda purposes. Often the idea is to hollow out the word and insert a new meaning into the husk, so listenera (at least initially) get the associations of the old meaning while it is transformed into a new one.

I hate this because it is deceptive, and I also hate it when no handy way remains to specify the original meaning ("plastic fleece" would be silly and redundant these days; you can't usefully say "real fleece" any more, so what term do you use?)

"Consuming" a book would mean destroying it ("consumed by fire"). Economists use this for the action of people who buy rivalrous goods or services -- a logical and obvious metaphor. But the use of "content" and "consumption" were deliberate coining: "content" expells any differentiation of what it refers to, applying an equivalence to user-generated work, commercial speech, advertising, propaganda, whatever; "consume" reinforces a corporate producer -> passive consumer mentality that again strips away the agency of the person actually looking at the screen.

Just part of the incessant effort to turn the Internet into "a remote control with a buy button".

>What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do?

You can use it on the craper, and can hold it with one hand on the bed or sofa, even lying on your back. Battery lasts a very good while (like 3x the time laptop bateries lasted when the iPad came out, modern AS laptops have caught up).

It also doesn't have all the other macOS maintainance, options, and junk I don't need for the content consumption I do with the iPad (browsing, youtube, netflix, books and magazines, social media for those whose that's their thing).

I mean that kind of extra portability/convenience is the whole purpose of tablets. It's not like they're some totally different technology and can do things a laptop can't do. It's a marginal convenience thing for those aspects.