The iPad Pro at 10: a decade of unrealized potential

The theory of the iPad has always been simple: size matters.

Even in its very first public debut in 2010, the iPad was mostly just an iPhone with a larger screen, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs believed that was enough.

Remember the way Jobs sat down on an easy chair to read his iPad, scrolling and panning his way through The New York Times’ website?

He was certain that the way you looked at the larger screen, the way you held it, the way you touched it, would all change your relationship with your device.

All because it was bigger.

When the iPad Pro came along five years later — it went on sale 10 years ago today — nothing much had changed.

The Pro ran all the same apps, did all the same things, had pretty much the same things in pretty much the same places.

It was just bigger.

Its 12.9-inch screen made it the biggest iPad yet, and Apple seemed to think that might change something about how you used it.

Nobody was sure what, exactly.

Bigger documents, maybe?

Apple’s Phil Schiller was excited about bigger documents.

Ultimately, that 12.9-inch screen looked a little too familiar.

Apple wanted people to see a larger canvas they could hold and touch and create on, the mythical third device between your computer and your phone.

But most people seemed to see a thing about the size of their existing computer, only with a much better screen and vastly fewer features.

The iPad’s draconian security policies, underpowered browser, and minuscule ideas about multitasking made the device feel like less than the sum of its parts.

Users wanted a new laptop, and Apple told them to kick rocks.

The iPad was something else, it said, and if you wanted a laptop you should buy a Mac.

Ten years later, though, the iPad Pro has changed.

Rather than try to make it into something other than a laptop, Apple made it… a laptop.

The Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard lines, which launched with the first Pro, both continued to improve.

The iPad’s multitasking got (slowly and chaotically) more powerful.

The iPad Pro was one of Apple’s first devices to switch to USB-C.

It began to support external drives, and devices like microphones and game controllers.

Even the Files app got better.

Slowly but surely, Apple’s tablet began to resemble a PC.

Apple gave the people what they wanted.

The current M5 iPad Pro is one of the most impressive pieces of hardware Apple has ever made.

The thin, light build Apple debuted on the M4 Pro is still the best tablet design you’ll find anywhere, and it feels more high-end than even the latest Macs.

The OLED screen (which now comes in both 13- and 11-inch sizes) looks better than ever.

With the Magic Keyboard attached, you get nearly as good a trackpad and keyboard as you’d get on a MacBook.

With the Apple Pencil, you can do things you simply can’t on most laptops.

The more important change, though, has been in the software.

Take just this year’s release, iPadOS 26.

It includes free-form multitasking, a menu bar, the Preview app, and more features previously reserved for Apple’s PCs.

And not to overthink a single feature, but the fact that the iPad’s webcam is now positioned to be used with the device in landscape mode, and almost certainly in some kind of dock, suggests that there is very much a correct way to use this thing.

I’ve been using the latest Pro as my go-to laptop for a few weeks now, just to see what all this change adds up to, and I’m shocked at how close this thing is to a truly all-purpose computer.

There are the obvious things, like built-in cellular connectivity and the Apple Pencil, that give the Pro powers the Mac doesn’t have.

The mix of touch and trackpad is genuinely great, too; I’m constantly back and forth to the screen, scrolling or swiping with the trackpad but doing finer and more complex things with my hands.

And there’s just no replacing the fact that you can turn on a movie, pick up the screen, and flop back on the couch.

Add in the solid speakers, good camera, and great battery life, and there’s a lot I like about life with the iPad.

If you do creative work of any kind — and more and more people do — it’s a uniquely useful device.

Which makes it all the more annoying every time you run into some totally unnecessary system limitation.

There are still a lot of those.

Apple’s laptops are allowed to run any app, not just the ones in the App Store.

They can interact with more accessories.

They can access virtually everything about the system through the Terminal.

They can run better browsers.

Utility apps I rely on to make my computing life easier, like Raycast and Better Touch Tool, just don’t exist the same way on the iPad.

There’s almost nothing the Mac straight-up won’t let you do, but the iPad is full of limitations.

They’ve been there for so long, and are so glaring, that we’ve been mad about them in reviews since at least 2018.

Apple saw them as a feature, not a bug.

Now that Apple has embraced the iPad’s computerness, the project over the next decade is to start shedding those limitations.

If not all of them, then most of them.

Apps need more power to run in the background, and to interact with one another.

System-level apps should get more access to actually interact with the system.

The iPad deserves a desktop-class browser.

Reasonable people can probably disagree on whether Terminal access matters to most computer users, but in general you should be able to do anything your computer can do.

Years ago, the iPad Pro inspired one of Apple’s most interesting commercials.

It featured a day in the life of the iPad, with all its features in use, and landed on a simple question: what’s a computer?

The ad made a lot of people angry, but points at a conundrum even Apple itself was grappling with.

If you think the iPad is the future of computing — and make no mistake, Apple absolutely does — then you have to decide what makes something a computer.

The answer, more than any app or accessory, is about access.

A computer is a device without artificial limitations, on which you can do anything it can do.

Anything less than that is simply not enough.

Apple spent a decade trying to reject the idea that the iPad is a computer, trying to invent a third space in the computing ecosystem.

But the iPad, and the iPad Pro in particular, is not a third thing.

It’s a laptop.

A damn good one, even.

The hardware, the operating system, the accessory ecosystem — everything is in place for this to be not just a full-fledged computer, but maybe the best computer Apple makes.

Now Apple just needs to finally let it act like it.