I have a trip coming up next month where I’ll be in an airplane for about 25 hours and in airports for about 3 whole days. Getting my MacBook in and out of my backpack gets tiresome very quickly like that, not to mention that I quite literally cannot use a 16-inch laptop in an airplane. It simply does not fit. So, I got an iPad.

At first I just got the iPad itself. The latest model equipped with an M5 processor seemed like a good bet for longevity, and I didn’t want too much of a footprint, so 11 inches seemed best for portability, which was the whole point for getting it. Entry-level model had too little space for data, so I got the 512GB model. Figured it would fit enough films and tv shows to keep busy for weeks and thus totally suffice for my needs. No 5G though, just WiFi1.

Wait a second - wouldn’t an iPad be perfect for architectural diagram sketching as well? I have a need for that fairly often, so I also got an Apple Pencil along with it. Hmm … The typing experience is rather subpar on a touch device though, so I also went ahead and got the Apple Magic Keyboard with a trackpad for it. Lo and behold, I invented a MacBook. A tiny, very portable MacBook, but a MacBook nevertheless.

Except that I actually gave that a go. Using this device as a MacBook, that is. I offloaded my work things to a VPS, downloaded Blink Shell 2 terminal so I could SSH into it, and did all my work for a whole day using nothing, but the iPad. I had video calls over Slack, I managed pull requests on GitHub, did task management on ClickUp, and I wrote a whole bunch of code. At almost every turn where I thought I would run into problems, the iPad surprised me.

The keyboard and trackpad, while tiny, are very good. They are, or at least seem to be, the exact same keyboard and trackpad that I use with my MacBook. I much prefer FaceID over TouchID, so that’s an actual improvement. The iPad is capable of running my 27” 5k 160hz external monitor without any issues, not to mention that its own display is holy-moly amazing, and on top of that I really like being able to use phone apps on this thing. Yes, I live in the EU and iPhone Mirroring for Mac is not available here.

It does all that while remaining highly portable. It’s a tablet where the laptop part of it is optional, and until now such a concept had never really crossed my mind. I always thought of the iPad as just an oversized iPhone, but with its Windowed Apps mode, it’s actually a lot closer to the Mac. No, you do not have access to the filesystem like you do on a Mac, hence why I’m using a VPS for my work, but the experience of otherwise using it is quite close.

As far as my regular workday goes I only noticed one negative - screen-sharing. Often enough to probably become annoying, I give video presentations on Google Meet and other such platforms. Now while I haven’t yet tried anything other than Google Meet for this, at least on Google Meet, while I can share my screen, I can only share the entire screen. And just one screen, the iPad one, not the external monitor if I have it connected. Additionally, when I do share my screen, the video feed of myself disappears3.

My conclusion then for the iPad 11” M5 review is that for my own needs, it can replace my MacBook 90% of the way, which means most of my workdays I can easily spend entirely behind the iPad. I think that’s incredible and goes to show how versatile this little device can be. For the rest I’ll still have my MacBook, and with my work all being in a VPS, jumping from one device to another is an absolute breeze.

Maybe one day the iPad will be all I’ll need, and that would be quite something. Maybe the rumoured foldable iPhone will be the ultimate device for me when that comes out. Either way, I’m loving this form factor and I never thought I would.

  1. I might end up regretting this at some point. I didn’t think I’d have so much use for this device. That said, I don’t really go anywhere without my iPhone so connecting to its network isn’t a problem. ↩

  2. Highly recommend, by the way. As far as I can tell it’s the only shell for an iPad that supports shared clipboard, meaning that you can copy text from the shell to the rest of the iPad and vice versa. ↩

  3. I figure it’s resource constraint, with the iPad only having 12GB of RAM and no active cooling, but damn it would’ve been awesome to have. ↩