MacBook Neo is the compact macOS machine iPad Pro tried and failed to be; iPads should go touch-only, and MacBooks should never gain touchscreens.
Key Takeaways
MacBook Neo costs less than an iPad with a keyboard, runs full macOS, and pairs natively with LLM tools like Claude Code where iPadOS cannot.
Apple’s core error: adding trackpad and keyboard to iPad, then shipping broken multitasking, instead of committing to a radical touch-native iPadOS.
Procreate is iPad’s only genuine killer app; most Pro workflows including Lightroom are crippled by missing basics and unreliable iCloud sync.
M1 MacBook Pro in late 2020 ended the iPad Pro productivity dream; once macOS ran on Apple Silicon, serious work migrated back permanently.
macOS Tahoe’s apparent convergence with iPadOS and visionOS is the wrong direction; the prescription is touch-only iPads, keyboard-first LLM-optimized MacBooks, and zero overlap between the two.
Hacker News Comment Review
Strong consensus that touch on macOS is ergonomically broken: reaching from keyboard to screen fatigues quickly and conflicts with how an iPad is naturally held in the hand.
The structural critique of Apple resonated: three contradictory iPadOS goals (powerful for pros, locked for parents, not capable enough to cannibalize Mac sales) are irreconcilable by design.
Meaningful pushback on stripping keyboards from iPads entirely: students and portable-keyboard users are real; a dual-mode container or VM approach (macOS when docked, iPadOS when undocked) attracted genuine interest as a middle path.
Notable Comments
@hbbio: argues the real missing product is an iPhone with desktop mode via USB-C display and Bluetooth keyboard, not a better iPad.
@chromadon: Android pie launchers showed genuinely futuristic touch UIs that died under mass-market pressure before iPadOS could absorb any lesson from them.
