On a hardware level, today’s iPads can function a lot like a Surface Pro. Use one on its own, and it’s a sleek, portable tablet with a large, high-resolution display (and a much better touch-first app selection than the Surface). But slap on an Apple Magic Keyboard or similar third-party accessory, and it becomes a laptop-like device. Adding an Apple Pencil makes it suitable for full-fledged digital drawing, note-taking or PDF annotation. No dedicated laptop can match that level of versatility.

The iPad wins easily on streaming videos, reading and browsing photos. A premium tablet provides a thin, lightweight window into your favorite Netflix shows, books or articles. You can hold it as close or far away as you like, or prop it up — there’s no permanent keyboard to contend with. On the portability front, the iPad is unbeaten.

iPads also give you the option of a cellular connection so you can stay online even away from Wi-Fi (and without using your phone as a hotspot.) Apple is rumored to launch its first cellular-compatible laptop before long. But considering this will likely be part of an “Ultra”-expensive MacBook that also has a touchscreen, the iPad will presumably remain the more affordable option for 5G connectivity.

Drawing, photo editing and handwriting are all right at home on the iPad, giving you a more immediate connection to what you’re creating or working with. Although they aren’t always on par with their desktop equivalents, apps like Procreate, Photoshop, Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve make creative work possible without a “real” computer.

Performance isn’t much of a concern. Although Apple’s M-class iPads aren’t necessarily more powerful than their MacBook counterparts, they’re essentially peers on a raw hardware level (at least if you set RAM aside). As our M4 iPad Air and M5 iPad Pro reviews found, these two devices (especially the latter) have far more processing power than most tablet workloads require, with enough horsepower for heavy multitasking and demanding creative apps. In practice, the biggest bottleneck is usually iPadOS itself.

Thankfully, some of the old complaints about iPadOS have diminished, if not disappeared. iPadOS 26 finally introduced a proper windowing system that lets you freely resize and move app windows. (You can still use the old full-screen-only mode, too.) Applications now have a Mac-like menu bar. The Files app is more capable and closer to a true Finder replacement. Preview even made its way to the iPad.

That combination makes Apple’s tablet a much more potent laptop replacement than it was just a couple of years ago. The iPad feels more like the new kind of personal computer Apple wants it to be.