MacBook Air vs. iPad Pro: what is Apple's best new computer?

At yesterday's Apple event, I saw a company returning to its finest form. Apple paid overdue attention to its stalwart MacBook Air and Mac mini, introduced a much more powerful iPad Pro, and fixed the design that Apple's Pencil's charging. You do not have to be an expert analyst at the Cupertino team.

In crafting its most compelling iPad and MacBook Air to date, Apple also created a major headache for people like me. I'm a member of that classic Intel. You will not be doing me 3D modeling or 4K video production on my laptop, but I do not know what to do, or a word processor, or in Adobe's Lightroom. I've been using a MacBook Pro for two years, but it really does not last long enough. Now I'm in the mood for a better life I need to have the high-quality display Both the new MacBook Air and the new iPad Pro could be the ideal computer for me.

The new Air is the most familiar and predictable scenario. Its strengths are known: long endurance, densely packed, high-quality construction, and all the good things that make macOS attractive. For me, the latter are all the small utilities like Alfred and Flycut that just make my workflow smoother and faster. I tried recreating the same experience in Windows last year, but that really did not support the original quality of the Apple original. Windows laptops have also failed to impress me on the battery life, which is where the MBP underwhelms, and so Apple has a significant opportunity to stand up to its promised 12 hours of battery life with the MacBook Air 2018.

The iPad Pro, on the other hand, is the most exciting and adventurous choice. I would not immediately know how to do this. But it's grown into such a versatile machine that I get the sense I'd invent new jobs, new ways of doing things, with it as my primary tool. A few of the advantages to the iPad Pro: the display, with its fast refresh rate and True Tone color adjustment, the new Apple Pencil 2, which magnetically docks to the side of the tablet and even loads wirelessly, and LTE.

Adding LTE to your most-used portable computer is truly a transformative upgrade. My colleague Dan Seifert wrote about it in the context of the Surface Pro LTE from Microsoft earlier this year, and it covered the whole of Apple. When the coming Wi-Fi network was going down, he did not even notice, because his computer seamlessly switched to using the cellular connection. The small efficiency of being able to be more mobile with a mobile hotspot.

In the years since Apple's last upgraded the MacBook Air in a meaningful way, I've noticed much of my work time shifting to my smartphone, with the laptop taking over . That's in large part because of the always-on connection of the phone, the immediacy of everything I can do it, and the connectedness to all the most popular social and work communication apps. The number of times I've caught myself using my phone in front of an open laptop.

At its outset, the iPad was dismissed as a "jumbo iPhone," but in 2018 we might want to start asking if that's a criticism or a form of praise. The best apps today are being developed for the iPhone and by the iOS extension of the common platform, for the iPad. iOS is the operating system of Apple's future, macOS is the operating system of Apple's past. As a writer, I find plenty of apps like iA Writer to deposit my loquaciousness into iOS. As a photographer, I'm excited that real Photoshop is arriving on the iPad. And as a casual gamer, I recognize that iOS gives me vastly more entertainment options than macOS.

Here lies the dichotomy: Do you want to go back to school? I've been doing it for years, or do you want to be a computer for the future? Apple appears to have strategically engineered this tension into its product portfolio. It refuses to offer LTE, Face ID, or touchscreen options on its Mac line, while limiting the port on its mobile devices (the latest iPad Pro loses the headphone jack and its new USB-C port does not support external storage). The 11-inch iPad Pro fits into bags and pockets inaccessible to a 13.3-inch MacBook Air, but then the air is vastly more stable.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

The big commonality shared by these attractive new devices is Apple's typically luxurious pricing. You'll have to spend $ 1,599 for a 2018 MacBook Air with 512GB of storage or $ 1,498 for an 11-inch iPad Pro with a Folio Keyboard, LTE, and the same storage upgrade. Those are MacBook Pro, and yet you can not wait to see what you're doing for Apple's supposedly junior mobile computers. I'm so excited to trade in my MacBook Pro for one of the new Airs, though the best idea right now may be to take a deep breath and wait for the early-adopter price premium.

Apple will be differentiated by Apple iPad, Apple MacBook Air, and a MacBook Pro can happily coexist on store shelves . Until this week, Apple was still embarassing some embarrassingly out-of-date computers, but now it has been replaced by a variety of rich people.