Yesterday I said that iPadOS 26 sounds so promising, it might be the laptop replacement I’ve always wanted it to be. However, Apple thinks (no surprise) folks should buy an iPad and a Mac.
During a Tom’s Guide interview, Mark Spoonauer sat down with Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak to talk about what the new iPadOS 26 means for customers and how they should decide whether to get an iPad or a new MacBook.
Now that iPadOS has many of the same features as the Mac, some folks will certainly be tempted to go for an iPad Pro rather than a MacBook. But Apple maintains (as it has for years) that these two devices remain quite distinct despite the growing similarities.
Joswiak told Tom’s Guide: I recommend buying both Yeah, not even being facetious. I mean, the reality is, it has always been a little bit of a false trade-off to say it’s one or the other. The reality is, it’s a small number of people, the overlap [between iPad and Mac] is actually pretty huge.
We’d love you to buy both, but that’s just the reality. People love to have both. You can use your Apple Pencil and do Procreate and do some incredible things on your iPad and then turn around and export it to the Mac and do some other stuff. They’re both incredible tools, and they are very different from each other.
But what if you have to choose?
Federighi told Tom’s Guide: I feel like we in the industry talk a lot about this, and customers don’t seem to talk about it. They actually seem to know which one they want. And you know it has not been a struggle for most of them.
However, Spoonauer said that he’d argue that the versatility of iPadOS 26 will actually make the iPad vs Mac call a tougher one for shoppers. I agree.
And it may not matter that much. Apple’s Phil Schiller once said that the company wasn’t worried about products “cannibalizing” specific product sales — as long as it was one Apple product cannibalizing another.
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