My sister in law has used an iPad as here primary compute device for school. Frankly, it works absolutely fine for her. 95% of her need is reading, email, and writing papers (in Google Drive).
You put a bigger chip in so you can run it at lower power consumption levels. Essentially, there are two ways this can pan out:
* Overall utilization can remain lower, keeping it in a more power efficient band.
* Expensive actions complete faster, thus using less power (since they run for less time).
From an overall business perspective, there also doesn't really seem to be a reason to _not_ standardize the lineup on a single chip. I have to imagine is less overhead from a manufacturing standpoint and it's not like there's a particularly meaningful difference in manufacturing costs of these chips.
Yep, I have the original 11" iPad Pro from 2018. It still works flawlessly and would be perfect for this use case. Someone who needs a device for school should buy a used iPad like this, not a new one that would be overpowered for the task and would cost double. Even with the edu discount, it's over $1k with the keyboard case. Why not just buy an MBA at that point?
This has been my reasoning for years and it has been great for that. If I have to leave in the middle of the workday for errand or appointment it’s with me in the Logitech folio case and I have connected computing power in my hands in a form factor that is roughly the size of a moleskine.
I guess that's fine, but if that's all you're doing you could easily just get a hundred dollar chromebook. The marketing for this references things like transcode performance for Final Cut Pro. Implying that you would use it for some sort of serious computing task.
I don't think the "I just need to edit things in google drive crowd" overlaps much with the "I want to run a local LLM on a tablet" crowd.
Anyway my point isn't that people shouldn't buy iPads, my point is that it's silly that Apple has hardware that is incredibly capable and is held back entirely by terrible software policies.
My parents use their iPad(s) for 100% of their compute needs. At 70+ years old, they will tell you those needs are minimal.
If you use one program at a time, do not need an actual file system, have no need to install software from a variety of places (Github, Vendor sites, etc), have no problem installing multiple "apps" that only work behind paywalls or not at all and you don't care about replacing a functional device whenever Apple obsoletes it... iOS is the best thing since sliced bread.
If you need anything outside of iOS's limited list of abilities, its a trash operating system that has crippled amazing hardware.
