The iPad Air Has Become My Main Daily Device

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Depending on what plan on doing on a particular day, I switch between bring my iPad and MacBook. And for the vast majority of my tasks, the iPad (I happen to have an iPad Air) is hands down the mobile device that I grab on my out. And if The Apple gods permit it, it might be the only device I will ever buy, which means no more MacBooks for me.


Email, paying bills, reading books/news, playing Clash of Clans (yup, I still clash), and watching videos, those are the things I do on the iPad. I also do a lot of work on it as well. I am shocked at just how powerful the iPad is now when it comes to office productivity. 

On the days when take my MacBook Air to work is when I needed to do some work via AI-enhanced work locally or when I needed to vibe-code something. For a layman, these are things that I have not found a way to do on the iPad (I will be experimenting with some Python scripts to see if they work on the iPad this weekend). And these days, local AI is all the rage as my company has become distrustful of having our data sitting in the cloud even if it is sandboxed.

And this is where the Apple gods I mentioned previously come in. I am looking for a more powerful Mac, likely a Mac mini with 32 GB of RAM, that will become sort of my command center for all AI-related work. With it, I can run bigger and more powerful models. Beyond chatting with a LLM model that, as I understand it, is very good at predicting the next word and the next ones after that, there is so much that we can do with agentic AI these days. Once you get past asking the AI models using ChatGPT or Gemini as a glorified search engine or seeking its medical advice and are willing to put in the energy to turn ot its more agentic potentials, you will get a lot more done.

Contrary to what some people have suggested or said, I have not stopped thinking for myself or turned over the AI matters that really need my attention. As I have turned over the routine work to the AI and scripts it created, I have been able to pay more attention to things I really should have spent more time on in the past. And because I have, I really have my life a lot easier at work. Instead off putting out fires, I am now building to prevent the fires in the first place. 

So, Apple gods in your spaceship shaped temple in Cupertino, I really want a new Mac mini with M5 Pro and 32 GB of RAM. I’ll take more RAM but I’m not greedy. I know things are tough these days. But once I can move all my work to a more powerful Mac, I plan on doing all my work on it and use the iPad for the daily workload. And if I am away, I can connect remotely if I have too.

But folks, you may not have to do this in the future. I do believe more agentic functions is coming to Apple products. And as a mobile warrior like me, you will greatly appreciate just how powerful these new features will be (I’ll list some features I want Apple Intelligence to have). If you have tried the new Siri AI, you know what I am talking about.

For now, the iPad Air is what I grab when I leave the house. I’ll occasionally take the MacBook Air if I need to do things I cannot do on the iPad. But when I get that new Mac mini, it’ll all be the iPad Air for me. 

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