April 23, 2026
Finger grease or key please?
MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be
Keyboard warriors vs finger dancers: the Apple split
TLDR: A bold take says iPads should go full touch while a MacBook Neo handles typing and work. Comments split into camps: typists slam touch for writing, creatives beg for wild touch apps, pragmatists accuse Apple of holding back macOS on iPad, and an AI subplot sparks jokes and side‑eye.
The author’s big idea is spicy: make the iPad a pure touch playground with no keyboards, no mice—just a “finger ballet”—and let a MacBook Neo handle the serious typing life. Cue comment-section civil war. The keyboard crowd stormed in first, with gyomu declaring, “Touchscreens suck for text manipulation,” arguing that email, code, and writing need keys and a cursor, not greasy swipes.
But the creatives clapped back with nostalgia and glitter. altairprime dreamed of Bryce 3D on iPad, picturing a two-handed, sci‑fi control scheme that finally makes “touch-first” feel right. Meanwhile, the pragmatists rolled their eyes at Apple’s lineup: ginko just wants a super-light 10-inch laptop that runs real desktop apps, fuming that the iPad “could run macOS” but doesn’t—calling it market segmentation in neon lights.
Then came the plot twist: AI people. vessenes hyped a comeback for the command line (old-school text prompts) because chatbots—aka LLMs—speak text. Some even asked, “What would an AI-first macOS look like?” Enter weevil with the mic drop: “Like a product I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.”
So we’ve got Team Keyboard vs Team Finger Ballet vs Team Let-Me-Run-macOS vs Team AI Terminal. The vibe? Equal parts “Ferrari engine on a scooter” and “don’t make me finger‑type an email,” with memes about finger grease, bargepoles, and a glorious return of weird UIs. Popcorn secured.
Key Points
- •The article advocates making iPads purely touch-first devices without keyboards, pointers, or windowed interfaces.
- •It calls for iPadOS to be a unique, full-screen, multitouch environment, distinct from desktop OS paradigms and not a scaled-up iOS.
- •The 2020 iPad Pro with trackpad support and Magic Keyboard sparked a desire for macOS on similar hardware, highlighting a gap at the time.
- •Earlier Intel-based MacBooks are described as hot, noisy, and limited, while iPad Pro offered silent, fast hardware with strong displays.
- •Despite powerful hardware, iPadOS and apps constrained professional workflows; Procreate is cited as a success, while Lightroom on iPad illustrates limitations.