[jsheard]

It could be a great do-everything machine if they let you run macOS on it, but of course they don't want to sell one machine that does everything, they want to sell you an iPad and a MacBook even though they are basically the same hardware plus or minus an integrated keyboard.

[selykg]

I want that experience I seen on some other device at some point... Palm? I forget now.

In tablet mode, iPad OS. Touch being the primary operation. Basically just as we see it now.

In a pseudo desktop mode, macOS, where you get the power of a laptop in a smaller form factor. You can optionally try to use this in touch mode in a pinch but it's not necessarily designed for it.

The win would be seamless switching. Including apps... if I have photoshop open on iPad, dock, convert to Photoshop for Mac. I.e. you "dock" your iPad and it converts to a more Mac-like experience. Undock, you get the iPad experience.

To me, this would be ideal. I don't generally _need_ a laptop for personal use, so this would be a serious boon for me as I use my iPad all the time in the evening for simple consumption, but I also have a MacBook over here that gets used a few times a week, which is a costly device for how little it gets used.

[rtkwe]

There was the Motorola Atrix that had a dual mode system where you could plug the phone into a keyboard, larger battery, and big screen in a mostly laptop form factor. Never used it myself though because the keyboard module was expensive for at the time.

[selykg]

Ohhh that might have been what I was thinking of! Good memory!

[rtkwe]

I had one and wish I had the spare money at the time for the laptop portion of the unit but that was college years for me and I wasn't working during the school year just the summer and longer breaks.

That phone is still kicking around my drawers somewhere.

[yencabulator]

ChromeOS tablets behave like this. Connect a keyboard and the UI switches to desktop mode.

[ufmace]

You can kind of get that now with the 360-degree rotation laptops, which are available with Windows or Chrome OS. I haven't used a Windows one, but Chrome OS behaves pretty nicely as a tablet.

The trouble though is, once you get an acceptable laptop keyboard and a corresponding screen, the resulting device seems excessively heavy and bulky when flipped over into the tablet form factor. You probably won't want to hold it up for more than 10 minutes.

I like the idea of one all-in-one device, but it's hard to see a way around these things. The cheesy tiny portable "keyboards" they make for tablets are pretty lame for extended typing, but better keyboards are too heavy for tablets. Meanwhile, I expect a desktop device to have the compute horsepower and RAM that are tough to get in a proper tablet form factor.