If you’re a computer science student and plan on purchasing a new device to aid your studying, you may be confused between an iPad and a MacBook.
For the past year, I’ve been using the 2022 MacBook Pro and the 2022 iPad Pro side by side every single day. I’ve used them both to watch lectures, take notes over my classes, and write video scripts and articles. I’ve spent a ton of time on both of them, especially during the holidays.
While both devices complement each other greatly, choosing one device over the other for computer science studies is hard. But here, we’ll take various factors into consideration and help you decide.
Let’s get started.
Similarities Between the iPad and the MacBook
Let’s start off with the similarities between the iPad and the MacBook and what they both can do. It turns out they can both do a lot. Pretty much 80% of the things you can do with a laptop, you can get away with doing on an iPad. This is especially true in less complicated areas like reading textbooks, taking notes, writing essays, surfing the web, and watching YouTube. All of these things you can do pretty well on an iPad.
If what I’ve mentioned is primarily what you use a laptop for, then yeah, you could probably get an iPad and be fine. However, before you make your decision, let’s talk about some of the differences between the two, because while they’re somewhat niche, they can make a big difference if you’re heavily involved in those areas.
What Can the iPad Do That the MacBook Can’t?
These are somewhat obvious. The biggest features are the touchscreen, the portability, and the simple delight of using an iPad. iPads shine when it comes to tactile input, like handwriting, swiping around, and scrolling through websites. There are a lot of people who love that sensation of directly interacting with technology. It can be a lot of fun to swipe around on a tablet and be so physically close to your work.
My favorite feature of the iPad is how amazing it works with the Apple Pencil. This one aspect of the iPad has allowed me to go completely paperless, which is great. I love solving problems, taking notes, and drawing diagrams, all in Notability with the Apple Pencil. If you’re someone who loves drawing and physically writing, the iPad shines in this category. This is probably the headlining feature of the iPad, at least to me.
The iPad is also very light, thin, and portable. It is definitely a lot easier to bring around than a heavy laptop, which is pretty nice. Overall, the touchscreen and the portability just make it so fun to interact with the iPad. This is the value of delight, which definitely motivates me to use it more.
What Can the MacBook Do That the iPad Can’t?
Most of the stuff you do on a laptop, you can do on the iPad. Sending emails, writing essays, doing research—yeah, you can do all that stuff on an iPad, but what you do give up is optimization and speed. iPadOS is not and will never be as efficient as macOS. While you can do many of the same things, everything is just so much faster on macOS. And when you use these products every single day, that time difference does add up. This difference is magnified the more complex your task gets. Writing a research paper would take even longer. Taking notes in a class—God forbid, programming on an iPad—would be impossible.
If you’re not a productivity nerd or you don’t use tech that much, then fine. You probably won’t notice that much of a difference. But for me, someone who wants to make everything as efficient as possible, that difference is stark.
Computer Science: iPad vs. MacBook
Now, I’m going to discuss the specific computer science differences between the MacBook and the iPad, and what it’s like to use both of them for computer science classes rather than university as a whole.
In computer science classes, there are two broad categories of things that you do on a daily basis. These could be related to assignments, lectures, or labs. Everything you do in the class falls into these two categories: theory and programming.
Theory
Theory is the higher-level, abstract part of computer science. This is where you’ll discuss your data structures, algorithms, and how everything works at a high level. During theory, you don’t really code. You’ll either draw diagrams or work with pseudocode, which is an informal way to represent real code. If you weren’t a Computer Science student, you’d think of it more as math rather than computer science because you’re not really programming anything. You’re understanding these abstract structures and how they interact with one another.
For example, recently in my algorithms class, we learned about graphs, which is a popular data structure in computer science. We also learned about breadth-first search and depth-first search, which are two common algorithms that you can use to traverse these graphs. If you look at my assignment for this week, the theory part doesn’t really have any code. It gives you a problem and asks you to solve it by hand. It’s very mathy like that. Often you’ll learn theory during lectures because it’s very easy to teach on a whiteboard. You don’t even need a computer to study it, just a pen, paper, and maybe a textbook.
Programming
The programming portion of Computer Science courses is where you actually write code. It could be Java, Python, C . This is where you use one of these languages to program something that performs a function. Often, programming in Computer Science courses takes the form of a weekly assignment or project. Depending on the course, you might talk about programming during lectures, but usually, it’s on your own or during a lab. Programming is where you’ll take what you learned during lectures and actually apply it to coding something from scratch.
Let’s look at the programming portion of my algorithms assignment from this week. At the end, we have this assignment where you can use the language of your choice to actually implement depth-first search. If you remember earlier, I explained how we learned the theory of depth-first search. This part of the assignment asked me to take what I learned in lecture and actually code it in a language of my choice.
iPad vs. MacBook for Theory and Programming
Now that you know the difference between theory and programming, let’s talk about the iPad versus MacBook in these specific areas. I’m going to start with the positive stuff.
iPad for Theory
For theory, the iPad is incredible. It’s awesome to be able to draw data structures by hand and solve problems during lectures with the Apple Pencil. I always do the theory portion on my iPad because it’s just so nice to write directly on the assignment using my Apple Pencil. This is why the iPad is great for math as well. You can’t really solve problems on a computer. It’s really hard to show your work while typing. This is why the iPad shines when it comes to solving problems by hand. So for theory, the iPad is amazing.
MacBook for Programming
Honestly, the iPad is terrible for programming. I’m going to mention it upfront: you basically can’t program on an iPad. When it comes to programming, everything you do in the grand scheme of computer uses is pretty complex and niche. First of all, there are no IDEs that work on an iPad. Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio—all those let you code easily, but none exist for iPad. Second of all, there’s not really a command prompt on iPad either, so you can’t even use that to code using Vim, SSH, or anything else. It’s very unoptimized. You’d be fighting against the product to get anything done on an iPad.
However, as you might’ve guessed, the MacBook works beautifully for anything programming related. Every IDE under the sun is optimized for Mac. Mac is Unix-based, so the terminal is even better than Windows Command Prompt. And yeah, every bit of programming is perfect on a Mac. There’s this myth that Computer Science people don’t use MacBooks, and that’s completely false. During my summer software engineering internship, my entire team was on Mac. People always say, “Oh, you’re a Computer Science major, how can you possibly use a MacBook?” And I always respond with, “Because it’s a lot better and it works for everything you wanna do.”
Anyway, for programming, the MacBook works beautifully, and the iPad basically doesn’t work at all.
Pricing and Recommendations
Really quick, I’m going to talk about pricing and which iPad or MacBook I recommend getting. If you’re on a budget, you should probably get the M2 MacBook Air. If you’re looking for a cheaper MacBook, that hits mostly everything. It starts at around $999 and will do everything you need to do for your Computer Science classes. There are also probably some student discounts you can add on top of that.
If you’re looking for an iPad and are on a budget, the budget iPad would work well. It starts at $349 and is definitely the best deal of any tablet at that price. Yes, the iPad Pro is a lot better, but if you just want to have an iPad and you want the most value for money, the budget iPad will take you most of the way there.
Conclusion: Which Should You Buy?
Overall, I’d say for normal students, you can probably get away with using an iPad as your daily driver, especially if you don’t really care about efficiency and you find using it really fun. However, for Computer Science majors, the answer is no. You can’t replace a MacBook with an iPad and maintain any semblance of normalcy. When I think about the iPad, I think of it more as a complement rather than a substitute for the MacBook. For me, the iPad will never really replace the MacBook. However, it does add a few fun features on top, like handwriting, which is why I use them both every single day.
Also, if you already have a Windows laptop and are considering getting an iPad, that makes much more sense. The Windows computer can handle all the programming during your classes, and maybe then the iPad would be really nice to take notes by hand during lectures and solve homework problems.