A few weeks ago, I picked up a Smart Folio for my 13" iPad Pro at an incredible discount. It was more an impulse purchase than anything else, but I also thought it would be a good opportunity to try something new.

Since I bought the 13" iPad Pro, it's lived in the Magic Keyboard case. Functionally, it's been a touchscreen laptop running iPadOS. I love the form factor and get so much done on it, but I've always had this nagging feeling that I'm not using it to its full potential. The iPad is meant to be a tablet, after all. So I decided to carry my iPad in the Smart Folio rather than the Magic Keyboard for a while and see what it was like using a 13" tablet.

The first thing I noticed was how much thinner and lighter the iPad is in the Smart Folio case. The Magic Keyboard adds quite a bit of thickness and weight to the device, something I've just gotten used to. But carrying it around without the Magic Keyboard, I was reminded what a feat of engineering the 13" iPad Pro really is. (I'm still using the M1 version; the latest M4 model is even thinner and lighter.)

That being said, the big iPad Pro is still a beast of a tablet. I never could figure out how to comfortably hold it in my hands while navigating or reading on it. I always had to rest my arm on a table or prop the iPad up with my leg while holding it, which isn't ideal for tablet use.

I was surprised how intuitive it is to use Stage Manager in touch mode. I've only ever interacted with floating windows via a cursor before, but bringing up new windows and arranging them the way I want them with my fingers made total sense. As much as it's been optimized for indirect input over the past few years, iPadOS still works incredibly well via touch, even in its most complex configuration. One of my favorite things to do with the iPad Pro in tablet mode was working on my creativity log, which involved a lot of switching between windows, copying and pasting, and running shortcuts.

Typing with the on-screen keyboard was something I couldn't ever quite get used to. I would prop the iPad up on my desk with the Smart Folio and do my best to replicate touch typing on it, but it resulted in so many typos that the whole process really slowed me down. I'm just better at typing on a physical keyboard, I suppose. Working with text was the part of this experiment where I ran into the most friction.

There are still certain elements of the web that aren't optimized for touch as well. Most user-facing websites are optimized for any input, and I was able to read my favorite sites without any problem. But when I tried to do any work on the backend of my blog or my employer's website, I ran into elements that still didn't work quite right – or at all – via touch because they expected a cursor.

After a few days of using the Smart Folio, I swapped it back out for the Magic Keyboard and put it away. The majority of what I do on my iPad Pro falls into the categories of text editing and web work, so I really missed the physical keyboard and trackpad, and I decided they were worth the additional thickness and weight. My iPad Pro is a laptop once again.

But at least I got a chance to experience what it was like to use my iPad as a true tablet. There are still cases where I could see myself switching back to the Smart Folio for a limited amount of time, especially while watching TV and films, so I'm keeping it around as an option. For the most part, though, the Magic Keyboard is the perfect iPad Pro accessory for me, and I'm sticking with it.

For tablet use, I still have my trusty iPad mini, which I adore. But this experiment has me once again reminiscing about the old days when I had an 11" iPad Pro that served as both my tablet and laptop. Now that the smaller iPad Pro has the best screen technology once again, could I go back to using a single device for both use cases? Or am I better off with my dual approach, getting the most out of both ends of the spectrum? Those are questions for another day, but for the time being, I'm going to consider this 13" tablet test complete and return to my multiPad lifestyle.