As a security engineer, I don’t own a laptop. Let me explain.
When it comes to portable / mobile devices, I prefer to avoid full fledged desktop operating systems. When I’m away from home, I don’t want to worry about things like managing running applications or intricately arranging windows. I want to focus on the task at hand. And I find iPadOS fits these requirements far better than a MacBook or Surface.
The use case
I, as you can imagine, do a lot of cyber security related work. You’re probably wondering, how do I do such things from an iPad? Most tools I use are accessed through a web browser. But for things like malware analysis, being on an iPad can be problematic. So to answer, “how do I do this on an iPad”, simply put, I don’t.
When you’re in a business setting doing incident response, you want to use a clean isolated virtual machine for every action you take involving the incident. So if I were on a Mac, I’d be running a Kali Purple VM. But since it is a VM, does it really matter where it is being run? So I use cloud instances for these types of situations. And I’ve never ran into something I can’t do with this setup.
The reason why
Traditional desktop environments are cumbersome. You have to arrange windows, you have to manage running applications, you have to arrange virtual desktops. It is just a lot of shit work that doesn’t serve any purpose other than managing the system. The system is better at managing these things than you or I. Even if it isn’t, it is far, far faster at it.
Desktop operating systems are a relic of the past. In the near future we will see Windows go by the wayside and even macOS will fade into edge cases. Mobile OS’s are more secure, easier to use, and becoming more powerful in important ways. The future is in the iPad, and further down the road, in augmented reality glasses. Proper glasses sized devices that will superimpose digital assets over the physical world around you.
Simply put, desktop operating systems are going away. And there will be edge cases where they are required or preferred, but the future is in mobile OS’s. You might as well get ahead of the curve.