Why would anyone want a 16-inch iPad?
You could be in luck. If the Apple rumour mill is to be believed  which, lets face it, usually requires you to take not so much a pinch of salt as a truckload  smart folks Cupertino-way are busy cooking up a gargantuan 16in iPad Pro Max. Proponents reckon this could further the creative potential of apps on the platform, by giving designers and office types a larger canvas. Youd have more room for illustration, video editing, audio mixing and boring old spreadsheets. The problem is, this would confuse the product line and ruin the iPad for pretty much everything else. The iPad has always been a balancing act. It began life positioned as a third category of device, halfway between a smartphone and a laptop. It had to justify its existence by being better than both of those devices at key tasks. A large multitouch display, the iPads ability to become the app you were using, along with excellent portability, ensured the iPad provided a distinct and immersive experience  along with the mainstream appeal required for it to be a commercial hit. In more recent years, Apple has pivoted in part to iPad as laptop, through its Magic Keyboard for iPad. But Apple remains deeply opinionated about its tablet and how it should be used. Its frequently depicted in standalone fashion, or with an Apple Pencil nearby. The iPad Pro and iPad Air mostly dont care which way up they are, with only a charging port betraying the bottom edge. Its most notable feature isnt the trackpad or fancy hinge, but the fact you can remove your iPad from it in about a second. In other words, Apple believes the iPad laptop experience should be temporary; your tablet should only ever be a moment away from its natural state. Now you might argue these things would still be possible with a 16in iPad Pro Max, but youd be wrong. The 12.9in iPad Pro is already at the very edge of being manageable. Its heavy for long handheld sessions, weighty in a bag, and can be awkward when used on a sofa because FaceID wont fire until you tilt the device just so. But it remains a suitable compromise for those who want or need a bigger screen, whether to draw, edit video, read, write notes or gawp at YouTube. The 16in crowd nonetheless bangs on that bigger is always better and appears to divide into two distinct camps. The first includes designers and artists who  perfectly reasonably  love bigger canvases they can directly interact with. But on talking to such people, you quickly realise their dream isnt a mere 16in, but something closer to an A3 iPad Pro (as in, a 20in model)  or bigger. Theyre driven by the idea of a Wacom Cintiq that would have the elegance and simplicity of, well, an iPad. But expand the iPads dimensions by too much and it ceases to be portable, meaning you cannot use it to be creative anywhere you please. It stops being a consumption device, thereby eroding its versatility. And it becomes colossally expensive, making the device far less viable. In short, it would no longer be an iPad in any meaningful sense, being too niche to be broadly useful  to the point hardly anyone would buy one. The second set of users also appears to want an iPad to be something else entirely  in this case, an actual laptop. These people gripe that a 12.9in iPad Pro has a smaller display than a 16in MacBook Pro (The clue is in the name, everyone!) and assert that using a display any smaller than that is akin to trying to do work on the touchscreen equivalent of a postage stamp. Furthermore, they argue strongly  and endlessly  for iPadOS to have windowed apps rather than Split View and even suggest Apple should allow you to run macOS apps on your iPad Pro Max. Only then could it finally replace a MacBook Pro!