Great review of the Retina iMac from Shawn Blanc. The review mentions one of the often-discussed struggles that many of us have dealt with — deciding between using a notebook as your primary computer or using a desktop as your primary and having a lower-powered notebook as a secondary computer for travel.

At least for the foreseeable future it seems that the Retina iMac has tipped the scales towards having a desktop as your primary computer. But, I wonder if having a notebook as your secondary computer is actually the way to go this time around. As Shawn notes in his aforelinked review:

Secondly, when I do travel to a conference or drive to a local coffee shop for the day, I mostly prefer to take my iPad. The work I do revolves around reading, writing, and communicating with my team. All of which are things I can do quite easily from my iPad thanks to apps such as Instapaper, Drafts, Poster, Unread, Editorial, Slack, Mail, Basecamp, OmniFocus, Safari, and Pushpin.

I wonder how many users could get away with using a desktop as their primary computer and having an iPad Air 2 as their portable machine. With all the power under the hood of the Air 2 it’s starting to feel like the power users are being held back by the software available on iOS and the mainstream users could easily use an iPad as their secondary machine.

I guess the debate between desktop and notebook computers is just another one of those tick-tock cycles in technology. They’re incredibly interesting to watch as time goes on, as they don’t always play out the same way as they did before. And, this time we could see tablets becoming the go-to secondary computer for many users (with a little help from Apple’s software development team).