My writing setup
I’m doing all of my writing on an 11” iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard. There are a lot of discussions online about whether or not an iPad is a suitable laptop replacement. The answer is always dependent on what you’re using it for. In my day-to-day writing, I don’t need anything else.
I’m an iOS app developer by trade (yes, I’m a real Apple fanboy), so I have a M1 MacBook Pro that I use for my personal software development work. I could fall back on that for novel writing/publishing if I have to, but I’m trying to avoid it. The iPad is more compact, and since I already have to travel with my 16” MacBook Pro work laptop, I’m not looking to add more bulk.
I use the Scrivener app for outlining and writing prose. On the iPad, it’s quite a bit more slimmed down than the Mac version. As I’m writing the first draft of my second novel, though, it’s working perfectly for me. It allows you to set standard formats for the manuscript. It has your daily word count and project word count. It allows you to view all the scenes like flash cards, each with a brief synopsis. You can leave comments within each scene.
I use Obsidian for world building. It’s an easy way to build a local wiki for your fictional world. There was a little bit of a learning curve, but once I got familiar, it became a powerful tool. It also has a pretty extensive theming system if you want to change up the appearance.
I usually like to have an ambient music channel of some kind from YouTube playing for background noise. Something without any lyrics. They’re probably all put together using AI, but hey, it works.
For my website, I’m using SquareSpace. While they do have an iPad app, using it to build a website from scratch proved to be a show-stopper. Now, I should temper that by saying that I was running the iPadOS 26 beta, which could very well be making things worse. In any case, I needed to switch to my Mac to actually build the website. Squarespace’s iPad app(s) may be better suited for minor changes, posting blogs, etc.
For me, the iPad is the ideal writing computer and a joy to work on.