This is a myopic take.

I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.

Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.

Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.

Well, the author needs it to be a tablet form factor with a stylus as described here https://teddysvoronos.com/2015-11-19-in-praise-of-goodnotes/

Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.

I’m sure Apple could as easily break presentation mode on macOS.

A lot of teachers at my uni use them for drawing on the slides during lecture

Why? It would be helpful to understand why you support such a silly statement.

Why not play it even safer with an overhead projector?

Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.

Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.

I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.

It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.

I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.

In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?

I mean, the real lesson is to not trust Apple. I can do the very basic things the OP article is describing on my phone, let alone a tablet.

This is a completely absurd take. The entire point of TFA is that it used to work fantastically well until iOS 27 broke it.

Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.