Jared White

The one thing which has been so frustrating lately about iPadOS isn’t how far away the “pro” experience of #Apple #iPadPro is from what you get with a Mac. It’s how close it is. Tantalizingly close. You plug a modern iPad into a display, keyboard, and mouse, and if you squint a bunch and don’t try to accomplish too much all at once, you can kinda sorta see a powerful desktop OS at work. The “death by a thousand paper cuts” is what makes this experience so frustrating.

The word on the street (aka Mark Gurman’s latest reporting) is that Apple will be rolling out an advanced set of multitasking features for iPadOS at #WWDC, including an interface which will “let users resize app windows and offer new ways for users to handle multiple apps at once.” No mention of proper external display support, but it feels like that must be a given if you have a new windowing system.

Look, I’m not trying to replace my Mac. I love my Mac. The M1 Mac mini is an impressive desktop at an affordable price. However, I also want to be able to “KVM switch” myself over to an iPad desktop and enjoy everything about that experience as well. Because there are some tasks I really do prefer to perform in iPadOS vs. macOS. Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? Hopefully Apple will soon have an affirmative answer to that question when it comes to the iPad.

Right before the keynote on Monday started, I posted “Things I’m most excited for at Apple WWDC 2019”. How did I do with the wish list? Well, let’s say it was a very, very good day. 😁 I just recorded a podcast episode where I break it all down and that’ll be going out later today. Stay tuned! #Apple #WWDC

Things I’m most excited for at #Apple #WWDC 2019:

• #iOS “Pro” for #iPadPro
• New Safari/WebKit features across all platforms #openweb
• UIKit on the Mac (aka “Marzipan”) #macOS
• iOS Dark Mode
• Mac Pro hardware teaser
• Some sort of indication of future notebooks that don’t suck
• Dedicated App Store for Watch
• tvOS 😜

A lot of people are commenting on recent statements made by #Apple CEO Tim Cook about the future of its two major platforms. I’ll be honest with you—I don’t think Cook is saying anything here that we don’t already know. While it’s a popular point of speculation that somehow #iOS and #macOS are going to be “merged” and eventually we’ll all just be using a unified range of Apple computers/devices from phones to large desktops, the fact is that nothing Apple is currently doing that we can directly observe and report on is trending in that direction.

I do think that once #WWDC rolls around again this June, we’ll hear a lot about new tools and techniques that make it easier to develop cross-platform apps that run on both iOS and macOS without a lot of fuss. But that doesn’t mean the environments are merging. It just means the developer story is being simplified. And that excites me because if more iOS developers can easily port their most popular apps over to the Mac platform, that’s a big win for everybody.