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The smallest Mac screen was a lot smaller than 11.6

9” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

The screen size doesn’t really matter, it’s more about being able to easily use controls with a finger.


If Mac UIs worked fine for touch, companies would have done that and not made iOS specific UIs?
That Mac didn’t have a touch screen and macOS had a much different UI back then. In the OS X+ era the smallest screen was the 11.6” MacBook Air. And macOS UI is definitely not optimized for touch.

Try accessing a Mac using a remote desktop app such as Jump Desktop. It’s doable but less than ideal.
 
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Funny, this is exactly what I want on my Mac for productivity and don't want on my iPad for simplicity during content enjoyment...

iPadOS-26-Preview-App.jpg
 
iPados 26 = MacOS Lite

Only if Mac apps can be installed,
at least for iPadPro …

Now there is keyboard, Mouse, Pointer, Menu bar … All is set!
 
For iPad OS 26, this is just the start as Apple will keep refining it and adding more multi tasking features. Don't discount them allowing full Mac apps for the M powered ipads either. Anything is possible going forward.
 
iPad is NOT intended to be a “light” Mac. So, whatever more features we get are not intended to be a computer replacement. Just a paliative.
 
Really looking forward to trying out the new features. I wish the public beta would hurry up and get here. I don't want to fuss with it until then.
 
See the problem here? iPadOS 26 new windowing system, menu bar, traffic light indeed makes iPad more like a Mac, when using it with a keyboard and trackpoint device. But the touch experience is worse.
 
I am interested in the current iPad without AI.
For the most part, AI is quite lame, a bit like predictive text.
 
It’s not the screen size, it’s the UI element sizes that are not designed for a finger, or would be very awkward
Well Tahoe seems to to in that direction, Finder Windows and buttons seems touch optimized
 
Didn’t MR already do this post?

The only thing holding back the iPad is the app support. I hate having to switch to my MacBook Pro for certain apps such as Xcode.
 
Very happy with all the changes to iPadOS this year. Files app is miles ahead of how it was before. Still a lot can improve in the future versions.
 
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I almost bought the Zenbook Duo with the dual screens. I could do just about anything with it and have best of both worlds plus TWO touch screens.

Problem is I really do not like Windows OS.

PS. The keyboard / track pad shown is actually the second screen. It also comes with an actual magnetic keyboard/ track pad.
 

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After you buy a mid to high-end iPad, add a keyboard /w touchpad and then you are near (or above) the price of a MacBook. Just buy the MacBook.

There is nothing the iPad does that makes it worth 4-digits USD.
yeah if you buy it all at once... If you already own a trackpad and keyboard a powerful iPad which is perfectly fast enough for most people is like half the price of a MacBook. An iPad is more modular this way. I've just thrown out an old MacBook with battery and HD failure, but it's keyboard was fine.
 
See the problem here? iPadOS 26 new windowing system, menu bar, traffic light indeed makes iPad more like a Mac, when using it with a keyboard and trackpoint device. But the touch experience is worse.
well you could make an automation that turns windowing on or off depending on whether you're connected to a keyboard or not...
 
I prefer iPads to be small. Converting them to Mac will make them look bulky and hard to carry. We already have Mac, so there is no need to transform iPhones into them.
 
Remember back about 7, 8 years ago, when if someone had the timerity to claim that Apple was gradually "merging" the MacOS and iOS, how folks would laugh at such a notion?

Remember?

Folks will still laugh.
But the laughter is dying down...
 
No. And that’s one of the reasons why running Mac apps on iPadOS wouldn’t work. Other reasons are that they would have to provide a multitude of macOS APIs on iPadOS, emulate a compatible file-system structure, and further difficulties along those lines. People should understand that this won’t be happening.
You seem to be forgetting that MAS-distributed apps already use containerization, meaning, it would be extremely easy for Apple to provide that same filesystem structure, much in the same way that certain iPad apps can already run on Apple Silicon Macs.

Also, have you ever SSH-ed into any of Apple’s mobile devices or disassembled an .ipsw image from an iOS or iPadOS build? I personally haven’t, but I’ve seen it done before, and the filesystem structure is already good ol’ Apple’s semi-proprietary Mac OS X’s BSD-based Unix under the hood (I’m going with the vintage branding, just so we’re all on the same page).

About the only recent-ish Apple devices that didn’t have it were the classic scroll/touch/clickwheel iPods and, surprisingly, even the later touch-screen-based nanos, whose OS was based on Pixo’s solution instead, which was perfectly understandable, as the OG iPod was still compatible with iTunes 1.x on Mac OS 9 and OS X was still a comparatively unoptimized, bloated mess back then (or at the very least overkill for the currently available and compatible PowerPC hardware, let alone for a puny, pre-TSMC ARM processor from the era).
 
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Of course this will not satisfy the people that want have macOS on the iPad, but for the most reasonable people that already use the iPad as a replacement for a MacBook, this will be a welcome addition to bring the experience closer to macOS. for the exception of a few workflows that require the macOS environment, this will, even more, allow people to use the iPad as a replacement for a MacBook. I have been using the iPad since the iPad 2 as a replacement for a notebook computer quite effectively and efficiently. I first configured remote access to my Mac mini to be certain that I had access to everything that I needed while mobile, but soon realized that I did not need to do so as everything that I would need while mobile was available on the iPad natively. I believe that the enhancements on iPadOS 26 allow the iPad to properly sit between the iPhone & Macintosh.
 
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