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Apple Aiming to Make iPad More Mac-Like With iPadOS 16 Multitasking Changes

While the hardware isn’t good, I actually prefer the Surface devices. I have a full blown Windows and can run full desktop apps on it. It’s 2022, I would love to start seeing fully responsive operating systems. iPad on the go is the current iPad look and feel. Docked (don’t limit to apple exclusive accessories please) you get macos experience.

Laptops aren’t as mobile as tablets. Laptops have horizontal and vertical space as a requirement. Tablets don’t have this requirement as I can use my iPad on one hand with the screen flat vs how it would be with a laptop.

Surface Pro is almost there. I believe Apple could improve on it and make it great.
 
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aibo82 said:
I think Apple ready should start splitting the OS one for the iPad and one for iPad Pro!

The sheer amount of features for the sake of features in iPad is has completely destroyed the ease of use for my parents! It’s not intuitive and multi tasking pop ups are a nightmare to get rid of in safari.

For a child or elderly person or someone who wants the basics I think the standard iPad should come with how the OS used to be years ago just simple!

If they want a pro device then keep the features of multi tasking windows and a 100 options to that, not allow some of the complexity to fall over to the standard iPad or the Air.
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I couldn't possibly agree more with this. The amount of frustration in trying to "back-out" of all the snare traps set in multitask functions is immense. I do not know how some of these get out of development.
 
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Ethosik said:
While the hardware isn’t good, I actually prefer the Surface devices. I have a full blown Windows and can run full desktop apps on it. It’s 2022, I would love to start seeing fully responsive operating systems. iPad on the go is the current iPad look and feel. Docked (don’t limit to apple exclusive accessories please) you get macos experience.

Laptops aren’t as mobile as tablets. Laptops have horizontal and vertical space as a requirement. Tablets don’t have this requirement as I can use my iPad on one hand with the screen flat vs how it would be with a laptop.

Surface Pro is almost there. I believe Apple could improve on it and make it great.
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The Mac OS UI experience isn’t what would fix your problems though. The problem is that iPadOS limits how apps run in the background, how you apps talk to each other, memory limits, iPad apps that are limited… the app market on the App Store isn’t conducive to funding high quality development either which further hampers the existence of good apps. The fact that companies give up on iPad apps because of the App Store further hampers the experience.

I would like a concrete example of how a windowing environment like macOS would actually solve problems people have. You can already use slideover and split view to quickly move between apps, and with iPadOS 15 you can so easily rearrange windows in the expose-ish view. With iPadOS 15 I think they have solved most of the windowing issues but there are many other issues that are holding back the iPad.
 
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Neepman said:
I couldn't possibly agree more with this. The amount of frustration in trying to "back-out" of all the snare traps set in multitask functions is immense. I do not know how some of these get out of development.
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What snare traps? I think discoverability is a problem but manual window resizing and placing is only easier because it is familiar. I think that the early multitasking implementations on iPadOS gave people a bad understanding and now people have just given up on it.
 
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bcortens said:
The Mac OS UI experience isn’t what would fix your problems though. The problem is that iPadOS limits how apps run in the background, how you apps talk to each other, memory limits, iPad apps that are limited… the app market on the App Store isn’t conducive to funding high quality development either which further hampers the existence of good apps. The fact that companies give up on iPad apps because of the App Store further hampers the experience.

I would like a concrete example of how a windowing environment like macOS would actually solve problems people have. You can already use slideover and split view to quickly move between apps, and with iPadOS 15 you can so easily rearrange windows in the expose-ish view. With iPadOS 15 I think they have solved most of the windowing issues but there are many other issues that are holding back the iPad.
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I wasn’t talking about just the UI. Full macOS including everything you said is what I would like. The architecture difference is gone now. It would be nice to have a responsive OS based on the current config.
 
Ethosik said:
I wasn’t talking about just the UI. Full macOS including everything you said is what I would like. The architecture difference is gone now. It would be nice to have a responsive OS based on the current config.
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I hope they don’t go this route. The iPad has a better UX for most use cases than macOS and its limitations are more focused on what I mentioned rather than on any particular windowing UI choice.

Conceptually the Mac has a space with a number of windows that overlap and hide one another and can be manually sized. The iPad, conceptually, has a large black canvas with windows (sometimes grouped together) that don’t overlap and you move leftward organized by date of opening. I think maybe pinning windows might be helpful to help with spatial memory but generally I don’t even know if that is necessary. Once you start to play around and really spend time on the iPad it becomes as intuitive as the Mac. Familiarity leads to comfort.
 
Jonas Silver said:
I would like to be able to hook up to a monitor and not have those ugly bars on the side.
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Yeah - the current external monitor UI is garbage.

I’d like these options:
Mirror iPad (when you don’t have a keyboard and mouse attached) - this is the current experience
Extend (requires keyboard and mouse) - allow you to drag windows to the external display and tile them in fullscreen or split view (3 wide split view?)
Replace (requires keyboard and mouse) - essentially clamshell mode for iPad - you can only have two apps in split view (to prevent having to rearrange windows when disconnecting) but you now have full large screen available to you - so in my case this would mean I could have my PDF reader open beside pages and both would have the huge 27” screen rather than just being a scaled up iPad layout
 
smulji said:
That's exactly how I understand it.
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That's what I'd like. Put it on my magic keyboard with trackpad and it goes into macOS mode and I can fire up Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, or whatever Mac apps I want!
 
patseguin said:
That's what I'd like. Put it on my magic keyboard with trackpad and it goes into macOS mode and I can fire up Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, or whatever Mac apps I want!
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This would be terrible and would take a decade for the apps to be updated for this to work.
Apps would need to have two modes and draw on the same databases for each app - I strongly doubt that the existing apps are architected to allow this in most cases.
Additionally unless you somehow plan to keep both the macOS UI and the iPadOS UI in memory at all times it would have to launch each one at each mode switch.
This mode switching idea is very unlikely to be a good UX experience.

Edit: People hated this when windows 8 did it and Dex and other smartphones attempts at this have also consistently failed. Could apple crack it? Maybe, but I’m doubtful because it breaks the continuity of the UI.
 
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ballyhoo said:
Apple needs to go back to the Jobs playbook. Too many iPad models. It’s confusing to the customer. Overheard this in an Apple store last month and I agree! If a new MacBook or the like doesn’t come out soon, Ima gonna blow my top. Bought a new iPad Pro, keyboard and pen. Less than 2 weeks later, the security update made it all completely unusable. Struggled along for another couple of weeks. Returned all to the Apple store @41 days. Why did they allow that? Because they knew. Thankfully they still have great customer service…
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Something odd going on there. I’ve got an iPad Pro and no problems from the security updates. What was unusable about it that could not be addressed?
 
xXRainKingXx said:
Fair enough. My iPad is still on iOS 14, so I was just going off that experience. I guess they improved multitasking in iOS 15.
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Substantially improved. It used to require secret handshake gestures to do multitasking. Now there is a small control at the top of the screen that lets you setup split views and then you can just open any app that you want to add. It’s just more direct and explicit now.
 
FasterQuieter said:
I think something like the Samsung Dex mode would be best. Don't cripple the tablet experience, but open up the hardware for more functionality. If there were a MAC OS mode though and it was always ready to go, you'd be wanting rather more RAM than they currently come with.
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Samsung Dex is two separate working modes with no connection between them. It’s most assuredly not what people keep thinking it is :)
 
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ballyhoo said:
Apple needs to go back to the Jobs playbook. Too many iPad models. It’s confusing to the customer.
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This is not 2007. Imo, people want choices in 2022.
Overheard this in an Apple store last month and I agree! If a new MacBook or the like doesn’t come out soon, Ima gonna blow my top. Bought a new iPad Pro, keyboard and pen. Less than 2 weeks later, the security update made it all completely unusable. Struggled along for another couple of weeks. Returned all to the Apple store @41 days. Why did they allow that? Because they knew. Thankfully they still have great customer service…
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Don’t know what issues you had. My m1 iPad Pro works flawlessly.
 
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Throwing this out there.

I think the best compromise would be using the hypervisor hardware in the M1 (obviously this would limit the feature to higher end iPads) to create a barebones virtual machine MacOS app that you launch when a keyboard & pointer are attached. They would be forced to open in “full-screen” mode. Full-screen Mac apps function very similarly to iPadOS apps so they would fit in with minimal fuss. If you detach the keyboard and mouse the virtual machine would pause (show up as a greyed out square in the app card/switcher interface) or use the existing Continuity feature to switch over to the iPad version of the app and let you continue where you left off.

If you have an external display attached (with a keyboard & pointer), the additional display is setup similar to Universal Control where the OS tries to learn/guess where the display is in relation to your iPad based on where you are pushing the pointer. The external display become a second, or third, multitasking instance.

So no free form windowing system and minimal UIX muddling. It would leverage existing technology to improve professional features, multitasking, and external monitor usage.
 
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