When it comes to high-end, complex apps, what iPad struggles with (I feel comfortable saying this, I ran an M1 13" iPad Pro on 16 as my daily driver for seven months last year) is consistent discoverability for controls and switches from one app to the next. Each app was more-or-less a world of UX ideas unto itself, and the only unifying thread was the share sheet (which itself merits some very stern Kubrick stares, let's be honest). The concept here is called
cognitive load - how much mental energy you have to spend transitioning between apps and remembering where to go in each UI for a thing (also, how each app might or might not handle sending or receiving content you’re working with. See the share sheet).
The Mac's menu bar (and the convention of toolbars/sidebars in app windows) is a simple part of how the Mac addresses that: No matter what you're doing or using, anything you need to discover will be available to find up there in the pulldowns along the top of the screen. Always, without fail. All the
really good Mac apps also go out of their way to help you discover more obvious, in-context controls for the features you need to use as you go, whether its a button in the window or a keyboard shortcut. But you don’t have to flail before learning them.
It's also, er, a little weird. It's a constant fixture of the Mac UI, yet its contents are a mix of global and app-specific. Yes, the Apple Menu is always the same from app to app, but the File menu and its siblings aren't. That's kinda weird! Familiar and ingrained, but weird! You can make a good case for Windows' approach of stashing all global
stuff in the taskbar and putting app-specific stuff in app windows. It's a little more visually inefficient, but it's also a sensible organizational separation much like any UX designer these days would come up with (even Stage Manager does this on iPad!). Here's the difference:
- The taskbar-for-global and app-windows-for-apps model is there to always remind you of the complete working picture you have.
- The menu-bar-for-everything model is there to help remind you of the thing currently in the foreground.
That second one sounds a lot like the iPad ideal. Which is the point, I think: the iPad is trying to be what the Mac
should be, freed of decades of tradition and being an onscreen office (Desktops? Files? Folders?
Hmm.). The trouble in my mind - after all that - is that iPad has an intoxicating tactility that makes every little interaction a delight. Individual apps on it can be brilliant, but they’re
most brilliant when they’re not just a foreground but the entire device’s face so you can touch them all the more. iPad is brilliant canvas for apps to play on. But I've never seen it do a meaningful job of being a workspace for apps to play
together. The second part hasn’t been cracked yet - every solution shipped so far has either been too simple or too wildly over-engineered. I hope they figure out where the magic lies this year.
As for the Mac’s take on things…it’s tried, its tested, and until something definitively surpasses that menu bar for workspace consistency I would very much like it to stay. Somebody please figure out how to surpass it though. It’s kinda weird.
I'm not the only one who feels this way.
