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I demand a touchscreen Pro Display XDR so I can run iPadOS on my Mac Pro!
 
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Yes, Quick Switch between MacOS and iOS. The only reason I still have a Macbook Pro is there are still things I need a real os for working as a Managed Service provider...they are becoming more rare and if they could run Mac Os, then Windows via VMWare on my iPad I'd only need one device.
Unfortunately that’s why they’ll never give macOS to iPad. Apple wants us to buy both a mac and an iPad.
 
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This thread has me remembering some of my earliest experiences with computers where the only input was keyboard (MS-DOS and C64 — command line interface). Of course there were applications that accepted additional forms of input like joysticks and the like.

In terms of “touch input” on a modern computer, there’s still a distinction in my mind of the type of touch input. Finger input or stylus input. Like I’d use a joystick for a game on an old command line operating system, I’ve seen the usefulness of stylus input for certain applications on “traditional” computers. I helped move some full—time illustrators from pen and ink to doing much of their finished line art digitally on those 20+ inch Wacom Cintiq tablet displays many years ago. Heck, I remember a time when there was a company making Frankenstein touchscreen MacBooks— seems like they were harvesting the touch screens from 13” cintiqs or something like that.

However, I don’t see MacOS shifting to the point that touch (especially finger) is ever the primary input method. (I think the idea that touching a vertical screen is not ergonomic is sound.) But I don’t see why it couldn’t become a bit more ”touch friendly”. I suppose we see this with Sidecar Allowing an iPad to act as touch input & screen within Mac OS. It doesn’t mean Apple plans on making touchscreen Macs— just that there’s opportunity to expand/enhance certain applications on Mac. (Just like iPadOS has been gaining better support for external inputs to expand/enhance its usefulness.)
 
Could all this be a red herring and just simply be that Apple wants the UX to be similar for users on both MacOS and iPadOS? That is a common theme for companies when releasing their products on different platforms
I’d buy this. For as much as some folks may not want to believe it, the majority of folks using Apple devices today are familiar with iOS and iPadOS, not so much macOS. If those folks ever HAVE to use a Mac (it could happen!!), they could find their way around by recognizing those icons from the non-Mac OS
 
Unfortunately that’s why they’ll never give macOS to iPad. Apple wants us to buy both a mac and an iPad.
And iPhone, and Apple Watch, and iPod Touch, and Apple TV etc.

Seriously, though, I can’t envision anyone walking into an Apple store and saying…
I like this iPad thing for the touch interface, but I kinda like the pointer on this MacBook. Well, there’s no two ways about it, RING ME UP ONE OF EACH! More aligned with reality? They compare features, determine which features are most important and then deal with or devise workarounds for any limitations.

BUT, maybe there are some HARDCORE macOS users that WOULD buy both? But, wait a minute, if they’re hardcore macOS users, they wouldn’t buy both, right? Wouldn’t that go against being a hardcore macOS user?
 
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With regards to this argument, I find this probably one of the weakest arguments. Apple history is filled with examples of denying or misleading on something. Here's an example:

2003 - No Plans to Make a Tablet

"There are no plans to make a tablet," Jobs was quoted saying to Mossberg. "It turns out people want keyboards.... We look at the tablet, and we think it is going to fail." Steve Jobs

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Steve_Jobs_No_Tablet_No_PDA_No_Cell_Phone_Lots_Of_iPods/

It turns out Apple was toying around with tablets prior to iPhone, and had the intention of doing a tablet, but then decided to go with the phone first, and then the tablet.

Jobs got away with this 'lie' perfectly fine.

In this specific case, I don't see a clear denial from Joswiak, look at all his statements closely, look at this statement for example "Apple plans to keep making both products better and is not going to "get all caught up in" theories of "merging or anything like that.""

Lets dissect this:

1. "Apple plans to keep making both products better" - true statement, it's possible there is a merged product in the pipeline, but in the meantime both lines will get improvements, so you see Joswiak doesn't have to lie here.

2. "...and [Apple] is not going to "get all caught up in" theories of "merging or anything like that."" in other words, Apple executives won't get stressed out or distracted with theories around the internet about merging, because they have better things to do, like... actually working on the merged product line :D.

See how legally Apple can get away with these statements? There is nothing that legally binds Apple here.
There’s a difference between genuinely having no imminent plans to release a product at a given time and actively lying to the public (specifically investors, as a publicly traded company).

Apple didn’t have a tablet product remotely near production in 2003 before they pivoted to the iPhone, and so he said they didn’t plan on pursuing it. They didn’t, and then several years later they changed their minds once they could build the tablet on the shoulders of the iPhone. That’s acceptable.

If Steve Jobs or another senior executive had come out in June 2009, just several months before the iPad was to be announced, and outright said that they weren’t making a tablet, there’s possible legal exposure there. It’s well known that by that point Apple would have been knee-deep in R&D on the iPad as a product intended for release.

Joswiak is not the only Apple executive. There have been other explicit denials from Apple executives that there will be a touchscreen Mac, including one from Craig Federighi in November — quoted earlier in this very thread. He said that the design changes in macOS Big Sur are “not some signaling of a future change in input methods,” which addresses your point precisely, unless you would like to argue that the addition of touch would not constitute a “change in input methods.”
 
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Notice the significant difference is size
Do you seriously think Apple just forgot to consider how lar when recommending its 44-pt square minimum in the HIG?

The slider gets a pass to dip below that because the hit area is already given to you visually (with the handle), giving you something to “aim” for where shapeless buttons don’t. Even with that leniency given to the macOS Control Center sliders, they’re pushing it because they’re rendered smaller in the first place.

It appears you’re trying to will touch-ready macOS UI into existence by setting your display resolution lower than native resolution. Something tells me that won’t go over well.

Short of that, I still don’t know what the hell you’re doing with scaling. Points are points are points. Please kindly directly explain the math behind your scaling, explain why points on Macs will suddenly become larger, or quit wasting both of our time by proving to me that you know how to use grab handles in Adobe XD.
 
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There’s a difference between genuinely having no imminent plans to release a product at a given time and actively lying to the public (specifically investors, as a publicly traded company).

Apple didn’t have a tablet product remotely near production in 2003 before they pivoted to the iPhone, and they didn’t plan on pursuing it for the time being. They didn’t, and then several years later they changed their minds once they could build the tablet on the shoulders of the iPhone. That’s acceptable.

If Steve Jobs or another senior executive had come out in June 2009, just several months before the iPad was to be announced, and outright said that they weren’t making a tablet, there’s possible legal exposure there. It’s well known that by that point Apple would have been knee-deep in R&D on the iPad as a product intended for release.

Joswiak is not the only Apple executive. There have been other explicit denials from Apple executives that there will be a touchscreen Mac, including one from Craig Federighi in November — quoted earlier in this very thread. He said that the design changes in macOS Big Sur are “not some signaling of a future change in input methods,” which addresses your point precisely, unless you would like to argue that the addition of touch would not constitute a “change in input methods.”

I disagree because for one, they filed a patent for multi-touch in 2004, which confirms their intention of a developing tablet, even if it was a long term possibility.

I'll give you another example where Apple was actually working on the product and yet they were at best 'misleading. iPod video. Jobs dismissed it vehemently twice in 2003 and 2004, yet introduced iPod video in 2005. https://www.engadget.com/2004-04-29-steve-jobs-says-it-again-no-video-ipod.html

"You can't watch a video and drive a car," he said. "We're focused on music."

But again if you look closely, it's a game of words. There is no outright direct lie, Apple is working on music, (just not exclusively!). See?

Joswiak is playing the same game. This is the game Apple has been playing for decades.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's imminent that touch is coming to mac, or that mac is coming to iPad. And it could be true there are no immediate plans to do so. But you can't tell me Apple doesn't have a contigency plan, or a plan B that they are not disclosing. And Big Sur may setting up the groundwork in case the contingency plan needs to be enacted.

In the same way they planned a contingency to switch from PowerPC to Intel at any sight of trouble, while at the same time Jobs was saying that Apple was committed to PowerPC.
 
And it could be true there are no immediate plans to do so. But you can't tell me Apple doesn't have a contigency plan, or a plan B that they are not disclosing. And Big Sur may setting up the groundwork in case the contingency plan needs to be enacted.
The plan will be that the iPad continues to get Mac-oriented features, re-imagined for a touchscreen, as they make sense to Apple. I am willing to bet my last dollar that Apple will never port macOS in its current incarnation to the iPad (or any subset of iPads).
 
It appears you’re trying to will touch-ready macOS UI into existence by setting your display resolution lower than native resolution. Something tells me that won’t go over well.

Stop being disingenuous. I showed both tests, native resolution, and middle resolution. In both cases the UI element has a target size comparable to that found on other iOS products, in my example I'm showing an iPad Mini. I took a direct photo showing the devices where it's clear the target size in Big Sur is comparable and viable for touch, even at the default resolution.

Yet you keep claiming the UI size isn't ready for touch, a claim that you can't back up because there is no AHIG that you can cite.
 
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The plan will be that the iPad continues to get Mac-oriented features, re-imagined for a touchscreen, as they make sense to Apple. I am willing to bet my last dollar that Apple will never port macOS in its current incarnation to the iPad (or any subset of iPads).
Don’t need to. Just wrapping Mac apps and letting them run fullscreen on iPad Pros is sufficient.
 
Unfortunately that’s why they’ll never give macOS to iPad. Apple wants us to buy both a mac and an iPad.
A new interview with Greg Joswiak was released today by Techcrunch and he reiterated again, no merging iPad / macOS or macOS coming to the iPad Pro.

 
Don’t need to. Just wrapping Mac apps and letting them run fullscreen on iPad Pros is sufficient.
How would that work? Mac apps have helper apps, daemon tasks, and things like plugins. Mac apps expect to have access to a fairly unrestricted file system. Allowing those things in iPadOS changes the nature of the iPad. I think it is a bit more complicated than just wrapping an application.
 
How would that work? Mac apps have helper apps, daemon tasks, and things like plugins. Mac apps expect to have access to a fairly unrestricted file system. Allowing those things in iPadOS changes the nature of the iPad. I think it is a bit more complicated than just wrapping an application.
A walled filesystem mirroring that of a Mac can co-exist (and be ignored by iPadOS) that shows those apps what they need.
 
A walled filesystem mirroring that of a Mac can co-exist (and be ignored by iPadOS) that shows those apps what they need.
Would all wrapped Mac apps share the same walled file system? That would be very different from the current iPadOS. I’m not disagreeing with you. I just think wrapping all of macOS as a virtual machine would accomplish the same thing and actually be easier too.
 
Problem with the VM is it may mean you need to interact with the GUI of the MacOS instead of what I described, where you simply had the app.
 
Problem with the VM is it may mean you need to interact with the GUI of the MacOS instead of what I described, where you simply had the app.
That’s an implementation detail. I trust that Apple would work that out. The various Mac VMs have modes that integrate Windows and Linux apps as Mac GUI windows. A macOS VM could do something similar. Most Mac applications are multi-window so you can’t just have full-screen without changing the way the application works.
 
The ONLY reason they wouldn’t is to simply sell two pieces of hardware. Last year, I sold my MacBook Pro and bought the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard. It does everything I needed my MacBook for and does leaps and bounds more because of iOS. I don’t see a reason to go back. It just comes down to preference, but as a company its less efficient to be working on two different OSs and developing so many devices. They could hit that green mark so much quicker and have larger profits.
 
But they use the same hardware, exactly the same
Not exactly the same. There is one big way the iMac and Mac Mini are far superior to the iPad: they plug into wall for power so they achieve desktop class performance and they have no battery to take up space and cost extra money.
 
they plug into wall for power so they achieve desktop class performance
Everything Apple makes plugs into wall for power at some point or another… being plugged in doesn’t make the processor compute any differently. (For Intel chips, it IS true that top performance required some devices to be plugged in, but these are Apple Silicon)
 
I'm teaching my kid to learn python with pygame library. It is absolute no problem to install Python3+VScode on my iMac. I don't think there is an equivalent way to do it on iPad.
I thought Apple had apps to teach coding or something like that (maybe just for Swift).

If there are no apps for teaching Python on the App Store then that is egregious and it should go on my list.
 
I was all in on the iPad Pro but now I’m rethinking that support in light of the availability of the M1 MacBook Air and the refusal of Apple to consider running macOS apps (including Finder) on the iPad Pro. My ideal computer work environment would be a desktop Mac and a mobile device. That mobile device has always been some sort of MacBook but in the last few years I’ve experimented with the iPad Pro. As long as I have a decent net connection it is pretty workable by running a remote connection to my desktop either with Screens or lately Jump Desktop. Along with the Magic Keyboard the remote connection allows me to do whatever I can’t with iPadOS. The problem is that this solution isn’t tenable in locations without LTE or reasonably high-speed WiFi. When you need to do something that the iPad is poor at or in some cases can’t do at all, it is very frustrating and it can cost productivity.

My previous MacBook was a 2018 13” MacBook Pro. It was an ok computer but nothing great. The iPad Pro was better in most ways except the communication limitations as described. Now the M1 Air is available and it is better in every way than the Intel MBP. It is lightweight with a battery easily lasting a full day and it performs better than the old MBP. The competition for the mobile device just got a lot tougher for the iPad Pro. But the M1 iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard still has better hardware in almost every way. I was hoping that Apple would go with the M1 in the next iPad Pro for the performance and because the M1 has support for virtualization. I see virtualizing macOS as solving all of my issues with iPadOS.

The cool thing about virtualized macOS is that it doesn‘t have to change the nature of iPadOS. Only people who needed it would download it as an app. It would run in the normal iPadOS sandbox so it isn’t a security problem. The hypervisor virtualizes the hardware so the Thunderbolt/USB4 port is available. iPadOS already restricts every app to a protected file directory hierarchy so the whole Finder file system would be cordoned off from the rest of the iPadOS apps. But iCloud and access to the Files app would be available as normal for iPadOS integration.

The best part is that most of work has already been done in Big Sur. That’s why it is so discouraging to hear pronouncements like this. Why not be open to ways to solve your customers problems especially when it would have no impact on any iPad user who wasn’t interested. It only complicates the iPad when desired in much the same way that a sophisticated iPadOS app does. I want to be optimistic that Apple is thinking in these terms but statements like the ones reported here make it seem unlikely.
Interesting. I don’t know much about virtualization. Would it run and make use of the hardware as efficiently as native/non-virtual? Would people get and install Mac apps via the Mac App Store inside this virtualization? There’d be no issues regarding how to divid up the iPad’s storage between the OSes?
 
I believe them as well, at least for the moment.

I agree, I think the iPad should continue to remain the tool that it is; however, for an iPad Pro with the same level of compute power and capability as a regular Mac, I would think macOS (in some form) would make sense. Hell, call it iPadOS, but open it up.
It is called iPadOS haha 😆. I don’t know, I think iPad will always improve but will always be limited compared to Mac because of its target market. It needs to be very approachable to very non technical people, which means things like an open file system won’t fly which is kind of necessary for heavy file creators. And having an OS that switches modes seems like a lot of work for maybe not a huge market, and might bog down the device in some way for people who don’t need it. If a large enough market exists for such a device it might happen though. But I think they just give it power because it’s readily available. The a14x wouldn’t be very different from the m1 from what I hear, so it’s probably just saving them money to consolidate chips.
 
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