I totally agree with this. Every change that Apple makes to iOS and the iPad is making the experience more difficult, more complicated, less elegant. Even though they are clearly trying hard to keep the baseline experience the same and hiding the power user features, there are still compromises being made.
I thought the iPad was a miracle product when it was first announced. I bought one right away for my parents, who were not that old, but still old enough that managing a Windows machine or a Mac was a trying experience. Ever since then it's been all the computer they've wanted, because it just works, and because they only need to be familiar with one operating system across phone and tablet.
Likewise it's been great for some of my employees who work in the field, not just the older ones but all of those who never developed fluency with regular computers. I used to get tech support calls from all directions but these have greatly diminished.
For the elderly, for people who have spent their lives working with their hands and not with screens, and for children too, the iPad has finally made the internet accessible. And what's usable for people with special needs is good design for people without them, like those Oxo kitchen utensils.
I suppose everything's got to change, though, to keep people consuming. Now setup is difficult, there are too many different long press durations that do different things, too many multi-finger gestures, weird behaviors that I guess are trying to bridge the iPad and iPhone X experiences, and a multitasking UX that I think is way more complicated than overlapping windows on a Mac.
I wonder: do children, who have grown up with iPads but not computers, who can type 60 wpm on screens, ever use split screen or any of the advanced gestures?
