It's interesting reading people complaining that iPad can't play more than one audio source at once. My experience with the Mac is it often plays multiple things at the same time when I don't want it to, and also when I try to use the keyboard pause key it will often fail to stop the thing that IS playing and instead start something ELSE playing that I don't want. Much prefer the iPad way of dealing with audio
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iPad as a laptop replacement
- Thread starter Omar Comin' Yo
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I have an MS Surface Pro where Office is full on and a 13" M4 Pro where it's partially hobbled - and I think this is exactly how MS wants it.
Totally agree. I have never found myself wishing for multiple simultaneous audio streams personally. I think as an optional toggleable thing it would be fine, but I don’t think it’s a very common feature request, so probably not very high priority. 👍🏻
Exactly. At this point Microsoft has zero excuse to not deliver much better, and really hasn’t had any excuses for probably the past 5 years. Especially since we have to pay for access to it. iPadOS has never been the problem on this front, Microsoft just clearly doesn’t seem to want to provide a more fully-featured Office, presumably because it would dig into their Surface Pro marketing pitch. Hopefully they face enough pressure that they eventually have to cave and do better, or get overcome by the competition in the office software field. Rather than succeeding in pushing me towards a Surface Pro, all they succeeded in doing was pushing me away from Office, and I use Apple’s iWork suite of software. They’re free, and aren’t lacking a bunch of basic features like Office. The only Microsoft softwares I use on any regular basis now are OneDrive and OneNote.
Interesting example. I tried it out on my Windows machine and the two sources played together, over each other.
For some people, the issue is an inability to listen to two things at once, or listen to one thing while watching a separate video muted. For others, like myself, the issue is that when I am listening to something, such as music, and I load a web page that has some source that could play audio, such as an embedded video, the system stops my existing audio playback even if I have no intention of playing that embedded video, requiring me to go back to my original audio source and hit play again. This is annoying.
Edit: exactly what richpjr said above.
Yeah. Unfortunately, when working with Office files shared amongst others, you're stuck staying with Office - you don't want to be the one who screwed up a document because you went with a different app.
I don’t know… you looking at it from the standpoint of digging into the Surface Pro sales, but Microsoft has a Windows OS that’s licensed to many OEMs.
Just how Apple likes to keep their features tied to their OS (AirDrop & iMessage)… Microsoft is practically doing the same. What I don’t get why folks complain about not having full Office support on the iPad, but don’t mention that Microsoft limits the Mac version too.
Yeah, I understand the concerns there, I manage some business documents with others who use Microsoft, and so far I have never run into any issues if I export the document as a Word document from Pages. 👍🏻
Yeah, that’s a good point, I guess it’s probably more about securing OS distribution than the particular hardware. And they definitely do limit the Mac version as well. I think they treat the Mac version only marginally better from what I recall last I tried Office on the Mac. 👍🏻. Good points. 👍🏻
Yep, try using the Apple Music app from the Windows Store - not a great user experience.
In a previous discussion on this platform, there was a detailed exploration of alternative office suites. I initially contributed with Open Office, but I was promptly informed that it was an outdated software and that there were significantly superior packages available. Their assessment was accurate; Open Office was compatible with Microsoft Office at the time.
The Windows App Store is the Temu of App stores. This is the reason why I have Amazon Music and YouTube Music on my NucBox.
Yeah, I know some people run into that, and I’m not opposed to an option for it, I just haven’t really ever had an issue with it, and I’ve had several times when I wanted to switch from listening to one thing to another, and was glad that iPadOS handles that automatically. I guess I view it more as a feature than a con. And if I want to listen to music and think I may run into videos that play audio or something, I can always just play the music on my iPhone which I use for my music most of the time anyways.
I went back and tested it, and I can confirm that it creates a single workspace without Stage Manager. With Stage Manager enabled, you can create as many app groups as you want with as many windows in them as you want. 👍🏻
Yeah in the business world there essential not competition for Office, if you don't want to mess with your client's / colleagues' work made in Office, you should use Office, fullstop.
Has anyone ever run into issues with exporting documents out of Pages as Word documents though? In my experience, as long as you’re using standard fonts, I’ve never had an issue with the inter-compatibility of Pages with Office, at least not with what I’m doing with it. Though I do mostly just fill out forms I created with the custom document templates functionality in Pages, and then forward them off to another person who uses Office. I also have worked on collaborative documents with someone using Word (and me using Pages) and I didn’t encounter any issues. Again though, my use here is more limited, so maybe there’s something I’m missing?
The one (albeit niche) time I need two sources is when playing guitar. I plug a guitar into an audio interface and play along to songs from a playlist in Music on my Mac - would love to be able to do that on my iPad.
We worked with a lot of design documents, requirements specs and other CDRLs, all under formal configuration control. Woe to the employee who screwed one up.
So it seems to me that unlike with the previous iteration where you had full screen apps, Split View/slideover, or Stage Manager, with iPadOS 26, you really just have one windowing system, with the user left to decide how much to use. If you keep all your apps in full screen mode, then it will feel like the original iPad OS. If you decide to shrink at least one app into a smaller window, then you have one space/stage to play with for any apps you shrink with as many windows open as you want. In that space, you can also use the new tiling modes if you want. If you decide one work space is not enough for you, then you toggle on Stage Manager in order to create and jump between multiple work spaces (with as many windows open in each stage), which will then give you the stages tray on the left for that purpose (which you can hide off screen if you want).
Edit: here I'm just talking about on the iPad Screen itself. I never use an external display and haven't really thought about that.
If it's things that are created in Pages, and then used in Word, it's fine. But if it's things created in Word, especially with complex formatting, Pages or even Open Office can cause serious issues. Same with PowerPoint. And most businesses use MS Office.
Probably not? But man I liked the look of the new windowing system. I’m too conservative to try it out before the release though so I am enjoying first impressions from braver souls.
If they would just add Smart Albums to Photos on iPad I could give it a little more thought.
Well, now with iPad OS26, I was thinking about it for a little bit. However, Xcode is still not on iPad, and until the iPad gets a full fledged version of Xcode, I just can't make the switch. So my iPad and my Mac still go with me everywhere when I am on the road. I just gotta have both. Haha. But for the average user, hell, even video editors and content creators, it is 100% doable in my opinion now with iPadOS 26.