And ”opinion piece“ doesn’t equal “I get to present opinions as facts”. No logical fallacies involved, just pointing out his false claims. Think whatever you want…
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
And you repeating the same logical fallacies doesn’t invalidate someone’s empirical findings.
You keep saying that, but as I recall, you didn’t even correctly describe the “faulty appeal to authority” fallacy, so there’s that…
I rewatched the portion of the keynote about Apple Intelligence, and beyond all of the features that they did cover that will be incorporated with Apple Intelligence, they also said that they’d be adding additional features and functions. So I think it’s likely we’ll see some more features that ship with Apple Intelligence than just what was demonstrated there, which is exciting because what they demonstrated alone is going to be huge for streamlining workflow in my opinion. I also caught that we’ll be able to test it this summer in the betas if I understood that part correctly, which would mean we actually don’t have to wait all the way until fall to start seeing some of those improvements! 👍🏻
Makes sense then, stage manager seems to be the way to achieve proper background multitasking for now - I guess the apps in one stage are all considered 'foreground'.
So I wouldn't go as far as to say that background processing on the iPad is perfectly unrestricted, I think it could be opened up further.
And I'd really like a setting for when stage manager is on - to adjust the default behavior when opening an app that isn't in this stage. To me, it should add the app to the current stage by default, instead of creating a new stage with the one app every time. Basically invert the current tap and shift + tap behavior.
And when it reaches 4 apps in a stage, just remove the least recently used app from the stage.
That isn’t true. The Smart Script features are only available on the iPad, because they make use of the Apple Pencil. And several of the math notation features in the Calculator app are also only on the iPad. Besides, just because a feature is added to other devices as well as the iPad doesn’t mean it won’t be very impactful to the iPad. Ex. Stage Manager which was shared between the iPad and the Mac.
Well, WidgetKit allows widgets to get background updates independently of the main app now, including URLSession calls. However it’s still subject to quotas. Don’t remember exactly, but something like not more than once in 15 minutes or so.
This might not apply to this discussion but frequently on my M4 Pro when I toggle between apps the app refreshes. I notice this in the Music app and YouTube and I also notice it in weather apps. This evening I hit the lock button instead of delete on the keyboard by mistake. When I unlocked my device all my Safari tabs reloaded. I feel like Apple is way too aggressive here. I understand why it was necessary when the iPhone and iPad first came out but on a device that has a chip like the M4 and 8GB RAM? Why so aggressive with memory management?
It's the reality of running a blown up phone operating system. It was never designed from the ground up to do what more and more iPad users seem to be demanding: better multi-tasking, which means more robust background processes. As I mentioned, one main problem with iPadOS is a lack of virtual memory: compared to macOS, it's a gimmick and the virtual memory only became available recently in iPadOS... and only really works with Stage Manager and has limited performance given the hardware/flash memory along with the constraints the OS applies to it. The end result is a lot of memory swapping, meaning apps get dumped out of memory.
So without a robust virtual memory framework like in macOS, it's not possible to reliably run a bunch of stuff in the background... the memory runway runs out fast. Another problem... is thermals and battery life. iPadOS, like iOS, is fully designed for thin and portable devices meant to be used on battery only, not plugged into the wall. So the OS is aggressive in shutting down background processes... which leads to the other main thing... iOS/iPadOS is designed based on the concept of card views. Apps are like playing cards. And whatever card is showing at a particular time, is what the OS throws the majority of its resources at. It's different, in many ways, compared to macOS. It's more of a one trick pony so to speak, comparatively speaking.
Last edited:
Are you using Stage Manager? With Stage Manager, I don’t even normally have this issue on my M1 iPad. With Stage Manager, background processes run differently than without it, probably due to the use of VRAM. There’s a notable difference.
I can hopefully contribute something fruitful here. For D, all Viticci needed to do to the "Edits ticci story.md" file he wanted to open was just change the file extension from .md to .md.prefferedMarkdownEditor. iPadOS uses file extensions to determine which app a file is opened in, just like macOS. Markdown files are text files that typically or casually uses the .md file extension to indicate a text file is using Markdown formatting.
He could have change it to .txt and it would have opened in Files. If he had Textastic, he could have changed the file extension to .textastic and tapping it would have opened it in Textastic. His Markdown editor of choice should have a native file extension and should have supported a network storage service of his choice.
The issue Viticci likely encountered was that the Delta game emulator committed a major bad by claiming the .md filename extension as belonging to Delta. I presume the default app for files is based on the most recently installed app, and hence .md files opened in Delta rather than whatever app he used before. There aren't any good reasons whatsoever for Delta to do this, and Delta should be criticized for this.
Of course, apps are supposed to register what files they can open so that they can appear in the Share sheet. So, all the apps that opened the .md file before should have appeared in the share sheet, and Viticci should have been able to use the share sheet. There needs to be a UI for setting default apps to file extensions, like in macOS, but not yet there obviously. It doesn't means users are left without options however.
That is good to know. Didn’t consider that. Have to play with that.
Still, the author’s point is valid as a general user should not have to jump through hoops to get a needed function. I’m in the camp that there should be an easier way to accomplish this task. Currently it isn’t there. For the general user and user knowledge level. Biggest issue I see is that a lot of this functionality is there but not easily accessible by the average user. They just don’t know and Apple makes little effort to “educate” or “inform” the user.
Reading back through Federico Veticci’s article, I think some of the things he says could be read two different ways. On rereading it, I think he is meaning to say that background tasks on iPadOS aren’t as consistent as on macOS and more limited, not necessarily that they aren’t at all possible. Though what he wrote implies that none are possible at all. And that wouldn’t be accurate. I think on a second read-through, I jumped to some wrong conclusions on what he was trying to say. Though I totally disagree with him on some of his takes in there, such as “Files is a bad product”. But I do think that it’s phrased too ambiguously for my preferences, and that he winds up heavily implying a number of things in his article that I don’t think are consistent with the facts, or for that matter, his actual opinion and thoughts when reading other pieces of his. 👍🏻
Last edited:
Your lived experiences with using an iPad is just as valuable as Viticci's experiences. Never discount that.
Viticci can only talk about how he likes to compute and how he wants to do it. It basically stops there, and even with that, I'd be careful in applying what he says about the workflows he uses because I'm not so sure he knows what he is talking about even there. It's not to say that he doesn't know what he's talking about - he has his lived experience which is indeed valuable and knowledgeable - but computing systems are complex and it's pretty rare to find anyone who knows how to do everything. His article definitely indicates he doesn't know all of the iPad's capabilities.
Like, most readers should have to just surfed away when the thing he lead with was iPadOS missing simple apps, where he said "Of all the issues I have with iPadOS, I want to start with a relatively simple one: some apps from macOS and iOS just aren’t available on the platform." His examples were: Calculator, TextEdit, Preview and Journal.
First of all, he forgot to include the words, "... available on the platform by default." Even with that, that lead-in item to the article was ********. There are ample apps on the platform to do those things. That those apps are not there by default is not some deficiency of iPadOS, especially in an article about its problems. It's easily solvable and not a problem. Why he choose to lead with that, who knows? It was stupid. It's one of those things that makes you question his expertise, and maybe you shouldn't read the article at all.
I agree with him that "desktop" apps are few and far between, and something Apple promulgates itself. It's a technical debt from the iPad having small amounts of RAM without a page file, so this one is slow going until the iPad makes its way to more professional workflows. Not sure what Apple can do about MS Office. MS purposely leaves features out of the non-Windows version of Office to ensure its Windows dominance. Apple has to count itself lucky that the MS Exchange team was off the reservation in letting companies interface with the email server well. Apple has to press to get full-featured Xcode, FCP, Terminal.app and hypervisors for iPadOS. Same with visionOS.
You already disagree with him on the Files.app. He lists several esoteric features that are niche use cases (Shortcuts and Quick Actions), and lists something of questionable value, and ignores that you have 3rd party file managers available. During my vacation the last 3 weeks, I imported gigabytes of images from SD cards directly into photos and downloaded gigabytes of photos from a photographer's Google Drive directly into the Files.app on my iPP10.5. It had progress icons and transfer rate data displayed. Seems to work fine. I already talked about his app association issue. So, if you are a ShortCuts users, there may be problems with the Files.app? Otherwise, the 97% of the remaining userbase is likely unaware.
For multitasking, Viticci is not a Stage Manager user. So, you should doubt anything he says about it as he likely doesn't use it enough. To this day, none of the Apple mediarati have written about what the characteristics of Stage Manager are. Like, if you are connected to an external display with Stage Manager, are all 8 windows: 4 on the iPad display and 4 on the external display, live and running? What are the characteristics of the pagefile, how large will iPadOS let it grow? What apps stop running when they lose input focus (ie, do they run in the background if their window is displayed but doesn't have input focus)?
The biggest issue among the Apple mediarati with iPads boils down to one thing imo: there isn't a way to record multiple streams of audio. They need a way to record their own audio while recording multiple audio streams from conferencing platforms of their choice. If this was there, it lets them podcast on iPads, and I think 99% of their whining goes away. Whether Apple enables that who knows. If meeting software enables that, it may mean they can use iPads full time.
Did you play with file extensions? What's your experience?
Viticci was basically writing in the first person. He wasn't speaking for the mass market, average user, and was talking about his issues. Average users don't use Shortcuts, they don't podcast, they aren't web publishers. Changing file extensions is what you can do with macOS too. It's basically a 40+ year old implementation of associating files to apps. Proficient users should know of it, and there really isn't an excuse for Viticci. He deals with markdown files and text files all day. He has a direct line to developers of multitudes of apps, including Delta.
I question whether has was on the up and up after reading that statement about not knowing what to do about a .md file.
I agree, I think many of the things he said were problematic due to either his not regularly using certain features like Stage Manager, or not being aware of some features as you said. It’s puzzling to me that so many people still claim Files lacks a file progress indicator, when it’s right there and obvious if you regularly use the Files app. It’s been there since iPadOS 15. And I also don’t see the need for a separate Preview app when Quick Look does most of the same things within the same app, so no odd app hopping to get a preview of a photo like with the Finder and separate Preview app on macOS. And third parties also already offer solutions for these things, even a Terminal app. Xcode is a thing I think could be ported, though you can write code for the iPad on the iPad now with Swift Playgrounds, which has a nice IDE interface. I’m not sure that Apple will ever port niche apps like TextEdit and Terminal, because I think the vast majority of users don’t use these things.
He does know, he's been reviewing iPad updates in depth for at least 5 years... so, he's well accumulated to what he can do with the iPad. Granted, there's always new apps and workflows to discover... but for the most part he's aware of iPad capabilities.
He's only pushing this narrative to get macOS onto the iPad, it's that simple.
Bingo! This is the one area where Apple needs to address, it's the low hanging fruit.
And it was rumored to be announced for iPadOS 17... by way of enforcing it through Stage Manager, but no word of it since. Apple gave us the ability to control output when connected to a monitor in iPadOS 17.... yet we are waiting on simultaneously audio streams.
Christopher Lawley of YT found a method to record podcast on the iPad... he uses a mic to record into some external device, not sure exactly what it is. But it's certainly possible.
Maybe you and I are reading that in two different ways. To my understanding, he was (myself also) looking a way to define the default app for a file extension. You can define it each instance, but not as default unless it is specifically from an app or an Apple default app.
My limited testing on this is if you use the share menu item on a file with a particular file extension, choose an app to open with, then files with that file extension defaults to using that app. This changes again if you choose a different app to open the file of said file extension using the share menu. Compatibility applies like normal.
Obviously, since people can have different readings of Viticci's words, he should have written with more clarity.
Yes, he wants to have a GUI way to do it. Understandable criticism, but he then sprinkles in this: "On the iPad, every document you click in Files defaults to showing you a Quick Look preview, and there is no way to tell the system that you want to view the document with another app instead" or this: "John sent me edits for this story as a .md file. Since I have a beta of Delta for iPad installed, the Files app is convinced that this file is a SEGA Genesis game, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. I wish I was kidding."
Obviously false, right? I just did it with Textastic, Pages, and Pythonista by using the share menu. You don't even need to change the file extension. You just need to use the share menu.
There is nothing magical about file extensions. The OS maintains a database of file extensions and apps that say that can open them. It's a way of telling the OS what app can open what file. With text formatted files, it's basically a free-for-all as any app can open them and you can change them at will. Markdown files are text files, just like html files, python scripts and whatnot.
For some apps, you need to have the right extension to get the proper text highlighting, and if so, change the extension and/or open it from inside the app.
Last edited:
I try to give him the benefit of doubt. He doesn't know everything about the iPad. He knows a lot of about Shortcuts and web publishing, but other aspects of the iPad, I bet he doesn't really know them that well.
Like, I saw a Youtube video where a FCP export wasn't stopped when the user switched away from it, but they were using Stage Manager, which Viticci admits to not using by default. FCP exports being cancelled while in Stage Manager could also be a function of how much RAM is free on an iPad. Perhaps a 16 GB RAM iPad with Stage Manager doesn't have FCP exports cancelled while in background for more cases? What's going on here? I don't know.
Would actually like to know what the Stage Manager multitasking characteristics are. It's been 2 years, and the Apple media-sphere obviously have no desire to cover it, test it, etc. Really, what is happening to the page-file when the user enters and exits Stage Manager?
There are a lot of virtual keyboard and multitasking gesture inputs that are just not described too. They are pretty powerful, but are not covered because most of them use iPads with keyboards. They use them like laptops, not tablets. There's a bit of expectations mismanagement there.
There really needs to be full terminal emulator app where the user can download arbitrary packages, libraries and compile code.
The terminal emulators available in the App Store have to ship with all the tools inside the app, and users can download CLI apps, packages or libraries with them. There's always something missing from those apps.
Apple should put Terminal.app (and XQuartz or other X-Window emulator) onto iPadOS and visionOS. Let people compute. They are niche cases, but these type of tools will increase where you can use an iPad, just like all the calls for system level, multi-stream audio recording will.
It enables iPads to be used in more places. Like iPadOS 18 calculator includes the big dream of symbolic math with Math Notes. Writing down your equations in a meaningful way is very nice. Terminal.app, or coding language support, enables the next step of taking what you mathematically model by hand on "pencil and paper" to written code. That's a nice step that they really should take.
I’m not opposed to them adding a Terminal app in iPadOS, I just don’t know how likely it is to be incorporated. 👍🏻