The traffic light buttons wouldn’t work well for touch interactions. They are far too small, and by the time you make them big enough to tap, you’ll be wasting a lot more screen real-estate for no good reason. It makes more sense to use the Multitasking Menu button that iPadOS does, because it’s a single smaller button that expands into separate buttons that are appropriately sized for touch.
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$349 is insane? I've used both an iPad 10 and a Tab S6 Lite, the price gulf is very justified.
There are major workflow problems in iPadOS with things like saving files, opening files, print workflows, etc. iPadOS should not mimic macOS, because it should be a touch first UX. But, more attention needs to be paid to how a user can complete processes. For example, right now it is way faster and easier for me to add PDFs to iBooks, or save them to a folder, on Mac compared to iPad. That does not need to be the case, and has nothing to do with traffic light buttons.
I literally see no difference between saving files, opening files is easy, and printing works perfectly fine. And when it comes to PDFs, I can save those to iBooks very easily with the Share Sheet. It’s basically the same, I don’t know how people conclude these things. I use an iPad every day for my primary computer, and I’ve used a Mac and still have one for a few niche secondary things, and I see zero difference in speed with things like that…
I use an iPad as my primary device as well. I use an iMac at home. Saving PDFs is not the same. Sometimes I have to save 20+ at the same time. I also want to sort them into a collection in books. This is much harder on iPad than on Mac.
Just low standards, I think, and inflated expectations on features that haven’t shipped yet.
I’m happy to see an iPadOS thread that isn’t another “are you disappointed” or “are you sending your M4 iPad Pro back” rant thread. I agree, iOS and iPadOS 18 actually bring some really nice features.
I read it more as counter-trolling to troll the iPad doomsayers, in response to all those “are you returning your M4 iPad” and “iPadOS is a huge letdown” type threads (which themselves probably are part serious grievance, part trolling).
Agreed. Tho, I’d rather wait for an excellent Siri than muddling through several iterations of mediocre/underperforming Siri’s.
Can’t wait to see what it’s capable of doing!
You do know that Apple Intelligence is also coming to M1 Macs and later and what if people need more CPU, GPU and RAM than an iPad Pro can provide….
People use macOS because of the desktop apps, the freedom, the ability to use multiple monitors. There are so many reasons as to why people use macOS and Macs. All of the additions to iPadOS are coming to Mac as well.
In fact macOS 15 got features that iPadOS 18 did not like window snapping and iPhone Mirroring.
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The bigger M chips are the Pro and Max chips those are real powerful and those will remain on the Mac due to active cooling.
The thing is there has always been potential, but the developers aren't making use of said potential. There's the basis of the gripes. The people who know how to code and make apps happen aren't making things happen for us consumers to see the potential being used.
You're not going to get us excited any more with just potential.
You're not going to get us excited any more with just potential.
For those who complain about iPads not having MacOS, I would challenge them to use Windows on a similar size touchscreen device for 5 days and see how many times they resort to a keyboard and mouse instead of touch. A desktop OS doesn’t translate to touch-based interfaces.
On the other hand, now that Apple has finally embraced AI, I believe we will see a paradigm shift in how people interact with their phones and tablets. I predict that even touch-based interaction will decline and more people will shift to voice-controlled AI interaction. “remove the lens flare in the upper right and change the subject’s eyes to dark blue“ will be an AI prompt that can happen on a desktop or tablet. Why spend hours correcting photos when you have them completed in mere seconds by AI?
’AI will not replace people. People who use AI will replace those who do not’
On the other hand, now that Apple has finally embraced AI, I believe we will see a paradigm shift in how people interact with their phones and tablets. I predict that even touch-based interaction will decline and more people will shift to voice-controlled AI interaction. “remove the lens flare in the upper right and change the subject’s eyes to dark blue“ will be an AI prompt that can happen on a desktop or tablet. Why spend hours correcting photos when you have them completed in mere seconds by AI?
’AI will not replace people. People who use AI will replace those who do not’
Exactly, I think people underestimate how much AI can add to iPadOS in terms of functionality. I think Apple Intelligence is the big part of the story we haven’t seen yet. I think it will unlock a lot of functionality in iPadOS, and I think it could revolutionize multitasking and general workflow. 👍🏻
Unless Apple Intelligence can unlock “render and export this Final Cut project while I browse the web with YouTube running in a PiP” I doubt it will revolutionize multitasking in the way many people want.
An example above of how we could use AI was “remove the lens flare in the upper right and change the subject’s eyes to dark blue“, but that’s not multitasking. Those are multiple tasks within the same app. Multitasking is running multiple apps simultaneously and the iPad is still really bad at this. AI will help with some aspects of this, as according to the demo you can have it pull data from and write to multiple apps within the system but I highly doubt it’s going to stop iPadOS from shutting down background processes as aggressively as it does. All of the people I’ve seen who praise the iPad as a primary computer specifically say they like the experience of working within one app at a time because it helps them focus. AI isn’t going to fundamentally change that.
And Apple Intelligence is also coming to the Mac, so you’ll still see a disparity between iPad and macOS because macOS is inherently a less limited system. I just don’t see any way that AI fixes the fundamental limitations of iPadOS.
An example above of how we could use AI was “remove the lens flare in the upper right and change the subject’s eyes to dark blue“, but that’s not multitasking. Those are multiple tasks within the same app. Multitasking is running multiple apps simultaneously and the iPad is still really bad at this. AI will help with some aspects of this, as according to the demo you can have it pull data from and write to multiple apps within the system but I highly doubt it’s going to stop iPadOS from shutting down background processes as aggressively as it does. All of the people I’ve seen who praise the iPad as a primary computer specifically say they like the experience of working within one app at a time because it helps them focus. AI isn’t going to fundamentally change that.
And Apple Intelligence is also coming to the Mac, so you’ll still see a disparity between iPad and macOS because macOS is inherently a less limited system. I just don’t see any way that AI fixes the fundamental limitations of iPadOS.
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It will likely improve multitasking by removing the requirement of navigating to an app in the background to grab a bit of data, a file, or whatever to insert into the foreground process you’re working on. And we will have to see how it impacts active background tasks, but iPadOS currently handles background tasks. I believe it’s only some apps that don’t take proper advantage of it that have issues.
sameeeee. I like the update a bit, but “revolutionary” and being THIS excited is a little over the top for such a mid update. But I’m glad people are happy. Or at least 1 person is
I still can’t edit a TextEdit file created on a laptop (MacOS) on an ipad. … no, not even on an ipad “Pro”. Just did a Apple call where they suggest just using Pages, which does (somewhat) work better. But I have many plain text files that I work with regularly, that I can VIEW ONLY on the tablet. Why continue this omission for so long? It bothers me. And that along with the Notes app not making it easy to save notes as a text file, nor to backup Notes with any sort of ease.
Sorry, a little bit of a rant perhaps, but I don’t share OP‘s exuberance about the latest iPadOS version.
Sorry, a little bit of a rant perhaps, but I don’t share OP‘s exuberance about the latest iPadOS version.
You are totally right, I can’t stand that it’s so hard to rename files on iPad.
It’s outrageous that Apple doesn’t give us a Terminal window where we can type “mv abc.txt 123.txt”
Curious what you use text files for? It could be that a laptop is still the best solution for your use case.
What you on about the iPad is just a big iPhone it’s so bad it’s embarrassing; m4 for what exactly