So I could see the other argument here: I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Now, another operating system might see this tension and say: why not have a UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen or stay on the existing shared window?
Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Nobody wants complexity for complexity’s sake, but this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up.
I think there’s a solution that fits within the Apple Design culture that they already use. If you’re connected to a display you can already click the “AirPlay” icon to change the audio output location. (Eg I’m connected to a display via usbc cable but want the audio to go to a Bluetooth device or headphones)
So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.
It's a while since I used Airplay for anything other than Youtube videos, but here is how I thought it worked:
1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.
2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.
3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.
4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)
>I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.
The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.
Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.
The Apple Home View is proof that Apple could implement some kind of user switching / login and log out scheme if they wanted to do so on the iPad as well.
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
What’s funny is that it’s not the public or even the board that is demanding that Apple release whiz-bang moonshot software features every year. Users do want shiny new hardware, but besides necessary hardware drivers, 90% of users LOVE it when the core OS and the UI stays stable for years. So they can get used to it. Instead of reshuffling the UI of every app every 12 months like iOS has been doing for 10 years. And evolving the visuals in big and small ways constantly. Both of these are not fooling anyone into overestimating Apple’s innovativeness.
I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.
That's because back then, they weren't releasing major new versions every year.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
It's a trade-off. It could be a setting, but if one adds too many settings then the space of possible options gets huge and bloated leading to bugs and complexity for the users and I already barely know how to use iPadOS.
"If you ask a user what percentage of Word features they use, they will tell you 10%. But if you ask multiple users which 10% they use, they will all give you a different 10%."
Definitely a failing of understanding how real people use the software here. Frustratingly, Apple has a tendency to dismiss users who have different intentions than the product manager thinks they “should” have. Even if most users would want a certain behavior, they are “courageous” enough to tell users they’re all wrong and they should use it a different way. Funnily enough, the infamous Apple discussions forum features volunteers who consistently have that same attitude. Fans who have internalized the Apple “we know best” principle.
So I also wouldn’t bet on the feature coming back.
Does Apple even have QA anymore? Do they even do user testing? I know a lot of people who have left Apple testing and validation in the past few years and every new macos and ios release is buggier than before. Insanely basic stuff where anyone actually using the app for a few days would have caught glaring UI and usability problems. I haven't worked there, but what I can see with my own two eyes makes me assume they've automated the hell out of usability testing. Maybe software is only being tested by other software. Maybe developers are the only people testing their own features. Many of the bugs I'm seeing today are iphone4 bad. How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand? And on top of that, it certainly seems like they're hyper-focused on new features and are utterly ignoring foundational systems that everything runs on. Preview, Mail, and Finder are going down the tubes fast. I intentionally don't update my personal macbook because I see so many bugs in each new release on my work macbook.
I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.
There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.
To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.
Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.
If you read this article, the author is basically saying “the way this worked before was very opaque and probably almost no one figured it out, but _I_ knew how it worked, and so the change is bad for me”.
Do they have a good point that they have a valid use case? Yes. Do they have the only use case? No. Did Apple do this to try to make things better? Yes. That doesn’t make them “evil”, that makes them trying to make things better.
> Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.
Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
I doubt anyone at Apple was sitting in a meeting and was like, "I hated all my teachers in school, let's make it impossible for them to use iPads as presentation devices", and then everyone else agreed with them.
>> Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.
> Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
> Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.
> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
On the other hand, post-release patches made very complex software practical. And very complex software takes a very long time to test and people want the new stuff now.
There is no easy or even single "correct" answer. Just trade-offs.
Yes. Apple is a behemoth, heavy with layers and layers of middle management. It's pretty difficult to steer it any new direction and have everyone on board.
I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.
Having worked at Microsoft at the time that comic was made, you need to understand that it also had more groups and it was fractal, zoom in and there are guns everywhere. Microsoft created a system where every silo was in competition with every other silo. As an example, I viewed this from the sidelines, during this time there was MS Messenger and MSN messenger which both supposedly worked together with the same backend except it didn't because whenever MSN wanted to add a fun feature they had their hand slapped by the MS Messenger team and visa versa. It was a shitty experience and I'm glad I left.
Seems to me like it was an explicit design decision that fixed some use cases and broke others, rather than a regression in the sense of "A bug we introduced but didn't catch." As such a regression test wouldn't have caught this.
Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.
When you're a gatekeeper / the phone company like Apple, the expectation is that as a general purpose device, you will adhere to at least some level of quality... simply because users have no alternative.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.
I don't like the "deliberate choice or general incompetence" framing. It just isn't useful. What's both more likely and more interesting is to speculate on the specific mechanisms and forces that might lead to this sort of situation.
For example, perhaps the knowledge that firmware updates are possible for modern consumer devices means that the software teams have a higher risk tolerance when it comes to feature creep. They've been able to fix bugs in the past, and it was no big deal. It certainly wouldn't involve scrapping existing inventory or retooling anything in the production line like you might have to for a hardware defect.
Or, and this reflects my own experience as a software person, perhaps broader changes in software development culture are partially to blame. 15 years ago one of the first lines of defense for the team I was on was the project manager. As the one person whose only job was keeping a more holistic eye on the value chain, she often caught latent quality risks (e.g., the potential for two different in-development features to adversely interact) long before anything made it to QA. Nowadays most companies, in a lovely iteration of the doorman fallacy, have nixed that role because they believe Jira can do the job.
I've got similar feelings about Scrum. I have been on Scrum teams that were great at delivering consistently high quality software. But they were the exception. The more common situation is people rushing to merge a glut of changes on days n and n-1 of an n day sprint, every n days, forever. Which, regardless of what any manager says, is how they're de facto expected to behave. Taking two or three more days to get the job done properly would screw up the metrics on some KPI dashboard.
I don’t know. Embedded software makes things way harder on itself than is necessary by tying itself to the comparative Stone Age in terms of language, tooling, and methodology. At least in the automotive & robotics world I interact with. I can’t believe how much time is unnecessarily pissed down a hole because everyone is just stuck doing the thing they know how to cobble together today instead of reforming what they do and how they do it.
No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.
And since Steve was the only Apple CEO with a backbone, Apple just does the normal big company thing now of chasing short-term growth and neglecting most of what made them different or great.
> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
In fact Apple gets its highest praise (from nerds like us) for OS releases that just fix bugs and improve performance. Of course shareholders praise other things like cutting costs and raising revenue.
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
macOS, when it was called OS X, used to get released whenever it was released. It usually had some bugs and those would be worked on over the lifetime of the release. After Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook decided to switch it up to a yearly release schedule. That was self-imposed. Since then, Apple’s software quality has been steadily declining. They have no one to blame but themselves, yearly releases is not enough time to introduce new features and polish and fix bugs in old ones. And they keep adding more operating systems, making it hard on themselves when they have proved they can’t do it.
I had heard 27 was much better than 26, so I broke my usual embargo on new macOS versions until x.y.5 and upgraded. I also had a problem with the 26.6.7(?) update that came out the same day as 27.0, so I went for it. Big mistake. I regret it.
I also regret updating my homepods and ATV to 27.0. I had lots of phantom clicks on the tv remote. Turns out it was the homepods. When it happens I have to restart them to fix it.
Never again. I will be on 27.x.y until 28.6 is released.
The thing is, despite the damage since 18 not being fully undone, 27 gets comparative praise because of 26's disaster lowering the bar.
I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.
If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.
yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe.
but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).
Another stupid quirk is USB-C HDMI output sometimes outputs 4:3 mirroring of the iPad screen even when in a full screen video. If you reconnect and fiddle with pausing/playing the content while screen locked, you can “trick” it to use presentation mode at the screens native resolution.
Half the problem is flagship apps like HBO/Netflix don’t implement this correctly.
Oh and this is all different if you have a keyboard attachment because only then are you allowed to “extend” display which can use the screen’s native resolution.
I’ve been bitten by these changes before and it left me feeling hoodwinked.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Stage manager and liquid glass were 2nbig flops. Stage manager because it’s unusable and adds clutter to the screen and liquid glass because it makes an m1 ipad pro feel like a 2010 device
stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
Fully disagree. iPadOS is too unstable, janky, immature, and prone to awkward half-baked changes to be used as a regular computer. I've tried for years. OP is correct - stay far away from iPadOS for computing. Use macOS.
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
In my humble opinion it’s best to prepare yourself for that to stop being possible, if you intend to stay on MacOS. We both know which way the wind is blowing on that, with the sealed System volume, etc. etc.
(I’m not happy about that - I used to love modifying the system in unapproved ways on Windows and Mac.)
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I had to use an iPad with the Magic Keyboard as a laptop replacement for a week, since my only laptop (MacBook) was in repair for that time.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
This is a lot different from the core concept whether or not the iPad is suitable for a large general purpose set of tasks. I recognize that there are things in your workflow that the iPad was not ideal for, but a lot of these points come down to user preference rather than an ability or inability to do something.
I could complain about a Windows machine messing up my habits simply because Copy and Paste uses CTRL instead of CMD. Even if I have that complaint and it legitimately messes with my habits, that Windows machine still has that capability and it functions, so whether or not I like their implementation is a matter of personal preference and not an indictment of the fundamental capabilities of the OS.
I could easily make a list just like yours of things that don't work well on a Windows/Mac/Linux system that work great on iPad. Illustrating sucks on those platforms compared to using Procreate on iPad. They aren't good for scanning QR codes, barcodes, using front and rear cameras (FaceTime). They are bad at being held with 1 hand or being used with cellular connectivity. Making a list like this doesn't mean that Mac/Windows/Linux systems aren't suitable for general purpose computing, it just means that each platform has its own strengths.
There are also some potential issues with some of the line items you have here:
- Multiple audio playback is actually possible, but the app developer has to implement background playback. Apple is providing the functionality, it's not really their fault that developers don't use it. (e.g., Flacbox allows this exact use case)
- There are alternative apps you can use to search your iOS/iPadOS device (e.g., easySearch). Do we not complain about bad search on desktop OSes like Windows too? I was just on an HN thread recently where a commenter mentioned how Spotlight on macOS sucks.
- Edit videos with the features you need: this has nothing to do with the underlying OS, this has a lot more to do with the software published to the OS. We could similarly criticize Windows for not having Final Cut Pro or Linux for not having Adobe Premiere but that doesn't mean those systems aren't capable of running that type of software.
- There are definitely ways to record presentations on iPad. They aren't as flexible as OBS, but if your goal is to record a presentation, it can definitely be done. I would guess that most people doing that specific task are likely to do that via Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet rather than setting up OBS, even on desktop systems.
- I'm not sure what you mean about the inability to quickly extract text from images, this is a built-in feature of the iPadOS that works identically to macOS.
- The limitations of iPadOS and iOS browsers are well known, but it does have extension support and so this again becomes a question of software library rather than underlying capability.
I don’t think the examples I gave were particularly specialized.
Enterprise is running what I assume
to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
Sibling to you gave a dozen examples. But your first paragraph is exactly the point of what an iPad’s correct use is: Enterprise’s use case could be done by any portable device with a camera, and doesn’t need a keyboard. iPad is perfect for that.
Ditto for drawing on or highlighting PDFs with only a single mirrored screen being visible to everyone. You couldn’t ask for a simpler task.
It’s tasks that are more complex than this where iOS (including the hilariously-named iPadOS which we all know is just iOS) is a joke.
I’ll give you some things that I would never bother to try on iOS. To be fair, an android tablet is just as bad:
- There’s a folder full of files and I want to organize them by moving them in a few groups into different folders. A mouse and multiple selection in various varieties, and opening several finder windows makes this trivially easy. Doing this in iOS is painful.
- I need to extract three files from a zip and modify one of them and then zip them back up. A few clicks on macOS. An afternoon project on iOS.
- I have a movie file and I want to add a subtitle track to it. Or maybe change the container format to be compatible with my Apple devices. 10 seconds with the terminal and FFMpeg. I’m sure someone will sell me an iOS app with a weekly subscription cost, which might do it.
I could go on all day.
I got rid of my last iPad about 7 years ago and haven’t missed it. My M1 MacBook Air is more useful to me than the latest iPad Pro (even with its $300 keyboard accessory) would be, and I’d never trade it.
I did respond to that sibling and you can peruse my response there. Maybe it's a crazy response, I don't know, but I hope it makes sense.
We could also go on all day about things that your Mac can't do like illustrating with Procreate, connecting to a cellular network, FaceTime with a rear camera, etc, but this whole debate centers around this idea that the iPad is just this useless thing that can't be used as a general purpose tool. That idea is not grounded in reality. It's grounded in user preferences, but if we go down that rabbit hole we can definitely nitpick various things that Windows/macOS/Linux can't do.
Regarding your examples:
I'm confused about what's difficult about these file management and zip/unzip tasks. It works exactly the same as macOS [1]. You can even use a mouse with an iPad. Sure, you lose multiple Finder windows. [2] This costs a small amount of time. "Afternoon project" is a wild exaggeration. [3]
Unlike your Mac, Files centrally manages multiple cloud storage connections. For example, Filen shows up right in Files, but on a Mac you have to do some weird "mount to network share" stuff as a workaround.
[2] We can also argue that my desktop with 3 monitors is more capable at this task than a laptop computer at a coffee shop but I can't exactly put that in a small bag and take it with me, so the iPad is just making an expected trade-off.
[3] We might even make the argument that file system manipulation has been shown to be a failure in general purpose operating system UX for the general public and that file folder organization is far too difficult for the average person. I know this idea sounds a little insane but if we really think about it I think there's some merit to the idea. How many relatives do you know who have misplaced files in a sea of folders or dump all their stuff on the desktop with hundreds of desktop icons everywhere because they don't know where else to put them? I have at least one elderly person in my life who is only able to find documents on their computer via their physical graphical position on the desktop. I submit the idea that the average person may prefer the paradigm where apps and services "contain" the data and present the data in a way that makes logical sense for that data (e.g., photo albums for photos, message feeds for messages, project structures for documents) and the data moves around between applications via the share button.
I appreciate your big picture thinking with files in (3). I have seen as well how most of the people I have “helped with computers” have no idea how to organize their files. But the iOS paradigm where the files just “live inside the apps” only works for the happy path. Create Procreate document. Edit document on this device. Using iCloud Drive by default and then you can also edit it on the other device. Everything fits in your storage (cloud or local) at once.
It immediately collapses when you don’t have enough storage space for everything at once. Or potentially the bandwidth to transfer it to and from iCloud. As the person who’s called in to help when someone doesn’t want to have to add an expensive higher iCloud tier, or buy a new $1400 phone to get higher storage, it is painful that I can barely even help solve these problems myself on that platform.
The Files app is occasionally useful and is better than the first decade, where iOS didn’t have one. But the Finder (or even Windows Explorer) absolutely embarrasses it.
I've definitely seen the "why do I have to pay to store my files now?" friction play out in this situation.
Some of my relatives are highly anti-cloud. I know they're also at risk to lose their data, as they don't back up anything. When I set up a backup the workflow isn't followed, the time machine drive gets unplugged, etc.
My other set of relatives recognize the concept that they are paying for someone else to handle this data for them and not have to worry about it. They're on the 50GB iCloud plan, so it's not a huge deal.
As far as paying a lot or not a lot, I think it's just a personal question of "is this data important or not?" It either is or isn't. The avenues for saving money if you really want to keep storing a lot of stuff are limited. I should know, I have my own home NAS, and I can tell you it definitely hasn't been a money-saving exercise.
I definitely agree that Files is behind the rest and can be a whole lot better.
> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
The ability to downgrade a package on a desktop OS is not universal.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
Its not just possible, but actually easy. You only need to run a competent OS that doesn't make an enemy out of users, or better, the owner is an actual owner and not a sharecropper (like Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS)
So now our thesis has devolved into "Linux is the only usable OS."
That's a perfectly sensible opinion to have, but it's not exactly related to the discussion at hand, and we can't objectively say that the operating system with a 1-3% global marketshare is the only one that is suitable for general purpose computing use. That just doesn't make logical sense.
This would be like saying that the only real automobile out there is a 2018 manual transmission Buick Regal station wagon, and that everyone driving a Toyota RAV4 has it all wrong.
It doesnt take much to look at the anti-user, advert laden, AI jammed Windows 11. And well, forced Microsoft online accounts. This is well documented.
Similar with MacOS. Sure, if you do a bunch of songs and dances, you can get what resembles root. But every version closes and makes being a owner harder.
iOS? Are we even discussing how anti-owner this platform is? Thats right, this whole article is about unilateral changes by the real owner of all these devices.
Android is better, but even so, actively prevents root by owners. The existing root are effectively attacks. And the upcoming 'wait 24h to install your own app store' is just more anti-owner.
It’s not even that to me, it’s bigger than that. On a real computer, if you don’t like what application is showing on Monitor 2, you can just drag a different program onto Monitor 2.
iOS in contrast, follows the modern way of designing devices: nothing is customizable besides mild “theming.” The entire interface (and every behavior) springs fully formed from the mind of an inexperienced “uX dEsIgNeR” and is a fixed, immutable object whose specifics are not available to be adjusted.
But if we go down this rabbit hole of user preferences, then we also have to criticize MacOS or Windows for being less customizable than Linux.
And we certainly can do that, it's just that what we are discussing in this thread is not related to that concept.
The root comment of this thread is "An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)" which is just a ridiculous statement, especially the "for any task" part.
Whether or not I can complete the tasks I need and want to do has very little to do about the level of customization of the OS.
Apple only lets you downgrade to iOS versions that are still signed. Typically previous updates remain signed for ~1 month. You can check which updates are still signed here: https://appledb.dev/
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
> Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
"I can do this for you, but I will need to use your computer to do it, and I will need you to read me off a bunch of 2FA codes in all likelihood, so you can either give me your phone or you can sit next to me while I do it. Oh, and they're your emails, so you may as well pull up a chair or I'm just going to have to guess whether you care or not."
My time is valuable too. You want me to do it, you help.
Especially in this department, where limitations are very much fixed. Even if he wants it to work on a phone, he cannot make it do certain things if the OS doesn’t intend it to be possible. If she were trying to do things on Linux, at least you could accuse him of being too lazy to write custom software to do it. Not true on closed platforms though.
MacOS 26 Has lots of annoying and worse changes. At least there is a possibility to revert to 25 if the device ever supported it but phones and tablets are more trapped. My wife is having a miserable time with iMessages on ios26 they are not always hitting the phone and even after applecare fixes they revert to only hitting her laptop. I think Apple has peaked if they can't right their software ship. It will be a loss as they are more secure.
I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
They are a hardware company. They want you to have to buy two devices. One for showing the presentation, another for notes and any kind of accompanying support material that is only for the presenter to see.
Am I the only one having ridiculous issues in MacOS 27? The window management is simply broken, whenever I click an app in the dock the OS switches to the completely wrong screen, and when I move a window to another screen I often have a black screen on the source screen.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026
I hate stuff like this. Apple changed how the new Apple Watch buttons work, breaking massive muscle memory on how to get the app switcher. "Thankfully" my Apple Watch "ultra" from 4 years ago is basically considered obsolete so it won't get the update.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
Apple hardware is underserved by software. iPad versions of the desktop applications are severely limited and I see no reason to upgrade my iPad Pro to the latest version, because I know all that computer power would be wasted.
This isn't just an Apple problem though. Even Samsung, Google / Qualcomm or Microsoft and Intel / AMD face the same business issue - hardware development has outpaced software development. Think about it - multiple core CPUs are essentially multiple CPUs packaged into one and Intel now offers 10+ core CPU for regular consumers. SSDs also give "outdated" hardware another lease of life. And as software companies find it more and more difficult to utilise completely the hardware powering them, they also face a dilemma of how to support hardware development by creating softwares that run "slower". This is best exemplified by the famous WinTel partnership between Microsoft and Intel, wherein every subsequent version of Windows required better hardware. Google Android too follows the same model. Today, including AI can slow down your computing. But it faces two major problem - 1) it clashes with the business model of AI companies that offer AI as a subscription service and 2) people can't afford the hardware to run AI (this is is why Windows 11 was forced to downgrade its minimum hardware requirement from 16gb to 8gb). (Also, the bottleneck of AI isn't computing power but memory throughput and bandwidth).
We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).
Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.
Honestly you get what you deserve if you try to use an ipad as your main computer. There's no faith in Apple ever fixing iPadOS - it's why they are releasing a touch screen Mac (Which is what they should have done in 2010).
in AI era, marginal cost of getting your 'anything' compatible with open systems and solutions is so low, that soon I expect only really stubborn, sad people still fighting with MacOS/Windows/PadOS
Define soon? I'd put a lot of money on the current crop of OS's still being dominant in 10 years. Most folks don't care enough to switch let alone "vibe" their own replacement software.
As much as I wish 2027 to be the year of Linux Desktop, I'm afraid the companies will just "up the ante" by making all the APIs and boundaries much more convoluted, with AI watchdogs and remote servers along the way.
At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.
I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying.
Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?
The post makes it clear they’re making heavy use of multitasking and you’re isolating just one task then saying the CPU is overkill. I don’t think simultaneous note taking, Airplay display and remote control of a Mac was a solved problem in 2014.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
He could have achieved all that even with an iPad Air. So again, my question is what is the relevance of the "pro" moniker?
The broader question is "is a desktop grade processor sold with a "pro" moniker being able to perform some basic PowerPoint and screensharing worth the $1000 asking price?"
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.
Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.
Do you suppose that Google or Samsung are self-consciously catering to my specific use case either? I don't. But an Android tablet is open enough that I can do what I want to do with it, and an iPad is not.
Very much agree with you, but I’m pretty surprised that you even bought the M4 given that all these limitations blocking the iPad from its potential have been there since the first iPad Pro first made the claim that it could be on par with a general purpose machine.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.
if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.
The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
For simple tasks (someone pointed out a rental car agent doing the walk around photo taking and signature capturing) an iPad is great - its light weight is the main advantage. But if I was doing a walking-around task that was more complex, a convertible laptop that folds around (HP x360 for example) and runs a real OS is just more powerful. There’s nothing an iPad can do (besides being light) that wouldn’t be done better by such a device. (Assume here that Apple made an x360-shaped Mac, this argument isn’t about Windows vs Mac).
Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.
I mean, yes, they did position it for this. But it’s surprising that anyone has taken them seriously, and to me it’s surprising that anyone has signed up for all the homework it takes to find and perform the workarounds to every one of its dozens of self-imposed limitations in order to force it to work.
Like, even as simple as positioning windows on the screen. On a Mac, you don’t need to ask how, you just drag and size them where you want. On an iPad, even with Magic Keyboard and trackpad, same basic input devices, it requires a bunch of learning to vaguely approximate what every Mac user has been doing for 42 years. And until like 1 year ago, there weren’t even window-like things, only weird alternative paradigms to learn and accept.
You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.
This is what happens when you do not own and control hardware you buy.
Keyword: buy, own, control
Any "autoupdating", or otherwise controlled device by the manufacturer is more an indefinite rental with horrific terms that basically amount to "lol screw you".
The device supports installing software, but only THEIR approved (cr)app store? Thats just a rental.
Device doesnt provide you root or administrator, but retains it for the company? Thats just a rental.
Features are sold one day, but an update removes them without your permission? Thats just a rental.
Cant revert an update that damaged your usability, cause the company prevents downgrades? Thats just a rental.
Thankfully, we already have laws on the books to cover this. There's plenty enough proof that these devices may be physically in the hands of someone who paid money to a retailer, and have proof of first sale. But it's demonstrable that these are indefinite rentals *masquerading* as sales. In other words, they are lying about a "sale". This should trigger Federal Trade Commission, under mass fraudulent rentals.
(And no, im looking at the capability and ownership of the whole device. Its obvious that a dumb device that just does the features its claimed to do is not a rental. But devices that have underlying inaccessible parts to the purchaser, BUT retain company control is the scope of this complaint. Nobody's arguing for a dumb coffee maker to have a web browser.)
Ever since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has, deliberately or not, been introducing regressions into its software. Is it more secure? Yes. But things are getting uglier and uglier (I’m looking at you, Ive), and many things are broken or slower.
iPads are something you give to a kid to keep them entertained. You should not make any production system wholly dependent on a platform you don't have root access to without some sort of backup or egress plan.
Now, another operating system might see this tension and say: why not have a UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen or stay on the existing shared window?
Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Nobody wants complexity for complexity’s sake, but this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up.
So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.
1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.
2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.
3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.
4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)
While a bit annoying, that seems like the optimal solution within the constraints of apple's design culture.
Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.
The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.
Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.
You can either share a specific window (and need to switch off and share another if you want to share another app) or you can share entire screen.
If I understand correctly that’s what would be the solution here
Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager can remotely configure it on managed iPads.
"Essentially to reduce the space used you need to increase the size lf your storage"
https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
It's not like now where they rush a yearly release and more than half the OS is nonfunctional until the .1 update several months later.
The point is to slow TF down on the OS updates. We never needed yearly releases. Going back to the pre-Lion model of OS upgrades is the way.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
"If you ask a user what percentage of Word features they use, they will tell you 10%. But if you ask multiple users which 10% they use, they will all give you a different 10%."
So I also wouldn’t bet on the feature coming back.
Capital won't like what comes next.
Except Apple can't even sing that verse.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.
To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.
Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.
If you read this article, the author is basically saying “the way this worked before was very opaque and probably almost no one figured it out, but _I_ knew how it worked, and so the change is bad for me”.
Do they have a good point that they have a valid use case? Yes. Do they have the only use case? No. Did Apple do this to try to make things better? Yes. That doesn’t make them “evil”, that makes them trying to make things better.
Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
It effectively makes it useless for anyone where not showing the presenter’s screen content was critically important.
Unless you know of some alternative method?
It's easy to be outraged about everything, it's hard for everyone to do everything right 100% of the time for use cases most have never even heard of.
(I don't work at Apple).
> Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
> Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
There is no easy or even single "correct" answer. Just trade-offs.
Apple's org chart now resembles Microsoft's org chart from this classic meme, but with far more groups: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6
I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.
It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.
Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
For example, perhaps the knowledge that firmware updates are possible for modern consumer devices means that the software teams have a higher risk tolerance when it comes to feature creep. They've been able to fix bugs in the past, and it was no big deal. It certainly wouldn't involve scrapping existing inventory or retooling anything in the production line like you might have to for a hardware defect.
Or, and this reflects my own experience as a software person, perhaps broader changes in software development culture are partially to blame. 15 years ago one of the first lines of defense for the team I was on was the project manager. As the one person whose only job was keeping a more holistic eye on the value chain, she often caught latent quality risks (e.g., the potential for two different in-development features to adversely interact) long before anything made it to QA. Nowadays most companies, in a lovely iteration of the doorman fallacy, have nixed that role because they believe Jira can do the job.
I've got similar feelings about Scrum. I have been on Scrum teams that were great at delivering consistently high quality software. But they were the exception. The more common situation is people rushing to merge a glut of changes on days n and n-1 of an n day sprint, every n days, forever. Which, regardless of what any manager says, is how they're de facto expected to behave. Taking two or three more days to get the job done properly would screw up the metrics on some KPI dashboard.
Their shareholders sure do.
Or buy them. Sign me: Vision Pro owner
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
I wonder if Apple simply has too many employees?
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
Why do you think that? With unlimited talent and money on either side it seems possible to do both really well without it hurting profit margin.
I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
Half the problem is flagship apps like HBO/Netflix don’t implement this correctly.
Oh and this is all different if you have a keyboard attachment because only then are you allowed to “extend” display which can use the screen’s native resolution.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Or you can use Zoom or likes of it and connect to it from ipad and share screen.
That actually has lower latency than quicktime thing you mentioned
It’s just yet another way to manage windows. It’s fully optional, I never even remember it exists. It was introduced in iPadOS 16 / macOS 13.
https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/ipad1240f36f/
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mchl534ba392/
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
(I’m not happy about that - I used to love modifying the system in unapproved ways on Windows and Mac.)
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I do believe them to be computers that excel in specialized settings. Like in your two examples.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
I could complain about a Windows machine messing up my habits simply because Copy and Paste uses CTRL instead of CMD. Even if I have that complaint and it legitimately messes with my habits, that Windows machine still has that capability and it functions, so whether or not I like their implementation is a matter of personal preference and not an indictment of the fundamental capabilities of the OS.
I could easily make a list just like yours of things that don't work well on a Windows/Mac/Linux system that work great on iPad. Illustrating sucks on those platforms compared to using Procreate on iPad. They aren't good for scanning QR codes, barcodes, using front and rear cameras (FaceTime). They are bad at being held with 1 hand or being used with cellular connectivity. Making a list like this doesn't mean that Mac/Windows/Linux systems aren't suitable for general purpose computing, it just means that each platform has its own strengths.
There are also some potential issues with some of the line items you have here:
- Multiple audio playback is actually possible, but the app developer has to implement background playback. Apple is providing the functionality, it's not really their fault that developers don't use it. (e.g., Flacbox allows this exact use case)
- There are alternative apps you can use to search your iOS/iPadOS device (e.g., easySearch). Do we not complain about bad search on desktop OSes like Windows too? I was just on an HN thread recently where a commenter mentioned how Spotlight on macOS sucks.
- Edit videos with the features you need: this has nothing to do with the underlying OS, this has a lot more to do with the software published to the OS. We could similarly criticize Windows for not having Final Cut Pro or Linux for not having Adobe Premiere but that doesn't mean those systems aren't capable of running that type of software.
- There are definitely ways to record presentations on iPad. They aren't as flexible as OBS, but if your goal is to record a presentation, it can definitely be done. I would guess that most people doing that specific task are likely to do that via Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet rather than setting up OBS, even on desktop systems.
- I'm not sure what you mean about the inability to quickly extract text from images, this is a built-in feature of the iPadOS that works identically to macOS.
- The limitations of iPadOS and iOS browsers are well known, but it does have extension support and so this again becomes a question of software library rather than underlying capability.
Enterprise is running what I assume to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
Ditto for drawing on or highlighting PDFs with only a single mirrored screen being visible to everyone. You couldn’t ask for a simpler task.
It’s tasks that are more complex than this where iOS (including the hilariously-named iPadOS which we all know is just iOS) is a joke.
I’ll give you some things that I would never bother to try on iOS. To be fair, an android tablet is just as bad:
- There’s a folder full of files and I want to organize them by moving them in a few groups into different folders. A mouse and multiple selection in various varieties, and opening several finder windows makes this trivially easy. Doing this in iOS is painful.
- I need to extract three files from a zip and modify one of them and then zip them back up. A few clicks on macOS. An afternoon project on iOS.
- I have a movie file and I want to add a subtitle track to it. Or maybe change the container format to be compatible with my Apple devices. 10 seconds with the terminal and FFMpeg. I’m sure someone will sell me an iOS app with a weekly subscription cost, which might do it.
I could go on all day.
I got rid of my last iPad about 7 years ago and haven’t missed it. My M1 MacBook Air is more useful to me than the latest iPad Pro (even with its $300 keyboard accessory) would be, and I’d never trade it.
We could also go on all day about things that your Mac can't do like illustrating with Procreate, connecting to a cellular network, FaceTime with a rear camera, etc, but this whole debate centers around this idea that the iPad is just this useless thing that can't be used as a general purpose tool. That idea is not grounded in reality. It's grounded in user preferences, but if we go down that rabbit hole we can definitely nitpick various things that Windows/macOS/Linux can't do.
Regarding your examples:
I'm confused about what's difficult about these file management and zip/unzip tasks. It works exactly the same as macOS [1]. You can even use a mouse with an iPad. Sure, you lose multiple Finder windows. [2] This costs a small amount of time. "Afternoon project" is a wild exaggeration. [3]
Unlike your Mac, Files centrally manages multiple cloud storage connections. For example, Filen shows up right in Files, but on a Mac you have to do some weird "mount to network share" stuff as a workaround.
You can literally run ffmpeg in a shell on your iPad: https://shaunhevey.com/posts/how-to-use-ffmpeg-on-ios/
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102532
[2] We can also argue that my desktop with 3 monitors is more capable at this task than a laptop computer at a coffee shop but I can't exactly put that in a small bag and take it with me, so the iPad is just making an expected trade-off.
[3] We might even make the argument that file system manipulation has been shown to be a failure in general purpose operating system UX for the general public and that file folder organization is far too difficult for the average person. I know this idea sounds a little insane but if we really think about it I think there's some merit to the idea. How many relatives do you know who have misplaced files in a sea of folders or dump all their stuff on the desktop with hundreds of desktop icons everywhere because they don't know where else to put them? I have at least one elderly person in my life who is only able to find documents on their computer via their physical graphical position on the desktop. I submit the idea that the average person may prefer the paradigm where apps and services "contain" the data and present the data in a way that makes logical sense for that data (e.g., photo albums for photos, message feeds for messages, project structures for documents) and the data moves around between applications via the share button.
It immediately collapses when you don’t have enough storage space for everything at once. Or potentially the bandwidth to transfer it to and from iCloud. As the person who’s called in to help when someone doesn’t want to have to add an expensive higher iCloud tier, or buy a new $1400 phone to get higher storage, it is painful that I can barely even help solve these problems myself on that platform.
The Files app is occasionally useful and is better than the first decade, where iOS didn’t have one. But the Finder (or even Windows Explorer) absolutely embarrasses it.
Some of my relatives are highly anti-cloud. I know they're also at risk to lose their data, as they don't back up anything. When I set up a backup the workflow isn't followed, the time machine drive gets unplugged, etc.
My other set of relatives recognize the concept that they are paying for someone else to handle this data for them and not have to worry about it. They're on the 50GB iCloud plan, so it's not a huge deal.
As far as paying a lot or not a lot, I think it's just a personal question of "is this data important or not?" It either is or isn't. The avenues for saving money if you really want to keep storing a lot of stuff are limited. I should know, I have my own home NAS, and I can tell you it definitely hasn't been a money-saving exercise.
I definitely agree that Files is behind the rest and can be a whole lot better.
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
Its not just possible, but actually easy. You only need to run a competent OS that doesn't make an enemy out of users, or better, the owner is an actual owner and not a sharecropper (like Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS)
That's a perfectly sensible opinion to have, but it's not exactly related to the discussion at hand, and we can't objectively say that the operating system with a 1-3% global marketshare is the only one that is suitable for general purpose computing use. That just doesn't make logical sense.
This would be like saying that the only real automobile out there is a 2018 manual transmission Buick Regal station wagon, and that everyone driving a Toyota RAV4 has it all wrong.
It doesnt take much to look at the anti-user, advert laden, AI jammed Windows 11. And well, forced Microsoft online accounts. This is well documented.
Similar with MacOS. Sure, if you do a bunch of songs and dances, you can get what resembles root. But every version closes and makes being a owner harder.
iOS? Are we even discussing how anti-owner this platform is? Thats right, this whole article is about unilateral changes by the real owner of all these devices.
Android is better, but even so, actively prevents root by owners. The existing root are effectively attacks. And the upcoming 'wait 24h to install your own app store' is just more anti-owner.
And it leaves Linux and BSD's.
iOS in contrast, follows the modern way of designing devices: nothing is customizable besides mild “theming.” The entire interface (and every behavior) springs fully formed from the mind of an inexperienced “uX dEsIgNeR” and is a fixed, immutable object whose specifics are not available to be adjusted.
And we certainly can do that, it's just that what we are discussing in this thread is not related to that concept.
The root comment of this thread is "An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)" which is just a ridiculous statement, especially the "for any task" part.
Whether or not I can complete the tasks I need and want to do has very little to do about the level of customization of the OS.
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
For example you can use https://github.com/pwnerblu/surrealra1n to downgrade A12/A13 chip devices using this bootrom exploit: https://github.com/ahmadkamal09999-tech/usbliter8
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
On her phone.
Without her computer logged into her email.
Without her phone.
"I can do this for you, but I will need to use your computer to do it, and I will need you to read me off a bunch of 2FA codes in all likelihood, so you can either give me your phone or you can sit next to me while I do it. Oh, and they're your emails, so you may as well pull up a chair or I'm just going to have to guess whether you care or not."
My time is valuable too. You want me to do it, you help.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).
Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
The broader question is "is a desktop grade processor sold with a "pro" moniker being able to perform some basic PowerPoint and screensharing worth the $1000 asking price?"
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.
Gaming? It's complicated for them as well and I have the impression they also hate gamers.
Video editing? Maybe, but what does the latest CPU brings on the table for that compared to the other ones?
Office tools? The situation looks as miserable as programmers.
3D modeling? Maya3d/Blender/... aren't available and even if it would be, Apple would likely ban plugins, making it useless.
AI tools? Too locked down to work.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Like, even as simple as positioning windows on the screen. On a Mac, you don’t need to ask how, you just drag and size them where you want. On an iPad, even with Magic Keyboard and trackpad, same basic input devices, it requires a bunch of learning to vaguely approximate what every Mac user has been doing for 42 years. And until like 1 year ago, there weren’t even window-like things, only weird alternative paradigms to learn and accept.
Keyword: buy, own, control
Any "autoupdating", or otherwise controlled device by the manufacturer is more an indefinite rental with horrific terms that basically amount to "lol screw you".
The device supports installing software, but only THEIR approved (cr)app store? Thats just a rental.
Device doesnt provide you root or administrator, but retains it for the company? Thats just a rental.
Features are sold one day, but an update removes them without your permission? Thats just a rental.
Cant revert an update that damaged your usability, cause the company prevents downgrades? Thats just a rental.
Thankfully, we already have laws on the books to cover this. There's plenty enough proof that these devices may be physically in the hands of someone who paid money to a retailer, and have proof of first sale. But it's demonstrable that these are indefinite rentals *masquerading* as sales. In other words, they are lying about a "sale". This should trigger Federal Trade Commission, under mass fraudulent rentals.
(And no, im looking at the capability and ownership of the whole device. Its obvious that a dumb device that just does the features its claimed to do is not a rental. But devices that have underlying inaccessible parts to the purchaser, BUT retain company control is the scope of this complaint. Nobody's arguing for a dumb coffee maker to have a web browser.)