Apple gets over its hang-ups, and the iPad enters a new era
Some of us have spent an awful lot of time pondering the iPad’s use cases as a professional productivity device. As a heavy user of the iPad, I’ve frequently wanted to push it into areas where it wasn’t designed to go because if I could get it to do what I wanted, it would fit in my life better than going back to the Mac.
As I pushed, the iPad pushed back. In recent years, I’ve come to accept that most of the time I travel, I have to bring both my iPad and my MacBook. I’m not alone in having reached the stage of acceptance.
But a funny thing happened this week: Apple seems to have changed direction, again, when it comes to more advanced uses of the iPad. In the early days, the iPad was clearly being groomed as the future of computing. In the middle ages, after Apple seemed to accept that the Mac wasn’t going to be eclipsed by the iPad, there seemingly remained a fear to let the iPad come too close to acting like a Mac.
We are in a new era now. Today’s Apple is not afraid to let the iPad run Mac-like windows, complete with stoplight buttons and Expose. In Cupertino this week, I got the strong sense that whatever dogma about not letting the iPad feel Mac-like has dropped away, replaced with an acceptance that the Mac is pretty great at a lot of things—and if the iPad is also great when it does those things, it should just do those things. It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad.
This is good news for advanced users who want to push the iPad to its fullest, of course. But it’s also a move that benefits Apple directly, because—if you haven’t noticed—the company is continually shipping very expensive iPad Pros powered by some incredible hardware, only for the reviews to keep mentioning that the hardware is let down by the less accomplished iPad software. I predict a little less kvetching about iPadOS when the next pricey iPad Pro model rolls around.
Checking the boxes
I’ve been writing about the iPad Pro since it arrived in 2015. I was about a year into doing Six Colors and podcasts as a living, and I was really intrigued by the idea of changing my productivity and breaking out of the laptop box. I wrote stories on my iPad. I edited podcasts on my iPad. I traveled with only my iPad.
But along the way, I built up a huge list of complaints about all the things that the iPad just couldn’t do, things that got in the way of me using it the way I wanted to. The latest version of that list, going into this week, was this:
- Can’t record local microphone audio while on a VOIP call
- Awkward multitasking and windowing
- Limited support for global keyboard shortcuts
- Better support for items running in the background
- Clipboard manager
- Improved Files interface for working with, well, files
I can’t say that Apple checked all the boxes, but after this week, I feel a lot more confident that those not checked this week may be checked in the near future.
I’m going to get the podcasting thing out of the way first. It’s such a niche need, but it’s a huge blocker from a workflow standpoint: you’re recording your podcast or video on a third-party app, but for quality reasons you want to also be recording your local audio and video so that they’re of the highest quality, as opposed to the versions that get compressed and sent over the Internet. It’s easy to do on a Mac, but impossible to do on an iPad… until now. (For the record, this feature also works on iOS 26, which means that podcasters could actually get by with just an iPhone and a USB microphone!)
Next, multitasking and windowing. In earlier eras of the iPad, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way. But at some point, Apple decided to just throw out that entire system and build a new one that’s unabashedly inspired by the Mac. In iPadOS 26, you can resize windows arbitrarily, put them anywhere, and manage them using the familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. (It even supports keyboard shortcuts, so you can Globe-F to toggle full screen, or Globe-Shift-Left Arrow to automatically send a window to the left half of the screen.)
Related: The iPad has a Menu Bar now! This has been something Apple has been creeping toward for four years, since iPadOS 15, but it’s finally here. And you know what? Within an hour of using the iPadOS 26 developer beta, I ended up wondering how to perform an action in an app—and realized I could just look in the Menu Bar. The Menu Bar is one of the great innovations of the Mac, allowing an ordered way to browse through functionality and discover keyboard shortcuts, and why should the iPad be denied it just because it’s such an important part of the Mac? (And yes, Command-Shift-Question Mark will let you automatically search the menus.)
It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been two years since Final Cut Pro for iPad shipped, answering once and for all the question “why are Apple’s biggest pro media apps not on the iPad Pro?” Unfortunately, it also just showed how far behind the iPad was: Once you kicked off a video export, you had to just sit there and watch the progress bar, because leaving the app would cause the export to fail. Again, iPadOS 26 to the rescue: There’s now a Live Activities-based interface for background tasks (available for all user-initiated tasks with clear end states, such as exports, renders, and file copies) that actually does the Mac one better by coalescing all the ongoing activity in one place. I should be able to leave Final Cut or Logic or Ferrite and move on to something else while the export takes place in the background, just like on my Mac.
There are also enormous improvements in the Files app, where the list view now features customizable columns and folders with expanding disclosure options. You can also control which app opens a file and, yes, even assign a default opening app, something Mac users take for granted that was just never there before in Files.
There’s no clipboard manager or support for global keyboard shortcuts yet, but even there, I’m optimistic. If macOS can gain a clipboard manager after 41 years via upgrades to Spotlight, it’s pretty easy to suppose that iPadOS might be getting similar functionality next year. That Spotlight upgrade in macOS also features a bunch of other power-user productivity boosts that would work well on the iPad, adding keyboard-based control power that might make my desire for global keyboard shortcuts less strong.
As a fan of the original iPad pointer, I’m sad to report that it’s been replaced by a new, Mac-inspired one. The reason the old one died is a pretty good one: it was meant to represent the touch target of iPad software designed for fingers, and Apple is now accepting that sometimes pro users want more precise pointer control than that. (Also, those new stoplight buttons are smaller than the old pointer circle!) I’ll miss the morphing cursor because I think it might’ve been the strongest example of the iPad rethinking and outdoing an old Mac idea, but the new pointer fits like a comfortable old shoe.
Easy or expert?
One of Apple’s greatest challenges is its own success. It’s got millions of users across a wide spectrum of demographics, geographies, and levels of expertise. How do you create a single product that can be what it needs to be for all of them? This can lead to discoverability problems for new features, overly complex interfaces for novices, and frustratingly simplified features for experts.
The iPad is the device where this struggle has been out in the open, though I’d argue it affects the iPhone and Mac just as much. On the iPad, though, the divide is pretty stark: A lot of people really never want to do anything but use one app at a time. They’re never pressuring the processor. They’re not connecting peripherals, even Apple-built ones. How do you give the people who want more what they want, without wrecking the experience for the much larger group who like it simple?
Apple’s taking another cut at this, and it seems to me that by following the Mac’s lead, they’re setting the iPad up for success. Nobody, not even power users like me, wants to see the simplicity of the basic iPad experience degraded in any way. I think they’ve done a pretty good job of adding pro features without breaking it for everyone else. We’ll see how it goes over the summer and into the fall.
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