In the article, 2 of 3 examples are about consumption. This just reinforces my opinion that the iPad is primarily a consumption device. My wife is a teacher and I asked her if her students, the so called „digital natives“ hold up to their reputation. She declined and said they were producing TikTok videos and instagram photos at best (which can lead to a creative career but I’d argue that’s the exception not the rule). Even if we improve productivity somewhat, it’s offset by a huge increase in consumption. I don’t see this changing in the near future, mainly because there are no incentives to do otherwise.
Unifying iPadOS and macOS
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Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#12Interesting take, there's 0 doubt that iPads are incredibly more intuitive to use, and anecdotally, I've also seen the same observations regarding young and elderly. I think a good portion of that is the indirect pointing method (mouse or trackpad) that takes some use to, but there are certainly inherited conventions, features based on past limitations and other things that look just weird to a new audience picking it up.
It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on.
Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store).
The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1].
If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability.
I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so.
And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great.
[1] : https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_maco...
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#13It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…
Counterpoint to this, is that I’ve seen people be reluctant to click where they are not reluctant to touch. That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it.
Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus?
Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#14You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
Full app development and selling apps in the App Store is close to being released on the iPad. You can use SwiftUI right now in Playgrounds, but Apple has not released app generating functionality yet.
It is a funny feeling working on the same Playground project on both an iPad and MacBook, but it works. The code for reading data files is a bit different, but the iPad dev experience will get better.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#15I think iPad is the one product that Apple is the most proud of and it shows. The 2021 iPad Pro is the most sophisticated product in Apple's lineup. It's the smoothest, fastest and most elegant software they have ever made. I know some people who used to work at Apple and they said it was clear that Apple wanted to let the Mac die and focus primarily on iPadOS and iOS but regular users and professionals kept buying M…
I would argue that this is just "timing" thing. If we look far enough into the future I would bet that almost 100% of regular tasks should be done not only on iPad, but on iPhone.
Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. We are pretty close to this reality tbh. Mostly software is a limiting factor.
As for computer pros...we probably will be forced to use some other vendors(sad) or use remote systems for compute tasks while using our phone/tablet as thin client.
Thanks Apple for not jumping into that train just yet!
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#16Talk to a CS professor and they will tell you an OS is what is deep inside the machine but not see. Read a review in arstechnica and you would think an OS is about appearances and the exact shape of each UI component, etc.
My understanding is that the kernel is basically the same already, it is the services stacked on top that are different.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#17It's amazing to me that Apple made a very strict distinction between touch UI systems and keyboard/mouse UI systems, right from the start, has maintained that rigorously, and has been right all along. Their competitors and the pundit-sphere saw this as a fatal weakness, but every attempt at unifying touch and keyboard/mouse interfaces failed miserably. So I'm not concerned about Apple trying to merge iPadOS and MacOS…
What do you mean? iPadOS has keyboard and mouse support. Apple sells a first-party keyboard accessory for iPad.
Yes... but it's still a very touch-focused system. The mouse support on iPad, you'll notice, has very little precision in where you click. It's a round dot like a finger - you can't precisely click a few pixels. They found a way to make a touchpad while keeping the touch focus.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#18It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…
Counterpoint to this, is that I’ve seen people be reluctant to click where they are not reluctant to touch. That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus? Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
>That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it.
Who are you talking about? Senior citizens? Or maybe people outside of the US in developing countries? Because anyone under 50 in the US has grown up around tech.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint to this, is that I’ve seen people be reluctant to click where they are not reluctant to touch. That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus? Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
>That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Who are you talking about? Senior citizens? Or maybe people outside of the US in developing countries? Because anyone under 50 in the US has grown up around tech.
Don't just assume that default. Remember more than 10% of the US still doesn't have internet, and a shocking portion of the US has smartphones as their only method of computing and would be dumbfounded at a PC.
Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS
#20You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
>This is bad for IT.
Maybe for how we do IT. But consider the future where 99% of apps are developed on a tablet or phone (for a tablet or phone) using a cloud web interface with mostly low-code or no-code widget drag and drops.