At the launch of the iPad Pro M4 last month, Tim Cook said it was “the biggest day for iPad since its launch”. It clearly wasn’t: it was a day of really nice incremental hardware updates to a tablet that already had more power than most people knew what to do with.
But Cook’s proclamation could still be true, at least in retrospect. Apple just needs to land and use WWDC to show us a powerful operating system worthy of the new iPad Pro’s powerful hardware.
Glass pain
Let me put this into perspective: the base iPad running today’s iPadOS is fantastic for the things most people use their iPad for. No one should spend more than $500 on a tablet that they’ll mostly use for reading, checking email, and keeping track of things, and the OS is already great at that.
However, Apple spent a lot of money to create an iPad Pro with an M4 processor, a tandem OLED screen, and lots of RAM and storage. And Apple has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that it’s also a real computer for real work — putting all of human creative expression into it, things of that nature.
iPad is a computer. iPad Pro especially is a computer. You can choose the processor, RAM and storage. It has a keyboard – now with a trackpad and a range of functions – that’s “more MacBook-like than ever”. It has a $130 stylus that you can press and roll. You can spend more on it than a comparable MacBook Pro. But if you try to use it like a computer, the operating system will fight you every step of the way.
This has been the case throughout the life of the iPad, and even more so since the launch of the iPad Pro. But as the gang continued to discuss Vergecast and David Pierce mentioned in his reviews of the new iPad Air and iPad Pro, the hardware now looks like it’s gone as far as it can go. Without a meaningful change to iPadOS, the iPad Pro won’t be what Apple wants you to believe it is.
So what’s missing?
If you’ve never tried working on an iPad, I’m honestly happy for you. I’m writing this story on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an 11-inch iPad Air M2. It’s a very nice keyboard and the Air is a very nice tablet, but this would be it much faster and easier on a convertible Chromebook. And I could still watch Andorra in airplane.
It’s still too annoying to do any work on the iPad that doesn’t involve staying in a single full-screen app all the time. Even something as simple as writing a blog post and pulling up photos and links from other articles takes a lot longer and involves a lot more jumping around than it would on any other screen this size. Stage Manager has taken the middle ground, but it’s still not great, especially without an external monitor. And the iPad still doesn’t have good multi-window support—there’s no way to snap app windows to specific parts of the screen or save window configurations.
Try to do something slightly advanced and you’ll run into all kinds of basic problems. The iPad version of Final Cut Pro will fail to export video if you switch from the app, even just to the home screen, because the operating system does not have proper support for background processes. There’s also no task manager, no good file manager, clipboard manager, and no way to fill the gaps in iPadOS functionality with third-party apps and tools. These are all things that the iPad’s excellent hardware could support.
Federico Viticci v MacStories has the definitive catalog of all the ways iPadOS still falls behind, but you don’t have to be Federico to get the drift; just try using your iPad as a computer for 10 minutes.
Second Pro
Apple has been clear from the start that an iPad is an iPad and a MacBook is a MacBook, and if you want a computer with a touchscreen and laptop, better buy both. This argument makes sense for the regular iPad (and for Apple’s quarterly earnings reports). But it’s pretty corny when an iPad Pro costs as much as a MacBook, runs on the same architecture, and has an Apple keyboard as “just like using a MacBook.”
It might sound like I’m asking for macOS for the iPad. I mean sure, yes, if necessary, but Apple has an opportunity at WWDC to unveil an iPadOS that’s as powerful and capable as the hardware deserves, while still differentiating itself from macOS.
Not to rate it too well, but the Surface Pro does right there. Admit it or not, Apple has been chasing the Surface Pro ever since it first gave the iPad a USB-C port and keyboard.
The Surface Pro has a new Arm processor that Microsoft says is a match for Apple’s Silicon. It has an OLED screen. It runs Windows 11, which, apart from my complaints, is a real operating system, with task manager, file manager, proper window arrangement, background processes, you name it. It also has a lot of AI features of uncertain utility, just as Apple is expected to announce at WWDC.
We’re a few weeks away from knowing if Microsoft has pulled it off, but right now there’s very little distance between the device Apple wants you to believe is the iPad Pro and the one Microsoft wants you to think is the Surface For, even if they are coming from opposite directions.
I doubt too many iPad die-hards will switch to a Windows PC, no matter how good the Surface Pro is. But the more I beat my head against the limitations of iPadOS, the better the Surface Pro looks. And people who buy Apple’s hype and get an M4 iPad Pro should have an operating system that’s worthy of the hardware.