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Well, given the disasters that other parties in the industry have seen trying to make the new platform into the only platform, I can't help but think that some trepidation is justified. Power users also seem to be quite outspoken about traditional keyboard-and-mouse UX not going away, which also makes the success of a single unified platform unlikely.

> Universal Control to me is the epitome of that mentality: a supremely technically impressive, but ultimately completely over-engineered and absolutely ridiculous "solution" to a problem that wouldn't exist if the Mac simply had a touch screen. You wouldn't need WiFi and communication between two computers to move your mouse from screen A to screen B if the Mac just had a touch screen. The experience of having a touch Mac that you just... plugged into an external display would be strictly better than the weird world of Universal Control, where you drag an image from Adobe Photoshop for Mac over to Adobe Photoshop for iPad, or sometimes, you drag it from Adobe Photoshop for iPad running on the Mac using Catalyst to Adobe Photoshop for iPad running "natively" on the iPad.

There are plenty of use cases for Universal Control that wouldn't be fixed by a touch Mac, though. I use it to control multiple Macs (previously used ShareMouse and before that Synergy, but Universal Control works much more smoothly without a hardwired connection), as well as to use native iPadOS apps from developers that force their Electron apps on macOS with, like Slack and Discord.

Personally speaking I have no desire for touch on traditional MacBooks – I can only see it making sense on a dockable iPad-like Mac.

> Personally speaking I have no desire for touch on traditional MacBooks – I can only see it making sense on a dockable iPad-like MacBook.

Yes, the fundamental premise is that the last 10 years would have been used differently to grow the touch space to where it fits in the lineup. Arguably a desktop and laptop are as far apart as a laptop and an iPad. That doesn’t mean they need different OSes. I shouldn’t have to use a completely different OS because I want to use the Apple Pencil. It’s just a peripheral. And yes, peripherals should influence the UI (like how scroll bars appear or disappear depending on whether you have a mouse with a scroll wheel attached). I imagine a “Touch Mac” as a laptop where you could spin the screen around to draw on the go for example. Forget complex touch uses, just being able to fold it back to read like a book or watch a movie is a killer feature. But even the Magic Keyboard for the iPad doesn’t support this transformation, you have to take the iPad out to use it… like an iPad. It’s silly. Similarly, opening up touch to the Mac to allow for things like the Surface Studio, for those who need it, would be great! Instead touch is locked in a tiny screen on Apple’s least-used OS (well, after tvOS I guess).

I can kind of see the larger point you're making – it would be nice to be able to directly use an Apple Pencil on a Mac, but at the same time I do think separate OSes are necessary for radically different form factors. The UX requirements just change too much between phone/tablet and laptop/desktop… when you try to fudge both models into the same device you get a mess like Windows 8 or GNOME 3/4 which doesn't serve either set of users particularly well.

> Instead touch is locked in a tiny screen on Apple’s least-used OS (well, after tvOS I guess).

If sales figures are any indicator, it's macOS that likely takes the position second-least-used OS. Apple sold 19.1 million iPads in 2021 and only 10 million Macs[0]. Lots of users who'd never consider buying a Mac are in the market for some form of iPad.

[0]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/23/apples-ipad-domin...

> but at the same time I do think separate OSes are necessary for radically different form factors.

But the last 10 years have been Apple repeatedly disproving this. iPadOS started radically different from macOS... only to have every major inflection point be defined by it moving closer to desktop/macOS. Whether it was giving up on the single-app model to one that recognized that apps needed to run in parallel (first in a "managed window manager" like a tiling window manager you might find in Linux, and later to a more traditional "unmanaged" one like in normal macOS), to shunning away from keyboards and mice entirely, to then only being an accessibility feature, to now being a major add-on that they sell, and even finally adopting key-commands, etc. (I don't know if anyone ever shook an iPad to undo).

I think this position was defensible at the start, but at the very least has had little supporting evidence since. It is indisputable that the evolution of iPadOS has been to move further and further from iOS and closer and closer to macOS. Perhaps there exists some third way (there probably does!), but Apple has proven to be stretched too thin to try anything other than "maybe it should work more like a phone" and "maybe it should work more like a laptop", and the latter has been the consistent, if begrudging, winner.

> The UX requirements just change too much between phone/tablet and laptop/desktop…

I think this has the line in the wrong place. It should be "between phone and tablet/laptop/desktop". The mistake was starting at iOS and having to trudge to macOS over 10 years vs. the other way around (although perhaps it made sense for marketing reasons). I mentioned this before, and Gruber wrote about my thoughts here [1], but the funny thing about the iPhone is that despite being more constrained than the iPad, I feel less frustrated with it. I am impressed with how much I can get done on my phone, I am understanding when it falls short. But the iPad makes it so clear to me all the time that all that's standing in the way of me getting something done is some designer's stubborn reluctance to allow me to do things the "old way". An easy example is writing long form text before there was a good keyboard you could attach. I get why the phone isn't a great place to type, the iPad feels unnecessary for that to always be the case.

> I can kind of see the larger point you're making – it would be nice to be able to directly use an Apple Pencil on a Mac,

I think the best way to think about this is from user workflows first, as I mentioned above it's not even just about the touch aspects. I think the YouTube experience is pretty great on the iPad. Touch here is kind of a bare necessity, I need to pause the video somehow, but it's not a fundamentally "touch experience", it's just a nice form factor for watching videos on the couch. But that experience immediately changes to frustration if I want to suggest the video to someone or have to quickly reply to an email. I'd love to be able to swivel the keyboard out, copy/paste the link, send it in Messages and type something out quickly. Or reply to an email that's longer than a sentence without thinking "ugh, I should really go to my computer for this". This is a point that is bizarrely absent in all these "the devices complement each other" discussions: they work worse separately. I often want to circle something in a picture and draw an arrow, which sucks with a mouse, then type something out, which sucks with a Pencil. The experience is frustrating on both devices, but would be better if I could do both things. And just like a device supporting all sorts of peripherals doesn't mean its a requirement, you could choose to use it as if it didn't have a Pencil or touch as well. There are tons of scenarios that would be way better even in the absolute worst implementation of this: a machine that when in flipped around in "iPad mode" gave you iPadOS, and when the keyboard was out, have it act like macOS (again, I'm not suggesting this is how it should work, but it represents a "floor" of what the experience could be like). Just the weight savings of not needing both devices is great.

> when you try to fudge both models into the same device you get a mess like Windows 8 or GNOME 3/4 which doesn't serve either set of users particularly well.

I've never been impressed with pointing at Linux at Windows as proof that "the other way doesn't work". It is unfortunate that the cost-to-entry on this hardware means we get very little alternatives to compare. And frankly, Windows and Linux don't do that much great in any UI department, that doesn't mean "if Apple can't do it, it must be impossible." If you only had Windows and Linux, you might be convinced that desktop computing was an unsolvable UI problem too...

1. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/04/30/tolmasky-ipad-c...

Conceptually Apple has to create the illusion that these devices are dissimilar enough to justify shelling out thousands for both.

But at the end of the day (in my experience), users fall into one of two buckets- primary use case is productivity (coding, office, photo/movie editing, etc.) or primary use case is consuming content. While there is some overlap between the two users as evidenced by the fact that many people own both and do some of both on each device, it seems inevitable that the devices will continue to converge until a $900 iPad is fully capable of doing 95% of what a $2000 MBP can do and then Apple will have a real problem on its hands as people stop buying the more expensive devices and the cheaper ones last much longer.

We are watching the innovator’s dilemma play out inside a single company. Interestingly one of the tell tale signs a disruption is underway is a hybrid use case where people use a costlier version of a product along side a cheaper version because the cheaper version does certain things better than the costly one.

It's even weirder when Microsoft has been releasing Surface tablets for over a decade, which are generally well liked by their users (from what I understand, I've never personally owned one). They just created some dedicated touch UIs for core functionality, and optimized the higher-level UI elements for touch control. Surface Tablets certainly aren't perfect. But they can run any windows software, they have proper file management, and they can actually be used by professionals without major compromises.

For professional use, iPad OS will always be a compromise until it's fully integrated with MacOS. And it baffles me that Apple is trying to market iPads to professionals, yet their unwilling to take that step.

Microsoft Tablet PC came into being over 20 years ago. It worked quite well actually.

There was a customized Windows 3.1 version, for a Compaq tablet in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Concerto

> They just created some dedicated touch UIs for core functionality, and optimized the higher-level UI elements for touch control.

One should note that the changes Microsoft initially made to support the Surface (and touchscreens in general) so deeply compromised their desktop OS's design and functionality that many had to be reverted for the next OS release; many other "features" have continued to be among the biggest usability pain points for the ecosystem.

Surface laptops are slow with cumbersome interface and even Microsoft’s own apps took years to be touch friendly. Even as of Windows 10 at least there are still parts of the interface that go back to Windows 95.

Apple didn’t design iPadOS to be “arbitrarily different enough to be called new.” They are incrementally building a new type of GUI from first principles. Mouse-based input took decades to evolve to where it is today.

Its okay to feel like this GUI doesn’t work well for your needs, but that doesn’t mean it was “arbitrary”.

The cursor on iPadOS is a game-changer and arguably one of the very few noteworthy UI/UX innovations of the last few years.

IMO it is incredibly well implemented and thought through. And it works amazingly well and serves a clear purpose for the medium which is iPadOS with all of its design details.

In the user interface/interaction world, I'd go as far as calling it genius.

Can you explain why? I mentioned some of my actual issues with it in my critique, which were neither addressed nor even explained away as an acceptable sacrifice in exchange for the many real benefits it provides. I’m legitimately curious what actual big problems you believe it uniquely and amazingly solves. For the record, I think it’s great to simply be delighted by the feature — but if I understand correctly, you think it goes above and beyond that into real “for the history books” usability. That’s why I find it a bit strange that you spent 3 paragraphs saying it’s genius, but didn’t mention one actual problem it solves or capability it enables, let alone what makes it one of the few noteworthy innovations in all of UI and UX in the last few years (which is really saying something considering it has competition like “Scan Text” in photos which is really Sci-Fi incredible stuff that still makes me think “what did I do before this?”).

Adaptive precision to match the OS and the different tasks the OS accomplishes.

This video explains in more details the thought process behind the design decisions. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10640/

How is it special?

Explains the design process and the why: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10640/

Stage Manager strikes me as a rip off of the idea behind webOS card stacks, but making it harder to select a specific card from a stack.

While we're on this train, the new spotlight button on iOS just seems like worse "Just Type" from webOS.

My least favorite thing by far is the f#*$#%ing "Launcher bar" thingy. Apple, I know how to get home...I don't need a garish bar on screen all the time to remind me whichs ide to swipe from.