Apple's Craig Federighi on the long road to the iPad's Mac-like multitasking | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Craig Federighi on the long road to the iPad's Mac-like multitasking

arstechnica.com

20 pointsmiles14 comments

Having played with it on my M1 iPad, seems like they really nailed the interaction with this release. It feels like it always should have worked this way, unlike Stage Manager, which was just kind of weird.

The sad part is, of course, that Apple still hasn’t addressed the-useless-for-real-productivity part of the iPad. The fact that you can’t even open the web inspector in Safari strikes me as patently absurd. (Only remote inspection is possible, achieved by connecting your iPad to your Mac with a USB cable. Really, Apple?)

I really wanted to like Stage Manager. I feel like there was something there in terms of window management that hadn't really been done before, but there was just something about it that wasn't quite right - the gestures never seemed intuitive or something, and I'd end up having windows shuffling all over the place whenever I was switching task.

I look forward to seeing the changes ipadOS 26 (with the possible exception of liquid glass)

Making the iPad a serious productivity machine would mean giving up their App Store control and the 30% cut. There's no way the business side of the company will let that happen.

I think most people would find that a funny definition of "real productivity"

I don't get it why is performance such a massive issue that they still need to have an artificially low limit on the number of windows.

M-series iPads are more powerful than most of Apple's Mac Pros were. They have 8GB of RAM, but until recently so did Apple's best-selling MacBook models.

  > artificially low limit on the number of windows

afaik its because ios has swap disabled so even with 8gb its gonna be tight with some apps (or even just browsing some heavy pages)

Or they could… you know finally put macOS on the iPad

The problem is when they tried to make iPad apps available on macOS by default, developers revolted and made it an opt-in. Now Apple has to weigh losing a large amount of their app catalog and cannibalize MacBook sales. It's hardly an obvious win for anyone. Allowing dual boot with the caveat that macOS will inexplicably be missing the iPad apps the user was previously using won't really jive well either.

For the people that want to run real applications, not having TikTok isn’t going to matter.

  > developers revolted and made it an opt-in

if they really wanted to, they could just remove the option and let the apps run on any platform... it might make some devs upset but (n=1) this dev is ok with it

But that would mean *shudder* Apple using their control of the App Store for consumer good instead of corporate greed.

If you want a device that runs macOS, Apple makes plenty of them, at all kinds of price points.

Which one of them has a touch screen?

How about just letting us run OSX? I don’t even care if you limit it to pro models to protect your margins.

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