Apple Finally Destroyed Steve Jobs’ Vision of the iPad. Good | Hacker News Reader

Apple Finally Destroyed Steve Jobs’ Vision of the iPad. Good

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14 pointsCharlesW17 comments

Great, take a step further. The future is docking your phone, probably ultimately wirelessly, and have a keyboard, mouse and multi monitor, why not a solid voice interface at the same time?

What Apple has done with these mobile processors is insane. The M-series MacBooks were the first laptop I ever owned that felt like a Desktop, no compromise to go mobile.

Sure, you'll have to make a bunch of thermal/size compromises for the phone form factor but given wall power as a daily driver it is far more than enough for email, teams, web browsing, even development.

Windows Phone had this very feature back in the day. You just connected the phone to the PC via USB, and magically, you had a desktop environment.

My Motorola Atrix had this years before that, even.

The ability to switch modes is going to be important. I'm on the latest iPadOS beta, and when I'm using it to do work across multiple apps the new macOS like window management is amazing. When I'm just trying to read a book, watch a movie, or do some other focused activity, it's mostly annoying.

It doesn't have a toggle in the quick switch in Control Center like Stage Manager on current iPadOS?

https://archive.ph/VlDtG

I was always under the impression that the reason they seemingly crippled the iPad Pros from functioning as full-fledged computers was to prevent it from cannibalizing MacBook sales.

That's why the latest iPads, with their M4 processors, always felt like overkill for what you could realistically use the device for. I've got an old iPad Pro 10.5 that's 8 years old at this point, and it still works perfectly for my use cases (drawing tablet with Procreate, GarageBand, watching YouTube, etc.).

They were never crippled, there were just no apps making use of that performance at that point, their vision's still the same as it is today IMO. Now there's a lot of pretty good apps for video editing, CAD, etc.

Of course we computer enthusiasts feel the iPad is still restricted in a lot of ways, but a lot of younger consumers genuinely want the iPad experience, which is why I presume this new feature can be toggled on and off, and why we're probably never getting macOS on an iPad.

They were crippled in terms of multitasking. You edit a video in Final Cut for iPad, go to export it, it takes 15 minutes. You can't even leave Final Cut to reply to an email while it's working, that interrupts the export.

> Cupertino has done the thing it swore it never would: turn its tablet into a full-blown window-wrangling, compromise-abandoning computer.

Contra: I (and my senior mom) would like to have a simple device with a simple interface. If I wanted to use a 'real' computer I would use a real computer.

At the very least there should be a "simple mode" switch where the behaviour can be toggled.

AFAIK, there is (for now at least).

> AFAIK, there is (for now at least).

What is the path with-in Settings that I can find this toggle?

Settings -> Multitasking & Gestures

From there you can choose whether you want to use fullscreen apps (traditional iPad), Stage Manager (weird thing they added a few years ago) or Windowed Apps.

Steve Jobs duly listed browsing the web, dealing with email, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading ebooks, and enjoying photos. Coincidentally, those were the exact things the iPad was really good at. Agreed * Except Music * I have loved having many iPads, but the speakers have always been terrible and they point the wrong way - about time this was fixed.

I have the 13" M4 iPad Pro and the speakers on it are incredible.

I only ever activate the iPad multitasking features by accident, and then I don’t know how to get out of Split View or hidden Safari windows or whatever other weird thing I’ve triggered. So I’m looking forward to this mode switch that goes back to 2012. I have a fully tricked out MacBook for work, I don’t need to work on my iPad. I’m totally happy in an armchair like Steve.

The windowed mode is indeed optional and can be turned off in the Settings or Control Center.

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