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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens.

MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop.

Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding power. MS made gigantic missteps by trying to force a windowing OS to support touch.

Both are somewhat meeting in the middle, and now Surfaces have gotten pretty decent, but they started out bad.

The other thing to remember is that people buy tablets for touch, and Surface Pros are pretty decent laptop replacements but still so-so as an actual tablet.

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Could you imagine "macOS" mode in iPad OS? It's simple: app screens in iPad OS turn into windows on macOS and vice versa in a easy to understand way. It remembers the window positioning and screen ordering as you switch between modes. The mouse automatically is added and removed when you switch between modes.

It would not ruin the iPad, it would ruin Apple's bottom line.

Macs aren't even 10% of Apple's revenue, so it can't do that much to their bottom line.

I don't think that would be a great experience, but if it made the iPad into a stronger competitor to Surface Pro and similar Windows convertibles, it might bring in enough new business to counteract any drop in Mac sales.

Apple has their Handoff feature for moving program state from one device to another, maybe that could be adapted for on-device handoff between a Mac and iPadOS version of the same software.

Another thought on this - Apple's push to state driven interfaces with SwiftUI would make it a lot easier, provided the Mac and iPad versions are structured in the same way.

Which they probably will be because there are maybe three development shops that will spend any time thinking about how to make their Mac interface better optimized for a destktop OS.

Still not saying this is a good idea, but it's an idea. Wouldn't be surprised if Apple were exploring it internally.

I wasn't fond of the windows start menu when they decided to replace the list style with the tiles. But that is long gone. Long live the windows start menu.

But seriously If ipadOS doesn't at least allow for backwards compatibility with the software from MacOS. The iPad will never be a replacement for your Mac computer. It will only be an expensive surrogate.

The windowing OS vs Touch OS is definitely a good point. But here we are coming full circle to adding a track pad to a touch os. Sound like apple is a bit confused about what they're offering also. I can't imagine them ever making the ipadOS on par with the Mac operating system. Unless we can start running any type of code on it. It will be the handicapped device.

The Surface pros make great tablets when you ditch the windows app store and run android APK's on them instead.

In my view, Apple doesn’t want to make an iPadOS-running iPad into a laptop replacement, they want to make it into an orthogonal alternative.

In some sense, for many categories of use, the App Store hosts superior offerings to what the Mac App Store does. Panic and Omni offer extremely sophisticated applications that I use on a daily basis. Office is likewise almost on par with the desktop equivalents (for most users, I’m well aware of the limitations in macros and plugins and so forth).

Many developers seem to be taking a “Mobile First” approach these days, and that is driving wind into the iPad’s sails.

I really would be more prudent before dismissing it.

May I ask how you manage to get into tablet mode unintentionally? I've never experienced this issue and it was my understanding that this is only possible to switch over by opening the action center and turning it on...both very deliberate actions that seem hard to do by accident. I'm not being sarcastic either, though. I work in a repair shop and one of the most common things people bring their devices in for is they accidentally put their device in tablet mode and have no idea what they're doing.

This might be confusion over what "tablet mode" means. I think he just means the non-Desktop interfaces, which in Windows 8 you could unintentionally get into very easily, famously by double-clicking an image file. And back then, going back to the desktop was a lot harder - this was before they made the taskbar and window frame appear when you moved the mouse to the edge of the screen; you had to use arcane gestures or press the Windows Logo Key and click "Desktop".

It's been years since I had one, but IIRC it could change based on folding the keyboard back behind the computer. I vaguely remember having connectivity issues with the keyboard (sometimes needing to remove and reattach it so that I could type), and that may also have caused issues for the automatic mode switching.

It may be the auto rotate. I think if the tilt of axis is over the angle to enable tablet mode it will enter it automatically and ask you if that's what you want. You have to choose a default and it won't ask again.

There was no tablet mode in Windows 8.

Windows 10 has a tablet mode, but it still sucks compared to Windows 8's "default mode". It is actually better to use tablets in regular, "windowing OS" mode than in Windows 10's tablet mode.

For me Windows 8 is an example showing one can make a decent mouse and tablet UI. Obviously it will be worse than the two, but at some point there is an advantage of having a common UI rather than specialized.

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