Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Apple made a big deal about iPadOS being its own separate OS, even though the differences are so minimal.
The iPhone is their baby, and the iPad is decidedly not. It’s a good business, it’s a big business, and they sell a lot of them, but in terms of revenue it has never really exceeded the Mac and doing QA for both iPhones and iPads running the same operating system at feature parity year after year was holding their baby back. That’s why when they do new releases, things like widgets on the Home Screen appear on iOS a year ahead of when it does on iPadOS. By renaming it iPadOS, they’ve given themselves cover to hold stuff back a year and roll features out on a tick-tock schedule cuz now the iPad is running a totally different operating system.
That it may benefit them here dealing with the EU’s shenanigans is probably just a nice incidental bonus, but that’s just my own cynical take. Honestly though, gun to my head, I think prioritizing iPhone features and QA probably is the right thing to do. I like my iPad, but it couldn’t replace either my iPhone or my Mac, and it’s a supplement to both at its best.
I have worked with Apple and know a couple people that work there. They would not be able to operate with the level of precision and scale to pull of a single OS across mobile and ipad. But it wouldn't be a totally different OS, it would be a branch.
The crux of the issue is that the latest Pros have one of the most awesome and powerful processors on the market for traditional computing purposes, but all that power is locked behind a toy OS that you can’t do much with.
There are few meaningful differences in the underlying hardware between this and a MacBook Air, but I can take my MBA anywhere to code, work offline, easily multitask by switching between numerous project windows, install all sorts of open source software as needed, etc.
With the iPad, I can watch some videos, and download some popular games with gacha mechanics. Cool?
I picked up a cheap refurbed Surface Pro X. While no means perfect, having an actual usable OS that I can do whatever I want with is so nice. Come on, Apple. Just let us run MacOS on these things.
You and I may not be able to do our jobs on it, but I know people using it as their primary machine, including people running their entire business off it. (Such as my sister who runs a very successful photography/design Business with only an iPad Pro.)
It’s not for me, but I can accept not everybody requires the same of their machine and software as I do.
I hope they never do that. The UI on Windows has been too compromised by the need to support both tablets and traditional users.
The more plausible and less conspiratorial theory is that iPadOS was made separate to help market more expensive iPad Pro devices.
It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial, even if they didn't know about this specific regulation back then.
There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy."
> It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial
I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons.
In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.
GDPR was proposed in 2012 and implemented in 2016. Any reasonably intelligent observer would look at the contents of the GDPR and predict that the EU was interested in sweeping regulation of large American tech companies, and it would have been foolish to think they'd stop at data use. Apple's legal experts and lobbyists are more than just reasonably intelligent observers, they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
One wonders, then, why Apple didn't do more to open up the iPhone and protect it from regulation before the EU had to force something worse down Apple's throat. (The tone of Apple's PR yesterday was startlingly bitter and combative.) Moreover, it's not clear that the iPadOS ploy is even going to work in the end: "the Commission has opened a market investigation to further assess whether Apple's iPadOS should be designated as gatekeeper, despite not meeting the thresholds." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
In fact, Apple has made a series of anticompetitive moves with the App Store in recent years, enraging third-party developers and practically daring regulators to bring down the hammer.
Besides, iPad is already kind of a neglected software platform. Some developers still don't bother to specifically support it with their apps. Lack of iPad support isn't going to stop anyone from going outside the App Store if they can; indeed, this move may backfire on Apple by causing even fewer apps to support iPad.
That being said, I still don't think Apple rebranded iOS for iPads to evade an EU regulation. The EU wasn't even aware of Apple's monopoly until the Epic lawsuit a year and change later.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innova...
And "iPadOS" was and still is basically just a name change. Even from day 1 iPads had a different set of features.