Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
teddysvoronos.com
teddysvoronos.com
Now, another operating system might see this tension and say: why not have a UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen or stay on the existing shared window?
Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Nobody wants complexity for complexity’s sake, but this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up.
1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.
2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.
3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.
4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)
I think the counter-argument you posed is the weaker of the two. You of course know you want to switch to displaying the live demo environment instead of the presentation you chose to cast to the display, but there's no way the OS can reasonably infer that, so it shouldn't.
> Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Sadly true.
So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.
Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager can remotely configure it on managed iPads.
"Essentially to reduce the space used you need to increase the size lf your storage"
Why or how would some designer say "Perfect". The context of a filesystem browser requires those actions, level up from current directory is a basic feature. Hell worst case just give me the entire current directory path as a string and I can remove the current folder and go.
It is mind boggling how they're aclaimed for being so innovative with UI/UX and yet get the foundational basics so wrong.
There's a back button, which if you just went into a child folder from a parent folder, then pressing the back button will go to the parent folder.
If you explicitly want to go to the parent folder, clicking on the name of the current folder in the dropdown in the top center of the open dialog, will reveal a list of folders that is the hierarchy from current folder on top, to root folder on bottom.
You can also press Command + Up Arrow to go to the parent folder.
To edit the path as text, press Shift + Command + G, which will show a dialog with the current path, and allow you to edit it as text with autocomplete support.
Bonus tip: While in the file open dialog, if for some reason you want open the current directory in a full normal Finder window, press Command + R.
Better yet, allow for a dock on the extended screen, that lists all apps that have feature support for another monitor. The dock will have an app to duplicate screen 1. However, Control of this dock will have to be done via mouse / trackpad, because touch is not available on second screen..
While a bit annoying, that seems like the optimal solution within the constraints of apple's design culture.
I'm trying to find a flaw, so far it sounds logical to me:
There's only one AirPlay session, and whichever App requests it suspends the previous one. This way you can also go back from "live demo" to presentation by switching back to the presentation app and selecting AirPlay in that context again...
Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.
The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.
Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.
If it's not turned on, the Springboard (Home Screen) - from where you would launch the app - could have the presentation handle ..
You can either share a specific window (and need to switch off and share another if you want to share another app) or you can share entire screen.
If I understand correctly that’s what would be the solution here
I was completely agreeing with you until this statement at the very end.
How do you know it didn't come up in a meeting and that Apple isn't full of assholes who channel their inner (wildly distorted perception of) Steve Jobs to shut down dissent? If there's any place where a whole goddamn committee could be that delusional about its own nature, it's Apple. The company got way too big for its own good a very long time ago.
You're spot on otherwise. It's the fundamental reason why everyone who does hates Apple.
Ultimately the team behind it doesn't want to relinquish control to the user, so we're stuck in this world where it can never truly by a professional tool because every step of the way there is something like this where on a real computer its just an extra screen and you put on what you want on it and the situation where content of the other screen gets suddenly shown can't happen. But the iPad has to pretend screens don't exist and only apps do.
These days I still think we were wrong, but I also think we were more right than we knew at the time.
It's frustrating for professionals, and it's too big for kids to be carrying around, but after observing my parents I realize who it's for: people who have trouble reading on small screens. That's why I like my iPad.
No such an animal. I have recently been issued an iPad for logging jobs and material use, it's terrible. Tablets are essentially little TVs made for consuming images and video with minimal user interaction, when you have to start typing up a dozen lengthy descriptions of jobs on a touch screen it gets frustrating in a hurry. Most of the contractors that come buy have been been given iPads as well and are equally impressed with the experience.
Same goes for basically every other scenario where people complain about needing dongles.
So I also wouldn’t bet on the feature coming back.
"If you ask a user what percentage of Word features they use, they will tell you 10%. But if you ask multiple users which 10% they use, they will all give you a different 10%."
Apple may actually know this was uncommon.
https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
There's been a macOS update that allowed anyone to log in just by pressing enter and another one that showed the actual password when you pressed the password hint button.
Granted these were a long time ago but their marketing was just as strong back then.
This was around the time they were making fun of Windows (I'm a Mac, I'm a PC)
The problem is, everybody has a different notion of what those are.
In any case, I don't recognize the world people are talking about here. I ran the 27 betas all summer and upgraded to 27.0 on day one and it's been great. The betas were definitely betas, but quite good. 27.0 was (and 27.0.1 still is) excellent. I don't have a single issue I'm hoping the next point release will fix.
It's not like now where they rush a yearly release and more than half the OS is nonfunctional until the .1 update several months later.
The point is to slow TF down on the OS updates. We never needed yearly releases. Going back to the pre-Lion model of OS upgrades is the way.
IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.
There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.
That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.
And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.
They cleaned up a lot of things with the minor 26.x releases and even more with 27.0, but it's still years away from being done.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
My iPhone 14 Pro 1TB finally broke down too much to remain usable a couple of weeks ago.
The screen shattered when the phone hit the floor. White and green lines on one side, making reading things more difficult and also straining on the eyes to look at at night. Since then, cracks in the screen cut my fingers ever ever so slightly on each touch. Not enough to make wounds, but enough to be discomfortable. I tried to use it still but over the next couple of days I dropped the phone on accident multiple times and now the touchscreen is not reacting as it should either. Some parts of the screen do not respond to touch at all, other parts still work, and others yet misregister where the touch is.
I investigated replacing the screen at third party phone shops. But it doesn’t make sense to pay to repair the screen. I was already living with a battery that was due to be replaced. And beyond that some hardware issue is preventing NFC from working since a year ago, so I can’t scan my passport NFC to renew my national bank id on it anyway either. Apple Pay doesn’t work, probably also because of the broken NFC. Finally, for whatever reason whenever I try to update iOS it fails saying it can’t verify the update after having downloaded it. Paying ~$200+ to replace the screen and battery and still having these other issues (NFC broken, and stuck on an older iOS version than it should) just wouldn’t be worth it.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what phone to buy next for quite a while. And now that the screen broke and I was forced to make a decision I decided to not buy the latest greatest iPhone 18 Pro.
Because I am not as happy with Apple the company and their actions as I used to be.
I don’t want Android either however.
I ended up buying an iPhone 15 Pro 1TB second hand with good battery health. It gets me USB-C so that’s a plus compared to the 14 Pro I had.
All that is to say, no it’s not a given that we will keep buying new hardware from Apple directly anymore even if we did in the past used to buy our stuff new from them when time came to replace our old Apple devices. Of course even buying second hand is still supporting Apple indirectly to some degree. Because the people that do buy new from them know that a couple years later the amount they can sell that device for second hand to someone else is still pretty ok, relatively speaking.
Doesn't this just prove his point ? People will buy Apple product anyway, direct or indirectly. You are still using Apple service and Apple still can extract data from you.
I'm sure they saved a ton of money though.
> [iPhone 4] How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand?
That's well documented, all their field testing models were disguised as iPhone 3Gs with a rubber case around them. Gizmodo got their hands on one from a drunk engineer who left it in a bar.
So they didn't actually touch it with their bare hands ever, outside of the office at least.
Capital won't like what comes next.
Except Apple can't even sing that verse.
I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
There is no easy or even single "correct" answer. Just trade-offs.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.
To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.
Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.
If you read this article, the author is basically saying “the way this worked before was very opaque and probably almost no one figured it out, but _I_ knew how it worked, and so the change is bad for me”.
Do they have a good point that they have a valid use case? Yes. Do they have the only use case? No. Did Apple do this to try to make things better? Yes. That doesn’t make them “evil”, that makes them trying to make things better.
Flat out removing a functionality that is 100% certain to be critical to many without any way of regaining it via any combination of features found on the iPad…
And without any notice whatsoever, and with no way to downgrade back, gets pretty close to flat out evil.
Don’t try to talk out of both sides of your mouth.
Even if they clownishly made it more buried and difficult to find under a dozen submenus… it would still be much less bad in comparison.
(If they never advertised or implied the iPad as being suitable for presentations, education, etc., then that have lessened the severity, but clearly that’s not the case)
Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
It effectively makes it useless for anyone where not showing the presenter’s screen content was critically important.
Unless you know of some alternative method?
It's easy to be outraged about everything, it's hard for everyone to do everything right 100% of the time for use cases most have never even heard of.
(I don't work at Apple).
> Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.
> Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
Apple's org chart now resembles Microsoft's org chart from this classic meme, but with far more groups: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6
I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.
It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.
Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
For example, perhaps the knowledge that firmware updates are possible for modern consumer devices means that the software teams have a higher risk tolerance when it comes to feature creep. They've been able to fix bugs in the past, and it was no big deal. It certainly wouldn't involve scrapping existing inventory or retooling anything in the production line like you might have to for a hardware defect.
Or, and this reflects my own experience as a software person, perhaps broader changes in software development culture are partially to blame. 15 years ago one of the first lines of defense for the team I was on was the project manager. As the one person whose only job was keeping a more holistic eye on the value chain, she often caught latent quality risks (e.g., the potential for two different in-development features to adversely interact) long before anything made it to QA. Nowadays most companies, in a lovely iteration of the doorman fallacy, have nixed that role because they believe Jira can do the job.
I've got similar feelings about Scrum. I have been on Scrum teams that were great at delivering consistently high quality software. But they were the exception. The more common situation is people rushing to merge a glut of changes on days n and n-1 of an n day sprint, every n days, forever. Which, regardless of what any manager says, is how they're de facto expected to behave. Taking two or three more days to get the job done properly would screw up the metrics on some KPI dashboard.
Their shareholders sure do.
Or buy them. Sign me: Vision Pro owner
I wonder if Apple simply has too many employees?
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
The people who actually get the money being made are the ones who want more money asap. They are the ones who set the (often unrealistic) timelines so that they can line their pockets sooner. After all, those yacht payments are coming due.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
And I don't think these software releases really have anything to do with that. I would be very surprised if they were meaningfully driving sales.
Why do you think that? With unlimited talent and money on either side it seems possible to do both really well without it hurting profit margin.
I know it's old complaints, but this place really should not be calling itself "hacker news."
I remember from an old CCC conference they talked about looking for vulns in specific portions of the OS that have had UX changes like this as it may indicate a lower skilled developer having to show that they are getting tickets done. Code that was solid ends up introducing bugs. Areas of the OS untouched have less likelihood of easy to find bugs. I don't know how valid that theory really is but your example makes me think I have to start wasting time monitoring the beta program to see what changed and if my most used app features are touched I wait until at least the .1 release or now probably .2 release. Problem is with the advent of AI assisted hacks, it feels like I should update the nanosecond something new comes out.
I use my iPad 99% without a keyboard and a mouse, and the window management only became worse over time. It got more features, sure, but it got very hard to use in a useful way.
So I'm back to the single app mode most of the time, which provides less functionality than 10 years ago.
Having a full windowing system just adds a bunch of overhead, weird edges cases when apps have multiple windows open, and slows me way down.
PS: they brought back the option to just drag an app from the dock to enable Split View, but it's still not as smooth as it used to be before 26.
It's also incredible how many window arrangements features they added (long press on the green button, next to the red X to close the window). Most of them are completely useless.
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
It’s just yet another way to manage windows. It’s fully optional, I never even remember it exists. It was introduced in iPadOS 16 / macOS 13.
Fortunately, I found that there is now a way to reduce the stupid corner radius ("defaults write -g NSConvolutionOverride1 -float 8") and to remove the floating sidebars ("defaults write -g NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance -bool false").
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
After months of suffering through that, he switched back to a Macbook Air and carries the iPad for watching Plex now. I am still baffled as to which "pros" the iPad Pro is targeting.
It's nice to have for movies on flights.
A few times a year I use it as a portable second monitor.
I use the stylus for sketching sometimes.
Being self-critical, I overpaid for something I thought I would use more.
I'm not a fan of and don't use the ipad OS features that basically make it more like a mac desktop.
iPadOS 27 broke many keyboard use cases for me, including very simple things like using tab to move to the next field on a form in Safari. It worked in iPadOS 26, but doesn’t now.
This adds to the bug where switching between apps with modifier keys tends to cause those modifiers to “stick”. That bug has been there for years, and prevents me from using my iPad as a programming environment even though the software support is there.
Those who I have observed who have done so basically use the ipad for email and writing.
I was responding to "why would anyone use an ipad ever for anything?"
Windows has the benefit that it's still an open-ish OS. If something doesn't work as expected, it can be somehow hacked into the way you need it to be. I think Linux doesn't work well with touch devices and pen input, also the choice of presentation software is much more limited.
I've used and like https://github.com/nyblnet/bento, but more and more I'm just going to self-contained html because the effort in to get what I want is just so low.
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
(I’m not happy about that - I used to love modifying the system in unapproved ways on Windows and Mac.)
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
That’s where I am.
I love my iPad, because I love the tablet form factor. I used an Android tablet for years prior to the iPad Pro releasing, and iPadOS is much better. I’ve played with Android tablets periodically since but they don’t seem to care about the form factor at all.
Just because it’s the best doesn’t mean it’s good, though. I don’t understand how they can justify selling a $300+ keyboard for a $1,700 device and never fix long-standing bugs with keyboard use, much less continue to add regressions in new releases that aren’t fixed.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
But you could always make an app to handle car rentals for ipad or iphone or whatever. You could make an app for lawyers doing documents. That was never the argument against "ipad isn't a computer." It doesn't expose the file system to you. More than anything, it tries to keep up the curtain between you, Dorothy, and the wizard, who is just a man after all. That is why it is not a real computer and will never be one fundamentally.
The problem is that the line of being “real” or not is defined in the eyes of the beholder. Is a computer a real computer if it lets me rm -rf / or is that just stupid system design? Is a computer not a real computer if you can’t move the menu bar or taskbar or are the designers of the computer allowed to have a strong opinions on such topics? Everyone will draw those lines in different places.
We could use this same philosophy to claim that a laptop isn’t a real computer because it doesn’t let me add expansion cards, doesn’t have GPIO pins, etc. All those lines in the sand are in the eye of the beholder.
In your eyes, a computer that doesn’t let you write and execute arbitrary code on the device is not a real computer, but to the vast majority of people on this planet have no ability or desire to write code ever on any device, so for them that distinction is completely irrelevant. That would be like if my garbage man told me that my Toyota Tundra isn’t a real truck because it can’t compact garbage.
I do believe them to be computers that excel in specialized settings. Like in your two examples.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
I could complain about a Windows machine messing up my habits simply because Copy and Paste uses CTRL instead of CMD. Even if I have that complaint and it legitimately messes with my habits, that Windows machine still has that capability and it functions, so whether or not I like their implementation is a matter of personal preference and not an indictment of the fundamental capabilities of the OS.
I could easily make a list just like yours of things that don't work well on a Windows/Mac/Linux system that work great on iPad. Illustrating sucks on those platforms compared to using Procreate on iPad. They aren't good for scanning QR codes, barcodes, using front and rear cameras (FaceTime). They are bad at being held with 1 hand or being used with cellular connectivity. Making a list like this doesn't mean that Mac/Windows/Linux systems aren't suitable for general purpose computing, it just means that each platform has its own strengths.
There are also some potential issues with some of the line items you have here:
- Multiple audio playback is actually possible, but the app developer has to implement background playback. Apple is providing the functionality, it's not really their fault that developers don't use it. (e.g., Flacbox allows this exact use case)
- There are alternative apps you can use to search your iOS/iPadOS device (e.g., easySearch). Do we not complain about bad search on desktop OSes like Windows too? I was just on an HN thread recently where a commenter mentioned how Spotlight on macOS sucks.
- Edit videos with the features you need: this has nothing to do with the underlying OS, this has a lot more to do with the software published to the OS. We could similarly criticize Windows for not having Final Cut Pro or Linux for not having Adobe Premiere but that doesn't mean those systems aren't capable of running that type of software.
- There are definitely ways to record presentations on iPad. They aren't as flexible as OBS, but if your goal is to record a presentation, it can definitely be done. I would guess that most people doing that specific task are likely to do that via Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet rather than setting up OBS, even on desktop systems.
- I'm not sure what you mean about the inability to quickly extract text from images, this is a built-in feature of the iPadOS that works identically to macOS.
- The limitations of iPadOS and iOS browsers are well known, but it does have extension support and so this again becomes a question of software library rather than underlying capability.
All of these are form-factor complaints. macOS, Linux and Windows all support every single feature you just listed, it's just that people don't buy hardware providing it. Conversely, the iPad has these hardware features, but is widely criticized for only supporting an OS that is markedly less-capable than macOS. iPadOS is a derelict wasteland lacking USB class-compliant hardware drivers, basic graphics APIs and any of the escape hatches that macOS offers to power users.
I just can't see how anyone can make this argument in good-faith. It is consensus that iPads are less capable than Macs, and most people will blame the iPad software more than the hardware. iPads are artificially restrained by a weak, incapable OS that prevents the hardware from cannibalizing Mac sales. iPads might win on a convenience factor, but they will always lose when comparing capabilities. It could be argued that iPadOS has a grand total of zero redeeming features.
These are just blatant objectively false statements, and annoying forms of techno-elitism. We can play ball if we want to talk about the iPad having compromises or limitations, but y'all act like the iPad is the spawn of Satan.
On my iPad, it theoretically works the same, but the workflow differs when I take the screenshot. The screen gets filled entirely by the new screenshot interface instead of keeping to a small window that keeps other windows in view (like on MacOS), and often, text selection just doesn’t work on the iPad until I crop the screenshot further to just the text (versus working reliably on MacOS). So, it’s fiddly and takes a lot of time.
On the MacBook, I could even install free third-party software to skip a couple steps (Cmd+A, Cmd+C) and immediately save any text in the selection to my clipboard.
And that is the core of the issue for me. For the actual person using the device to get something done, many of the tasks I detailed are not possible to complete on the iPad as it is today, due to limitations on what I can install.
I would be happy if I could at least dual boot to another OS or run a virtual machine (even if touch becomes disabled) so I can install more software tools, as the hardware capability is there for the iPad. On Linux, at least I can run a Windows virtual machine to run Adobe Premiere Pro (or dual boot with Windows), but I cannot fully use the hardware of an iPad with the way its operating system is currently designed.
Take the screenshot > hit the checkbox > save to photos > open photos app > choose the first photo > select the text.
I guess it’s true that there is a lack of overlapping windows but other than that this process is very quick with very few button presses.
Why does app have to support it when the OS is perfectly capable of doing this ?
This situation is identical to when Electron desktop apps that ignore the native menu bars and UI elements. How about all the AI harnesses that refuse to act like a normal posix app where you can pipe and redirect output and all that.
It’s not like desktop operating systems are immune from the same issues of applications violating the design principles of the OS.
But QR codes shouldn't even exist.
Enterprise is running what I assume to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
Ditto for drawing on or highlighting PDFs with only a single mirrored screen being visible to everyone. You couldn’t ask for a simpler task.
It’s tasks that are more complex than this where iOS (including the hilariously-named iPadOS which we all know is just iOS) is a joke.
I’ll give you some things that I would never bother to try on iOS. To be fair, an android tablet is just as bad:
- There’s a folder full of files and I want to organize them by moving them in a few groups into different folders. A mouse and multiple selection in various varieties, and opening several finder windows makes this trivially easy. Doing this in iOS is painful.
- I need to extract three files from a zip and modify one of them and then zip them back up. A few clicks on macOS. An afternoon project on iOS.
- I have a movie file and I want to add a subtitle track to it. Or maybe change the container format to be compatible with my Apple devices. 10 seconds with the terminal and FFMpeg. I’m sure someone will sell me an iOS app with a weekly subscription cost, which might do it.
I could go on all day.
I got rid of my last iPad about 7 years ago and haven’t missed it. My M1 MacBook Air is more useful to me than the latest iPad Pro (even with its $300 keyboard accessory) would be, and I’d never trade it.
We could also go on all day about things that your Mac can't do like illustrating with Procreate, connecting to a cellular network, FaceTime with a rear camera, etc, but this whole debate centers around this idea that the iPad is just this useless thing that can't be used as a general purpose tool. That idea is not grounded in reality. It's grounded in user preferences, but if we go down that rabbit hole we can definitely nitpick various things that Windows/macOS/Linux can't do.
Regarding your examples:
I'm confused about what's difficult about these file management and zip/unzip tasks. It works exactly the same as macOS [1]. You can even use a mouse with an iPad. Sure, you lose multiple Finder windows. [2] This costs a small amount of time. "Afternoon project" is a wild exaggeration. [3]
Unlike your Mac, Files centrally manages multiple cloud storage connections. For example, Filen shows up right in Files, but on a Mac you have to do some weird "mount to network share" stuff as a workaround.
You can literally run ffmpeg in a shell on your iPad: https://shaunhevey.com/posts/how-to-use-ffmpeg-on-ios/
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102532
[2] We can also argue that my desktop with 3 monitors is more capable at this task than a laptop computer at a coffee shop but I can't exactly put that in a small bag and take it with me, so the iPad is just making an expected trade-off.
[3] We might even make the argument that file system manipulation has been shown to be a failure in general purpose operating system UX for the general public and that file folder organization is far too difficult for the average person. I know this idea sounds a little insane but if we really think about it I think there's some merit to the idea. How many relatives do you know who have misplaced files in a sea of folders or dump all their stuff on the desktop with hundreds of desktop icons everywhere because they don't know where else to put them? I have at least one elderly person in my life who is only able to find documents on their computer via their physical graphical position on the desktop. I submit the idea that the average person may prefer the paradigm where apps and services "contain" the data and present the data in a way that makes logical sense for that data (e.g., photo albums for photos, message feeds for messages, project structures for documents) and the data moves around between applications via the share button.
I don't know why a filesystem could not show me both views for when I want one or the other. I like having all of my movie files organized into a single folder. I don't like when I can't find the damn one I'm looking for but I remember I last used it or edited it or transcoded it with HandBrake. Let me choose how I view my stuff: as I organized them, or, if I turn everything 90 degrees, how they were created.
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
Its not just possible, but actually easy. You only need to run a competent OS that doesn't make an enemy out of users, or better, the owner is an actual owner and not a sharecropper (like Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS)
That's a perfectly sensible opinion to have, but it's not exactly related to the discussion at hand, and we can't objectively say that the operating system with a 1-3% global marketshare is the only one that is suitable for general purpose computing use. That just doesn't make logical sense.
This would be like saying that the only real automobile out there is a 2018 manual transmission Buick Regal station wagon, and that everyone driving a Toyota RAV4 has it all wrong.
It doesnt take much to look at the anti-user, advert laden, AI jammed Windows 11. And well, forced Microsoft online accounts. This is well documented.
Similar with MacOS. Sure, if you do a bunch of songs and dances, you can get what resembles root. But every version closes and makes being a owner harder.
iOS? Are we even discussing how anti-owner this platform is? Thats right, this whole article is about unilateral changes by the real owner of all these devices.
Android is better, but even so, actively prevents root by owners. The existing root are effectively attacks. And the upcoming 'wait 24h to install your own app store' is just more anti-owner.
And it leaves Linux and BSD's.
iOS in contrast, follows the modern way of designing devices: nothing is customizable besides mild “theming.” The entire interface (and every behavior) springs fully formed from the mind of an inexperienced “uX dEsIgNeR” and is a fixed, immutable object whose specifics are not available to be adjusted.
And we certainly can do that, it's just that what we are discussing in this thread is not related to that concept.
The root comment of this thread is "An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)" which is just a ridiculous statement, especially the "for any task" part.
Whether or not I can complete the tasks I need and want to do has very little to do about the level of customization of the OS.
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
For example you can use https://github.com/pwnerblu/surrealra1n to downgrade A12/A13 chip devices using this bootrom exploit: https://github.com/ahmadkamal09999-tech/usbliter8
but for work where you actually need to create things and do things that don't fit the mold (custom software dev, use multiple apps at the same time for creative work etc etc) a classic computer like a mac or windows/linux is far superior
On her phone.
Without her computer logged into her email.
Without her phone.
"I can do this for you, but I will need to use your computer to do it, and I will need you to read me off a bunch of 2FA codes in all likelihood, so you can either give me your phone or you can sit next to me while I do it. Oh, and they're your emails, so you may as well pull up a chair or I'm just going to have to guess whether you care or not."
My time is valuable too. You want me to do it, you help.
Hell, I’m not a coder; I don’t even work in IT. I can install Linux and configure it reasonably well for an end user, but ask me to code something up and… well, hope you like Claude’s output.
Her desktop is a 27” iMac that’s too old for OCLP to help keep it going, and I keep thinking about putting Linux on it, but I can’t imagine trying to get her onto something that isn’t either Windows (used at work) or macOS (we have full Apple ecosystem at home and her laptop is an M2 MBA) until it just won’t run Citrix and a browser capable of hitting Gmail. Or until Apple finally makes another 27” iMac, which given the RAM and storage situation isn’t happening any time soon.
Keyword: buy, own, control
Any "autoupdating", or otherwise controlled device by the manufacturer is more an indefinite rental with horrific terms that basically amount to "lol screw you".
The device supports installing software, but only THEIR approved (cr)app store? Thats just a rental.
Device doesnt provide you root or administrator, but retains it for the company? Thats just a rental.
Features are sold one day, but an update removes them without your permission? Thats just a rental.
Cant revert an update that damaged your usability, cause the company prevents downgrades? Thats just a rental.
Thankfully, we already have laws on the books to cover this. There's plenty enough proof that these devices may be physically in the hands of someone who paid money to a retailer, and have proof of first sale. But it's demonstrable that these are indefinite rentals *masquerading* as sales. In other words, they are lying about a "sale". This should trigger Federal Trade Commission, under mass fraudulent rentals.
(And no, im looking at the capability and ownership of the whole device. Its obvious that a dumb device that just does the features its claimed to do is not a rental. But devices that have underlying inaccessible parts to the purchaser, BUT retain company control is the scope of this complaint. Nobody's arguing for a dumb coffee maker to have a web browser.)
Airplay and everything around it is flaky AF. For me, when Tahoe came out Airplay stopped working for me for ~3 months. After it came back, Airplay continued to just decide to disconnect randomly for me, all the time. I'd extend my screen via my AppleTV, 2, 5, 10 minute later it would just suddenly disconnect.
A long standing bug, last night on Golden Gate, I extended to TV via Airplay. Then later turned it off. The dock disappeared and was in auto-hide mode (I don't use auto-hide mode). I go into setting and clearly auto-hide mode is off. Toggle in on and back off to fix. This bug has been there for 5+ years?
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).
Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
My biggest pet peeve with Apple using USB-C is this very incompatibility. It made super duper sense to allow docking station capabilities. It would have been well within the capability of the CPU and GPU. And it would have been a killer feature. Possibly even killing the need for macbooks, but definitely killing the idea of laptops.
So I've built the system with a separate control and presentation. It connects to PowerPoint, Google slides, etc so you can present through web and control it anywhere.
I've also recently added tools to annotate slides just like described in TFA. It's still quite basic but if you're finding yourself in situations like OP, give it a try and let me know how it goes.
[1] theopenpresenter.com
This was invaluable especially from the photo app, where sharing the entire screen shows everything.
Starting airplay from within the photo app puts it into a form of slideshow, where I can scroll all the photos and videos and select one, one at a time for it to appear on the screen instead.
It is a much better experience for viewers on the screen not seeing the entire device screen. If you switch to another app, what's on screen doesn't get affected.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Or you can use Zoom or likes of it and connect to it from ipad and share screen.
That actually has lower latency than quicktime thing you mentioned
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
LOL. The famous JuSt wOrKs experience.
About half a century ago, while trying to solve printer jamming problem, someone smart figured there's no single fits-everyone solution. But Apple and its army of fans are allergic to this paradigm.
Keep struggling, maybe you'll get there someday in a form of "revolutionary" Apple invention.
Or you'll adjust and learn to passionately love the new broken design. This worked so far.
Half the problem is flagship apps like HBO/Netflix don’t implement this correctly.
Oh and this is all different if you have a keyboard attachment because only then are you allowed to “extend” display which can use the screen’s native resolution.
We clearly have different types of problems in our lives, the author and I.
It’s not about what features are used or not used or available or not available, it’s about having a little perspective.
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
The broader question is "is a desktop grade processor sold with a "pro" moniker being able to perform some basic PowerPoint and screensharing worth the $1000 asking price?"
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.
Gaming? It's complicated for them as well and I have the impression they also hate gamers.
Video editing? Maybe, but what does the latest CPU brings on the table for that compared to the other ones?
Office tools? The situation looks as miserable as programmers.
3D modeling? Maya3d/Blender/... aren't available and even if it would be, Apple would likely ban plugins, making it useless.
AI tools? Too locked down to work.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Case in point: authoring academic papers. If you have a local or self-hosted Zotero collection, you will want to cite them. Any desktop platform allows you to use [word processor of choice] and Zotero together fairly seamlessly.
This is a big kludge on iPadOS where you keep switching back and forth between Pages/Word and Zotero to paste in a citation key, which then makes it untenable long-term because the attention break is too great.
Like, even as simple as positioning windows on the screen. On a Mac, you don’t need to ask how, you just drag and size them where you want. On an iPad, even with Magic Keyboard and trackpad, same basic input devices, it requires a bunch of learning to vaguely approximate what every Mac user has been doing for 42 years. And until like 1 year ago, there weren’t even window-like things, only weird alternative paradigms to learn and accept.