brianus
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Compared: iPad mini 6 versus iPad mini 5
iPad Arr!!
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Apple reported to have killed the project to create Mac-connected AR glasses
Are you kidding me? As the article rightly notes, Mac Virtual Display is considered by many to be the most compelling feature of the Vision Pro. This would be like that, but with normal glasses that are comfortable and not too weird looking (well, one hopes). The very large number of VIsion Pro customers who use it primarily for Virtual Display would ditch their clunky, heavy goggles in a second if something like this was available. I don't own a VP, but glasses with that feature would be a day one purchase for me.twolf2919 said:If this really existed - not an assured thing in this rumor driven world - then it's the dumbest idea ever. Thanks god it was canceled! I could understand AR glasses tethered than iPhone - at least you could still experience AR's promise of augmenting the world with useful information as you moved through it. But what's the use of augmenting anything while you're sitting somewhere with your MacBook??? Add a virtual calculator or calendar to your office walls? Who'd walk around with a laptop in hand? Makes no sense at all.
To be clear, it's not so you can have a floating calculator. It's so you can extend your Mac's display without needing an external monitor - extremely useful while traveling or in confined spaces, when the tiny laptop display just isn't enough for your workflow. I currently use the XReal Air USB-C glasses for this purpose, and they're... ok. But it's a 1080p display with no spatial awareness (it moves as your head moves). Apple could make something much, much slicker.
Anyway, very disappointed to hear they cancelled it. I tend to agree it would require iPhone tethering for mass appeal, so I get that if they couldn't make that work, it wasn't worth it to make something just for Mac users. Still, huge bummer.
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iPad finally has a Calculator app - Here's everything it can do
Can anyone with the beta confirm that this supports slideover? Would be pretty lame if we had to run it as a fullscreen app. I was hoping they'd make this a "utility" app invoked from a corner, like Quick Notes
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Apple rumored to release iOS 26 at WWDC, instead of iOS 19
Good. It has always annoyed me that macOS switched to 11.0 after 10.15.. not only did it seem totally random, it makes it hard to remember which number follows which (I had to look up what the last 10.x release was). If they had switched to 11.0 after 10.10 that would have made much more sense. 10.8 (8th revision of Mac OS X), 10.9 (9th), 10.10 (10th), 11.0 (11th), 12.0 (12th), etc.Worse, doing it in 2020, when iOS was hitting version 14, made it seem like macOS was “younger” than iOS, and in any event it’s hard to recall which iOS goes with which macOS based on number alone.This is kinda like how they name cars. “The new 2026 Ford Ginecticazoink…”. Given all their OSes are on a yearly cycle and have been for like a decade or more, this makes a lot of sense.
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Heavily upgraded M3 Ultra Mac Studio is great for AI projects
I’m sure this was meant to be snarky, but for me it’s a genuine question: what are the envisioned real world use cases? What might a business (even a home one) use a local LLM for?tiredskills said:Why on earth would I want to run an AI model? Locally or otherwise?
The article mentions a hospital in the context of patient privacy, but what would that model actually be *doing*?
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Apple TV+'s Mythic Quest to end with revised fourth season finale
I liked the third season but the cracks were definitely showing. Fourth season was just a slog and that last scene... well I'm glad they're revising it, is all I'll say!ramanpfaff said:
I totally agree. First two seasons were amazing, and by the fourth I really didn't even want to watch it.m4m40 said:Good. S3 and S4 were really not enjoyable for me. Quite mean spirited and just not like the first two seasons.
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iPadOS 19 rumored to get more Mac-like in productivity push
tht said:Don't expect productivity, multitasking miracles here.- As others have alluded, you don't really display multiple apps at the same time on an 11" display. It's a little bit better on a 13" display, but not great. Bigger is better for display multiple apps at the same time. Definitely will hopefully be better on a large external display, but at 11", you won't be displaying a lot of apps simultaneously.
- Having background apps continue running is just about 80% of the ask for iPadOS, imo. Like, you are downloading something large over the Internet or copying something large over USB, those types of tasks should be allowed to run until completion at least, whether it takes 1 minute or 100 minutes.
- Backgrounded apps should not be killed. Theoretically, Apple and the developer will save the state of the app, and if it is removed from memory, it will be brought back to exactly the same state when foregrounded. Too many developers ignore this, and Apple hasn't been able to force them to update properly. It's been like 6 years. Developers aren't going to change now. So, either Apple forces the proper saving of an app's state, or solves it in a way that doesn't require developer updates.
- Stage Manager is not a good multitasking UI. Just add a multitasking app icon in the dock. Upon a tap, a pop-up list of apps can be displays, ordered in terms of last touched and or in-memory. App windows would be a submenu in the pop-up list. I suppose you can set a tap on the multitasking app icon to bring up the task manager and other things too. Stage Manager might be better if it allowed unlimited number of open windows, but the current four windows doesn't improve upon Split View, Slide Over much.
- Get rid of gestures as a UI design. Design the UI for direct manipulation. I'd get rid of long press as a UI input even. Add a meta button in a hot corner. You will need to press on that with one finger and tap on the target get the target's pop-up menu. Two finger tap can do the same thing, or a double tap to get a list of the target's menu items to pop up. When dragging and dropping, there needs to be at minimum a UI target or a delay to execute the action. Like a long press on a URL opens up a preview and a slide up of the preview creates a Slide Over app or a Split View app. That slide has to go to a specific target, like the top of the display, and maybe have a delay timer. iPadOS generally is direct manipulation, but there are some frustrating exceptions.
- Terminal.app and Xcode.app needs to be on iPadOS.
Although I *do* routinely use 4 apps simultaneously via Split View, slide over and either quick note or a PiP or background audio app on my 10.5" Air, I take your point that anything more than that is not practical without a larger screen. Of course, now that we have external display support (and god, I hope hope hope, AirPlay Display support in iPadOS 19 so we aren't forced to use a cable. Macs have had this for years), it follows that support for more simultaneous apps on those displays at least would be useful.You lost me with the "get rid of gestures" thing though. What's wrong with the current gestures? I find them quite elegant and intuitive, and for those who prefer buttons, we have the "..." menus at the top of each window. Win win if you ask me. They could improve the "system tray" function which currently only displays up to 3 recent apps in the Dock though (needs to be more since you can have at least that many apps on screen at a time. Double it and it might actually be useful). -
visionOS 26 brings better organization, anchored widgets, & more to Apple Vision Pro
The new widgets look rad as hell. Very clever giving them depth and anchoring them to the real world (and allowing them to persist and be occluded by real objects).. clearly they saw how early adopters were using them in visionOS 1 and 2.
Not enough for me to buy a $3500 helmet but still cool. Some day, when these are glasses....
Still, how lame is it that half their built ins are STILL unmodified iPad apps? You're one of the world's biggest companies, not a startup. You have more than enough resources to be thorough here guys. -
iPadOS 19 rumored to get more Mac-like in productivity push
Heartily agree. And nobody who actually *likes* iPads wants this. As I’ve said countless times on this forum, Apple needs to continue iterating on the tablet paradigm, not give in and just slap the now 40-year old desktop one in its place. If anything, the innovations need to go in the other direction - Mac multitasking should be getting more iPad-like. Ditch the inefficiency, screen space wasting and manual management involved in having countless overlapping windows, and instead have tiled, multi-split app panels (rather than just the two horizontal splits we get now). If you need floating windows, have them operate more like slideover, “snapping” into place and having a revolving carousel of windows to choose from; and for small utility apps like the calculator or the color sampler, have them operate like the “quick note” and picture-in-picture features of iPadOS, with windows bound to hot corners so they don’t all pile up. Anyone who has actually given this form of multitasking a shot understands how much more elegant it is than the old free-for-all desktop paradigm. It just needs to be iterated on rather than abandoned (as it seems to have been ever since they introduced Stage Manager).braytonak said:
This is not, as Apple would say, elegant.charlesn said:[snip] If Apple wanted to give the iPad Pros a real sales boost, make them capable of booting into either iPad OS or Mac OS at the user's discretion, which Apple Silicon can do. In iPad OS, it works as usual. In Mac OS, you lose touchscreen capability and it operates just like a Mac, requiring the use of Magic Keyboard with the built-in trackpad. Apple could do this today. [snip]I still pull out my MacBook when I absolutely have to; but not because I want a ton of windows piling up on my screen. It’s because of a few things:
- Lack of third party software, or iPadOS versions of desktop software that are not fully featured (looking at you, Adobe), for reasons that are largely not Apple’s fault, but could be improved with a concerted push by Apple and some tools to make porting desktop apps to iPadOS easier
- Inability to do certain things that require having multiple documents / tabs open simultaneously. Most desktop apps support this, but on iPadOS, only Safari does (you can have multiple windows in many Apple iPadOS apps, but not tabs). There’s no technical reason it needs to be like this, so I hope Apple makes it easier for developers to incorporate multi-document design into their apps and I hope they lead the way with their own apps
- Background tasks that are broken / killed when an app is not on screen. This may be alleviated by getting a modern iPad with more RAM (my 2019 Air has just 3GB), but I don’t know. But that is one thing Mac OS definitely has over iPadOS currently. I don’t have to worry my Box upload is going to fail because I’m not looking at it on a Mac, but that happens on iPads, and it’s dumb.
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Craig Federighi says macOS would ruin what makes the iPad special
The irony of this headline is that iPadOS 26 is, in fact, ruining what makes iPadOS special by replacing its innovative touch based multitasking with shitty warmed over ideas from macOS.
GONE: slideover, and with it the ability to do anything with a second app when in full screen mode
GONE: the ability to run multiple 'spaces' of split-viewed apps (with slideover acting as a go-between among them)
GONE: the ability to quickly swap out a split screened app with drag and drop
GONE: predefined size classes that ensure buttons, controls and other UI elements are in a predictable place in every Split View configuration
Remains to be reported on but I would not be surprised if Picture-in-picture and Quick Notes were gone too. Has anyone checked to see if app folders are still supported in the dock? Either way, iPadOS 26 is a disaster for touch-based productivity. I did NOT intend to buy a small Mac, I bought a damned tablet and I want it so work like one.
