Penzi

Slide Over is the reason I didn’t use Split View & Slide Over. I detest Slide Over but had functional use for Split View. Since it was all or nothing, it ended up being nothing… I did not find Stage Manager to be a net positive. When using it on my 11” iPad, it takes up way too much real estate and when using it on via the Studio Display it makes horrendous use of the much larger space.

Bring on the new options! Way slower than hoped but steady as she goes. At worst I’ll now use Split View even if its functionality is less than before.

My clamouring for a more MacOS-like iPadOS is exactly that. I do not want the iPad to actually run macOS, I want iPadOS to become way more capable (iPadOS 26 seems very much to hit most of my pain points but we’ll see when I’m actually a daily user this autumn) and I’d want it to be more open and powerful (actual non-Apple browsers, macOS level apps but designed for iPad, etc). 

That said, Jason Snell had a fantastic suggestion a year or two ago: it runs iPadOS when gadding about town as a tablet but transforms into a macOS device when hooked up to an external display. Talk about overhead! But man, what a device that would be…

apple4thewin said:

Hopefully that means Apple works with Steam to make a temporary Game Porting Toolkit native mod until developers decide to update their applications.

OMG that would be wonderful! I don’t see the business case from Apple’s end, though. I imagine they’re somewhere between unconcerned to gleefully embracing that Mac gaming should pass through the App Store and leave residues in their pockets… 

CheeseFreeze said:

tobian said:

I would welcome old style Mac OS X System Preferences. iOS style with Mac related prefs is still confusing for me, have to use search for panes everytime.

The old style wouldn’t have scaled well with the amount of options available. I understand the change. And aren’t we mostly using the search bar there anyway? 

Nonsense. I have dual 32” monitors. Shrinking and turning functions into a list is annoying. Totally kills things. And no, I rarely use search, although more now that the system preferences pane is designed by a child with an iPhone. 

Edit: having the choice would be optimal. If you prefer the new way, great! It’s a Mac; the horsepower for choice exists… 

thedba said:

Here are my “on a napkin” calculations.

An iPad Pro 13” = $1299

Smart keyboard w/trackpad = $319

Total: $1618

OTOH MacBook Air = $999

MacBook Air 15” (you know productivity) = $1199

Does anyone really think that folks arguing for “productivity” and “real work” are going to start buying iPads by the truckload because of this?

Absolutely correct! However, I detest laptops and love my iPad. Despite it never quite living up to my hopes.

iPadOS 26 should come close but I’d need the software to allow more Mac-like behaviours (e.g. a non-Safari browser, desktop equivalent) for it to genuinely be my mobile computing go-to.

I’d given up all hope that the iPad would ever grow up. Now there’s a glimmer… but I’ve fallen for that before. I’m deep in the iPad rabbit hole so I suppose I just have to wait it out. I have a 16” MBPro which will remain my main portable computing device for a while yet.

Hope springs eternal…