brianus

9secondkox2 said:

Is it as high-fidelity? No. High spec? No. But is it the path Apple should have taken? Absolutely. 

An Apple-branded version of Xreal with retina resolution in each eye, full Mac and iPad Pro compatibility, allowing an extension of the connected device's multitasking to your entire FoV -- that would be an instant sale for me at $2k, maybe even $3k depending on the specs.

It's certainly not a direct competitor in terms of specs or features, but in terms of what it actually does, Xreal's products are a lot closer to what I want to see from Apple in this space than what Apple is actually offering.

I bring their current glasses (Xreal Air.. 2 I think?) with me everywhere as an alternative to a portable MacBook display for places where there's no room for one (planes, busses, tiny coffee shop tables), and they're excellent for that purpose. An Apple version of this, with non-glitchy hand tracking, super high resolution (Xreal is stuck at 1080p) and direct OS support could be amazing for productivity. 

Really think Apple dropped the ball on making Vision Pro a productivity device. All we get is screen mirroring from a Mac, plus iPad apps blown up to gargantuan size so you can't fit all that many in front of you at once, and then you have to awkwardly position them.. bleh. Coulda been so much cooler. 

When using an iPad I feel like I have to put in the same effort to get the UI to do what I want as I do in Windows, whereas everything is effortless on the Mac.

Aside from that, the multitasking UI is still unbelievably clunky. It needs real, overlapping windows rather than full-screen everything and constant clumsy gestures to navigate around.

I continue to be mystified by this perspective that I see on a lot of forums. Since when were overlapping windows the holy grail of effective UI design? There's a reason why the top apps in the Mac App Store are the ones that take over window management and do things like e.g, tiling. It's because macOS's window management, to the extent it even exists, kinda sucks. It's anything but effortless - I wonder how many days of my life I've lost, collectively, trying to track down a hidden modal dialog box preventing me from using an app, or rearranging and resizing windows to properly fit my content without wasting screen space. I think you're substituting "what I'm used to" for "what is actually better." The current desktop paradigm is the result of inertia and an accumulation of features over the years, some of which were never that great but at least did the job. It isn't the be-all end-all, and I'm glad Apple has gone for something different in its mobile platforms, where the touch interface and the limited screen real estate call for a different approach.

I use iPadOS daily for work - sometimes literally all day - and its multitasking features are dramatically better than macOS. I'm not talking about Stage Manager, which won't run on my 6 year old iPad Pro and looks like an attempt to mollify the "we want to overlap" crowd while satisfying no one  -- but the standard split view / slideover / PiP thing. It's seamless and fluid even on an older ipad. Apps can be quickly swapped out, merged, blown back up to full screen, or rotated in slideover., and are quickly accessible via the slide-up dock or the slideover multitasking view. Dozens of overlapping windows would just create an unusable mess on a small screen with large UI elements (which are a necessity on a tablet because of the touch interface). And firm limits on the size and position of apps means a consistent, predictable interface with a minimum of manual management required. 

There are of course plenty of things that are better done on a Mac, but TBH at least in my field those are mostly things that either require more screen real estate that you can expect on a tablet, require too much of the hardware, or things the app developers left out of their iPad versions, more because it costs time and money and the features are esoteric or seldom used, and less because of OS limitations. Apple could ship an iPadOS version of Xcode, or put a Developer menu in Safari for iPad; Adobe could implement all the missing features of Photoshop and Illustrator and make a tablet InDesign; they just haven't chosen to, so I'm stuck spending 10% of my work day on a very nice Mac using very sophisticated apps in a very clunky, old fashioned desktop multitasking paradigm   

danvm said:

It looks like SJ is talking about ergonomics and not about UI or form factors.  And from an ergonomic POV, an iPad Pro w/ Smart Keyboard is very similar to a notebook with touchscreen. 

Apple doesn't even promote the Smart Keyboard anymore though - not since the Magic Keyboard was released. It's clear they expect minimal interaction with the touch surface when connected in that fashion, since you can now use a trackpad or mouse. 

entropys said:

The windowing looks an improvement and much more intuitive than the current difficult setup.
what were the changes to the file manager? That is the other key limitation of ipadOS over a Mac.

I've never understood the desire to send iPad's UI back to the 80s with overlapping resizable windows - you say it's more "intuitive" but it's really only intuitive if the classic desktop style UI is what you're used to. I've been using full screen spaces, split view, slideover, PiP, etc on both my Macs and iPads since those features debuted and I find them to be a far better use of screen real estate than the old way. Windows don't get buried and lost, you don't have to hunt through spaces for some random popup that could be anywhere, etc, and you aren't constantly managing window sizes so the overlapping doesn't become burdensome. Stage Manager seems to be an admission that even on Macs, all those windows get messy.

Not to say they couldn't make some improvements to the existing multitasking - on Macs and maybe the larger iPad Pros, I would love to see horizontal split view or more than 2 panels per view. macOS also needs Slideover. 

One question I have: does external display support *require* the use of the Stage Manager UI, or can you have tradtional fullscreen, split view, slideover multitasking on an external display (assuming you have an M1 iPad of course)? Would really suck for e.g. video apps to be stuck inside a little window that can't use the entire screen.