tht

I liked it. It's a return to form, imo. Enable features that are beneficial to people. Do things well. Don't follow hype-trend of the year. They did the AI stuff at WWDC2025 better than WWDC2024. 

When I look at my phone, I don't see the outside world as clearly as I'd like. Despite the fact that it's an iPhone 13 mini, my phone certainly seems to occupy a large part of my vision.  Maybe that's a big part of why I am so opposed to the Apple Vision Pro. I'm already carrying guilt for having my phone on me in the first place.  Apple Glass, though, would allow you to still see the outside world. Maybe in a way that would force you to be a little more present.

Your reasoning here sounds backwards, vis-a-vis, an AR eyeglass form factor.

When these AR eyeglasses come out, it means you will have virtual displays in front of you during all your waking hours. The point of "eyeglasses" is to wear them all the time. It will enable you to doom scroll at all times. To people looking at you, you will appear to be not paying attention, in much the same manner as when you are looking at your phone. You will have to fight the urge to look at a virtual display even more. It won't be sitting in your pocket. You don't need to sit at a desk to look at it. It is always going to be there.

Assuming it is good, virtual displays, and their content, will be reachable to you with a blink of an eye or gesture from your hands. When your attention is on the virtual display, you will not be seeing the outside world. It's even worse, as all the services that are driven by ad money, will do everything they can to draw and keep your attention.

If you want less screen time, what you are asking for is to use parental controls, limit what apps can be used, and put a time limit on the usage of your phone.

A goggles form factor like the Vision Pro is a desk side device, or perhaps a home only device. It will eventually lead to something like 5 to 10 hours of usage where people can use it everywhere, but not now. Today, it is more of a computer+display system rather than a mobile device.

nubus said:

1. Why is "install what you like" blocked for devices with touch?
2. Why can't Mac get OLED or cellular (it seems Mac at some point will but why not now)?
3. Is iPad really ready to run a lot of windows with only 8 GB or will iPadOS 26 make most models feel slow?
4. Why isn't iPad base memory 16 GB or easier to configure?
5. Why can't Mac get touch for use with iPad apps?
6. And why is Files called Finder on Mac?
7. I'm not even sure I want to have multiple windows on iPad. It will require a larger screen making it less of a tablet.

1. Apple says it is for user security. If you used MS Windows in the early 2000s, or even MacOS 9 or OS X, you can understand why. People would have like 5 rows of toolbars in their web browsers. Un-killable pop-ups made the OS unusable. Downloading and installing an app could easily install malware. Often, a reformat, reinstall of the OS, and a reinstall of the apps was the best course of action as much of the malware were started in the boot process, as laypeople should not be changing Windows registry settings. It was in this environment that Apple designed iPhoneOS and subsequently iPadOS and iOS.

If it wasn't for the App Store generating trust in users to buy and download apps, I would submit the trillion dollar app ecosystem on top of smartphones would not exist. Apple is only going to give this up grudgingly, slowly and incrementally. This is the proper course of action.

2. Tandem OLEDs, what is used by the M4 iPad Pros, are still too expensive and Apple wouldn't have the gross margins they want on Mac laptops with them, and they don't want to raise prices. There has been a lot of pressures to increase prices, but they haven't. Single layer OLEDs could be used, but their performance and robustness isn't up to what Apple wants, or better than the miniLED displays on MBP models.

3. Yes, 8 GB is enough for unlimited multitasking in most cases. 8 GB is basically the practical minimum for PC operating systems with hundreds of millions to billions of lines of code, running the use cases for most of the installed base. It won't cover everything, like running FCP with a 20 Safari windows open, 3D apps, complex apps, etc. For most users it will.

4. I fully expect 16 and 32 GB RAM will be the RAM tiers in the M5 iPad Pros this Fall. Or, 12, 24, and 36 GB RAM. RAM might be semi-split off from storage tiers. Might. I wouldn't bet on it. RAM and storage configurations will likely be in lockstep. They do this to improve margins, increase the upsell, improve resale, etc. Eg, you won't be able to get the maximum RAM in a minimum storage configuration.

5. Apple doesn't think touchscreens on vertically oriented displays (including laptop displays) are a good user experience and the feature doesn't really sell Macs. If, possibly, or when, they add a touchscreen to a Mac laptop, I don't think it would increase sales either.

6. A Mac is a personal computer whose roots started in 1984. The then Mac marketing team decided to call it the "Finder", alluding to finding apps, files, and such. Back then, we had to use these 3.5" memory cartridges. Our files were stored in it. It was a graphical system to display files and directories (Folders). Often, you had to eject the mounted 3.5" cartridge, and insert a different 3.5" cartridge to find the file you wanted. Same with even running different apps! The Macintosh system evolved, multifinder (!), through the years, but the name stuck. In the OS X transition, the Finder was a carbon app, from MacOS 8/9. It was not the NeXTSTEP workspace manager, but the actual MacOS 8/9 code, and moved to OS X as the file system interface. It made a transition go Objective C and is likely, slowly moving to Swift code. They have not changed the name, and thus the filesystem interface on Macs has been called "Finder" all these decades. On iPadOS, I assume Apple thought "Files" was more descriptive, and a better name.

7. You can use the iPad like you may be using. There is setting to only to use 1 app, fullscreen, at a time. This was the first thing Apple said and demonstrated in their presentation. I would admit that the 13" iPad the demo person was using looked really big in her hands.

So, if it's not specs, then it must be leadership and internal rethinking of the platform. Or perhaps, just maybe, Apple started listening to the niche iPad users.

The 2021 M1 iPad Pros with 8 GB of RAM was probably the earliest they could do it. The 2020 A12Z iPad Pros would have been ok with 6 GB of RAM, but really would be absolute bottom of the barrel minimum. 

I'm not so confident that 4 GB iPads can do multitasking well. People should be able to podcast, where audio is being recorded (not so sure 4 GB can handle video recording) while the user is also browsing a webpage, looking at notes, and watching a video. Multitasking with full MS Office in 4 GB? That's going to be tight, imo. That is, you have MS Teams, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint and Word running. Your regular iPad apps, that run on 2 GB iPads, should be fine in 4 GB.

Waiting to hear how the 4 GB A-series iPads perform. It may be moot anyways as you really don't multitask well with a small display. It needs to be hooked up to an external display, and the A-series iPads won't be able to extend their displays I think.

It's always been leadership and internal thinking driving the iPad platform. They definitely had a vision for what an iPad would be, and they felt that multitasking was against this vision. So, they only chipped at it for a while. I'm speculating that John Ternus finally won against the design and marketing teams, but he only won because this original iPad vision ran its course. It was inevitable for this to happen as computing performance outran the original vision, and iPads having more and more personal computer features was going to happen.

The product marketing team (Schiller before, and Joswiak for the past 5 years or so) took a big hit after the last year of AI-hype vapor-ware game, and losing. Definitely think Federighi also played into this losing game too. Hopefully the experience has humbled them and reminded them of the lessons learned from many, many mistakes in the past.

Then, hopefully the design teams have fully retreated. I was happy to see Jony Ive go, and then, Evans Hankey go too. Designers being given so much power in the product is a bad sign. Designers in service a product architect like Steve Jobs is great. Designers doing the product design? No. There needs to be an architect who knows what the product does and how it will be used.

Xcode and Terminal are hopefully next. 

s.metcalf said:

tht said:

Hoping this iPadOS multitasking rumor means unlimited background multitasking has finally made its way to iPadOS.

The problem is, the vast majority of iPads in circulation have 8 GB of RAM or less.  There’s only so much multitasking you can do with that.  We saw the effect of low RAM inhibiting performance on the MacBook Airs before Apple finally (and stubbornly) increased it to 16.  You have to buy a super expensive iPad Pro with 1 TB or more storage to even get 16 GB, and considering graphics have to use it as well, 8 GB will fall over fast.  Fine for a phone, but not a supposedly Pro “what’s a computer” device.

Apple are always so miserly with their RAM and storage offerings, they wait until it’s beyond embarrassing to do anything about it.  It’s why I didn’t buy an iPad Pro which I otherwise would have.  They lost hundreds of dollars profit from me over something that would’ve cost a few dollars or a dozen or two at most to increase.

Yes. RAM limitations were definitely a reason for not implementing unlimited background multitasking on iPadOS.

However, the time is basically now for a change to that. The iPad Air with M2 and 8 GB of RAM has been shipping since 2022, and iPad Pros with M1 and 8 GB since 2021. A rather large fraction of the installed base of iPads have are 8 GB. The will be a little less RAM pressure on iPadOS since apps need to request the amount of RAM they can allocate, and they generally have to work on 3 and 4 GB iPads too.

One of the big issues imo is the apps are not designed to be of arbitrary size. Apps are generally 4:3 or 1.4:1 aspect ratios, and if we're lucky, they support Split View or Slide Over. There is a gigantic mass of apps that won't be updated for arbitrary display sizes needed for a multitasking system. I've been thinking Apple won't be doing unlimited multitasking until they can solve this for free to developers. A large fraction of developers just won't update their apps for it.