The iPad Pro needs software worthy of the name

At the launch of the iPad Pro M4 last month, Tim Cook said it was “the biggest day for the iPad since its introduction”. That clearly wasn’t the case: it was a day of really nice incremental hardware updates for a tablet that already had more power than most people know what to do with.

But Cook’s proclamation, at least in retrospect, might still be true. Apple just needs to stick the landing and use WWDC to show us a powerful operating system worthy of the new iPad Pro’s powerful hardware.

Let me get this out of the way: the base iPad, which runs the current iPadOS, is great for the things most people use an iPad for. No one should spend more than $500 on a tablet that they’re going to use mainly for reading, checking email, and watching things, and the operating system is already great at that.

But Apple spent a lot of money making the iPad Pro with an M4 processor, a tandem OLED screen, and a ton of RAM and storage. And Apple has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that it’s a real computer that can do real work, putting all the human creative expression into it, things like that.

The iPad is a computer. The iPad Pro special is a computer. You can choose the processor, RAM and storage. It has a keyboard – now with a trackpad and function row – that “looks more like a MacBook than ever.” It has a $130 stylus that you can squeeze and roll. You can spend more on it than on a comparable MacBook Pro. But if you try to use it like a computer, the operating system will fight you every step of the way.

That’s been the case for the entire life of the iPad, and even more so since the launch of the iPad Pro. But as the gang further discussed The Vergecast and David Pierce mentioned in his reviews of the new iPad Air and iPad Pro that the hardware now seems to be as far along as it can go. Without a meaningful change to iPadOS, the iPad Pro won’t be what Apple wants you to believe.

If you’ve never tried working on an iPad, I’m sincerely happy for you. I’m writing this story on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an 11-inch iPad Air M2. It’s a very nice keyboard, and the Air is a very nice tablet, but this would have been so much faster and easier on a convertible Chromebook. And I still could have watched Andor on the plane.

It’s still far too annoying to do any work on an iPad that doesn’t require you to stay in one full-screen app the entire time. Even something as simple as writing a blog post while pulling in photos and links from other articles takes much longer and involves a lot more jumping around than on any other screen of this size. Stage Manager has come an average distance, but it’s still not great, especially without an external monitor. And the iPad still doesn’t have good multi-window support: there’s no way to place app windows on specific parts of the screen or save window configurations.

Try to do anything advanced, and you’ll run into all kinds of basic problems. The iPad version of Final Cut Pro fails to export a video when you leave the app, even just to the home screen, because the operating system doesn’t have proper support for background processes. There’s also no task manager, no proper file manager, no clipboard manager, and no way to fill the gaps in iPadOS functionality with third-party apps and tools. These are all things that the iPad’s excellent hardware could support.

Federico Viticci op MacStories has the definitive catalog of all the ways iPadOS still falls short, but you don’t have to be Federico to understand it; you just have to try using the iPad as a computer for 10 minutes.

Apple has been clear from the start that an iPad is an iPad and the MacBook is a MacBook, and whether you want a touchscreen computer And a laptop, you’re better off buying both. That argument makes sense for the regular iPad (and for Apple’s quarterly earnings). But it’s pretty worn out when the iPad Pro costs as much as a MacBook, runs on the same architecture, and has a keyboard that Apple calls “just like using a MacBook.”

It may sound like I’m asking for macOS on the iPad. I mean sure, yes, if that’s what it takes, but Apple has a chance at WWDC to unveil an iPadOS that’s as powerful and capable as the hardware deserves while still being distinct from macOS.

Not to put too much emphasis on it, but the Surface Pro is right there. Admit it or not, Apple has been after the Surface Pro since it first gave the iPad a USB-C port and a keyboard.

The Surface Pro has a new Arm processor that Microsoft says is a match for Apple Silicon. It has an OLED screen. It runs Windows 11, which, my complaints aside, is a real operating system, with task manager, file manager, good window tiles, background processes, you name it. It also has some AI features whose usefulness is uncertain, just as Apple is expected to announce at WWDC.

We’ll only know for a few weeks if Microsoft has pulled it off, but there’s now very little distance between the device Apple wants you to believe is the iPad Pro and the device Microsoft wants you to think is the Surface Pro , even though they’ come from opposite directions.

I doubt too many iPad diehards will switch to a machine running Windows, no matter how good the Surface Pro is. But the more I bang my head against the limitations of iPadOS, the better the Surface Pro looks. And the people who buy into Apple’s hype and purchase the M4 iPad Pro should have an operating system that is worthy of the hardware.