In the world of Apple products the “pro” moniker can mean a handful of different things. Pro can mean “professional”. It can also be a shorthand for “nice” or “luxury”. Often times it’s somewhere in between. The iPhone Pro is a nice upgrade from the iPhone. It can also do Pro things. The Apple Watch Ultra isn’t much more than a nice upgrade to the regular Apple Watch. I would throw AirPods Pro in this category as well. Simply a nice upgrade form the normal AirPods. The base MacBook Pro is a nice upgrade from the MacBook Air but the MacBook Pro truly becomes “pro” once you start adding the higher end hardware to it. These are obvious things. The iPad Pro however sits in this somewhat strange place. In reality, it’s not really a “pro” product but it has way more compute power than the average user will ever need. If anything it sits in the same position with the iPhone: a nice upgrade form the iPad Air that can also do some pro things. The difference is that unlike the iPhone Pro, I feel like the iPad Pro really is less of a mainstream product. Everyone in 2024 needs a phone. Not everyone wants or even needs an iPad to begin with.

The average consensus among reviewers and Apple Nerds is that this incredibly powerful hardware is held back by what is basically a glorified version of iOS in iPadOS. That this incredibly powerful computer is going to waste inside this aluminum and glass slab with this underwhelming software. It’s true that given the M series chips powering the Pro and even Air lines of iPads, these are workstation caliber slabs of glass. But iPadOS is not a workstation OS. The EU has even called bullshit and lumped it in, correctly, with iOS. Enter the argument that the iPad Pro should run a version of MacOS. But what if we’re thinking about things the wrong way? What if the iPad Pro is just a really nice iPad that can occasionally do Pro stuff. What if the iPad Pro is just a really nice iPad? Like the iPhone Pro mentioned above. We’ve already done this experiment twice already: Microsoft Tablet PCs and Windows 8 on the Microsoft Surface.

There’s a reason everyone forgets about Tablet PCs and that the Surface tablets laptops don’t sell all that well.

The Hardware

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. – Alan Kay

Ever since the debut of the M series chips on the iPad there has been a call to have macOS on the iPad as well. And, arguably, from a hardware perspective, rightfully so. The hardware is generally the same as any Mac. It really just comes down to what other chips Apple wants to put on the logic board that enable other functionality¹. In the sense that people want macOS on their iPad, this hardware is more than capable. And, I would even argue, you may not need an iPad Pro to do it. After all, they’re putting the same chips in the iPad Air.

The problem here isn’t with the hardware. It comes back to the Alan Kay quote above. Apple is a serious hardware company and they’ve been building their own hardware for decades. It just so happens that now they’re building their own SoCs. Because we have this hardware, people seem to have this expectation that simply because it can do more it should do more. That isn’t always the case.

While the expectation is that since we have a desktop class CPU, we should have a desktop class OS (We’ll get to apps in a minute). I disagree. I think that it speaks to the confidence that Apple has in their SoC’s power consumption and resource management that they feel comfortable putting these on mid to high end iPads. As a PC gamer I can tell you that if I was into any kind of mobile gaming I would snatch this hardware up in a heartbeat. Why? If this thing can handle Ray Tracing then my games will look absolutely incredible and that is one of the reasons I build gaming PCs. I want the graphics to look amazing and the performance to be the best I can afford. It doesn’t do me any good if the game plays at 120 FPS but looks like shit. But I would never want to use macOS, let alone Windows, on a slab of glass. To take this one step further, the iPhone 15 Pro does hardware ray tracing as well and we don’t ask for any kind of desktop OS there. In fact, I seem to remember some visible confusion when Apple used the iPhone 15 Pro and it’s pro feature set at the Scary Fast event last year.

Apple has managed to do something that most companies have a hard time with: managing resources while maintaining performance². The M Series chips are the exemplification of this. A desktop class SoC in a portable computing platform. An example of power and portability at its best.

The Software

The OS

What most people don’t know is that, as an operating system, iPadOS is essentially a scaled version of macOS. I know this has been mentioned in the past in relation to iOS but I think people forget this. The only difference is in how the OS is presented. Apple, realistically can do whatever they want and segment it as a product however they see fit. And they do. The iPad, by design, was never meant to replace a Mac. It was always meant to be an “in addition to” thing.

Remember, macOS is POSIX compliant and an amalgamation of the Mach and BSD kernels which have their roots in Unix. The thing that makes this possible is that it’s a hybrid kernel. Meaning it attempts to take the best of both monolithic and microkernels making it easily scalable. iOS uses this kernel, and iPadOS is essentially iOS on steroids. Looking at it this way, macOS powers everything from the strongest of Macs down to smallest of Apple’s devices. So, in a sense, we’ve already got macOS on the iPad. Apple has just stripped out all the things that make macOS a “heavy” system and given us only what the iPad hardware and user experience would need. Nothing more, nothing less. By doing this they’ve ensured that, as a user, I can’t accidentally break something and ruin the iPad experience.

Its why we don’t:

• have access to the file system in the same way as macOS
• have a command line without a third party app
• Don’t have or have limited access to things in Settings that we have full access to on the Mac.

The User Experience

But what good is an OS without a UI? Even the most basic of systems has something, even if it’s just a command line. This is the first and most obvious issue with bringing macOS to the iPad. The iPad is based on touch. macOS is not. Whenever I hear of anyone asking to bring macOS over to the iPad I never hear of any UI redesigns to macOS. While we all get annoyed with iPadOS, it’s already designed for touch. If we were to bring macOS over as is, it would be a disaster. How do we know this? Because Microsoft already tried it with Windows 8 and the Surface.

Stephen Sinofsky, former head of Windows, who has some experience with this stuff, on Twitter X:

Simply enabling touch on a Mac gets a lot of flakey software that doesn’t really work with touch plus Macs will always have a trackpad so why bother.

Simply running macOS on an iPad (certainly something they have done internally) only shows the above even more. Without a keyboard/trackpad attached the device would be enormously frustrating. PLUS it would not run a bunch of Mac software not because the underlying hardware couldn’t run it but because huge chunks of those apps/tools would be somewhere between unusable and broken to try to use exclusively with touch.

If anyone knows about this and has publicly shipped a product like this it would be Sinofsky. At this point we’ve probably all forgotten Windows 8 and rightfully so. It was a bad product and it was Microsoft’s attempt to do exactly this. Their attempt to essentially plant Windows on a tablet and serve both desktop and tablet users with the same OS and UI. As we learned, neither worked. Desktop customers were both confused and infuriated and tablet users felt it didn’t go far enough.

But, while most people’s complaints about Windows 8 were the start menu, this is actually a problem macOS wouldn’t have thanks to Launchpad. One problem that macOS would have though is the same problem as the Ribbon interface: it’s really hard to tap that small stuff. Imagine trying to use the Menu Bar in macOS. Or really any of the UI for that matter on such a small screen. Websites work because things like CSS or frameworks like React tell them what size screen to present themselves for. OS UIs don’t really do that. I can’t imagine trying to tap any of the side bars in any window let alone try to tap to minimize or close a window in macOS. This is why we don’t really have a windowing system on the iPad. This is why as awful and annoying as the current UI is, for what the iPad is, it works. This is the compromise that Apple has made.

I know I said we’d talk about apps but the truth of it is, this has the potential to be an absolute disaster if developers just ported their Mac apps over to the iPad. At the very least this gives a sense of consistency and cohesiveness to the iPad experience. It creates standards and allows users to know how things work. We don’t need to make things more complicated than they already are.

Windows 8 has already proven that this would be a nightmare for the average user.

Resources

That’s just using the OS itself. What about the resources a full blown desktop OS would need, regardless if it’s native or virtual? Again, Sinofsky points us in the right direction, having been down this path:

Will you be happy with battery life? The physics of an iPad mean the battery is 2/3rds the size of a Mac battery. Do you really want that? I don’t. The reason the iPad is the 5.x mm device is because the default doesn’t have a keyboard holding the battery.

Now, I admit, I’m not the heaviest iPad user. My battery tends to last for days, as it arguably should any way. But mostly my iPad is one of two things for me: either a media consumption device, such as for YouTube or web browsing, or lately it’s become my Stream Deck. And that’s pretty much it. Yeah I do the occasional email but there’s nothing crazy happening here. The biggest drain on that battery as I sit here and write this is…. Notifications. Yes, notifications. Because every time one goes off the screen lights up, draining the battery. That screen, in the way I use my iPad, is the biggest resource draw on my battery that I’m aware of. A full throated macOS on the other hand would absolutely destroy that battery. As I’ve said before, the hardware here can keep up and ARM based CPUs are great for power management but imagine having to load a full desktop version of Word. Those apps don’t sip battery, they chug it. They hit the CPU hard when they start, and the CPU hits the battery.

Battery life is one of the main experiences Apple is selling with the iPad, pro or otherwise. To have this diminished, even for “power users” would ruin the experience for everyone. It’s the same reason why killing apps on you iPhone is a notoriously bad idea³: it kills your battery. People assume that just because the app is still visible in the app switcher it’s “running” in the background. It’s not. It’s not like on your PC where if you click away it’s still running. It does what it needs to do, saves its state, exits memory, and essentially goes to sleep. The system allows for background tasks on occasion or will group them into a batch to optimize that task and then ejects it. It’s meant for important things like email but a bad actor can certainly take advantage of this. Killing the app just makes it start from nothing which begats the cycle of taxing the CPU which taxes the battery all over again.

Mentioning apps brings up multitasking on a device like the iPad. I feel like in the ideal world, anyone asking for a macOS type experience is looking for multiple windows at the same time. While I agree the the multitasking on iPad isn’t the greatest, it works given what it is: a large touchscreen device. This combines both arguments above: not only would the battery life diminish immensely, trying to tap windows like that would be a terrible experience. Multitasking and context switching in an OS requires resources. Resources that are scarce on a device like the iPad.

From The Verge’s Surface review in 2012:

Overall performance on the Surface was a bit hit or miss. In terms of general UI responsiveness, touch response, speed and framerate of the tile interface, Windows desktop, and most basic OS functionality, the Surface felt incredibly speedy. Switching between apps was fast and fluid, organizing and navigating the Start screen felt snappy, and live tiles flipped and updated smoothly and as expected. Many of the first-party apps — particularly Internet Explorer in the new interface — felt good to me, but others left me wanting. The native email application, for instance, could be slow to update and unresponsive to touch on a regular basis. Other apps, both first and third-party, could be slow to open, then stall or crash altogether. Some 3D games, such as Rocket Riot, seemed fluid and natural, while others staggered along, seemingly struggling to pump out an acceptable frame rate.

When I was just dealing with the core OS, the Surface felt like a lively, sophisticated, fast-moving new system, but the deeper I got into apps and the more apps I opened, the more the device seemed to bog down. There were other issues too: video playback in the browser was a spotty experience. Flash content didn’t fare too well in either the desktop or new browser, and some HTML5 playback stuttered and dropped frames during play.

Is this really the iPad experience we want?

A Computer Of Convenience

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad he positioned it squarely between the Mac and the iPhone. It was the in-between device. At the time, most of the industry was trying to push Netbooks for this but they were awful⁴. Enter the iPad.

The iPad is a consumption device that you can get things done on. It’s also a productivity tool that lets you get things done whenever inspiration hits, wherever you happen to be. The iPad Pro, in 2024, lets you do all those things just better. It sits at the intersection of convenience and productivity. It’s not meant for power users or overly complex tasks. But it is meant for convenient tasks.

It comes back to [Steve’s analogy of cars and trucks].

“PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around [but] one out of x people will need them.” … “We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.”

But more importantly, it really comes back to approach. It seems we’ve all forgotten that the iPad is a tablet. In 2024 it might have some laptop like properties but those are few and implemented with care for the user experience. It’s simply not meant to be a laptop replacement.

Microsoft, even before Windows 8, tried to force the desktop onto a slab of glass. It didn’t work for the UI reasons mentioned above because it was based on a PC. Based on the Windows desktop where precision matters. It had all the benefits and flaws of a laptop. All the flaws listed above. The power flaws. The UI flaws. All of them. Then they tried a second time with Windows 8 and the Surface products. It still didn’t work. Even though Windows 8 was much more acclimating to touch, both of these products are based on PCs. They had the same flaws⁵. The approach was wrong.

iPads, by nature, are based on touch. Instead of trying to squeeze something down into a smaller device with no compromises, it was designed to do the things it does better. They’re meant to do one task at a time and (hopefully) do it well. That’s the compromise. Few tasks done well. This saves on battery which will let the device run for hours if not days at a time. It allows the system UI to be minimal, efficient, but as fully featured as the hardware and developer will allow. And that has even evolved over the years to include a mouse pointer when paired with the correct hardware. The one thing I think the iPad, and tablets especially, are not well equipped to do is window management and multitasking. That’s not an iPad issue, that’s a form factor issue. It can get better but it will never be the same as on a personal computer no matter the OS.

To come back to Steve Jobs’s analogy of cars and trucks I say let the iPad be the iPad. Let it be the car that lets you get most things done quickly and easily. Let the Mac be the Mac. Let it be thing that you pull out when you need to do the heavy lifting. And let the iPad Pro just be a really nice iPad.

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