THE NEXT STEP FOR TABLET
PRODUCTIVITY
“You may notice there’s been one thing missing
from the iOS 13 story,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s
Senior Vice President of Software Engineering,
told the audience at the company’s Worldwide
Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2019
after enthusing about the various features of the
new iPhone operating system, “and that’s iPad.”
There’s a simple reason for that: this year, the
iPad has been given its own dedicated OS called
iPadOS, reflecting the “truly distinct” experience
of using the tablet.
In a later interview with MacStories editor-in-
chief Federico Viticci, Federighi provided some
further color on Apple’s rationale for introducing
iPadOS. The executive explained that over the
years, the iPad has “become something really
distinct from the phone”. He clarified that
iPad-specific features such as the multitasking
functionality of Drag and Drop, Split View and
Slide Over, as well as the Apple Pencil, “are things
that really define a different way of working with
the device.”
Today, the days of the iPad being derided as
simply a “large iPhone” feel like a fading memory.
All the same, however, the iPad does not quite
feel like a complete replacement for the Mac
- even if in terms of functionality, the lines
between the two have become increasingly
blurred. VentureBeat’s Jeremy Horwitz has gone
as far as hailing the high-end iPad Pro as “only
an iPadOS update away from replacing a
laptop”, boding well for next year’s expected
refresh of iPadOS.