A number of commenters have made the point that iPad reviews haven’t really changed in years. Each generation, the hardware gets better, and the software gets left behind. That has led some to suggest a dual-boot iPad, which can switch between iPadOS and macOS as desired.
However, former Microsoft exec Steven Sinofsky – who was President of the Windows division for several years – says this idea “is just nuts” …
The WSJ’s Joanna Stern was one of those to propose a dual-boot iPad.
At first, maybe it’s dual boot. That is, just let the iPad Pro load up macOS if it’s attached to the Magic Keyboard and use the screen as a regular (but beautiful) monitor – no touch. Over time, maybe macOS is just a “mode” inside of iPadOS – complete with some elements updated to be touch-friendly, but not touch-first. I’m sure it’s not exactly simple to do all of this, but it is straightforward and obvious now with such technology.
Sinofsky stops short of admitting that Microsoft Surface products failed in their mission to be both tablets and laptops, but does say that desktop UIs don’t work with a touch interface – and that it wasn’t a commercial success for the company.
He argues that neither running macOS on an iPad, nor turning a Mac into a touchscreen device, makes sense.
It is not unusual for customers to want the best of all worlds. It is why Detroit invented convertibles and el caminos. But the idea of a “dual boot” device is just nuts. It is guaranteed the only reality is it is running the wrong OS all the time for whatever you want to do. It is a toaster-refrigerator. Only techies like devices that “presto-change” into something else. Regular humans never flocked to El Caminos, and even today SUVs just became station wagons and almost none actually go off road :-)
He said you can’t use macOS with the “blunt instrument” of a finger instead of the precision of a mouse.
If you want “touch-enabled” check out what happened on the Windows desktop. Nearly everything people say they want isn’t features as much as the mouse interaction model. People want overlapping windows, a desktop of folders, infinitely resizable windows, and so on […]
The metaphors that people like on a desktop, heck that they love, just don’t work with the blunt instrument of touch […]
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.
Top comment by Tech_Enthusiast
He's exactly right, but people who aren't designers and developers who work on this stuff just don't get it. If you sit down and really think critically about the difference between "more functional" pro apps on macOS versus their "less functional" version on iPadOS, the difference comes down to the amount of information the user can access on the screen. "More functionality" in pro apps means more interactions, more information, and more buttons. To have the same level of functionality in a mobile app would require so many extra layers of menus and icons that people would complain about it, too.
You genuinely can't have both the utility of desktop--where things are controlled by indirect input and therefore able to be very small--and the functionality of a touch screen--where direct input requires larger touch targets. You end up compromising on both experiences in a way that would, in my opinion, be even worse than the current complete separation of macOS and iPadOS.
That's why Apple is promoting the idea of spatial computing with the Vision Pro. The future of our interactions with computing is not to cram a desktop OS into a tablet, or a touch screen onto a desktop. It's to change the way we interact with computers completely, via our space, our voice, and AI.
If you change the OS to accommodate touch, then it’s no longer macOS.
9to5Mac’s Take
To be fair to Stern, she wasn’t suggesting that macOS on an iPad be fully controllable by touch, but she was proposing some accommodations, which risks diluting the things we love about macOS.
While I get the financial appeal of buying one device instead of two, ultimately I think this just means we end up with a device which isn’t a great iPad or a Mac.
The real solution here is not to attempt to turn an iPad into a Mac, but to rethink iPadOS from first principles, and set out to create the very best touch-first OS possible. That might perhaps include some features which are only available when using an attached keyboard and trackpad.
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