I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.
There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.
No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
In fact Apple gets its highest praise (from nerds like us) for OS releases that just fix bugs and improve performance. Of course shareholders praise other things like cutting costs and raising revenue.
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
I had heard 27 was much better than 26, so I broke my usual embargo on new macOS versions until x.y.5 and upgraded. I also had a problem with the 26.6.7(?) update that came out the same day as 27.0, so I went for it. Big mistake. I regret it.
I also regret updating my homepods and ATV to 27.0. I had lots of phantom clicks on the tv remote. Turns out it was the homepods. When it happens I have to restart them to fix it.
Never again. I will be on 27.x.y until 28.6 is released.
I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).
If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.
yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe.
but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
Stage manager and liquid glass were 2nbig flops. Stage manager because it’s unusable and adds clutter to the screen and liquid glass because it makes an m1 ipad pro feel like a 2010 device
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.
in AI era, marginal cost of getting your 'anything' compatible with open systems and solutions is so low, that soon I expect only really stubborn, sad people still fighting with MacOS/Windows/PadOS
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I had to use an iPad with the Magic Keyboard as a laptop replacement for a week, since my only laptop (MacBook) was in repair for that time.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
I don’t think the examples I gave were particularly specialized.
Enterprise is running what I assume
to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
Apple only lets you downgrade to iOS versions that are still signed. Typically previous updates remain signed for ~1 month. You can check which updates are still signed here: https://appledb.dev/
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
The ability to downgrade a package on a desktop OS is not universal.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
> Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
Apple hardware is underserved by software. iPad versions of the desktop applications are severely limited and I see no reason to upgrade my iPad Pro to the latest version, because I know all that computer power would be wasted.
I hate stuff like this. Apple changed how the new Apple Watch buttons work, breaking massive muscle memory on how to get the app switcher. "Thankfully" my Apple Watch "ultra" from 4 years ago is basically considered obsolete so it won't get the update.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
Am I the only one having ridiculous issues in MacOS 27? The window management is simply broken, whenever I click an app in the dock the OS switches to the completely wrong screen, and when I move a window to another screen I often have a black screen on the source screen.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026
At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.
I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying.
Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?
The post makes it clear they’re making heavy use of multitasking and you’re isolating just one task then saying the CPU is overkill. I don’t think simultaneous note taking, Airplay display and remote control of a Mac was a solved problem in 2014.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.
Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software monopoly.
I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.
if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.
You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.
The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.
Ever since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has, deliberately or not, been introducing regressions into its software. Is it more secure? Yes. But things are getting uglier and uglier (I’m looking at you, Ive), and many things are broken or slower.
I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.
There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.
I bet xOS at this point is just a sloppy mess. The way they software lock certain features alone is probably cause of a bunch of slop.
> because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.
Zero hardware changes forced springboard teams hand here.
No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.
> No one makes Apple release new products.
Their shareholders sure do.
>No one makes Apple release new products.
Or buy them. Sign me: Vision Pro owner
It's only a compromise on profit levels.
Re: feature creep.
I wonder if Apple simply has too many employees?
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
In fact Apple gets its highest praise (from nerds like us) for OS releases that just fix bugs and improve performance. Of course shareholders praise other things like cutting costs and raising revenue.
> I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
Why do you think that? With unlimited talent and money on either side it seems possible to do both really well without it hurting profit margin.
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Gives me hope!
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
Why do you think they need to do proper QA? People are going to buy their products anyway.
I had heard 27 was much better than 26, so I broke my usual embargo on new macOS versions until x.y.5 and upgraded. I also had a problem with the 26.6.7(?) update that came out the same day as 27.0, so I went for it. Big mistake. I regret it. I also regret updating my homepods and ATV to 27.0. I had lots of phantom clicks on the tv remote. Turns out it was the homepods. When it happens I have to restart them to fix it. Never again. I will be on 27.x.y until 28.6 is released.
I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).
If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.
yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe. but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
Stage manager and liquid glass were 2nbig flops. Stage manager because it’s unusable and adds clutter to the screen and liquid glass because it makes an m1 ipad pro feel like a 2010 device
I have no idea what stage manager is and I don’t wanna look it up. And I have an iPad. But it’s also running the older ios
Don’t upgrade. Stay as long as you can.
Yeah it feels like a subpar android device.
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.
in AI era, marginal cost of getting your 'anything' compatible with open systems and solutions is so low, that soon I expect only really stubborn, sad people still fighting with MacOS/Windows/PadOS
An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)
Well, the author needs it to be a tablet form factor with a stylus as described here https://teddysvoronos.com/2015-11-19-in-praise-of-goodnotes/
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
This is a myopic take.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
Which apps do you use for this? Keynote or something else?
I’m sure Apple could as easily break presentation mode on macOS.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
But it'd be far easier for me to fix it, even if I had to disable SyStEm iNtEgRiTy PrOtEcTiOn to do it.
A lot of teachers at my uni use them for drawing on the slides during lecture
Why? It would be helpful to understand why you support such a silly statement.
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Perhaps "real computer" means being able to perform general purpose tasks. I don't think iPads are capable of that with how locked down they are.
I do believe them to be computers that excel in specialized settings. Like in your two examples.
I had to use an iPad with the Magic Keyboard as a laptop replacement for a week, since my only laptop (MacBook) was in repair for that time.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
Desktop Windows computers at a large corp are usually also really locked down by IT, and are incapable of being able to perform general purpose tasks.
I don’t think the examples I gave were particularly specialized.
Enterprise is running what I assume to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
Apple only lets you downgrade to iOS versions that are still signed. Typically previous updates remain signed for ~1 month. You can check which updates are still signed here: https://appledb.dev/
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
For example you can use https://github.com/pwnerblu/surrealra1n to downgrade A12/A13 chip devices using this bootrom exploit: https://github.com/ahmadkamal09999-tech/usbliter8
The ability to downgrade a package on a desktop OS is not universal.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
Why not play it even safer with an overhead projector?
Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
How is he able to help more other than telling the truth that phones and tablets can't do what she needs?
This is a completely absurd take. The entire point of TFA is that it used to work fantastically well until iOS 27 broke it.
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
> Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
millions of settings to wade through, but no real control over anything.
Those millions of settings give some users a pleasurable but false sense of control.
I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
Apple hardware is underserved by software. iPad versions of the desktop applications are severely limited and I see no reason to upgrade my iPad Pro to the latest version, because I know all that computer power would be wasted.
I hate stuff like this. Apple changed how the new Apple Watch buttons work, breaking massive muscle memory on how to get the app switcher. "Thankfully" my Apple Watch "ultra" from 4 years ago is basically considered obsolete so it won't get the update.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
Am I the only one having ridiculous issues in MacOS 27? The window management is simply broken, whenever I click an app in the dock the OS switches to the completely wrong screen, and when I move a window to another screen I often have a black screen on the source screen.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
No, we are all on the same boat. 27.2 is a bit better, but introduced some new bugs too. In the end they fix one bug and introduce two new ones.
I honestly haven't seen any behavior like this. I use two external monitors and use different spaces heavily.
You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026
At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.
I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying. Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?
The post makes it clear they’re making heavy use of multitasking and you’re isolating just one task then saying the CPU is overkill. I don’t think simultaneous note taking, Airplay display and remote control of a Mac was a solved problem in 2014.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
Hard agree.
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Why doesn’t Apple allow you to use native screen sharing to control other Macs on the iPad??? it is enraging
Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.
Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software monopoly.
Sure, they don't like programmers, why not. Then who are the other users which could make use of iPads as powerful machine?
I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
> iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.
if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.
Yeah, I’ve had a similar experience. Even the features of iPadOS that work are buggy. iPadOS is a nerfed buggy mess compared to macOS
You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.
I don’t understand why users even went to iOS-based devices as a daily driver for more serious computing. They need to be seen as appliances.
You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.
The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.
Ever since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has, deliberately or not, been introducing regressions into its software. Is it more secure? Yes. But things are getting uglier and uglier (I’m looking at you, Ive), and many things are broken or slower.
Reason #1385275 why an iPad will never be a replacement for a real desktop OS no matter how much fancy hardware they shove in it.