With all of the focus being on Apple Vision Pro in recent months, not to mention the arrival of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro handsets, it's been easy to almost forget that Apple has an entire tablet lineup on sale. The lack of any new iPads throughout the entire 2023 calendar year — a first for Apple — hasn't helped matters, either. The company is now reportedly ready to refocus its energy on its various tablets with new hardware on the horizon. But part of the work Apple is doing will reportedly involve software retooling that will bring new desktop-class features into the mix.
It isn't unheard of for Apple to try and sell the iPad as a laptop-replacement device and it once centered its entire marketing campaign around the fact that tablets are real computers. They're great for doing more than watching YouTube and reading a book to be sure, but Apple knows that there is still work to be done. Part of that work reportedly includes bringing new desktop features to the iPad to try and give it a more grown-up feel, ditching the baby Mac app approach that has been an issue for iPad power users over the last decade and change.
Quite what these new features will be isn't immediately clear, but a timeframe has been suggested — Apple will reportedly seek to give the iPad a new lease of life via a slew of desktop features that could further close the gap between iPadOS and macOS.
A laptop in everything but name
Apple might be in the middle of a promotional push that claims that spatial computing is the way we will all be getting things done in the future, but with the Apple Vision Pro prohibitively expensive and still very much in its infancy, laptops are where most people do their work today. Apple wants to make the iPad part of the computing conversation and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that it already has a two-year plan to make that happen.
Writing in the weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman notes that Apple has tried to position the iPad as a potential Mac replacement by launching keyboards with trackpads and adding Mac-like cursor support. But it's still seen by many as a consumption device rather than a device they can get real work done on. The plan to change that reportedly includes "the company looking to bring more desktop-computer features to its tablet," a move Gurman says is "only going to accelerate over the next two years."
As Gurman correctly notes, Apple has had mixed results to date. The September release of iPadOS 17 is the best tablet software Apple has ever released, but it's still lacking when compared with macOS Sonoma. The way both operating systems — and the hardware they power — work is completely different, and Apple knows it. The walls between the two have been crumbling for years and Stage Manager is a prime example of that. The feature brings window-based working to the iPad, but in a way that doesn't work quite how people might expect it to. Apple's decision to bring the same feature to the Mac is even more baffling, too.
Software updates will no doubt bring new features, possibly as early as iPadOS18, but the upcoming OLED iPad Pro refresh will likely have a part to play as well. Sure to be the best iPad ever produced, the new tablets are expected to also ship with a revamped Magic Keyboard that will be more sturdy and make using the iPad Pro feel more like using a MacBook Pro — something that Apple hasn't quite managed to date.
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