It’s that time of the year again. Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is about to begin. Rumour sites share rumours and what-might-happen, with various degrees of trustworthiness. And tech pundits share their wishes. I have been thinking about what to write for at least two weeks. My first half of 2022 has been much busier than expected, both work-wise and in my private life, and the months of March-April-May have been particularly messy, as you may have guessed by the scarcity of updates here. Add to this the fact that, as of late, I’ve been finding writing about tech harder than usual, and I think you won’t have trouble believing that I was very close to not writing anything about the upcoming WWDC at all.
But why has writing about tech been harder than usual? Because as time goes on, the gap between what I want from tech and what tech companies are doing and their priorities just keeps widening. With Apple, it’s largely no different. That’s why writing a piece about my ‘wishes’ with regard to what Apple will present at the WWDC keynote felt utterly pointless — because what I want from Apple is something the company doesn’t seem interested in pursuing, or can’t do because that would imply a course correction that involves too much effort on their part.
Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS
While I have been for the most part pleased with what Apple has done with the hardware since the Apple Silicon transition started, their software keeps being underwhelming at best. It’s not just software quality or questionable design decisions in their operating systems’ UIs. It’s their — how to call it? — lack of platform vision, maybe.
The core feature of Apple’s ecosystem, what has made me choose Apple’s devices over decades and stick with them, is what Apple has generally done better than the competition: hardware-software integration. Apple’s advantage, of course, is that unlike most PC manufacturers the company builds both the hardware and the software.
This integration used to be tight, and it was the main reason behind the It Just Works motto. But over the past… hmmm ten years maybe? Over the past ten years it’s like there have been two distinct companies inside Apple, Apple Hardware and Apple Software, which have communicated with each other less and less frequently and less and less effectually. Apple Hardware has been accelerating over time, sometimes making mistakes but apparently willing to learn from them and correcting them over time. And with the innovation of Apple Silicon, they have done an excellent job at delivering breathtakingly powerful Macs, iPads, iPhones.
Apple Software hasn’t kept up with the pace at all. It has been moving in circles. It has been trying to fix what was not broken. It has introduced regressions in the user interface. It has seemingly un-learnt some good lessons of the past; lessons, I should point out, imparted by Apple Software themselves… only the older guard, people who clearly better understood the importance of software and the role it plays in powering a platform.
So here we are today, with insanely powerful Macs and iPads driven by inadequate operating systems. And as I was writing in Raw power alone is not enough, not only has Apple not been a source for software inspiration and innovation in years, but with their overbearingly protective attitude, they’ve been stifling many third-party developers, especially on iOS/iPadOS. They have been — inadvertently or not — obstructing innovation in software. What’s the point of having iPad Pros that are more powerful than a lot of non-Apple PCs, and then have third-party developers jump through so many hoops and restrict their movements so much that the apps they eventually create are miraculous constructions which have to balance so many things internally that sometimes even a minor OS update is enough to cause disruption.
Platform trajectory
A perhaps unpopular opinion I’ve been holding for a while is that the convergence of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS as platforms has been a bad idea, and that ideally it should be rethought. I’ve been saying this for years: to have the best of Mac OS and the best of iPadOS, Apple should focus on the particular strengths each platform has. The focus should be to double down on the differences between a Mac and an iPad so that you can one day provide the best computer and the best tablet experience. All these attempts at homogenising Mac OS and iPadOS for the sake of having ‘a familiar environment’ has only been hurting the usability of each operating system.
Remember the iPad at its heyday, when it was essentially a consumption device where you could consume content like you would on an iPhone, but more comfortably due to the iPad’s bigger screen? At that point in time iOS worked perfectly as the operating system for a device with that purpose.
But it was only natural to want to do more with a tablet. It was a device that just asked for creativity and creation. Things came to a crossroads, and in my opinion Apple took the wrong road. Instead of creating ‘iPadOS’ then (let’s say around the time iOS reached version 6), and start working on making a truly tablet-oriented OS, they let the software stagnate on the iPad. For years. For years what ran on an iPad was big iPhone OS and little more. Until the pressure from the more creative and iPad-first users got unbearable and iPadOS was officially created in 2019. And at that point, after not going anywhere for years, what can you do to make the iPad a more versatile and creative device? Have its OS ape Mac OS, essentially. Maybe not quite in a literal or slavish manner, but certainly conceptually.
The Newton’s operating system didn’t want to be ‘Mac OS on a PDA’. NewtonOS was/is an OS built for and around the hardware it ran on. iPadOS’s path seems to be destined to increasingly borrow from Mac OS. This is misguided. And not because I don’t want the iPad to get Mac OS features. That’s not the point.
But this is what you get when you leave a potentially computing-changing device stagnate for years OS-wise. Now its operating system can only go from being big iPhone OS to being little Mac OS because it’s too late to make a U‑turn and rethink the whole software paradigm. “Ooh, but multitasking on the iPad is getting better and will get better!” — Yeah, it only took 12 years to be able to run 3 apps simultaneously. As I said on Twitter recently, even by giving a better multitasking UI to the iPad, it’s not doing the iPad much justice, and it’s still a type of multitasking whose execution is very computer-like, but crammed into a tablet’s interface. The lazy thinking here is, It’s intuitive because it’s like on computers, people are used to that. But imagine making a tablet OS that’s really built around the characteristics, the form factor, and the applications (use cases) of a tablet. Imagine a tablet OS that fully embraces touch but also the stylus/pencil, with gestures and paradigms borrowed from writing and drawing. It could be just as intuitive, but it naturally would require more effort at the design and execution stages. Yet you may have a groundbreaking OS that treats the iPad like the tablet that it is and builds on its strengths as a not-computer, or as an untraditional computer, if you like.
Instead we’ll soon face a sort of ‘OS confusion’ and conflation, and the differences and distinctions will be more superficial, i.e. driven by hardware. iPads will increasingly become touchscreen Macs. And if Apple one day introduces a Mac with a touchscreen, what kind of differences will we be able to appreciate between, say, a 12.9‑inch touchscreen Mac and a 12.9‑inch iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard? Not many, I’d say. And that’s disappointing. Make this thought experiment: if Apple were to introduce a convertible 2‑in‑1 ‘MacPad’, with touch screen and Pencil support, would you buy an iPad? This MacPad would theoretically have it all: the same touch capabilities of current iPads, and a Mac OS that can effectively run both Mac and iOS apps. Maybe some nerds will even think this is the best of both worlds, while it’s probably going to be the worst of both worlds, mainly because of the compromises you’ll have at the user interface level when you ultimately mix up a traditional computer interface with a touch interface.
Based on what I’m seeing today, it’s hard not to think that Mac OS and iPadOS as platforms are on a path to become Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Surface ecosystem. Yes, it’s possible that Apple could end up making a better job at it, but it’s disappointing to think that the future of the iPad is to resemble something Microsoft did about ten years ago. Not because what Microsoft did and is doing with the Surface is a bad thing, not at all. It’s that doing a similar thing now doesn’t strike me as being particularly innovative or groundbreaking.
Here’s one thing I’d like Apple to do: give third-party developers a more Mac-like access to iPadOS. Yes, I think Apple should start differentiating policies between iOS and iPadOS. iPadOS shouldn’t be locked-down like iOS. It should allow for a little more breathing room like Mac OS does. Keeping a tighter control on what iOS allows to be put on an iPhone could still make sense in order to protect users from malware, etc., given that the smartphone user base is all over the place in the tech-savvy spectrum. But iPad users are generally a more tech-savvy bunch, with more sophisticated needs and creative demands. They could only benefit from a more open iPadOS. It would have the same security protections Mac OS has, and things wouldn’t certainly become ‘the Wild West’ Apple fears so much. If Apple has little to offer, software-wise, to push innovation on the iPad, they should at least avoid standing in the way of developers who potentially could. What’s the point of telling developers, Here’s this new amazing iPad, we can’t wait to see what you can do with it if the reality actually translates into, We can’t wait to see what you can do with it, provided you don’t do this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
Last-minute additions before wrapping up
All this talking about iPad, I was forgetting about the Mac. The thing I’d love to see in the next iteration of Mac OS is something I was mentioning at the beginning of this piece: I wish Apple UI designers would stop messing with the user interface and stop confusing ‘simple UI’ with ‘dumb UI’. I wish they started loving usability more than minimalism. Look at this tweet from Mario Guzman and its follow-up. The progress indicator is small and unhelpful as it is. The fact that you can obtain more information by clicking on it doesn’t make things better: such information should be given by default because it’s meant to be glanceable. I should be able to have Photos in a window on the side and check on the import progress while doing something else without having to click anywhere.
And don’t get me started on the icons themselves: at first glance, I didn’t even know that part of the UI was from Photos. Conversely, you could screenshot any part of the old iPhoto and Aperture’s main interface and you would recognise where you were and what that was. The art of making things discoverable and intuitive is to visually state the obvious in whatever environment you are. And to know whether something is obvious enough (an icon, a slider, a control), you ought to test it with users that are outside your design team and their collective hallucinations.
The other, more specific thing I’d love to see on Mac OS is “Time Machine 2”. Time Machine is a great feature that truly made backups easier for regular folks. But since its introduction back in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard era, the Time Machine interface (and I daresay its performance) has essentially remained the same. I’m not asking too much here, I think — just a less black-box‑y interface, something a bit more interactive so that you’re not left wondering if the entire backup process has frozen or if it’s still in progress when all you get is Preparing backup…. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have the option of more easily checking older backups and trashing them manually if you need or want it. And performance-wise, well, er, maybe having speedier backups wouldn’t be bad either. Not too long ago I witnessed a Time Machine backup of a Mac’s internal SSD to an external SSD backup drive, both APFS-formatted, and the experience was more underwhelming than expected.
Wrapping up
Now you understand why it felt pointless to write a pre-WWDC ‘list of wishes’. Simply put, Apple is moving in a direction I feel less and less compatible with, generally speaking. The more I want Apple to slow down, do fewer things but better and with a sharper focus, the more Apple seems to do exactly the opposite. I always hope to be proven wrong one day, and that Apple can surprise everyone with some unexpected left-field idea. The way I’d love Apple to operate is perhaps too developer- and consumer-friendly, maybe too countercurrent in relation to the tech landscape surrounding us today. That’s because I was sort of taught to think this way by Apple themselves when they were the industry brilliant underdog when Steve Jobs was still around.