The WWDC 2019 keynote was interesting and juicy. For once, it felt well organised and with an enjoyable pace. I liked a lot of what was showcased. I hated the audience, seemingly cheering for whatever was said on stage, but I actually cheered myself when they presented the Sign in with Apple initiative^[1]. And the new font management features in iOS made me blurt a Finally! as I was watching the event.

The Mac Pro

The Mac Pro introduction made me happy. Apple could have screwed up the Mac Pro redesign in hundreds of ways. The company — whew — did the Right Thing.

Of course, according to many, Apple screwed up one aspect of the redesign: the redesigned price. I have only two complaints here: one, 256 GB as base storage, for such a machine, and for the entry price of $6,000, is insultingly ungenerous. It’s not a MacBook Pro, Apple. Two, $999 for the Pro Display stand is ludicrous. Okay, you’re a premium brand, but even, say, a battery conditioner for a Rolls-Royce Phantom doesn’t cost that much (it’s about $580 if you’re curious). As other have said, it would have been better to mask that price by including it in the total price of the Pro Display.

As for the rest, no, I don’t believe the 2019 Mac Pro is an expensive machine. And neither is the Pro Display XDR. For their intended audience, they’re priced quite reasonably. Check out this video by Jonathan Morrison about the Pro Display for an informed perspective on the matter.

A lot of words have already been spent about putting the Mac Pro pricing in context, but just look at this progression:

• In 2012, an eight-core Mac Pro cost $3,499 (and a twelve-core was $4,999 by the way).
• In 2013/2014, an eight-core Mac Pro configuration wasn’t available, but the six-core variant cost $3,999.
• In 2017/2018, an eight-core iMac Pro cost $4,999.

Honestly, I was expecting a price tag of $5,999. Maybe a sweeter pill to swallow (especially with that meagre 256 GB SSD) would have been an entry-level Mac Pro priced at $4,999 and an iMac Pro reduced at either $3,999 or $4,499. I still think Apple should make the iMac Pro a little bit more affordable now that there’s also a new, powerful Mac Pro back in the lineup. As for the display, I agree with those who’d like to see a standalone version of the iMac’s 27-inch 5K panel. That would be an excellent complement to any kind of desktop setup, in conjunction with a MacBook Pro, a Mac mini, or even a Mac Pro for those who don’t need the esoteric performance of the Pro Display XDR.

Mac OS

As you may recall, in the days preceding the WWDC, I was still apprehensive about the Mac. After the WWDC, I’m… conflicted. And I realise my conflict is directly related to what’s happening to the Mac platform: hardware and software are becoming two very different beasts. Apple is still capable of coming up with impressive hardware (the Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR are obvious examples) — and that’s what’s making me a bit more optimistic. But on the software side, things couldn’t be more disappointing — and that’s what’s still fuelling my pessimism. Whatever few new features are introduced in Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, in my eyes they are outweighed by what’s being taken away (or locked down, or made unnecessarily complicated):

• “Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. In future versions of macOS, scripting language runtimes won’t be available by default, and may require you to install an additional package.” [From the XCode 11 beta release notes | Commentary on Michael Tsai’s blog]
• Notarising command-line tools: I’m no developer, but when I read this piece by Howard Oakley, I almost felt pangs in my stomach. Again, check the associated commentary on the always-excellent Michael Tsai’s blog.
• From the Mac OS Catalina Preview page:
  • Dedicated system volume. macOS Catalina runs in its own read-only volume, so it’s separate from all other data on your Mac, and nothing can accidentally overwrite your system files. And Gatekeeper ensures that new apps you install have been checked for known security issues before you run them, so you’re always using good software.
  • Data. Apps must now get your permission before directly accessing files in your Documents and Desktop folders, iCloud Drive, and external volumes, so you’re always in control of your data. And you’ll be prompted before any app can capture keyboard activity or a photo or video of your screen.

  I know many won’t agree with me, but these security measures — while understandable on paper — are cumulatively overkill, and there should really be a simple switch for power users to disable at least all the folder authentication madness. The user experience here is starting to resemble Windows and its barrage of confirmation dialog boxes. (For the related discussion, see Security & Privacy in macOS 10.15 Beta on Michael Tsai’s blog.)

These are just quick examples. But my general impression about where Mac OS is going is that Apple wants to turn it into a sort of low-maintenance system. The pretext is security: lock down this and that because it could be exploited; remove this and that because it’s code we can’t be bothered to update or optimise, it could potentially represent a vector for an attack, blah blah. Meanwhile, let’s also use these security measures to make the life of the already stressed-out Mac developers even harder. 

In 30 years as a Mac power user, what I have been appreciating about Mac software was the ability to think and act outside the box, so to speak. In recent times, Apple seems hell-bent on keeping Mac software inside the box. The walled-garden model and paranoid security made and make definitely more sense on mobile systems. I appreciate being able to look for and install apps on my iPhone that won’t mess with my device or present a security risk for the operating system or for me as a user (although Apple hasn’t done a great job at keeping scams away from the App Store); but on the Mac I want to have more freedom of movement. I’m an expert user, I know the risks involved. Let me tinker. Give the option to have a locked-down Mac for novice users who expect to use it like an appliance, or in the same way they use their phones and tablets. Leave the ‘root’ door open for those who know what they’re doing.

iPad and the Mac

You certainly know this rather famous Steve Jobs quote: I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ ” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. I look at what iPad is becoming and I see ‘a faster horse.’ 

Many seem happy that now Apple is listening. No doubt about that. But I also see it as kind of a bad thing. This might be completely off the mark, but I feel that today’s Apple pays too much attention to the input from an élite of tech pundits who are also iPad power users. On the one hand it’s nice that Cook’s Apple is more receptive to external suggestions. On the other, lately the company has seemed a bit too keen on pleasing the afore-mentioned élite. Sometimes I even get the feeling that the iPad’s path is pretty much a design by committee. 

Steve Jobs was less receptive to external input, probably because he knew what he wanted and typically had clearer ideas about the path ahead. (Again, no, I don’t think he was infallible. I simply preferred his leading style.) 

Anyway. A lot of iPad fans misunderstand one important thing about where I stand as a Mac user. I don’t want iPad to fail. I want all Apple platforms to succeed. But I don’t believe Apple’s homogenisation plan is a good way of achieving that. It may be a convenient way, for Apple and perhaps for developers too. But the various platforms have their unique strengths and unique strings to pull to make each of them progress healthily. But dedicated differentiation is hard, apparently. A multi-billion dollar company seemingly can’t afford enough resources to develop two major platforms concurrently, prioritising what’s best for each platform and for the users of each platform.

So we have a Mac platform that was doing fine until it was basically put on hold because the iPad had to grow, evolve, be revolutionary. iPad was course-corrected to become more pro. Meanwhile the Mac was neglected and iPad has been too slow to catch up than originally planned. Think about the time that has been wasted for this and because of this. It hasn’t been good for either the Mac or the iPad. Sure, maybe all is well now, and I’m worrying too much; yet I can’t help thinking it could have been different — and better. 

If iPadOS just becomes a Mac OS clone, that’s not progress, however you look at it. And at the moment I’m not really trusting Apple when it comes to having a clear plan to make iOS on the iPad evolve and shine. Adding Mac-like features is the easy way out. What’s next? That’s hard.

I’ve been upset with Apple for all the time the company wasted ‘pushing’ the iPad from a marketing/lifestyle standpoint, instead of concentrating on building a truly ‘pro’ variant. iPad Pro should have been a new device with a different iOS flavour/fork rethought from the ground up at the time iOS 7 came out. Instead they started doing something around iOS 9/10.

Another pain point in some discussions I’ve had with iPad fans is when I mention my general disappointment in the iPad as a system. What they always believe is that I’m making a direct comparison with the Mac, implying that the Mac is better. It’s. Not. That.

My disappointment is in the general lack of evolution at the operating system level. I don’t have any problem recognising the iPad as a ‘real computer’. Of course it is. That’s precisely why it’s also not a groundbreaking innovation. Let’s put aside all its hardware advantages for a moment — extreme portability, instant operation, magnificent display, desktop-class peak performance. The software it runs on is conceptually old. The way things happen when you interact with the operating system and applications and files is the same way we’ve been seeing on traditional computers since the Xerox Alto and Star, since the Apple Lisa, back in the early 1980s. Yes, it got much better visually. Of course. It’s the least that one could expect after thirty years! In the medium term, the iPad will reach a stage where it will be like using a Mac that also has Multi-Touch support. And while cool, it will still be anchored to decades-old paradigms and metaphors. 

The post-PC era I’ve had in mind since Jobs introduced the concept, is something else. From a user-interface, user-interaction standpoint, I expected (perhaps unrealistically) a different plan for iOS on the iPad. Hiding the filesystem in the first versions of iOS made me hopeful: let’s use the iPad as a tabula rasa for the computing experience. Let’s give people a tool to do ‘computery stuff’ on it without even realising they have a computer in their hands. John Gruber had the best insight in all recent history of punditry when he said It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.

Let’s look at the whole paragraph: 

The bigger reason, though, is that the existence and continuing growth of the Mac allows iOS to get away with doing less. The central conceit of the iPad is that it’s a portable computer that does less — and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and more elegantly. Apple can only begin phasing out the Mac if and when iOS expands to allow us to do everything we can do on the Mac. It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.

I’ve always thought that a better plan would have been to keep the Mac around (always refining it, always keeping its power up-to-date and relevant), while using iOS and the iPad to push the computing envelope. When I say that the iPad isn’t the future, iPad fans get upset because they think I’m looking down on it, or outright dissing it. I’m not. I look at it, and see traditional computing; maybe done a bit differently, maybe done with a cooler veneer, by touching a screen instead of using a mouse^[2], but still pretty traditional. 

Hiding the filesystem and having users interact with applications and documents in a different way — in a fashion that made both applications and documents sort of get out of the way, disappear as constructs because you have a full-screen environment and a series of actions to handle whatever you’re doing with the device — was an excellent starting point, in my book. But then things started to stagnate here, more complex workflows made a lot of collateral friction emerge, and now, in iOS 13, handling files on an iPad is pretty much the same as on a Mac. It’s a practical victory, but a theoretical defeat.

Criticising this stuff is hard, because there comes a point where I’m asked So, what do you propose, instead? I don’t have a clear solution or alternative fully designed and ready to be implemented here. (I recently shared some ideas about a kind of tablet I’d be eager to use). What I would love to see is more research to achieve a different and more evolved computing experience, one that is capable of letting go of old metaphors and paradigms so that people can interact with these tools even more naturally and in more immediate ways, instead of visualising the computer workspace as an eternal office. 

Some observations on iPadOS and its gestures

1.

The new way of selecting text looks simpler and more straightforward than the old way. It’s like you’re pointing at the text you want selected. I currently don’t have the means or opportunity to test this in person, but I’m curious to know about how efficient this method is for selecting large blocks of text, especially when they’re longer than what’s displayed on screen at the beginning of the selection gesture. I’m also curious to know about the efficiency of this new method when you want to make a precise selection of just a couple of sentences or words inside a paragraph. The old method wasn’t necessarily clunky per se; the problem was that it worked inconsistently. Sometimes it worked like a charm in Safari or Mail, but not so much in other text-based apps like RSS readers or PDF viewers.

2.

The 3‑finger pinch to copy, 3‑finger spread to paste, 3‑finger swipe to undo all looked like cool new gestures in the pre-recorded bits Federighi was showing on the big screen, but to me they feel like unnecessary additions to an ever-expanding gesture lexicon, and I also wonder about their precision — copy and paste in particular. What happens when you have selected the text bit you want to copy, and one of your fingers touches the screen and deselects the text (and maybe also re-selects a single word or another unwanted portion of the text) before the 3‑finger pinch copy gesture is completed? And don’t get me started on the ‘cut’ gesture: two consecutive 3‑finger pinches? Come on.

If you think I’m splitting hairs here, rewatch the first moments of the Apple Pencil demo by Toby Paterson (Apple’s Senior Director in charge of the iPad system experience): 

…And then to move the cursor, you’ll just grab it with your finger… whoops… and he tries again. 

And then, shortly after: Now, to select text, just hold your finger on a word… Hold your fing— aah, sorry…

He’s clearly struggling with these gestures, and while I concede he must be nervous given the context, other gestures like dragging out the virtual keyboard to turn it into a compact keyboard are clearly easier and less hit-and-miss.

3.

Window management and multitasking in iPadOS are clearly borrowing heavily from the Mac, but since the gestures on the iPad have to be keyboard-independent, there is a lot of tapping & dragging involved. Curiously, when there is indeed a keyboard attached to the iPad, there doesn’t seem to be a fallback set of keyboard shortcuts to make things easier. 

And as I was watching Federighi tapping, dragging, moving, and split-viewing on an iPad Pro propped on the table in landscape orientation with a Smart Keyboard attached, I was reminded of what Federighi himself said about not wanting to introduce a MacBook with a touch screen; he brought up usability reasons, and the fact that it’s not a great user experience because having to raise your arm to directly manipulate the screen gets tiring quickly. And it’s true! Yet that is exactly what’s happening when you’re working with an iPad set up this way. And you can tell me But with the iPad it’s different all you want: it is exactly the same experience, but suddenly those legitimate usability concerns have vanished.

4.

Safari shortcuts on iPadOS

Speaking of shortcuts, I was about to leave this screenshot here without comment, but I have to point out those terrible hybrid shortcuts that involve one or two keys and a tap on the screen. They look unnecessarily counterintuitive, and I can’t believe there wasn’t a better option. There is a keyboard — just make shortcuts that involve only keys. Better yet, use the same shortcuts as in Safari on the Mac. What’s the problem?

5.

In general, if you count the new gestures you do with your fingers, and the new gestures you perform with the Pencil, there isn’t much that can be intuitively discovered without at least a brief tutorial in the Apple Store when you’re purchasing an iPad. And even if all this is well explained in an online guide, or by an Apple retail employee, I wonder how many of these gestures are going to stick with users. This is just an observation, and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all these gestures end up being far more intuitive than they seem to me at first glance. My worry, of course, is that all this increasing complexity accumulates to a point where there’s a thin, yet persistent layer of friction when using an iPad, which inevitably brings frustration. One of the key differentiators of Apple devices is their software but also the fluidity of their experience. That’s what may convince a prospective customer (with no particular affiliation to a platform) to buy an iPad over a Microsoft Surface.

What about the rest?

The rest was good. I liked it. I don’t have an Apple TV or an Apple Watch, and I’m not really interested in having either, but the new features are nice, and I like where these two platforms are going (though tvOS is the slowest-advancing platform I’ve ever seen). iOS 13 looks like a very promising release and I look forward to upgrade later this year. Apologies for not having been exhaustive regarding everything that was announced at the WWDC 2019, but what’s really capturing my attention at the moment is how Apple is handling Mac OS and iOS on the iPad. 

 

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