IPadOS 19 Could Make Your IPad More Like a Mac
There are two types of iPad fans in this world: those who love the tablet for what it is, and those who desperately wish Apple would release a Mac with a touchscreen already. While Apple may never release macOS on the iPad (at least in my lifetime), there’s reason to believe that Apple’s tablet could soon bridge the computing gap between it and the Mac.
Could iPadOS 19 finally solve the iPad multitasking problem?
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman , Apple is planning a major overhaul of its tablets with iPadOS 19. Gurman’s sources say the changes this year are focused on “performance, multitasking and app window management.” It looks like the team wants the iPad to function more like a Mac than it does now.
If this is true, it’s fantastic news – at least for those of us who find iPadOS a little lacking. I really like my iPad for certain tasks, and in theory it should be my favorite computing device. (After all, my Mac doesn’t have a touchscreen or stylus.) But more often than not, I find myself returning to my MacBook for most applications that don’t involve simple web browsing, messaging, or content consumption. Despite the iPad’s 15-year history, our modern digital world is still optimized for desktop computing.
However, over the years, Apple has made significant changes to the iPad to emulate the desktop experience. Multitasking, for example, has gone through many iterations over the years. In fact, right now you have two options for multitasking: you can stick with Basic mode, which lets you lock two apps side by side in Split View, and show or hide another iOS-style window as Slide.
Or you can use Stage Manager , which Apple introduced in iPadOS 16.1. Stage Manager allows you to add up to four resizable floating windows simultaneously to your main display, or connect an external display to add even more. It’s definitely more similar to macOS than the traditional multitasking feature in iPadOS, but it’s far from a comparable replacement—the overall experience is a little buggy, and the resized app windows aren’t nearly as optimized as in macOS. I thought I’d like it when Apple first launched this feature, but the more I used it, the more I wanted my Mac back. In my opinion, the best way to use the iPad right now is to use one app at a time.
macOS won’t come to iPad
Gurman doesn’t share details about Apple’s plans to make iPadOS more like macOS, but he does add an important point here: If you’re hoping the company will simply bring the Mac operating system to the iPad, keep dreaming. Your iPad will still run iPadOS, and your Mac will still run macOS. While it would be great if Apple tweaked a version of macOS optimized for its larger touch devices, the company won’t do so—probably because it would hurt Mac sales.
According to Apple, the best case scenario is to make the iPad good enough for people to buy it, but also to buy a Mac for the things the iPad can’t do. It’s kind of like Trader Joe’s: you love it for what it’s good at, but as soon as you leave, you have to go to a regular grocery store for things Trader Joe’s doesn’t have.
I’m not sure what Apple plans to do here to make the iPad more powerful, with better multitasking and app window management. If macOS itself isn’t the goal here, perhaps we can expect more windows and macOS-like behavior: it might still be iPadOS, but resized windows won’t feel like glorified iOS apps. Perhaps you could run more windows at once or easily switch between applications without accidentally moving windows.
Any of these ideas would be an improvement on what we have now. While I’d love to have a real Mac tablet, if iPadOS 19 makes my iPad more usable as a computer, that might be enough for me.