ipados
Apple: "What's a professional?"
Apple announced their new iPad Pro and I couldn’t care less. The hardware itself is brilliant, yet Apple insists on artificially limiting what you can do with it for reasons I don’t understand. A “pro” device would let me run Mac-style apps like Nova and a real local terminal. It would let me compile and run the software I write when Shortcuts scripting isn’t good enough. It would be more like a hyper-portable MacBook for doing things that don’t require a heavier and more powerful computer, and less like a giant iPhone that gives me free rein of a walled garden.
I bought a 2018 iPad Pro 13" when they were released and used it constantly. It was overpowered for the software available to run on it, to the point that my kid in college still uses it for classwork today. The hardware was never the limiting factor in what I could do with it. I finally replaced it last summer with a MacBook Air that’s worse for my wants and needs in every way but one: Apple’s OS for Macs lets me do the professional things that the as-powerful iPad can’t do. Apple ran an ad when that iPad Pro came out, asking “what’s a computer?” I wish Apple would ask themselves, “what’s a professional?”
My vision for the iPad doesn’t align with Apple’s. That’s OK. They know their target market. They’ll still sell a gazillion of these.
Just not to me.
Not Upgrading for Stage Manager
Apple’s iPadOS 16 features a new multitasking mechanism called Stage Manager, but only on very new iPad models equipped with Apple’s M1 CPU. The ludicrous reason Apple gave for this limitation is that the recent M1 chip is the first iPad CPU capable of using swap space.
If you listen quietly, you can hear millions of computer science graduates rolling their eyes at that ridiculous excuse. Far less capable computers have supported swap space for decades, and I won’t bother going into details of how nervy Apple’s claim is. Admit it, gang: you want to give people a reason to buy new hardware to use the shiny new feature. I could respect an honest explanation that doesn’t insult my intelligence.
But because of this dishonesty, I’m holding onto my still-overpowered 2018 iPad Pro until it dies, or until Apple releases a feature I can’t live without. If there were a legitimate technical reason to hold back new features on older hardware, I might use that as a reason to upgrade. Now, though, I don’t trust Apple not to pull the same trick next year. If I bought a 2022 iPad Pro because of this, and next year they released a feature in iPadOS 17 that would only work on 2023 models for another contrived reason, I’d be livid.
Apple’s trick isn’t going to make me upgrade more often, but less often. I’m not risking my hard-earned money until I have to.