I have opinions. šŸ£

I tend to prefer working on iPadOS to macOS. There’s not any one thing, but a combination of things which just make it feel more comfortable to work withā€¦ It’s fair to say macOS has features which iPadOS is lacking, but the reverse is also true!

Windowing

  • Thereā€™s no weird distinction between maximised and fullscreen windows. (And letā€™s not get into how some apps donā€™t maximise, but ā€œzoomā€)
  • We donā€™t work all the time, and iPadOS defaults every app to be fullscreen by default when Stage Manager is disabled. šŸ‘Œ
    • In comparison, macOS just makes a mess if you do the same, and still opts to waste 80% of your screen by default.
  • Where in macOS a window would get lost behind another, iPadOS lets windows peek out from behind like a tab, ready for further use. This encourages layering of windows, where macOS would discourage!
  • iPadOS snaps windows to a neat & orderly grid, with enough snap guides that you can still size for exactly as much content as you want, so everything looks clean and you can get on with work.
    • With macOS, youā€™d better be ready to whip out a magnifying glass to avoid adjacent windows having a 3 pixel height difference.

Design

  • The animations are so goodā€¦ āœØ
  • The cursor is a nice and symmetric circle, clearly defining the interaction to perform. Not a miniature cap for a zebra! šŸ¦“
    • Donā€™t like the pointer effects? You can turn them off in Settings!
    • ā€œOh, but for what I do I need pixel-perfect precisionā€ - No, you donā€™t. If youā€™re using your cursor for this, youā€™re doing it wrong. Apps have snap guides and text fields for this sort of thing.
  • Minimal window chrome, and windows adopt an iPhone-style compact layout when small! And this has real benefits for side-by-side multitasking with many windows on 4k/built-in displays.

Power-user features

  • Shortcuts automations. Amazing utility on iPadOS, missing on macOS. Admittedly, 3rd party options are available on macOS for a price, and a fair bit of research & discovery time.
    • What are automation triggers good for? Try pairing dark mode with Do Not Disturb for use in lectures, making your text size larger at night, or playing a startup chime when connecting your external display! šŸŽµ
  • iPadOSā€™s share menu has useful options like ā€œCopyā€ and ā€œSave to Filesā€. Itā€™s also a powerhouse when loaded with custom-made Shortcuts.
    • On macOS, you sometimes have to break context to save content from an app to the filesystem via copy & paste, or depending on the app you may have to add it to the filesystem to get it into a Shortcut!
  • Native iPhone apps. But all of them, with touch, not like in macOS where 99% of developers opt-out and many of the rest donā€™t work..

Hardware

  • Rear-facing camera, good for grabbing the diagram from a slide when taking notes!
  • Touchscreen.
  • Detachable screen for content consumption.
  • Apple Pencil support.
  • Wonky side-on camera, yes, but itā€™s at crystal-clear resolution!

A case for macOS

  • Offline backups to external drives. Backing up your iCloud-synced files to iCloud is not a backup at all! Macs are currently a backup-making device, first and foremost.
  • If youā€™re a developer, IDEs exist beyond Playgrounds. At least until Apple releases CompilerKit, their ā€˜more secureā€™ take on code generation which meets App Store guidelines, and/or get round to an Xcode rebuild using a SwiftPM-based project format prototyped in Playgrounds
  • Accessibility APIs so you can use window managers as a crutch for your subpar windowing experience.
  • Command lineā€¦ Are you sure you couldnā€™t do the same stuff just as fast with a UI designed for humans, theoretically? Keyboard shortcuts are generally faster than typing words.
  • [Your niche use-case here]

I’ve delibrately left out the menu-bar here. iPadOS’s keyboard shortcuts overlay serves a similar purpose. The menu bar has some benefits, but it’s also a good way to have undiscoverable functionality - out of sight, out of mind.

Overall, I often get the impression iPadOS is the platform people choose to use, while macOS is the platform people need to use. And it makes sense - iPads can be used like a Mac, docked to an external display with a mouse and keyboard, or like a tablet, or like a notepad with a stylus! That’s 3 different modes of computing, and visionOS presents a fourth, and realistically people may prefer to work in any one of these.

Hopefully as Apple’s shared OS codebase matures, the need for separate devices running macOS to support the rest will continue to fade away! Because as computers start coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes, why should certain features like offline backups be tied to any particular kind of device and input method?