Why you should install iPadOS 13.4
Are the new iPad Pros that easily work with trackpads and increasingly look more like Microsoft's Surface Pro - is this surrender? Does all this mean that Microsoft, which followed “this path” back in 2012, was right - and Apple has been tormenting itself for all these 8 years and tormenting fans of its work, upholding fundamentally wrong concepts - no? More and more often in the media there is an idea striking in its simplicity and genius: let the iPad Pro, while the keyboard with the trackpad is not connected to it, work under the control of iPadOS, and when it is connected let macOS turn on automatically. Very similar to the truth, but not true - and I will try to explain why.
iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro, year after year, are actually more and more alike. And in some ways, the Surface Pro is even better than the iPad Pro - otherwise Microsoft did not continue, rolling up its sleeves and investing huge funds in this project, to sell these devices in millions of copies. Whenever Apple tried to convince users that the next computer of most of them would be a tablet, nothing worked, for the same reason: the operating system for mobile devices put an end to the idea.
The first iPad Pros were very good. The power of the processors used in them, both central and graphic, was in no way inferior to the power of their colleagues in laptops. Is Apple really unable, simply and without fancy, to adapt macOS to the ARM architecture? For some time now, it’s clear that macOS, in any case, very soon, will have to switch to such processors. Why stubbornly reinvent the wheel, instead of spending the effort and resources spent on it for something more valuable to customers? It would be clear to them humanly to explain their reasons. Although I do not think that this would improve the situation, but the premature disclosure of plans under the heading “absolutely secret” could seriously harm.
iPad Pro or Microsoft Surface
According to some, most of them so far - on the day of the release of iPad OS 13.4, Apple pleaded defeated in an 8-year-old principled dispute with Microsoft and signed an act of complete and unconditional surrender. Install iPadOS 13 on your iPad and connect almost any mouse or trackpad to it - and you will see this. In that the cursor behaves in an adult way, that the “cursor position control device” is effectively and beautifully able to replace the touch interface, that the iPad has never been so indistinguishable from personal computers - like Microsoft Surface Pro many years ago.
Everything is true, except for one moment: where does the surrender of Apple? Where did you see the “white flag"? Instead of installing the ARM version of macOS on the iPad Pro, driving it once again into the unusually cramped world of mobile devices (this was already done a decade and a half ago), having spent several years on it, Apple did the exact opposite. With jewelry precision, without destroying the touch-interface that was brought to perfection over a decade and a half, the same version of the tablet’s operating system incorporated a more self-sufficient, more “archaic” mouse-cursor-window mechanism. Where it was necessary, inventing it again.
What is the difference between iOS and iPadOS
For this, most likely, iOS was divided into two options. Up to iPadOS 13.4, the tablet version, if it was different from the usual iOS (which has become common for both systems, the common code is best for common goals in both systems), then just a little bit. A slightly different (outwardly) interface, built-in applications adapted to large screen spaces - and, perhaps, that's all.
Whether they intended to integrate into the iPadOS a software package that was created over several years to work with the archaic, but ideally suitable for some types of activity, window-cursor-mouse paradigm at once, or did everything go according to plan and planned to do it right now - I don’t know. Someday Apple historians will talk about this. Regardless of what was planned, iPadOS 1.0 is exactly iPadOS 13.4. iPad 13.0-13.3 are true versions of the general iOS + public beta of iPadOS 1.0 for the mouse and keyboard.
Since this is just 1.0 of the new operating system, problems are inevitable. Not a single first version in the world has ever done without them. It seems that they did it, but only time will tell how successful the first version is. Triumph is still far. According to the theory of Jean-Paul Gassé, in order to take place and get rid of childhood diseases, a complex system needs to survive at least three versions. 2.0, apparently, is destined to become iPadOS 14. Only one thing can be guaranteed - it will be interesting.