Malcolm Owen
Apple's iPadOS 19 at WWDC is rumored to be a more macOS-like update, with boosts to multitasking and productivity potentially making the tablet even more of a workhorse.
As a format, the iPad doesn't easily lend itself to productivity, outside of art and design. Even with the addition of a keyboard to the mix, it's not quite a full replacement for a MacBook Pro, but it could get closer with some tweaks at WWDC.
According to Mark Gurman in Sunday's Bloomberg newsletter, Apple's changes to iPadOS 19 will involve a shift to make the design of its operating system catalog more consistent.
However, an apparent big theme of WWDC will also be iPad software, the report claims.
While details are scant, sources cited by the report say that there will be a focus on productivity, multitasking, and app management. While this has always been relatively weak on iPad compared to a Mac, Apple apparently intends to make iPadOS more Mac-like in this regard.
While there have been the hope by some users for iPadOS and macOS to become one operating system, Apple is still resisting. Mac and iPad will still have their own operating systems, but it will be a bit closer usage-wise at least.
This occurs at a time when the iPad Pro models use the same Apple Silicon chips as the Mac models. There is also the anticipation of new iPad Pro updates using M5 chips, which could certainly benefit from some iPadOS productivity changes.
Previously, Apple was reported to make large-scale operating system changes for 2025, with revamps for iPadOS and iOS 19 apparently codenamed "Luck" with macOS 16 being "Cheer." There have also been insinuations that visionOS will influence the designs of the other operating systems, while ease of use will seemingly be a big feature of Apple's new introductions.
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Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
Andrew Orr
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27 Comments
That would be very welcome news.
Hopefully, everything can be done with touch and doesn’t require a mouse.
Hope springs eternal for these changes but Apple has long been resistant. There was similar hope for iPad OS 18, especially after the debut of the all-new Pro iPad models, but that hope died at WWDC. We'll see this year. If Apple wanted to give the iPad Pros a real sales boost, make them capable of booting into either iPad OS or Mac OS at the user's discretion, which Apple Silicon can do. In iPad OS, it works as usual. In Mac OS, you lose touchscreen capability and it operates just like a Mac, requiring the use of Magic Keyboard with the built-in trackpad. Apple could do this today. No merging of 2 very different OSes required, no need to figure out how to bring touch to the Mac, no blah, blah, blah whatsoever. Boot into whichever OS makes the most sense for your needs at the moment. Macs have been able to boot into Windows for how long?