@morrick Even Apple thinks it’s a joke. Look at the date on their iPad … 😉. That sidebar looks horrible! Like it’s designed by someone who never used an iPad before.

This is a screenshot from App Store, running on my M1 iPad Pro (iPadOS 18.7.3).

@morrick I will never get used to the anxiety-bringing floating toolbar.
@Arcticulate What induces anxiety for me is having this sort of pseudo Mac OS on an iPad. I know that it’s finally a dream for some ‘iPad Power Users’ (🤭) but to me it looks and feels so weird and wrong. (And don't get me started on that translucent menu…)

@morrick I think the Mac interface for iPadOS … well, hear me out … I think it is perfect as a high-res 4K, 5K or 6K desktop USB-C Mac with iPadOS apps that feel similar to macOS 26 apps.

However, there are two things: 1) why does it look like it’s running macOS 26? Because macOS already looks like a bad touch-optimized version of iPadOS. 2) I have a dream of having an iPad in the bag as a light laptop < 1 kg, hooked up to 4K or higher, as a pretend Mac.

@morrick I do *not* want an iPad to have floating apps and close, min, max buttons. I want the old-school iPad fullscreen UI. Except when I hook it up to the aforementioned USB-C or USB-C to HDMI desktop setup, with mouse and keyboard.

@Arcticulate This is when I get angry at Apple again. They used to make a light laptop (1.08 kg) running (the good) Mac OS. It was the 11-inch MacBook Air. The only thing they should have done to keep this machine relevant was to upgrade its display.

When they did, they produced the 12-inch retina MacBook which, while even lighter (920 grams), was a terrible laptop except — oh the irony — for the display.

@morrick It is MIND-BOGGLING to me why the 12-inch Macbook disappeared! Why in the world …? I remember how it disappeared when the transition to Apple Silicon was in full process and I thought it was to make sure no one bought an old Intel Macbook going forward, right before announcing the new model. I was waiting for the 12” Macbook with M1 processor. It made *perfect* sense. Super-light, very long battery life. Amazing! What happened? 🤨

@Arcticulate It had really slow processors for starters. To make a fan-less laptop that thin in the pre-M-chip era meant using low-power Intel CPUs, that were tolerable only if you used the MacBook for lightweight tasks and kept the number of open apps to a minimum.

And then there was the butterfly keyboard. An acquaintance of mine had her 2015 12-inch MacBook replaced THREE TIMES for that, and the third time she had to pay a hefty sum since the MacBook was out of warranty.

@morrick Oh right, the keyboard! I had forgot about that. No processor swap will fix that issue, obviously. Well, then maybe they would be better off slimming the battery down a lot, which gives it less battery time, but it can be outweighed by a high-performing (good enough) M5E (Efficiency) model, with no performance cores, only efficiency cores.

This also means the keyboard gets swapped for a normal model, making it thicker, but balanced with the super-slimmed battery.

@Arcticulate That would be an overall smart solution for such a machine. Obviously Apple will have other plans. 🙄
@morrick Yes, all about catering to stockholders first.