2024-05-06

The next month of iPad punditry is going to be unbearable

Not a surprise that I disagree with much of what Jason Snell wrote in his iPad article today. In his ongoing wishcasting for the iPad to run a virtual Mac he writes:

If Apple were to accept that at the top of the iPad product line, the iPad literally transforms into a Mac, that choice would also take a lot of the pressure off of iPadOS.

I'll say what I've been saying, at this point, after years of investment, why would Apple back off of improving iPadOS each year? One after the other these guys just keep saying put macOS on the iPad and call it a day. Sure, to appease the tiny podcaster community that will likely keep buying Macs anyway?

Does Files in iPadOS really need to keep slowly trudging toward life as an ersatz Finder? And more to the point, does anyone who has used Files over the past five and half years really believe it’ll ever get there? And should it even try, or is that stuffing way too much functionality into a much more basic, iPad-like file manager?

This one really gets me. Why do these folks keep insisting that the Files app is so basic? I did a fairly extensive comparison of the Files App on iPadOS 16 with the Mac Finder and I have to ask why they keep referring it as a basic app. Not only do I think it will get there but I think it's pretty much there right now. Is it an exact, feature-for-feature replacement? No. But when put side-by-side with the Finder, Files does almost everything that a normal user would do and does so in a way that is very similar, nearly identical to the Finder. Go ahead, click the link and look at the side by sides.

I used a Mac from System 7.6 to the OS X Public Beta and all the way to the current version of macOS and I have no problems organizing, accessing, copying, moving files with the Files app. I'm not jumping through hoops or using work-around, it works like the Finder. And as I point out in the post above it also does a few things the Finder does not, which is to say, in some ways it's actually more capable than the Finder.

The next month of iPad posts is going to be unbearable. Going to be a lotta 🙄 going on over here.