Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPad OS Impressions: They Listened!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and welcome back to your continued coverage of the world’s most densely packed keynote wwdc 2019, and i’m going to say that loki. My favorite announcement from that entire keynote was ipad. Os 13.. You see if you remember there were a lot of complaints and feelings in my ipad pro review and many others about how this is clearly the best ipad.
Ever it’s incredible hardware, great screen, great battery great chip, but it’s still sort of held back by the software by ios and it still felt like just an ipad well fast forward. A couple weeks till now till that crazy keynote happened, and now we have an update alongside ios 13, specifically for the ipads, it’s ipad os. Now it’s not an entirely new operating system. It’S still ios 13 for ipad, but this ipad os directly addresses. So many of the complaints and those features that it was lacking that sort of bring it up to speed of a much more impressive computer.
So in a way this software update kind of feels like it saves the ipad pro for me. So let’s break this down. First of all, the widgets on your home screen, so i never thought i would say that about ios. But technically you do have these here.
So, at least on the left hand side in a vertically scrolling list, but these are the ones that were over to the side of your home screen on your iphone. But you can pin them right alongside the rest of your smaller icons and they go a long way towards making it feel a bit more like a real computer already. You know, and i actually think, a lot of possibilities open up with the widgets that you can put over there they’re always available, there’s a lot of glanceable information and a lot of one-touch functions.
If you have some important apps up there, so i’m a big fan of that and then there is the multitasking improvements. So again, a lot of this is learning gestures and things like that. There’S sort of a learning curve to them, but you can have apps side by side like you always have, but now you can have two instances of the same app side by side next to each other, so notes next to notes or safari next to safari. It’S one of those things i didn’t know i would like, but turns out to be pretty useful and then, of course, there’s also the slide over apps and the whole gesture system. That goes with that. So there’s multitasking between slide over windows and quick, switching between them and all the stuff stays in memory, and it’s always remembered so if you have multiple apps and spaces next to each other, you can switch between those pairs of apps, it’s pretty impressive, so i feel, Like this is one of those features that you could not use at all to start, but slowly start introducing them into your workflow until you get really good at them and then they feel irreplaceable and then okay, remember when i said in the original ipad review. Having a usb c port makes the workflow dream seem, like you know, just plug your camera directly into that port or plug a card reader straight in import and then start editing your photos or whatever you’re doing you couldn’t do that on the ipad, and it was A bummer that that wasn’t supported until now in ipad os 13. You now can plug in a flash drive or plug memory in directly into the ipad and import into your apps and start working. This obviously feels like one of the features they should have had from the beginning, but now that it’s here thank you.
Finally, that’s originally what i was expecting when i saw usbc on the ipad pro so now. Let’S take advantage of that. There’S also this column view and the files app that’s starting to behave a lot more like finder, with the ability to quickly copy and paste files and compress files and folders into zip files.
I feel like also a lot of signing documents will be a lot easier. Now that you can do this, so file management is much better and then also desktop class browsing. So that was another one of my big complaints about the ipad was the inability to use several important desktop sites because they all treated safari on the ipad, like safari. On the iphone just like another mobile browser, so i was pretty impressed and happy to see full desktop class browsing now. So first thing i had to try was google drive that all now fully works? It’S not perfectly smooth, but it works which is great and then desktop youtube and the creator studio also works. So things like adding end cards and updating descriptions and a lot of the stuff. I would do on the desktop it now all works perfectly in the web. Browser this is literally one of the things i would carry around a macbook pro to be able to do, because i don’t trust doing that stuff on my phone there’s also now a download manager in safari, so you can use it for sites like dropbox and box.com, And google drive for natively downloading files – that’s awesome for me because the ultimate team i play for in new york empire, we put game footage all in the shared folder in google drive, but i couldn’t download from google drive to the ipad to watch it offline. I could only stream so now i can just straight up download it to the ipad and just watch it like a normal file, it’s great and then there’s a bunch of other little improvements.
So things like the keyboard anytime, you’re typing anything, you can pinch it down and it becomes this iphone size keyboard and you can move it anywhere. You want and then type with one hand or do swipe typing. It’S not the prettiest thing in the world, but the fact that you can do that in one quick gesture is pretty nice and also, if you use the apple pencil for markup a lot another feature, that’s super useful is you can now use the pencil to take A screenshot by swiping up from the corner, then you immediately are in markup mode and you can start drawing on whatever screenshot you just took. That is clean and then the icing on the cake is another new feature called sidecar.
So if you have a mac and an ipad as the name suggests it’ll, let you use the ipad as a second display for the mac. So i saw this demo at wwdc. It was literally two clicks away in the display settings and then suddenly, this macbook pro has a second display: that’s apple, pencil compatible and with the super low latency of the pencil, you can just start drawing and editing. I imagine this to be useful for artists and people that do a lot of photoshop work and things with the stylus.
I don’t know about replacing those wacom tablets that are so specialized that a lot of workflows use right now, but as responsive as this is and as good as it looked in beta. This looked really promising. Oh and let me just say that the improved latency of the stylus, they said on stage that it went from 20 milliseconds to 9 milliseconds. I didn’t know if i would notice that but trying it it is incredibly fast.
Now it looks and feels like you’re. Actually, writing directly onto the ipad’s screen. I don’t know if they could even make the latency any shorter than this, and if i would notice it at all, it is super fast. So does all this stuff take the ipad pro from being just another ipad to being a sort of a computer replacement for more people? As you might imagine, the answer depends on what you do on your computer.
But for me, if i’m not video editing on my laptop, the answer is actually yes pretty much everything i do in between desktops. As far as mobile work, i can now actually do on the ipad pro and that mobile web browser being treated like a desktop class web browser is a major part of that. I also really like the widgets on the more compact home screen and the multitasking improvements, and all this stuff to me legitimately saves the ipad. So today, like i said since i don’t edit videos on the go anymore, i do it in between at desktops today, i’m taking my laptop out of my backpack and i’m gon na be just carrying ipad pro, we’ll see how long this lasts.
But i really feel like i can do everything i used to do. I don’t know whether to be mad at apple for like holding these features back and then finally delivering them later to blow all our minds or if i should be super happy for apple for listening to our feedback and actually updating the ipad with all these features. For what we asked, but what i do know is the improvements that they’ve made to ipad. Os are stellar, i think, when they do hit the ipad in their final form, because this is still early beta and it’ll be a public beta soon.
But when these finally start hitting people’s ipad pros they’re going to notice they’re going to be major improvements, i think i’ll really like them. I really like it either way. That’S been it thanks for watching this video catch, you guys the next one peace you .