Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPadOS 15 Review: Dropped Expectations!”.
Hey what’s up mkbhd here, so this is the ipad pro. This is the m1 ipad at the top of the food chain, best ipad. There is – and i’ve been using this thing a lot for the last month or so, and i really like it and like a lot of other ipad users. It’S just really enjoyable to use this ipad, but i still wanted more from it because, as you probably remember from this review, this thing is way more powerful than any software.
That’S taken advantage of it like the m1 chip in here benchmarks, higher than the 16-inch macbook pro there’s 16 gigs of ram in this tablet. It’S crazy, and so it felt like it’s finally time for some big updates to ipad os, and i wasn’t the only one who said this on camera. The ipad os 15 update, that’s coming up, has got to be a pretty significant change to what we have now in ipad.
Os 14.5, like it’s got to be right. Maybe hopefully, this is the year that we see apple, put like real real apps. In this thing, like final cut – and this is honestly super exciting – because that’s going to make this thing so incredibly powerful – that it really is setting this ipad up to be able to do some really amazing things – maybe even run final cut pro. That is me crossing. My fingers now we’re currently filming this video two days before wwdc 2021, where apple is expected to announce some new features for the ipad os. I think i just.
I hope that the extra ram is indicative of something brewing for wwdc. Well uh. You know what else was also once said on video expectations are the thief of joy, meaning we got our hopes up pretty high for all these big changes we wanted to see in the software, but there was almost no way that whatever they announced could live up To what we wanted to see, and so ipad os 15, it’s it’s nice! It’S a nice update with some some tweaks and ui things refreshes.
That makes sense on the ipad, but it didn’t change the way i use the ipad and it didn’t really even get it much closer at all to actually replacing a computer. The way i kind of wanted it to – and i feel like that’s kind of just where the ipad is destined – to live for their furso future. But let’s not let the expectations be the thief of joy, because i’ve been using this beta ipad os 15. For a little bit, like i said, there’s been a developer beta now, there’s a public beta. It’S really good! There’S a lot of good stuff.
I’M going to show you the stuff! That’S made the most difference to me that i, like the most about the ipad, and then i have some thoughts on ipads as a whole, so the biggest change we’ve all seen by now is you can finally finally put widgets anywhere on the ipad’s home screen. You know, like you, could with android tablets for the last decade. It really shouldn’t feel like that big of an upgrade, but it does for the ipads, since they were confined over to the slide over area before where you can still put them by the way. But now you just have all this huge canvas to lay them out, and it’s so much better plus there’s also a new bigger widget size. So you can really use some massive widgets. You can have a whole home screen. That’S just 100 widgets! If you want to, but then the other home screen upgrade that the ipad gets, is the app library now too, which just shows all of your apps in one place. So, of course, you can now hide apps from your home screen that you don’t want, and it actually feels really natural that it just pops up after your last home screen.
So this is a long time coming. I really like this new, essentially app drawer for the ipad. The big thing that always comes up the most with the ipad, though, is multitasking, or at least having more than one thing open on the screen at once. It’S a huge canvas, but you might not necessarily be multitasking. Sometimes you just need two windows to do. One task, like you’re, taking notes on something or copying and pasting between apps things like that and so yeah. It’S not necessarily multitasking, but it is going to need window management so ipads running ipad. Os 15 technically handle multiple windows exactly the same as before, but the upgrade here is it’s more visible and it’s way easier to remember so they surfaced it by just constantly showing you these three dots up here anytime, you open an app there’s, a three dots up Top and when you tap the three dots it shows you three simple options: full screen with one app split screen or slide over. So if you split screen, you can pick another app to go, split screen with and right away, your half and half. So you can just copy and paste or go back and forth multitask or whatever you want to call it. The way you could before and if you pick slide over all the same slide over app support still exists as well. I don’t use slide over as much as i’ve seen some other people, but the functionality and the support is still the same.
There’S a bunch of small tall vertical apps in their own carousel. In multitasking view, though, you can also now drag one window right on top of another to create a split screen with them and then just dive straight into that which is pretty cool. And if you ever have two apps open – and you just want to replace one of them with something different – you just swipe down from the top of that one and you can replace it and get your substitute in now. You’Re, not crazy. A lot of this stuff is the same as before it’s the same function as before, but it’s just presented more obviously now and i like that, i really like the dots.
Actually that’s just it’s made everything easier to remember now. There are also apps like safari, where you can have multiple instances of the same app open, and so, when you open safari at the bottom on the new shelf, it shows all of the windows. You’Ve got open each with their own tabs.
You know got their own things happening and so that to me was the part that felt the most like a computer. Like i all the time i have multiple safari windows open next to each other, taking notes, especially when i’m writing, but on the ipad. If you want to split screen any one of these safari apps, you can so you can tap the safari icon and now it’s like.
Oh, did you want to use this one safari window here or a split screen of this different safari window with photos next to it or whatever other app you have going on next to it? No problem now the other biggest ui change to ipad os 15 is definitely the notes app. Now you might be like me and never really use the notes app very much because there’s other better to-do list, apps, there’s other better notes, apps but notes on this new ipad software is so good that it is honestly tempting for me to use it over some Other stuff like like pocket that i use all the time to just jot stuff down or just remember something i need to come back to later. This is really good.
So there’s a new quick notes: feature where you drag up from the corner, with your finger or the pencil and straight away. You can start writing something down or typing a quick note, and then that gets added to a dedicated, quick notes, section of apple notes. But it’s a bit deeper than that, because you can drag whatever you’re doing right into that quick note. So, sam in twitter, for example – and i want to remember this tweet – i can literally just drag this tweet right into a note and save it there for later write something down about it.
Whatever you want to do, you can drag a photo from your gallery into a note. It’Ll just add that photo to the note or if i’m on a website, you can swipe up a quick note and immediately add the link you’re at and with the apple pencil. You can quickly highlight something on that page so later in quick notes, when you click on that link, it returns you to the page. With that same thing highlighted how cool is that? How cool is that? So all of that plus the really good handwriting recognition and obviously it’s syncing between this and the mac and the iphone and all the stuff that has the notes app. It’S really tempting i’m gon na keep using pocket. I think for all this same stuff, just because it also syncs to my android phone and i’d i’ll, be damned if i have one more plug-in into the ecosystem but yeah.
The notes app now is really good, but then there’s some there’s some other smaller stuff. Uh safari for the ipad gets web extensions like the desktop version. So if you go into safari settings and scroll down to extensions, you can just go load up the section of the store specifically for safari extensions. I’M sure many more will be added here too, when it’s out of beta, probably including a dedicated, save to pocket button and there’s also all the other stuff. That’S coming to ios 15 on the iphone too stuff like share play and facetime live text on photos in the gallery: apple maps updates, etc. So if you want to look at all that stuff i’ll link, my video right below the like button love focus modes.
Of course, spoiler alert, that’s my favorite number one feature, but there’s a bunch of good stuff in ios, 15. and they’re also going to be adding that universal control feature. That was a super cool demo to control your ipad with a mouse seamlessly from a mac running mac. Os monterey, oh, and also, i want to show you guys this better, because i didn’t.
I failed you guys in the last video i thought notification summary wasn’t in the last beta, but it is, you just have to turn it on so to enable it you go into settings and notifications and then scheduled summary and then from here when you turn it On you can literally choose which apps you want to be looped into notification summaries. So maybe, instead of a random google news notification in the middle of the day buzzing you, you can have that and some others literally just collect and then show up in a summary at the end of the day, nice. But aside from that, ipad, os is still just how you remember it, which is really fun to use a lot of times just slightly frustratingly limited, sometimes also this there’s still no weather app by the way. So there’s this huge weather widget. But when you click on it, it just opens safari and goes to weather.com. You bought dark sky, just make a weather app. Also, there’s still no calculator app. Officially on the ipad. You can have a little widget from the quick settings or the control panel, but yeah there’s no uh, there’s no full screen weather app or calculator app in the ipad, but generally this is the update that we’re all talking about and waiting for and for those of Us who were teetering on being able to use our ipad pro full time and get rid of any laptop, i don’t think ipad. Os 15 is the thing that pushes us over the edge.
It doesn’t really change that. I keep doing this this ipad only challenge for myself, even though i’ve done it on video before where i just won’t use my laptop for a while and i’ll just try to use the ipad for everything, and this update didn’t really lengthen the amount of time it Took before i got frustrated and had to bring my laptop again, but it did make the time i was using the ipad that much better. So i think the thing to keep in mind here.
Just the background to all of this is the ipad’s great um. It comes from a company that also makes laptops right. So, even though they’ve got all this big talk in this marketing campaign, what is a computer all that fun stuff? At the end of the day, this company also makes computers.
So, if they’re going to keep selling those computers, the ipad basically has to stay firmly in between the iphone and the mac, and it’s it’s until they prove us wrong. Basically that i feel like that’s still going to be true uh, they didn’t become a two trillion dollar company by being bad at business, they’re not going to cannibalize their own products. This is this is just where the ipad lives. The one thing i will say that’s on the other side of this – is i’m reviewing all this new software on the perspective of someone who really wants to use this full time on a thousand dollar ipad pro, but this software will also be on everyone else’s ipads. On all the 329 ipads, you know in people’s homes in schools, all the ipad airs people who aren’t replacing their entire computer, or maybe they don’t need all that much functionality and they can do everything they want already with a normal ipad and all those ipads will Just get better for this, so that’s the ipad os 15 update, so there you have it more visible. Multitasking is my big takeaway, but also just like here’s, the ipad, here’s! What it’ll do it’s not really touching this or this, and i i enjoy using the ipad and that’s that’s what it comes down to, but let me know what your thoughts are in the comments section below we can talk about it either way talk to you guys In the next one, thanks for watching peace, .