Thread by @tolmasky

Thought experiment: if Apple said fuck it and just gave the new M1 MacBooks touchscreens and bare bones touch APIs, but no further direction or “UX investment,” then 5 years later which do you think would be home to more exciting touch apps and UX developments: macOS or iPadOS?

I say the Mac: if for no other reason that a tinkering community could actually exist. It wouldn’t be about wondering if *this is the year* Apple really decides to take the iPad seriously. Some passionate college kid could come up with a cool idea and ship it — for the whole OS!

But here’s another thing: either way we’d be maximizing our options. Currently, Apple has simply decided by decree that the future of touch has the evolve up from the a phone OS to Desktop workflows. They’ve forbidden trying to evolve down from an existing Desktop OS.

Which is an increasingly bizarre stance when you consider that the history of the iPad is kind of just repeated concessions to the Desktop way of doing things. E.g. after 9 years of hinting at a revolution… they just added mouse support & sold us a laptop conversion kit for $349

And of course they finally agreed that there *is* value in having a menubar to see your options instead of divining dozens of gestures. Only, you know, on the bottom instead of the top, cuz it’s new! Kind of like how Windows put the close button on the right instead of the left…

I sometimes kid that growing up is begrudgingly admitting over the years that your mother was right about more and more things. It kind of feels like the iPad matures in the same way: all those silly outdated “Desktop affordances” seem to have a habit of finding their way back in

But then what was the point? Why have we gone through this exercise of trying to redefine everything just to end up with two nearly identical machines, that now even use the same processor and have *multiple bridging technologies* (Catalyst and unmodified iPad apps on Big Sur)?

Here’s the thing: I don’t actually think Apple spent 9 years secretly trying every idea they could come up with, only to come to terms with the harsh realization that touch screens still need trackpads. And if they did, then they clearly just aren’t cut out for this job.

The reason I think this is because the apps aren’t there. Apps are like fossils, evidence of the past research. Go look at early iPad. It launched with a thoughtful new touch-enabled iWork. A year later a completely reimagined Garage Band *designed for* (*not ported to*) the iPad

None of us can know the *right* touch UI until we try it. And you can’t really try it if you’re not trying it on *real* apps. But here’s the thing: after that initial creative burst, Apple stopped writing new flagship iPad apps. So it’s no surprise that the ideas stopped too.

Every iPad app since has just been an “OS parity” play. FindMy has to exist on every platform.  News (ugh) has to exist on every platform. The incentive is to create lowest common denominator “universal” apps, not *tailored platform specific experiences* that push the envelope.

So if your goal was to actually create a new touch-first paradigm, this tweet has it backwards: you shouldn’t wait until you’ve divined the building blocks out of thin air to write Final Cut Pro. You should instead write Final Cut Pro in order to discover those building blocks.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1402380481497337863

If you were presented with the goal of making a worthy successor to Final Cut Pro on the iPad, you would immediately be faced with real world problems that would *have to be solved*. There’s no “release APIs and see what happens.” The success is gauged on the app, a higher bar.

And it goes without saying, if you released such a Final Cut Pro for iPad, one that you could actually be proud of as the replacement to Desktop Final Cut Pro, one that made people immediately want to switch, well, you’ve probably fixed iPadOS along the way.

This is a better strategy than every year doing another “safe” iteration where you take a bunch of demo ideas and see whether 3rd party devs make good use of them. Because putting  News and Notes in split screen sure as hell isn’t going to push the limits of your UI proposals.

And that’s how the iPhone did it btw. It didn’t have an existing platform to piggy-back off of. We had to reimagine things like Safari and Mail on the phone and m make a plausible case for their use. Apple didn’t ship a blank iOS with UIKit and wait for devs to figure it out.

But perhaps that was the first problem with the iPad: it got those iPhone apps “for free.” And like the stereotypical rich kid that underperforms because they could just ride on their parents’ money, the iPad was denied a trial by fire. We all already knew touch *could* work.

It’s still admirable that the iPad team didn’t slouch though. That first year was incredible thanks to iWork & Garage Band. It just sucks that after that, the iPad went on cruise control apps-wise (probably due to the shift in focus to a different vanity *cough, Watch* project).

Anyways, I think that’s how we ended up where we are today: 9 years going in circles with respect to touch UX, making us think “oh, add a trackpad.” Like when you keep reading the same paragraph over and over without understanding it because you’re thinking about something else.

So in some sense, this tweet is correct. We now have all the pieces to awkwardly shove a Desktop Final Cut Pro clone onto the iPad. Same processor, same peripherals, even a menubar. Too bad in the process we gave up the opportunity to find anything that would make it special.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1402380481497337863