One of the big changes for iPad announced in the latest WWDC is the introduction of conventional window management and a menu bar. While I suspect this is likely getting a lot of praise from the press and tech taste makers people who decried the iPad as a “toy”, it raises more questions about what the iPad is for than it answers.
Is the iPad intended to be some kind of “computer for the rest of”, free of “computer bullshit” like dealing with windows? Is it the next stage of evolution for the Mac, a do-over of all the jagged edges it gathered? A lighter alternative to the Mac? Some kind of converged system between the iPad and Mac? I thought this was unlikely; Apple seemed pretty intent on making the Mac and iPad two separate things with a common lower level foundation. I was sympathetic to what the iPad was, even if it wasn’t what I needed to do my job as a technical professional – it worked well for many others. Now I’m not sure what they want to do with the iPad.
There’s also the question of Stage Manager. Despite the flaws, and the fact it wasn’t that far removed than what we currently have, I appreciate they were trying something different. How does the concessions to making it work like a Mac compose with the efforts they were doing with Stage Manager?
It reminds me of the last big concession they made with files. While the iPad was limited in what it could do, they had potential to come up with a better kind of metaphor for managing user data. Instead, they just replicated what we had, with most of the problems intact (though cleaned up a little, to make it easier to implement things like file providers).
Maybe the Macintosh truly is the evolutionary endpoint of computer user interfaces – File, Edit, and View stomping on a human face, forever. (And maybe Bret Victor was right about the early commercialization of research into the GUI calcifying it.)