At WWDC 2024, Apple needs to provide better software for the iPad.

At the launch of the iPad Pro M4 last month, Tim Cook said it was “the biggest day for the iPad since its launch”. That clearly wasn’t the case: it was a day of very nice incremental hardware upgrades for a tablet that already had more power than most people know what to do with.

But Cook’s proclamation may still be true, at least in retrospect. Apple just needs to step up and use WWDC to show us a powerful operating system that’s worthy of the powerful hardware in the new iPad Pro.

Let me get this straight from the start: The entry-level iPad, running today’s iPadOS, is fantastic for the things most people use an iPad for. No one should spend more than $500 on a tablet they’ll primarily use for reading, checking email, and watching stuff, and the OS is already great at that.

But Apple spent a lot of money creating the iPad Pro with an M4 processor, tandem OLED screen, and lots of RAM and storage. And Apple spent a lot of money trying to convince people that it’s also a real computer doing real work — putting all human creative expression into it, things of that nature.

The iPad is a computer. The iPad Pro especially It’s a computer. You can choose the processor, RAM and storage. It has a keyboard – now with a trackpad and row of functions – that “looks more like a MacBook than ever”. It has a $130 stylus that you can pinch and roll. You can spend more on it than on a comparable MacBook Pro. But if you try to use it like a computer, the operating system will fight you every step of the way.

This has been the case throughout the entire lifespan of the iPad, and even more so since the launch of the iPad Pro. But as the gang discussed in The Vergecast and David Pierce mentioned in his reviews of the new iPad Air and iPad Pro, the hardware now feels like it’s gone as far as it can go. Without a significant change to iPadOS, the iPad Pro won’t be what Apple wants you to believe it is.

If you’ve never tried working on an iPad, I’m genuinely happy for you. I’m writing this story on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an 11-inch iPad Air M2. It’s a very good keyboard, and the Air is a very good tablet, but it would have been much faster and easier on a convertible Chromebook. And I still could have watched Andor on the plane.

It’s still pretty annoying to do any kind of work on an iPad that doesn’t involve staying in a single full-screen app all the time. Even something as simple as writing a blog post while getting photos and links to other articles takes a lot longer and involves a lot more swiping than on any other screen this size. Stage Manager has taken a middle ground, but it’s still not great, especially without an external monitor. And the iPad still doesn’t have good support for multiple windows—there’s no way to snap app windows to specific parts of the screen or save window settings.

Try doing something a little advanced and you’ll run into all kinds of basic problems. The iPad version of Final Cut Pro won’t be able to export a video if you exit the app, even just to the home screen, because the operating system doesn’t have adequate support for background processes. There’s also no task manager, no good file manager, no clipboard manager, and no way to fill gaps in iPadOS functionality with third-party apps and utilities. These are all things that the iPad’s excellent hardware could support.

Federico Viticci in Mac Stories he has the definitive catalog of all the ways iPadOS still falls short, but you don’t need to be Federico to understand; you just need to try using your iPad as a computer for 10 minutes.

Apple has made it clear from the beginning that an iPad is an iPad and the MacBook is a MacBook, and if you want a touchscreen computer It is a laptop, you better buy both. This argument makes sense for the regular iPad (and for Apple’s quarterly earnings reports). But it’s pretty wearing when the iPad Pro costs as much as a MacBook, runs on the same architecture, and has a keyboard that Apple markets as “just like using a MacBook.”

It may seem like I’m asking for macOS on the iPad. I mean, sure, yes, if necessary, but Apple has the opportunity at WWDC to unveil an iPadOS that is as powerful and capable as the hardware deserves, while also being distinct from macOS.

Not to say too well, but the Surface Pro is there. Admit it or not, but Apple has been chasing the Surface Pro ever since it gave the iPad a USB-C port and a keyboard.

The Surface Pro has a new Arm processor that Microsoft claims is compatible with Apple Silicon. It has an OLED screen. It runs Windows 11, which, my complaints aside, is a real operating system, with a task manager, file manager, proper window tiling, background processes, and more. It also has several AI features of uncertain usefulness, just as Apple is expected to announce at WWDC.

We’re a few weeks away from knowing whether Microsoft has pulled it off, but right now there’s very little distance between the device that Apple wants you to believe is the iPad Pro and the one that Microsoft wants you to think is the Surface Pro, even though they’re coming from opposite directions.

I doubt many iPad diehards will switch to a machine that runs Windows, regardless of how good the Surface Pro is. But the more I bang my head against the limitations of iPadOS, the better the Surface Pro gets. And the people who believe the hype from Apple and acquire the M4 iPad Pro must have an operating system worthy of the hardware.