So the other day I went ahead and installed the current beta on my M1 iPad Pro to try out. I’m currently typed this in Arctic on the iPad right now in a window that doesn’t try to snap to pre-determined lanes! Crazy!

I have generally been using it with Universal Control from my Mac to get the mouse and keyboard over, and that - so far - works pretty well.

But I wanted to open the floor up to see if anyone else has tried it and what their opinions are. Or, if you haven’t and have a question about the windowing stuff, I or others might be able to field them.

For me, other than what I’ll chalk up to beta bugs mostly, I do think this has legs. Obviously not the full macOS everyone has been clamoring for, but it’s certainly usable and more or less works like you assume it works. Hopefully down the line Apple will figure out how to extend the background tasks to include stuff like running local servers/Node and whatnot for project development. But we’ll see.

There is some wonkiness when putting a window to the top of the screen, as it then has to do some battling with the clock/battery area and the new menu bar dropdown. At that point you have to click to get to the stop lights where otherwise you can just hover over them.

So anyway, how has the beta been treating you? Or if you have questions an interaction or whatever, we can all help answer them.

Edit: I’m editing this to share an article from MacStories interviewing Craig Federighi about the iPad:

https://www.macstories.net/stories/interview-craig-federighi-opens-up-about-ipados-its-multitasking-journey-and-the-ipads-essence/

  • fubarx@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 days ago

    I’m running it on a latest-gen iPad Mini. It broke screen updates on a whole lot of third-party apps. Turned out the only way to get them to refresh was turning on multi-tasking and resizing the window. After a couple of them updated and fixed the problem, I turned off and went back to normal non-windowed mode.

    On a big size iPad Pro I might be tempted to turn it on, but the only reason to do it is if I was copy/pasting from one app to another, and I can already do that by toggling between apps.

    If I needed to jump between a lot of windows, I’d stick with a Mac. My regular Macbook sits docked with two large monitors on each side of the regular screen. I can get a lot done fairly quickly between them. Not sure what advantage the iPad offers.

    Speaking of iPadOS-26: on 18.5 Safari, I had a LOT of tabs open (1500+) in different groups. These were iCloud shared with MacOS. After the iPadOS-26 upgrade, Safari has become unusable. Down to a crawl with 30-60 sec refresh times per tab. Reported it. Switched over to Firefox for now, but I hope they fix it.

    For serious dev work, I need a Mac running Docker, Parallels (Windows/Linux), and USB ports. Apple knows this too. Doubt they’ll add background server support to the iPad since it can drain the battery and they wouldn’t want to cannibalize Mac sales.

    BTW, I HIGHLY recommend everyone watch the WWDC25 developer videos on local Foundation Models, especially the advanced one. This is a mind-bogglingly awesome feature, coming soon.