Most Apple software updates don’t leave you with the immediate impression something drastic has changed. iPadOS 13 does, and not only because the software has fully branched off from iOS.
The tablet looks and feels unmistakably different, as we found after signing up for the iPadOS 13 public beta. You can, too, although you may want to hold off if you use your iPad regularly. All betas have bugs.
iPadOS 13 makes an iPad seem a little more like a computer, rather than a tablet. A merging of MacOS and tablet software has been predicted since iPads arrived. We’re not there yet, but iPadOS 13 takes a few more steps in that direction.
A new look
The first of these is obvious from the homescreen. Hold any iOS 12 iPad, even an iPad 12.9, in portrait aspect and it displays four columns of icons, the same as a 5-inch phone.
iPadOS 13 has six columns of icons, five rows. You can fit an additional 50 per cent more app icons on each page. And, perhaps more important, it makes the software look less toy-like.
There are less superficial top-level interface changes, too. Flick from the left of the screen and a new widget window slides into view. It’s called Today View.
By default this is not hugely useful for most. It’s packed with the stocks and default Apple fodder probably more useful to an Apple exec than a normal person, but the roster can be changed and rearranged. The Files widget may be useful, for example. It shows any recently opened documents and files. We added the MUBI widget, which shows the new film added to the Netflix-for-snobs service each day.
Opening doors to files
iPadOS 13 also changes how Apple tablets handle files. Earlier versions had a “Files” app, but it was about as useful as you’d expect from an all-but hermetically sealed platform like iOS. Your files were created like intruders or unwanted visitors. You can now browse through files stored on USB drives, SD cards and external hard drives in a manner closer to MacOS’s Finder or Windows’s Explorer.
Those with new iPad Pros, which have USB-C ports, can do this pretty easily. Plug in an adapter, plug in your storage. Older iPads will need the rarer (or at least less commonly owned) Lightning to USB camera dongle.
iPadOS 13 makes iPads seem less cloud-obsessed, and that’s a great change of photographers in particular. The App Store is now home to some surprisingly good image- and photo-editing apps.
It is predictably not well-suited to Apple dilettantes. iPadOS will read the drive system formats MacBook can handle, but not the NTFS used by just about every larger SSD or hard drive paired with a Windows computer.
iPadOS has opened up, but we’re still in Apple’s comfort zone.
Plug-in potential
These productivity changes fit even better when you connect a wireless keyboard. iPads and iPhones have accepted wireless keyboards for years now. Many use their iPad like a laptop, and iPadOS 13 makes this seem less like a happy accident and more of a deliberate-by-design choice.
You can even use a Bluetooth mouse this time around. But don’t reformat your laptop in preparation for eBay listing just yet. This is a half-hidden feature not made for general consumption.
Mouse support lives in the Accessibility part of Settings. You have no control over sensitivity, and the cursor is a clumsy-looking blob.
In Steve Job’s 2010 introduction to the iPad, the remit of the iPad was clear. It was introduced to handle the things it could do better than phones and laptops. Life as an almost like-for-like laptop replacement clearly is not one of them, yet.
Multi-tasking
iPadOS 13’s new multi-tasking does nudge us closer to that laptop-like feel, though. The core components are the same. Split-screen lets you run two apps at once, side-by-side. Slide Over opens an app in a movable window that sits above the primary app.
The changes sit a layer deeper. iPadOS 13 lets multiple apps exist in the Slide Over window. You can cycle through them. Multiple instances of the same app can be run too. This doesn’t work with all apps, of course, but you can have three instances of Safari on the same screen.
These parts still feel a little awkward. Apple may still believe in the iPad as a touch full interface, with a little keyboard help, but involved multi-tasking works better with a mouse. Will Apple add full mouse support next year? Who knows.
Gaming tweaks
There is also support for another kind of peripheral. iPads can now work with Xbox One and PS4 pads. These slot neatly into the MFI Bluetooth controller system, which has been around since 2013. Connect a pad and it works fairly seamlessly in games, with very little obvious lag.
Why now? This is a transparent bid to support Apple’s new game service, Arcade. It was announced in March 2019 and will work across iPadOS, Mac OS, iOS and Apple TV. Like many digital services these days, it will be subscription-based and offer “more than 100” new and exclusive titles.
Support for mainstream controllers is doubly important as, even after six years, we imagine the number of people with an MFI controller is still vanishingly small.
As Apple Arcade isn’t available yet, we tried a DualShock 4 with Grand Theft Auto III. The experience was perfectly sound: properly mapped buttons and a low-latency, responsive feel.
Other bits
All of these software changes seem particularly beneficial for iPads. The software also has the features added in the iPhone fork, iOS 13.
These include Dark mode, gesture-based typing, a redesigned photos app and “Sign in with Apple”. That last one does not seem to be active yet, but has wide privacy implications. Good ones, for once.
Apple offers far better privacy than Google, Facebook or Amazon. All of their business plans rely heavily on the collection of personal data for use in ad targeting and god knows what else. Apple’s personal data collection is anonymised, making it relatively worthless. But that’s extremely valuable if you care about privacy.
It will offer a way to login to services, in place of the common “login with Facebook” or “login with Google”. And as the Apple approach links each to a generated email address that can be disabled, you can put a hard stop to any service’s link to you. From another perspective, it also deepens your dependency on Apple. But privacy as a selling point only seems more attractive and meaningful as the years pass.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
