The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition)
Another year, another series of incredibly-overpowered new iPads Pro, another round of '…shame the software sucks, though' reviews. But 'sucks' means different things to different people, and it's been a while since I put together an iPad manifesto so I thought I'd delineate where I think iPadOS is dropping the ball or needs improvement specifically from a core OS/developer perspective.
Below are the tentpoles that I think should be, need to be, addressed to make iPad Pro live up to the expectations of its monstrously-powerful M-series chip and multi-thousand-dollar asking price.
Apps should be able to create long-running tasks, or persistent tasks, that can use meaningful resources in the background as sub-processes. A scripting app like Pythonista should be able to run scripts in a secondary process that, if it crashes, won't take down the host app. Final Cut Pro should be able to export video in the background and let you work in other apps while you wait. Clipboard managers, like Clip, should be able to run in the background without the developer having to build an entire alternative app store and EU-based company to distribute it in, first 😛.
Bring the Hypervisor and Virtualization frameworks to iPadOS, to run macOS, Windows, Linux virtual machines at full native performance. All M-series iPads support hardware virtualization, and Apple has experimented with this internally for years.
