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Boy, am I glad I didn’t drop £2000 on a new M4 iPad Pro. At last month’s “Let Loose” event Apple debuted the most incredible iPad hardware ever made. So thin, so powerful, so much potential. The only thing needed to make the iPad story complete, was a more capable version of iPadOS.
Last year’s iPadOS 17 was a minor update that, as usual, kept the iPad from becoming a true MacBook replacement for professionals with demanding workflows. Many iPad users have adapted to its limitations, using the Shortcuts app to make the iPad more Mac-like. However, for creative professionals needing robust multitasking, file management, and real pro apps, iPadOS still doesn’t cut it. It still gets the basics wrong, it’s harder to use than macOS in some use cases and no matter how hard you try, there are still times where you need to revert to a Mac to complete that final 20% of your workflow.
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The excitement around the M4 iPad Pros suggested that the hardware was just the beginning. Discussions across Threads and Twitter speculated that WWDC24 would reveal a game-changing iPadOS update to match the powerful new hardware. I was even excited about the idea of Apple finally giving users the option to install either iPadOS or macOS as the hardware is more than capable of running either OS flawlessly. Many across the tech scene believed that this was the year that Apple would finally release a major iPadOS update and that the new M4s would be the first actually “pro” iPad Pros.
Well, WWDC24 came and went, and the big update turned out to be… a Calculator app. While the new app is impressive, it hardly lived up to our expectations.
Apple also introduced a new floating tab bar as well as the same new iOS 18 home-screen customisations. But come on, how will aesthetic tweaks improve the way we use our iPad Pros?
