Among its other new features, iOS 13 could bring USB-C mouse support to the iPad, a new report claims.
The rumor comes courtesy of MacStories editor Federico Viticci, who revealed it on the latest episode of his podcast. While he didn’t (unsurprisingly) single out names, he mentioned that he had heard it from a “couple of people.”
Viticci’s news was backed up by developer Steven Troughton-Smith, who confirmed on Twitter that, “as far as I’m aware, that is indeed in the works.”
If you missed last week’s @_connectedfm, @viticci had a pretty interesting scoop that he’d been sitting on re mouse support coming to iPad as an accessibility feature. As far as I’m aware, that *is* indeed in the works. I feel like every pro user will turn that on, day one ?
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 22, 2019
Don’t expect it to be a major UI switch-up, however. Instead of being the de-facto new way of interacting with your iPad, or even something on the level of the Apple Pencil, this is supposedly going to be an accessibility feature.
As Viticci commented:
“My understanding of these conversations was that enabling mouse support on iPad as part of the AssistiveTouch accessibility feature would make sense — you plug in a mouse and you get a cursor.”
The ultimate pro experience?
As he pointed out, it is already possible to have a cursor on iOS for accessibility purposes. This would just make it possible to control that cursor with a mouse, instead of a joystick or similar. Nonetheless, this seems to fit neatly alongside Project Marzipan, Apple’s framework that will allow developers to build cross-platform apps for iOS and macOS.
With more and more power users using their iPad Pro as their primary device (including several of my colleagues here at Cult of Mac), a lot of people would seemingly be very happy to use a mouse as part of their iPad Pro experience.
Would you welcome this change? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: iDownloadblog
