iPadOS 26 moves the iPad closer to the Mac than ever before. But don’t take the upcoming operating system as a stepping stone toward an eventual unification between iPadOS and macOS. That’s clearly not going to happen.
The reason can be summed up with a phrase that Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software development, used in an interview at WWDC this week: “iPad’s gonna be iPad.”
iPad gets more Mac-like as processors improve
Back in 2010, the iPad was essentially an iPhone with a very large screen. Its processor was flatly inadequate to have multiple applications running side by side. But as time went on, the tablets became more powerful, and Apple added new multitasking features to the iPad.
These built up gradually. First, there was Split View and Slide Over in 2015, followed by the more robust Stage Manager in 2022. And this year, iPadOS 26 makes huge strides toward making iPad more Mac-like.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told Ars Technica, “Over time the iPad’s gotten more powerful, the screens have gotten larger, the user base has shifted into a mode where there is a little bit more trackpad and keyboard use in how many people use the device. And so the stars kind of aligned to where many of the things that you traditionally do with a Mac were possible to do on an iPad for the first time.”
‘iPad’s gonna be iPad’
But further comments by Federighi make it clear that the changes in iPadOS 26 don’t mean Apple plans to put macOS on iPad. Only Mac features that work well on a touchscreen will make the jump.
“We’ve looked and said, as [iPad and Mac] come together, where on the iPad the Mac idiom for doing something, like where we put the window close controls and maximize controls, what color are they — we’ve said, ‘why not, where it makes sense, use a converged design for those things so it’s familiar and comfortable,’” Federighi said to Ars Technica. “But where it doesn’t make sense, iPad’s gonna be iPad.”
iPad is a touch-first device; Mac is not
During the Ars Technica interview, the Apple executive also said, “The iPad is a direct manipulation touch-first device.”
Plus, Federighi talked about keeping macOS and iPad separate with tech-journalist Rafael Zeier, telling him, “With macOS, you’d lose what makes iPad iPad, which is the ultimate touch device.”
The people urging Apple to put macOS on its tablets ignore the fact that the Mac operating system isn’t designed for touch. It’s made to be controlled with a trackpad/mouse and a keyboard. A signifiant redesign would be necessary to prevent users from getting very frustrated. And that redesign could easily irritate those not interested in a Mac with a touchscreen.
Keeping iPad simple
Beyond that, Apple intends iPad to be easier to use than Mac. To accomplish that, many of the advanced macOS features needed only by professional-level users are stripped out, and average users like it that way.
“With the iPad, we took away whole layers of complexity about how you would manage files versus managing applications and so forth,” Federighi told Zeier.
That ease of use would be lost if the tablet ran macOS.
Anyone trying to argue that an iPad running macOS would be hugely more popular should consider that Apple sold about 57 million iPads running iPadOS in 2024, versus 23 million Macs sold in the same time period. The company needs to be careful not to make changes that would make the tablet less popular.
“iPad is an absolutely beloved device. It has a huge number of users who love it as the ultimate touch experience. And one that scales from something that can be so simple,” Federighi told Zeier.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
