Apple Finally Gets Serious About the Post-PC Era (Premium)

I’ve been arguing for years that the iPad could never replace the PC until it provided all of the features that PC users demand. Well, Apple finally listened. So it’s time to dust off what I’ve been saying for years and wonder anew what took them so long.

“The ‘post-PC’ world that Steve Jobs imagined is closer than many expect,” I wrote almost four years ago while evaluating the then-new iPad Pro. “All it needs is for the major mobile platform makers to subtly shift their offerings to meet the needs to more sophisticated productivity scenarios.”

What were those necessary changes?

“Better multitasking user experiences, where apps can be arranged not just side-by-side on screen, but also in floating windows. And some kind of a cursor and pointing hardware instead of just touch and pen. Put simply, content creators need more sophisticated ways to interact with the system than we see today in Android or iOS.”

Apple hasn’t really provided floating windows, unless you consider picture-in-picture (PIP) video to be floating windows. But when it split iPadOS off from iOS last year, everyone expected major changes to come. And this month, we’re seeing the first such changes: iPadOS will indeed support an on-screen cursor and trackpads.

I described this coming mobile platform maturity as a “potential extinction moment” for Windows 10, and for the 2-in-1 PCs that use Microsoft’s legacy OS platform. I’m not ready to pat myself on the back for this prescience quite yet: I’ll evaluate Bluetooth trackpad support on iPadOS via my 9.7-inch iPad before I even consider dropping about $1000 on another iPad Pro. But still. Windows and Surface fans should be worried. This looks legit.

Most alarming---or, if you’re an iPad fan, exciting---is that Apple has subtly improved the cursor in iPadOS and its design looks like a winner for the same reason that people love iPads: It’s friendly and inviting.

The iPadOS cursor appears as a circular gray dot onscreen when you’re not using it, instead of the arrow cursor that’s common on PCs and Macs. (Which is curiously archaic, when you think about it.) But it still adapts to what you’re doing, much like a PC cursor. When you move the cursor over different objects, it visually changes using subtle animations. Move it between letters of text and it becomes an I-beam, for example. Move it over a tappable object like a button and it resizes to match that object. Move it over an object edge that can dragged and it morphs into a pair of arrows indicating that capability.

That’s smart. As important, it looks great.

“It’s only a matter of time before Google and Apple step up to the plate with more mature mobile offerings that will spell real trouble for Microsoft’s desktop platform,” I wrote.

Well, that matter of time was about four years, at least in Apple’s case. But it’s finally happening. So buckle up, folks. This is about to get really in...