MacBooks and iPads, macOS and iOS, in ‘This’ Direction and in ‘That’ Direction

As someone who has been iOS-only for a good while now (and being joined by more people all the time), the latest Apple keynote held little interest for me. That’s because, though the new MacBook Pro looks nice, I’m simply not interested in a new Mac device.

Apple’s executive team has been doing a small press tour to both promote the new device and defend some of their decisions, which led to an interesting quote from Phil Schiller in an interview with the Independent that I quite liked.

Regarding the future of both macOS and iOS, he said the following:

We’re steadfast in our belief that there are fundamentally two different products to make for customers and they’re both important. There’s iPhone and iPad which are single pieces of glass, they’re direct-manipulation, multi-touch and tend towards full-screen applications. And that’s that experience. And we want to make those the best in that direction anyone can imagine. We have a long road ahead of us on that.

Then there’s the Mac experience, dominated by our notebooks and that’s about indirect manipulation and cursors and menus. We want to make this the best experience we can dream of in this direction.

The difference between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ manipulation is precisely why I was (again) uninterested when Microsoft’s Surface Pro was announced. Though the device is extremely beautiful, I have very little interest in a computer with software designed for a mouse and hardware designed for touch. The two are simply so different that there can be no easy overlap.

Schiller continued:

Here’s one example of how they should remain distinct: the Mac from the very first has had a menu bar fixed at the top. It’s core to the identity and the experience you get. But iOS doesn’t have a menu at the top. It never will. The thought of pointing at a menu at the top of an iPhone feels wrong. If you made the Mac a touchscreen you’d have to figure out how to make it a good experience with your finger on a touchscreen. Trust me, we’ve looked at that — it’s a bad experience. It’s not as good or as intuitive as with a mouse and trackpad.

As I wrote a few months ago, I spent eight years waiting for a touchable interface. To have added a touchscreen to macOS and called it an iPad would have been a mistake years ago, and to add a touchscreen to a MacBook Pro would be a mistake now. I have no doubt about that — but I think we should all keep an eye out regarding future iterations of the iPad Pro.

The future of iOS is bright.