May 1, 2025 2:22 PM PT
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and its CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and creatively avoid answering any pointed questions from analysts. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call.
Continue reading “This is Tim: Complete transcript of Apple’s Q2 2025 financial call”…
May 1, 2025 1:41 PM PT
On Thursday, Apple reported its second-quarter 2025 fiscal results. Revenue was $95.4 billion, up 5% versus the year-ago quarter. Mac revenue was up 7%, iPad revenue up 15%, iPhone revenue up 2%, and Services revenue up 12%. The Wearables/Home/Accessories category was down 5%.
Read on for more charts!
Continue reading “Apple Q2 2025 results and charts: $95.4B revenue”…
My friend John Siracusa launched his Mac utility Hyperspace back in February. The app uses a clever feature of APFS, the Apple file system, to purge a disk of duplicate data without disrupting any files. You get free space back on disk without losing anything. It’s a very clever idea, and you can download Hyperspace for free to see what it might save you before paying a cent.
On Thursday John released a new version that’s a major milestone:
In some ways, Hyperspace version 1.3 is what I originally envisioned when I started the project. But software development is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way. Launching with a more limited version 1.0 led to some angry reviews and low ratings in the Mac App Store, but it made the app safer from day one, and ultimately better for every user, now and in the future.
The new version will reclaim space from packages, cloud storage, and Library directories, all of which were specifically barred from the very careful 1.0 release. If you tried Hyperspace and were disappointed with the savings, it might be worth another look. This new version enabled more than 12 GB of savings on my local disk.
May 1, 2025 9:30 AM PT
If you noticed the ground shaking, don’t bother checking USGS1: it’s not an earthquake, it’s just a court order upending Apple’s App Store model.
Court filings often provide illuminating looks into organizations that are all too often shielded from public view, and this one is no exception. Take, for example, this fascinating nugget:
Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly.
Cook choosing poorly isn’t just that he opted to side with Maestri rather than Schiller, it’s that he chose to make a risky bet. He rolled the dice on trying to hold on to as much App Store revenue as he possibly could, in the hopes that Apple would simply…get away with it. That may have worked for a while, but the bill has come due, and the end result is likely to be a significant blow to Apple’s entire App Store model.2
On a surface level, Cook’s bet would appear to be purely about the money, because isn’t it always? (CFO Luca Maestri being on the side of charging the commission certainly supports that idea.) But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine that flouting compliance like this was worth the few…billion, perhaps?…dollars that Apple has made via this mechanism over the last few years.
Which is why I think that more than purely being a matter of bottom line, it was about exerting control. Unfortunately, the end result probably means Apple will lose even more control than it will revenue.
Ultimately, though, I think this decision could be good for Apple—and especially good for its customers. Because getting rid of these long-time ridiculous measures forces Apple to compete—which, lest we forget, was the entire point of this court case in the first place.
Yes, some developers may continue to use Apple’s purchases system because it’s easy and integrated, but a good many of them will probably look at that 15-30 percent commission and think maybe it’s better to put in a little extra work to go outside the store.
In that case, what’s Apple going to do? It would be bad business for the company to just keep its terms the way they are, holding onto its “my way or the highway” philosophy. I have to assume that—at the very least—it will lower the commission. Because getting 5 or 10 percent is unarguably better than zero percent.
Apple could, of course, have done this long, long ago and frankly should have even before this case started. The closest they ever got was the Apple Small Business Program, which launched in 2020. While the program cut the commission for those making under the $1 million threshold, its structure always felt more beneficial to Apple. One could argue that disincentivized developers to try and make their apps popular and to generate revenue, lest they accidentally cross that threshold.
The same is true in the European Union, where Apple’s attempt at recouping its investments via structures like the Core Technology Fee make it unattractive to switch away from Apple’s existing terms and thus actually have a depressive effect on developers taking chances.
All of this amounts to Apple squandering the goodwill that its products have long engendered. As longtime journalist and developer Christina Warren noted on Mastodon:
You want to know why visionOS has no devs/apps? A big reason that I’ve long argued is that Apple abused the goodwill it had with its developer community over capricious IAP/linking strategies. Apple assumed devs needed Apple more than Apple needed devs. And for the iPhone, maybe that’s true. But for new platforms, it isn’t. When you actively kick someone every time they come to hang out, don’t be surprised when they don’t come to your house anymore.
Yeah. Apps and developers enrich Apple’s ecosystem. They help enhance the platforms and devices, turning them into things that people want to use. But the company’s overriding behavior over the last fifteen years has been to try and squeeze those developers for everything they’re worth, using its platform control as a cudgel instead of treating them as partners.
Adapt or die, the old saying goes. And though Apple might not be in danger of dying if it doesn’t make these changes—as I just wrote the chances of them ever really dying are slim—it’s still not without damage. To paraphrase the immortal words of one of our greatest heroines, the more Apple tightens its grip, the more revenue will slip through its fingers.
The thing that Apple used to be so good at understanding is that the bottom line isn’t just about how the numbers add up. Apple has long been a company that prides itself on its image and its brand, and marring that, whether it be via contentious relationships with developers or seemingly bending over backwards for authoritarians, does have an effect in the long term.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
May 1, 2025 8:27 AM PT
U.S. District Court judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled largely in Apple’s favor in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit back in 2021, but she did find that Apple’s requirement that apps only use Apple’s payment methods and not link to external methods was fundamentally anticompetitive. So she ordered Apple to change its behavior. After two failed appeals, Apple was forced to follow her orders.
In a judgment handed out on Wednesday, Gonzalez Rogers said that Apple acted in contempt by failing to follow her orders and scheming to find ways to avoid them, that at least one executive lied under oath, and concluded that Apple has so brazenly botched the aftermath of her order that several of its longstanding App Store policies are now entirely void.
It was a bad day in court for Apple. And a self-inflicted one. As Gonzalez Rogers writes in her finding:
Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up.
What the judge found back in 2021 was that Apple’s 30 percent cut of App Store in-app purchases was fundamentally uncompetitive, as was Apple’s rule that prevented app developers from pointing users to external purchase options on the web. She ordered that Apple change its behavior, but instead Apple did pretty much what we all imagined they had done: cook up a scheme that seemed to follow the order but made the result so unpalatable that developers would opt for the status quo instead.
Thanks to the power of the subpoena, Gonzalez Rogers has brought receipts. There’s a large document trail indicating that Apple reverse engineered a 27% commission for external transactions (including a lengthy post-referral royalty period) in order to make them no better than just using Apple’s own internal payment system. When a major app developer pointed out that the overhead of external payment systems was more than the commonly-cited 3% (meaning that the entire thing would be a net money loser), Apple celebrated the good news.
Apple also attempted to engineer the directive to allow external links in apps by creating new barriers and requirements that would similarly defang those orders. It created full-page “scare screens” (I referred to them as “This App May Kill You” screens), demanded that all links be to static URLs (neutering their utility), and kept editing the warning labels to dissuade users as much as possible from ever agreeing to follow the link. (Cook is specifically credited with amping up the language in the warning screens.)
The company’s internal struggle is fascinating to read about. While Apple Fellow and longtime App Store overseer Phil Schiller doesn’t come across entirely smelling like a rose, he does end up looking far better than literally any other Apple employee in the ruling. Schiller “advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction”—imagine that!—while Tim Cook, CFO Luca Maestri, and the company’s finance team instead decided to concoct a strategy of malicious compliance that led to the poison pill of the 27% commission.
“Cook chose poorly,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
Not only did Apple attempt to find ways to circumvent the injunction, but it fatally hid their discussions from the judge. While Schiller gets credit from Gonzalez Rogers for sitting through the trial and reading the final decision1, the judge suggests that his colleagues at Apple did not. Most troubling is the behavior of Apple’s Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, who the judge says “outright lied under oath” multiple times. She referred her ruling to the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco for possible criminal prosecution of Apple generally and Roman specifically.
“At every step Apple considered whether its actions would comply, and at every step Apple chose to maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream over compliance,” she wrote.
Because Apple has proven itself untrustworthy, the judge has decided that the time for talk is over. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote Wednesday. “There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order.” As a result, she has now enjoined Apple entirely from impeding the ability of developers to communicate with users or charging a commission for external transactions. In other words, Apple had its chance to comply, but since it refused to do so reasonably, it’s going to get hammered.
In the least surprising response possible, Apple says it will appeal. Maybe this time it’ll take things a bit more seriously.
Shōgun gets another season, Match Game re-revived, binge behavior calculated, bonus content promoted, Netflix results parsed, Apple TV+ losses pondered, and our TV picks explained.
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How sycophantic we want our chatbots to be, Google ending Nest support, what we’ve learned from Reddit recently, and whether developer conferences are still about developers.
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April 30, 2025 11:55 AM PT
It’s time again for your favorite part of the quarter: financial results!1
Yes, Apple is once again poised to report how much cash it will be pouring into the Scrooge McDuck vault concealed under Apple Park’s Rainbow Stage2. Fun fact: it’s the only company that reports its quarterly earnings in cubic feet.
While I may not be a Financial Wizard™, I have been following these results for almost two decades, so I’m going to bring some insight to bear on what to look for as the company, in the words of Tim Cook, “makes it rain.” Here are five key takeaways to keep your eyes on.
It’s tariffic: Everybody’s going to want to know what Cook and company are doing to prepare for the administration’s on-again/off-again/on-again/we-were-on-a-break tariffs. It’s hard to prepare with that kind of volatility, so I expect the company to respond in the only logical fashion: by consulting our country’s most accurate and trustworthy forecaster.…
Jason Snell and Weldon Dodd are back on the Mac Admins Podcast to discuss this year’s Apple in the Enterprise Report Card. How did the last year go for Mac Admins with Apple Products? Well, let’s find out…
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April 30, 2025 8:57 AM PT
Last updated February 13, 2026
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji (now Iru) approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our fifth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 124 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji/Iru commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so again—it had no control over the survey results or the contents of this story.
Also, I stopped by the Mac Admins podcast to discuss the report card with hosts Tom Bridge and Marcus Ransom as well as Kandji/Iru’s Weldon Dodd.
Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: A 2025 report card”…
April 30, 2025 8:45 AM PT
Every year we ask the Apple IT/Mac admin community for their opinions about how Apple fared in past 12 months. You can read our 2025 Enterprise report card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read all the comments from the panelists who were willing to share in public—all 25,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.
Onward.
Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: The complete 2025 commentary”…
I’m going to wax a little philosophical for this week’s column, which also happens to be my last.
Stay Foolish debuted ten years ago, almost to the day, but I’ve been writing regularly for Macworld for nearly twenty years. When I first started out, we were all excited about what the latest in technology—Intel-powered Macs—would mean for Apple’s long-term prospects for survival. Two decades later, nobody ever even whispers that Apple is doomed anymore, because to suggest it would mark you as somebody divorced from reality.
It’s difficult to overstate just how different the Apple of today is from the Apple of 2015 or 2006. In taking a retrospective look at Apple, we most often find ourselves comparing the enormously successful behemoth that Apple now is to the company’s nadir in the mid-90s, when it was just steps from going out of business. But the truth is that even in just the last decade or two the company has reached heights that seemed previously unattainable.
And somewhere along the way, I think the relationship of the company to its customers—and vice versa—changed as well. It’s something that I’ve found myself thinking about more and more in recent years. But is it me that’s changed, or is it Apple? I think probably a little of both.
April 28, 2025 4:37 PM PT
Last week, Roku held a press event in New York where they unveiled their latest streaming devices, wireless cameras, and minor adjustments to their existing, content-driven interface. If you were hoping for a dramatic update to Roku OS, Lucas Manfredi has the disappointing details over at The Wrap:
The platform introduced a “Coming Soon to Theaters” row and personalized sports highlights. It also launched short-form content rows in the All Things Food and All Things Home destinations for users to easily find smaller curated clips, from recipe tutorials to home organization hacks. It also unveiled badges to help users differentiate between free, paid, new and award-winning content.
If you have used Roku devices or TVs recently these announcements seem disproportionate to the scale of the event where Masaharu Morimoto served sushi, and puppies were available for adoption.
The hardware devices themselves don’t do anything novel over existing devices to justify this fanfare. That’s not that surprising when you consider that Roku loses money on its hardware. Ars Technica’s Scharon Harding summarizes it well:
For a clearer picture of how critical ads are to Roku’s business, in its fiscal Q4 2024 earnings report shared on February 15, Roku revealed that its devices division lost $80.4 million during the fiscal year. Meanwhile, its platform business, which includes Roku OS and its advertising arm, reported about $1.89 billion in gross profit.
Roku is the number one streaming platform in the U.S. It has been able to place promotions and ads in such a way that they drive consumers to shows and material, and has done so in a way that has mostly only grown its user base and the value of its promotional real estate.
Roku recently tested the limits of its customers by displaying an ad before the customer gets to the Roku interface. Chris Welch from The Verge asked Roku’s ad marketing lead, Jordan Rost, about that mess:
Rost didn’t say as much directly, but it’s apparent that Roku was keenly aware of the bubbling up of complaints. “Advertisers want to be part of a good experience. They don’t want to be interruptive,” he told me.
“We’re always testing. We listen to consumer feedback, we do all of our own A/B testing on the platform. We’re constantly tweaking and trying to figure out what’s going to be helpful for the user experience.”
I never expected the ad guy to say, “Ads suck!”, so this is completely in line with my expectations. Welch also asked him about that notorious patent to inject ads into the streams of non-Roku content. Again, he said nothing shocking:
He said Roku’s own platform is the “primary” focus of its ads strategy. But last month’s misstep isn’t going to stop the bigger plan to keep pushing to make ads more shoppable, interactive, relevant, and “delightful.”
I support Chris’s use of quotation marks around “delightful,” even if he was directly quoting Rost.
Recently, I had occasion to use a Roku 4K+ for a few weeks as my primary TV streamer, and it’s not all terrible ads top to bottom. As much as I might complain about ads, I see why most people don’t. Not because the drooling masses don’t know any better, but because everyone has different thresholds for advertisements and promotions.
The famous Roku City screensaver is actually a good metaphor for this. There’s a car driving through a city where there are various illustrated storefronts and billboards. The ads populate the places a person would see these things in real life—for example, I saw an ad for The Home Depot on the side of a building. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment whatsoever, but it’s more subtle than an autoplaying video before you get to the home screen. (People even have some strange affection for this screensaver, even though it’s an ad vehicle.)
Roku’s ads are mostly banner images that remind me of the old days of the web. They don’t even take up as much screen real estate as Amazon’s Fire TV interface bludgeoning poor Jason with mattresses. Roku’s content-driven interface obviously has value—otherwise advertisers and studios wouldn’t pay for placement there. The same goes for Amazon.
Every person will have their own tolerance level for advertising tested by the array of devices and services that they can use to watch TV, what the ads are for, how they are delivered, and how much they paid for the streaming device that shows it to them. Everyone will have a different threshold.
Suppose you’re weighing the difference between a cheap streamer box and paying maybe $100 more for a premium Apple model. In that case, Apple might be able to make the case that—despite its overbearing promotion of Apple TV+ subscriptions throughout the TV app—it provides an experience that’s a cut above the competition in terms of not pushing ads at you from every corner of the screen and using your viewing data to profile you.
But it doesn’t do that. Since 2015, it’s been all about how powerful the Apple TV is.
It can play games (third-party controller not included)! It can be a smart home hub (entry-level model no longer includes a Thread radio)! You can connect HomePods in stereo pairing modes (please buy two, very old, very slow-to-respond smart speakers that will grab requests they can’t act on)! It has Siri (it won’t get Apple Intelligence Siri or access your semantic index)! There are user profiles built into the OS (that don’t do anything)! You can watch Apple TV+ on it (or literally anything else)!
Competing devices tend to be pretty pokey (either because of underpowered hardware, or poorly optimized code), but they succeed because they’re cheap, and they’re just for TV. Apple recycles iPhone chips into Apple TVs, and anyone can tell you they’re overkill for simply streaming video to a TV.
There are rumors that there’s a new Apple TV coming later this year. It’ll likely have a chip that’s closer to the current generation of phone chips, which doesn’t suggest the boxes are getting any cheaper.
Roku and Amazon treat their hardware as a loss leader to get people into a platform where they can be monetized. Apple doesn’t need to do that, but there’s still plenty of room here to make an Apple TV box that just does TV. (Apple used to sell the 3rd generation Apple TV for $70. There’s certainly room under $130 for a stripped-down device.)
Cynically, a person could say that Apple needs to copy what Roku is doing and integrate ads into the interface—just as it’s so deftly integrated ads into the App Store—and subsidize the hardware. I don’t have any interest in seeing it do that.
I’d rather see Apple try to compete with these low-end devices by offering something priced a bit lower, with a revamped content-driven interface. Apple will never be able to match Roku or Amazon on price, but if it could offer a sub-$100 box with good content recommendations, combined with a story about limiting ads and ensuring privacy, it could make a more persuasive case.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Apple tiptoes a line between the U.S., China, and India, while Europe hits back with a big fine. Is the solution to the iPad’s high-end malaise… the Mac menu bar? And for Google, no thermostat is forever.
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April 28, 2025 3:04 PM PT
Jason wrote last week about his experience wearing an Apple Watch for sleep. He said he hasn’t gained a lot of actionable information from the data his watch gathered. My experience has been different.
I first tried sleep tracking with a Fitbit in 2017. I was able to note how much sleep I got each night, and some limited information about how well I slept. At the time, I didn’t mind that it wasn’t directly actionable. It was enough to understand something about my sleep patterns, and to know which nights of the week I tended to get the most rest. When I bought a used Apple Watch Series 4, I stopped wearing the Fitbit. Unfortunately, the Series 4’s by-then limited battery life meant I couldn’t easily sleep with it and wear it during the day, too.
When sleep apnea detection came to watchOS and newer watches, I eagerly snapped up a Series 9, ready to find out if a doctor’s speculation about my potential for apnea would be borne out by the watch. I have had bouts of insomnia, too, which I’ve always wanted to quantify for health care providers. At the time I started tracking, I was also going through a lot of life stress that I’m sure impacted my sleep. So was it apnea, or just stress?
I wasn’t looking forward to wearing a bulky Apple Watch to bed, but it was surprisingly unobtrusive. I got in the habit of taking off the watch at mid-evening and putting it on the bedside charger so it would be ready at bedtime. If you create a sleep focus with your preferred bedtime, your phone and watch will helpfully tell you when to put it on the charger to be sure the battery will last all night.
Of course, the Apple Watch will tell you how much sleep you’re getting, and how much time you’ve spent in bed. But it’s much more interesting to know how long I’ve spent in various stages of sleep. Was I getting enough deep sleep – the kind that is most restful – and how often was I waking in the night? On nights when my insomnia was bad enough to pull me out of bed and into a chair to listen to a podcast until I was sleepy again, how much sleep time was I losing? And how was awareness of my own stress experiences resonating with my sleep patterns?
I began to see patterns almost immediately. At the time I started sleep tracking, my awake periods were consistantly coming at around 2 a.m., lasting an hour or more. On good nights, I was averaging two periods of deep sleep, usually an hour or more removed from when I woke in the night. I also had data to show what I already felt was true. On Sunday nights, before a work week, I’m often a restless sleeper. On Saturdays, after a relaxing evening cooking dinner and watching movies with my spouse, I tend to sleep well, aided by the lack of an alarm the next day.
The next step was to check for sleep apnea. To do this, you track your sleep for 30 days in a row. The Health app will let you know if you have elevated breathing disturbances, and how often, along with your respiration and heart rates. According to Apple, it’s likely that I have moderate sleep apnea. When the test period is done, I can create a PDF showing my watch data, to share with my doctor.
As it happens, I’ve been tested for sleep apnea, and I have it. What I learned from my watch is how that condition manifests itself in terms of my breathing, and my ability to feel refreshed after fitful sleep. I’ve also learned how different those numbers look when I’m extremely tired, and manage to get a full night’s rest without waking. I tend to have fewer breathing disturbances.
I guess the question is: What do you call actionable data, and how different is it than awareness of your own patterns and trends? Sure, I learned what sleep apnea looks like for me. But even understanding my own deep patterns, both on individual nights, and over weeks or months gives me data I can use or share at my next doctor visit. If I stay up very late because I’m not sleepy at my normal bedtime, I might pay a price in tiredness the next day, or it might be two days before that happens. If I have an alcoholic drink before bedtime to help me get to sleep, chances are that my sleep, while it comes more quickly, will be restless. So I’ve learned that a nightcap isn’t really a great idea for me. I have better luck if I take melatonin, though there are right ways and wrong ways to use it.
I also altered my charge/watch-wearing routine to make sleep tracking easier. When I wake up in the morning, I keep my watch on until I get to my desk. I put the watch on a charger there, and return it to my wrist when the phone notifies me that it’s fully charged. This usually happens before I get up from the desk for the first time each morning. This setup lets me track all of my sleeping and waking activity without running out of juice.
[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]
April 25, 2025 2:00 PM PT
The EU squeezes Apple, the cheapest iPhone goes up a notch, and the Apple Watch is a perfect 10.
The European Union is turning up the heat on Apple. Again.
The EU announcement does not specify exactly what it finds to be in breach, although it likely relates to Apple’s App Store fee structure. Apple currently charges a commission of more than 17% on purchases made outside of the app. This would be in opposition to the DMA’s requirement that these abilities be offered “free of charge”.
Yes, 17% is not “free”. Good catch. Weird they only just noticed that as we all noticed when this was first implemented but I get it, there’s just a lot of good television on right now.…
April 25, 2025 10:26 AM PT
Two weeks ago, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported that some serious changes were in the works for iPadOS 19:
I’m told that this year’s upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It’s been a long time coming, with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.
This report is intriguing, but frustratingly vague. Apple wanting to tinker with iPad multitasking and app window management is dog-bites-man stuff at this point. Gurman’s report didn’t offer any real specifics, so we’re left to guess about what Apple might do to make changes that would “make a lot of [iPad power] users happy.”
On Thursday, purveyor of Apple rumors Majin Bu reported some interesting details:
One of the most exciting changes will benefit those using the iPad with a Magic Keyboard. When connected, the interface will adapt to show a menu bar at the top, just like on macOS, turning the iPad into a much more laptop-like experience.
Another key update is Stage Manager 2.0, an enhanced multitasking mode that activates automatically when the keyboard is attached. It will make managing apps and windows smoother and more productive than ever.
The idea of adding a “laptop mode” that alters the iPad interface when a keyboard is attached is a good one. That’s a strong signal that the iPad is in a context that would welcome more affordances for keyboard and pointing devices—while not burdening users who just want to use the iPad as a touch tablet.
Apple has been building to this on iOS for quite some time now, most notably with changes made in iPadOS 15. I wrote about it back in 2021:
Apple is rebuilding the Mac menu bar on the iPad, and it’s doing it in plain sight. Hold down the Globe or Command keys in iPadOS 15, and you’ll see an overlay that lists all the available keyboard shortcuts—organized in a quite familiar pattern that begins with File and Edit. You don’t even need to use keyboard shortcuts—tapping on any command will execute it…
Would Apple ever offer a proper Mac-style menu bar on the iPad? I think it might, in the proper contexts. Perhaps only when a keyboard and pointing device are attached, or only on an external display that has to be entirely driven by those input methods. But it’s not as if the iPad isn’t already most of the way there. The iPad’s status bar displays time, date, and a bunch of icons already—they’d be at home in a Mac-style menu bar. Toss in icons for Control Center and Notification Center if you want.
I don’t know if Bu’s sources are good on this or not, but if it is true, it would definitely fit into Gurman’s report that iPadOS 19 will make the iPad work more like a Mac when it’s in the proper context. Context is everything here. Regular iPad users don’t need to see this stuff—but if the device can adapt when snapped into a Magic Keyboard, all the better.