iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad--Step by step, Apple is taking the iPad in a wholly new direction.

Ars' is probably the best in depth review that I've seen of iPadOS 13, outside of YouTube videos.


While pretty much every freaking thing about the Fruit Company's operating system demands you learn to swipe friend in Elvish, Dwarvish, and sometimes enemies in Klingon, the multitasking is pretty win. In my eyes: Google mostly frakked it up with Android 9/Pie, and the ubiquitous metaphors of stacking window managers just suck when you throw fingers at them.

Coming from Android land: the iOS home screen is pretty damned primitive. Like any more primitive and iOS 12 would have had me pounding rocks together to make fire. It still mostly smells of cave men in iPadOS 13, but has a longer beard.

The floating keyboard supporting swipe style typing, pretty much rectified my only true issue with Apple's keyboard. Not that I like it being one glitchy mother fucker. The amount of times I've had my FKB decide to reposition itself, usually by zig zagging its ass until the drag bar is offscreen -- or simply fscked up input, is insane for a released product. But when it doesn't make me have to reboot my iPad it does work really, really well; much like Gboard on my Samsung. Like Mr. Axon, I'd rather see the input as part of the regular full sized touch keyboard but I'll take whatever progress I can get.

Editing text in iPadOS 13 being improved, I don't think can be overstated. When I first booted up my iPad Pro, I felt like trying to move the cursor for editing text was bad. Somewhere between having my hands wrapped up like a movie burn victim and fuck it, I'm returning this shit level bad. Seriously, the two finger trackpad trick the keyboard does is the only reason I persisted to see what iPadOS 13 would bring. By contrast, iPadOS 13 feels like someone finally admitted that the era of 3" phone screens and being totally hopeless typing at all on the damned thing, is long since over; or needs to be.

I for one, look forward to 13.2 in the hopes of less bugginess--and have high hopes for 14.x being an iterative improvement on the system.