I didn’t add “beta” to the title because 16.2 may release to the public by the end of the month. What I wanted to share was Fernando Silva’s rundown of the lates beta and both stability and feature performance. It looks like external monitor support is significantly better. I’ve played with it a little on my LG Ultrafine 27" (BB had a big sale a week ago for $299) and it looks good, but there are strange anomalies which I blame on developers (looking at you MS - no cut and paste between two active Word windows)…
BUT, what it really did was make me wish even more for MacPad OS…
HOWEVER, it also makes me wonder how much better this could be with a landscape camera and MK Folio on the M3 iPad Pro.
FINALLY, it has made the decision for me to stick with my M1 iPad Pro to help scratch the Apple itch. In fact, I do keep it on my desk on a stand to take FaceTime calls and answer iMessage texts.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s right to frame it as “bashing”, to me that kind of implies that people have an axe to grind. Most people commenting on it are just pointing out that aspects of it are confusing. It can at once be a cool innovation and imperfect. I hope Apple will keep refining it to make it more intuitive to use.
I for one will continue to “bash” because there is no reason to leave real professional users wallow through the next three years of incrementalism (remember the first pseudo mouse support as an “accessibility” feature), with the “hope” this will result in a usable windowing environment when Apple could fix this tomorrow by putting in a hidden switch to boot to MacOS (hidden so as not to distress the pure iPad crowd - put it behind a paywall for a $500 copy of MacOS).
Go ahead with the new paradigm experiment but give users a lifeline now.
PS - I read Ed’s spirited defense yesterday and although it is very well written, I am ranting there as well - I’m an equal opportunity curmudgeon.
I was going to point out that that even here there has been some, albeit nowhere close to say MacRumors, but @dstrauss outed himself as one of the ones I was thinking of
And slightly off topic, but the ones that on the Mac side doing it I find a bit baffling, considering that they still have Finder and that it’s not even on by default on the Mac.
Another way of looking at it is that the iPad Pro is no worse at multi window productivity than it was prior to iPad OS 16. It’s not like anyone lost anything. Except their hopes and dreams of unicorns.
All kidding aside, I’ve made my personal peace for now. If I want/need windows, I’ll USE Windows. For all my other personal fun (especially FaceTime, iMessage and photo/video editing) the M1 iPP11 plus LG Monitor get the nod…just as the Apple focus on creatives deemed it should be…
I reached the same conclusion albeit with gaming, not productivity. I’m over my attempts to get the Apple Silicone Macs to play Windows games. Or Linux for that matter. The simple and best solution is a Windows gaming laptop good enough for my needs and desires. And I now have one that I am happy with. No more tilting at that windmill.
And in the comment section I spotted someone named “dalestrauss” which I believe is one of the posters from the old TabletPCReview forum. Great to see he’s still fighting to get macOS on the iPad.
I think I found half of my battery drain with iPadOS 16.2 beta - even though I had no SIM in the device, the cellular data switch was on and I noticed the iPad getting slightly warm in my bag - after shutting it off battery drain dropped from 30% to 16% overnight, and this morning on my desk in five hours it only dropped from 84% to 81%…a decent improvement.
I did on the drain issue; updating to beta 2 right now and will follow up my report with the settings issue. This could be user error because I don’t recall resetting that switch when I moved my tablet service from my M1 iPP11 to my SP8…
As a further indictment of the minimal discoverability of iOS features, just today for the first time I noticed that in the multitasking view (swipe up from bottom) you can grab an app and drag it onto another app to generate split screen mode. How the heck did I not know this?! Does anyone here know how long that’s been there?
That being said, Apple does usually have a “what’s new in IOSxx” notification that appears after installation of an update. The issue is that it only appears once, and is easy to dismiss without really looking at it.
Way back in the versions of IOS prior to 11, the “what’s new” was a permanent point on the software update pane. I’ve never heard a reason why that went away with subsequent updates
So here is something I hope 16.2 fixes over 16.1 though at least so far in the betas it’s not.
On the plus side, the battery life indicator gives percentage remaining information versus just a hard to tell graphic icon. But…
There seems to be an issue with it updating on a predictable basis. For example, I used my Pro 12.9 to read an ebook for about 90 minutes and it was still showing as 100% battery when I was done. A restart seems to have updated it with showing 94% battery remaing.
My daughter has observed similar behavior playing video such as using Netflix for an hour and seeing no change in reported battery percentage. Again, a restart seems to fix it, dropping the battery remaining by a few percent.
