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It's a while since I used Airplay for anything other than Youtube videos, but here is how I thought it worked:

1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.

2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.

3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.

4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)

The "magic" here should be that whichever app was last explicitly cast to an external display should be the one that keeps casting to that display until the user chooses from a different app to cast it to the external display.

I think the counter-argument you posed is the weaker of the two. You of course know you want to switch to displaying the live demo environment instead of the presentation you chose to cast to the display, but there's no way the OS can reasonably infer that, so it shouldn't.

> Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.

Sadly true.

I think there’s a solution that fits within the Apple Design culture that they already use. If you’re connected to a display you can already click the “AirPlay” icon to change the audio output location. (Eg I’m connected to a display via usbc cable but want the audio to go to a Bluetooth device or headphones)

So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.

> UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen

Better yet, allow for a dock on the extended screen, that lists all apps that have feature support for another monitor. The dock will have an app to duplicate screen 1. However, Control of this dock will have to be done via mouse / trackpad, because touch is not available on second screen..

>I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?

Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.

The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.

Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.

> I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?

While a bit annoying, that seems like the optimal solution within the constraints of apple's design culture.

I mean isn’t that how zoom and likes of it work?

You can either share a specific window (and need to switch off and share another if you want to share another app) or you can share entire screen.

If I understand correctly that’s what would be the solution here

Probably simplest solution is to keep current behaviour and get a second iPad for notes.

> this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up

I was completely agreeing with you until this statement at the very end.

How do you know it didn't come up in a meeting and that Apple isn't full of assholes who channel their inner (wildly distorted perception of) Steve Jobs to shut down dissent? If there's any place where a whole goddamn committee could be that delusional about its own nature, it's Apple. The company got way too big for its own good a very long time ago.

You're spot on otherwise. It's the fundamental reason why everyone who does hates Apple.

Sure but here we are talking about Airplay, not about a monitor directly connected to the iPad (which also can be done)

This might be true but also ipadOS is a buggy mess and fails to even be a good walled garden

Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.

X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.

https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/

> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.

> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.

I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)

That's because back then, they weren't releasing major new versions every year.

Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.

iOS 26 made clear that apple completely lost their UX advantage they had in the past. A lot of things were changed to "look better", while completely ignoring that it made UX worse. I think they just lost the people and the know-how to design good UX. Just making it look "pretty" is not good UX.

Why do you think they need to do proper QA? People are going to buy their products anyway.

Does Apple even have QA anymore? Do they even do user testing? I know a lot of people who have left Apple testing and validation in the past few years and every new macos and ios release is buggier than before. Insanely basic stuff where anyone actually using the app for a few days would have caught glaring UI and usability problems. I haven't worked there, but what I can see with my own two eyes makes me assume they've automated the hell out of usability testing. Maybe software is only being tested by other software. Maybe developers are the only people testing their own features. Many of the bugs I'm seeing today are iphone4 bad. How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand? And on top of that, it certainly seems like they're hyper-focused on new features and are utterly ignoring foundational systems that everything runs on. Preview, Mail, and Finder are going down the tubes fast. I intentionally don't update my personal macbook because I see so many bugs in each new release on my work macbook.

It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.

> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.

The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.

Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.

It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.

There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.

Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.

Yes. Apple is a behemoth, heavy with layers and layers of middle management. It's pretty difficult to steer it any new direction and have everyone on board.

Apple's org chart now resembles Microsoft's org chart from this classic meme, but with far more groups: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6

I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.

> because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.

It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.

When you're a gatekeeper / the phone company like Apple, the expectation is that as a general purpose device, you will adhere to at least some level of quality... simply because users have no alternative.

By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.

Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.

It's only a compromise on profit levels.

I don’t know. Embedded software makes things way harder on itself than is necessary by tying itself to the comparative Stone Age in terms of language, tooling, and methodology. At least in the automotive & robotics world I interact with. I can’t believe how much time is unnecessarily pissed down a hole because everyone is just stuck doing the thing they know how to cobble together today instead of reforming what they do and how they do it.

No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.

I've been told that software is treated as a BOM cost in embedded with a fixed cost and it being 'done' whereas the Silicon Valley mindset should be that software dictates everything else and thus is in continuous state of evolution.

Zero hardware changes forced springboard teams hand here.

Re: feature creep.

I wonder if Apple simply has too many employees?

It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.

macOS, when it was called OS X, used to get released whenever it was released. It usually had some bugs and those would be worked on over the lifetime of the release. After Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook decided to switch it up to a yearly release schedule. That was self-imposed. Since then, Apple’s software quality has been steadily declining. They have no one to blame but themselves, yearly releases is not enough time to introduce new features and polish and fix bugs in old ones. And they keep adding more operating systems, making it hard on themselves when they have proved they can’t do it.

> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.

No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.

> I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.

Why do you think that? With unlimited talent and money on either side it seems possible to do both really well without it hurting profit margin.

The thing is, despite the damage since 18 not being fully undone, 27 gets comparative praise because of 26's disaster lowering the bar.

I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.

yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe. but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.

yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.

If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.

I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).

I upgraded my MacBook pro and iPad just for the touchscreen experience when I'm extending my screen to the iPad. Big mistake. I was on Sequoia until then which was incredibly stable. I don't have the time and energy to fresh install sequoia, so I guess I'll just keep using it until Apple fixes 27 or until my patience runs out and I do a clean install of Sequoia

also stupidly updated and mission control and window management is so crazy buggy, adopting your embargo from now on if I can keep my sanity

Ha! Guess there are multiple Apple Music regressions. Just upgraded to 27.0.1 on iPhone 13 Mini My regression is when playing local music in a playlist, if you try to manually seek when a song has less than 10 seconds left it jumps to the next song on the screen while the prior song continues uninterrupted and stays in a confused stuck state until the next song begins. Sometimes the counter for the next song begins while the last song is still finishing. Once the new song stats the counter "adjusts" itself and then we continue onwards.

I remember from an old CCC conference they talked about looking for vulns in specific portions of the OS that have had UX changes like this as it may indicate a lower skilled developer having to show that they are getting tickets done. Code that was solid ends up introducing bugs. Areas of the OS untouched have less likelihood of easy to find bugs. I don't know how valid that theory really is but your example makes me think I have to start wasting time monitoring the beta program to see what changed and if my most used app features are touched I wait until at least the .1 release or now probably .2 release. Problem is with the advent of AI assisted hacks, it feels like I should update the nanosecond something new comes out.

I never found a use for anything but single app mode on my iPad Pro.

I have no idea what stage manager is and I don’t wanna look it up. And I have an iPad. But it’s also running the older ios

stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.

Yeah it feels like a subpar android device.

I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.

This is a myopic take.

I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.

Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.

Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.

Well, the author needs it to be a tablet form factor with a stylus as described here https://teddysvoronos.com/2015-11-19-in-praise-of-goodnotes/

Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.

I’m sure Apple could as easily break presentation mode on macOS.

A lot of teachers at my uni use them for drawing on the slides during lecture

Why? It would be helpful to understand why you support such a silly statement.

Why not play it even safer with an overhead projector?

I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.

It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.

I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.

In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?

Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.

Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.

I mean, the real lesson is to not trust Apple. I can do the very basic things the OP article is describing on my phone, let alone a tablet.

This is a completely absurd take. The entire point of TFA is that it used to work fantastically well until iOS 27 broke it.

Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.

Those millions of settings give some users a pleasurable but false sense of control.

Are you sure how you use an iPad with a third party app is a common work flow? Are you sure it wasn’t broken by that third party app not updating for a new iOS?

See apps like Reflector.

Or you can use Zoom or likes of it and connect to it from ipad and share screen.

That actually has lower latency than quicktime thing you mentioned

In Android world scrcpy utility exists to just run and mirror device screen in a window.

Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.

Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.

Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.

No, we are all on the same boat. 27.2 is a bit better, but introduced some new bugs too. In the end they fix one bug and introduce two new ones.

I honestly haven't seen any behavior like this. I use two external monitors and use different spaces heavily.

You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026

I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying. Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:

> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.

That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.

Hard agree.

Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.

I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.

And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.

Very much agree with you, but I’m pretty surprised that you even bought the M4 given that all these limitations blocking the iPad from its potential have been there since the first iPad Pro first made the claim that it could be on par with a general purpose machine.

And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).

Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D

I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.

Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.

"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO

This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.

if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.

Yeah, I’ve had a similar experience. Even the features of iPadOS that work are buggy. iPadOS is a nerfed buggy mess compared to macOS

You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.

I don’t understand why users even went to iOS-based devices as a daily driver for more serious computing. They need to be seen as appliances.

You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.

This isn't just an Apple problem though. Even Samsung, Google / Qualcomm or Microsoft and Intel / AMD face the same business issue - hardware development has outpaced software development. Think about it - multiple core CPUs are essentially multiple CPUs packaged into one and Intel now offers 10+ core CPU for regular consumers. SSDs also give "outdated" hardware another lease of life. And as software companies find it more and more difficult to utilise completely the hardware powering them, they also face a dilemma of how to support hardware development by creating softwares that run "slower". This is best exemplified by the famous WinTel partnership between Microsoft and Intel, wherein every subsequent version of Windows required better hardware. Google Android too follows the same model. Today, including AI can slow down your computing. But it faces two major problem - 1) it clashes with the business model of AI companies that offer AI as a subscription service and 2) people can't afford the hardware to run AI (this is is why Windows 11 was forced to downgrade its minimum hardware requirement from 16gb to 8gb). (Also, the bottleneck of AI isn't computing power but memory throughput and bandwidth).

We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).

Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.

Define soon? I'd put a lot of money on the current crop of OS's still being dominant in 10 years. Most folks don't care enough to switch let alone "vibe" their own replacement software.

As much as I wish 2027 to be the year of Linux Desktop, I'm afraid the companies will just "up the ante" by making all the APIs and boundaries much more convoluted, with AI watchdogs and remote servers along the way.

Or it doesn’t need fixing and is perfectly adequate for the majority of buyers.

Yes, this guy’s whole life and workflow for teaching to a large class was based around his iPad having a basic feature. If you don’t lecture to students using an iPad, probably you do have different problems.

Yes, probably because that's not a feature that you really on daily. What of it?