Mac OS on an iPad this idea has been popping up on our vergecast Hotline in videos comments everywhere people really want to run the Mac operating system on the iPad because iPads just can't do everything that your MacBook can and as the iPad keeps getting more Hardware upgrades the software really isn't keeping up leading up to this past WWDC people were hoping iPad OS was going to get some updates that might even make it a little more like Mac OS finally then instead we got a calculator app that's right we're bringing calculator to iPad I
guess it isn't too surprising considering Apple's past response when this type of question was brought up no all of these questions are pretty much asking the same thing why won't Apple put Mac OS on the iPad and to answer as best we could I tried to make my iPad run Mac OS to see what the experience was like I talked to somebody with a lot of experience developing apps for IP ad and I also talked to the Virg editorinchief Nei Patel to help answer why not and here's a hint money but maybe not in the
way you might think the iPad is marketed for Creative professionals and I'm a pro I do video work but I wouldn't think to do any of that work on an iPad over my desktop or laptop especially because every time I see somebody online saying stuff like I did all my editing or whatever work on an iPad for a month month it's sort of presented like they are attempting a dangerous stunt or some impossible task I hear a lot that it's good enough for small projects or social videos or it works in a pinch but to
me that just screams compromise and limitations I used this iPad for a few weeks and ran into a huge amount of headaches and a laundry list of things I couldn't do on the iPad versus my Mac I could go off but here's a list so I don't but I also recognize the crazy amount of Hardware they shoved into this this is their highest end 13-in iPad Pro and just look at the specs on this guy I mean they skipped an M3 iPad and went straight to the M4 even their Crush commercial seems to hint at
all the power they're cramming into this iPad and all the tools it might be able to replace but it just feels like they didn't include the software to match the hardware being so beefy makes the software stand out like this strange bottleneck you've got all this power that iPad OS won't let you make the most of well now I want to see what all the buzz is about what would Mac OS be like on this iPad my plan was to run Mac OS on an iPad as a virtual machine this wouldn't be installing Mac OS
directly on the iPad we'd instead be setting some of the iPad's resources aside to act as its own machine and then boot Mac OS into that I was going to use the app UTM but Apple removed hypervisor support in an update to iOS 16.4 and on hyper visor what made virtualization possible and I'm on iPad OS 17 so since we can't run a virtual machine on the iPad I figured our next best bet would be to just screen mirror off a Macbook put it on the iPad and that way we can navigate Mac OS and
full versions of apps with the apple pencil and see what that's like and hey to be fair the experience might suck because Mac OS is not optimized for touch like the iPad is it's really easy to mirror your screens with sidecar and I'm opting for a a wired connection because I don't want to have to worry about latency make sure both devices are on the same Wi-Fi check that airpl is enabled for both go to screen mirroring and add another display which will be your iPad so I'm not trying to extend my display I'm going
to mirror it and just like that Mac OS is kind of on your iPad now let's pretend this MacBook doesn't exist for a little bit and I give you iPad Mac I know Mac OS isn't optimized for touch and when you see it on the iPad screen it really shows these Mac apps look like they'd be a challenge to navigate with clunky finger touches even if sidecar would let me which it won't I can use the pencil and some touch gestures like zooming and rotation though so it does know my fingers are there but even
using the pencil can be a bit less precise than I need it to be when resizing Windows some buttons and panels just have very tiny hit boxes to click you can only use the mouse or trackpad of whatever device you're mirroring from which makes sense you can't use the trackpad of your iPad's magic keyboard but you can use the key part of the keyboard so kind of a arbitrary limitation universal control wasn't meant to work this way but honestly this feels pretty good to me despite not being able to use all the iPads inputs the
way I would like to I really liked using the apple pencil Pro in Mac OS and it was nice drawing with it in Adobe animate and photoshop with the full UI and even though this iPad is insanely light and thin it's a little back heavy so I have to hold it steady when drawing with any sort of pressure or it'll kind of rock back and forth and that way I can't keep a handf free for keyboard shortcuts I actually decided that I would edit this portion of the video in full Premiere Pro on the iPad
Pro connected through sidecar so let's ask editor Owen how it's going what do you think me thanks me editing feels all right I mean it's just normal Premiere Pro but with an apple pencil but even this feels like a faster workflow than I've experienced on some iPad NL and sure the 13-in screen has a more cramped workspace but I appreciate being able to use lumry and my plugins and having more control over my workspace I'm trying to just use the pencil Pro and keyboard but I keep finding myself wanting to reach for the mouse for
more Precision with things like adjusting clip lengths and audio transitions but if I just used a separate mouse and keyboard then I'd be just editing on a tiny screen and kind of missing the point of using the iPad part of this I mean heck this isn't even using the M4 chip this is kind of just turning the iPad into a Wacom tablet so it feels okay the pencil is way more precise than I thought it would be my fingers would be less so but I'm not quite sold on video editing being something that benefits from
being a touch first experience it's nice to have the option though for things like masking rotoscoping or using the pen tool I liked having some touch and pencil support when using full versions of apps and of course managing big project files without pulling my hair out and I feel a little weird saying that I think I like it better than what the iPad's version of this experience is so this specific setup is not a solution but it does feel like there's a little something there anyway enough of this back to me mirroring a screen is
not at all the same as actually running Mac OS on an iPad and I just don't know how complicated that might be for that I figured I should talk to somebody who speaks Apple's language specifically Swift Apple's programming language I pretty much use my iPad for everything I can except for literally programming and that is how I've divided it this is Riley test it he's a developer of alt store.io which is a side loading App and the Delta emulator which just came to the App Store if you ever played any sort of Nintendo game on
your iPad or your iPhone it's probably because of him we were just in Europe for 2 months and so trying to launch alt store and I had to bring my iMac with me and I brought my iPad I need a way to program not on my iMac and so I had to literally buy a MacBook Air M2 2 weeks before the M3 one came out because I was just like there's no way I can get my work done and that to me was a really frustrating like my iPad is an M1 chip my iMac is
an M1 chip and I needed to buy a third computer I asked Riley about the challenges of porting the full versions of Mac applications to the iPad if we can't have Mac OS can we just bring full Mac versions of the apps to the iPads it's harder to go from Mac OS to iPad OS just because of like the technology stack cuz everything on Mac is written in a certain framework app kit that doesn't exist at all on the iPad so to bring it over to the iPad you're basically looking at a complete rewrite of
your entire UI which is like the hardest part to develop honestly or in my opinion the other side is it's easy to go from iPad to Mac now with catalyst Mac catalyst is an option in xcode for iOS projects that developers can enable to make Mac versions of their iPad or iPhone app and so I think that's what apple is trying to push going forward if you're making a new app develop it for iPad first but yeah I don't people aren't really doing that so we're stuck in a situation where yeah the Mac apps just
completely different worlds of the other platforms now what about the design of the iPad would need to change to even be able to run Mac OS I don't think much if it were to happen I really see something like it would be a Mac OS app that you could just boot into and then you would just be qu running Mac OS in its own little container environment and I think that's basically a policy decision at this point based on the technology is there there's a virtualization framework on the Mac that's even supported by the M1
chips that could in theory do this simply so it wouldn't be as complicated as like a whole big huge overhaul to make it exactly that virtualization framework Riley mentioned is still there Apple would just have to do something with it I thought that maybe the hardware was the problem but this iPad Pro specs are comparable if not better than the M2 MacBook Air which has an 8 core processor next to this iPad's 10 core CPU so if it's not an impossible Hardware problem holding this whole dream back what am I missing oh yeah money this
is Apple making a choice at a post WWDC Event John grber asked Greg jazak and Craig federi about the people who want Mac OS for their iPad because they can't do their professional work on them and this was their response they're very different products they're different design points and the Mac is the mac and I don't know I don't know why people have wanted for the the time that these have existed to want to Burge them together that's not our that's not our desire it's a still big fat no I do not want them to
become the the same device and we want to keep making iPad the best iPad it can be we we are not trying to create a a Windows 8 PC or whatever so their answer to why not is pretty much we don't want to this felt pretty vague keeping the iPad separate is most likely more profitable and my initial hunch here was if Apple made a MacBook with a touchscreen or an iPad that could fully replace a Mac they wouldn't sell as many devices if people didn't need to buy both but I wanted to ask somebody
who might know I sat down with our very own Nei Patel who knows a ton about Apple he's analyzed apple on vergecast for years and can shed some light on Apple's business decisions Apple's always been pretty fine with cannibalizing itself historically its Executives including Steve Jobs have said things like if anyone is going to cannibalize their business it had better be us so they're really good at cannibalizing their own businesses and moving their customers from one product line to another they initially viewed the iPad as the future of computing they said it really loudly this
is the future of computing and Max will fade away and there was a moment where it seemed like the Mac was fading away but the Mac was resilient because I think people wanted to do more things with computers than iPads let them do and so they just kept buying Macs famously to write an iPhone app you have to have a Mac you cannot write an iPad app on an iPad which is really interesting so you need a Mac for all this stuff and I think that's going to stay very powerful the idea that the iPad
would cannibalize that that is sort of up to Apple to allow but I don't think it is a negative I think could very easily be a positive because it might actually drive people to buy an iPad that currently are not thinking of buying an iPad I wasn't expecting that answer and he's got a point Apple has released products that made their older products Obsolete and it was seen as a positive the iPod Nano stole sales from the iPod mini iPods were replaced with iPhones well if it isn't that what's the real reason apple has a
lot of incentives to protect how applications work on the iPad and the iPhone the Mac is an open platform like anyone can write a Mac application they can distribute it to you any way they like they can distribute apps in the web browser and apple doesn't get any of that money uh so they sell you a Mac you have a Mac forever and maybe you never pay Apple another Cent after you buy your Mac the iPhone in particular curer is very different Apple owns that application model completely intent everything that happens on the iPhone is
in Apple's control so Nei is talking about how the App Store is the main way to get applications on your iPad Apple gets 15 to 30% of app purchases in app purchases of digital content and subscriptions on Mac you can get applications directly from developers without Apple getting a cut of that money that's the business that's growing for them they make an increasing amount of money from people who already have iPhones who are spending more money on their phones and a decreasing amount of money from people buying new phones and those numbers haven't crossed yet
but that is the mix the iPad sits right in the middle of those things cuz it looks like a computer it looks like a Macbook but the application model is still the iPhones model where everything is in Apple's control this makes a ton of sense Apple doesn't want to give up that sweet App Store money if iPad literally had Mac OS you wouldn't need to buy all those light versions of apps also selling Hardware is more of a one-time purchase the App Store and subscriptions are potentially forever money disrupting the money iPads make from that
would be the bigger blow in the long term Apple's answer to Mac OS for iPads has consistently been no so we asked why not it's not that iPad OS is bad it just simplified what you can do on a MacBook and maybe took that too far if it still wants to be considered for professional use I don't think iPad OS should get thrown out there are people who are really happy with it but when I used it for any sort of complex task it had me feeling like man I wish I was using a real
computer even though it is one it's certainly shaped like one and all the attachments that make it worth using so why can't we have Mac OS on the iPad after talking with Riley I didn't feel like it was Hardware holding it back after talking to Nei it felt like it was mainly the App Store it doesn't feel like apple is going to change its mind on this anytime soon instead there might be little updates to the iPad software and Hardware that push it a little closer to Mac OS one day your iPad might even feel
like you're using a real laptop and on that day you can ask yourself oh wait why didn't I just buy a laptop the whole reason we made this video was because we kept getting a lot of the same question so if you have any burning questions keeping you up at night that are about tech let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to answer
