Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, speaks on Monday, June 6… [+] During the keynote presentation of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in 2022, at the campus of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
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Apple’s big software special event, WWDC, is a busy time of year for Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. In the two-hour keynote, he was rarely far from center stage, introducing new features for the Apple Watch, iPhone, Mac and iPad. Still, he found time to sit down with me and talk about why he thinks this is an important year for the iPad.
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I started by asking him how software for the iPad and Mac is getting closer all the time. So, what makes the two platforms different?
“I love to use them both and I reach for them at different moments. I find that Macs, when it comes to connecting massive external storage, to multiple displays and the like, show that there’s a lot of power and a lot of hobbyist capability. It is something that is a development platform at its core. But the iPad has tremendous versatility in how you can use it and how it connects to the world, you can take it with you, you can hold it in your hands and lean back when you want to read. If so, you can flip it to portrait orientation. You can connect it to an external keyboard and trackpad when you want to do things that way. You can take out a pencil and doodle on it.
“It has great cameras so you can capture the world and AR capture and experience with it. And now you can connect it to an external display. So, I feel like taking the iPad anywhere, something This is the ultimate in versatility to do too which I think is fantastic.”
So, does adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad turn it into a touchscreen MacBook, perhaps?
“I think the experience remains different. We have used the car and truck analogies for many years now and I think they are instructive. You can do a lot of things with a car and a truck and they are both legitimate forms of transportation. forms, but they remain distinct at their center and I think the iPad at its center is this touch-first, hold-it-in-your-hands system designed around simplicity and at its core. The focus is on.”
Which brings us to the latest productivity option, Stage Manager, which is a neat way to manage multiple windows on the iPad screen. A version will also be available in the next software for Mac.
With Stage Manager you can only have up to four apps live at once (plus another four if you have an external monitor attached). Why this limit?
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“On the iPad we have this Invilate bar for fluidity and responsiveness to the experience. If it’s a tactile experience, you expect the moment you put your finger and start moving that you get a response.” : Anything less than that breaks your sense of connection with the device. And so, we have a tremendously high bar that we need to meet around responsiveness and that means we must make sure we can But balancing the amount of computation power and graphics capability, how many apps can predictably do live responsive things and still be fully responsive to the user.
Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc., speaks as Tim… [+] Cook, Apple Inc. CEO, listens during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference at Apple Park campus on Monday, June 6, 2022 in Cupertino, California, US. Apple unveiled a range of new software features and services that include an updated iPhone lock screen and a pay-later option that pushes the tech giant deeper into finance. Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
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“Also, we wanted to keep that in mind, from a user experience standpoint. I guess the Gestalt of the iPad, to make sure you weren’t hunting for and managing hidden windows. Anyone who has a lot of windows open on a Mac knows that what eventually happens is that you have a lot of windows that are covered or almost covered and you are constantly moving things around and selectively hiding stuff. are. And we wanted the fully automated experience on the iPad to be able to have all the windows you have on the platform accessible to you at the same time. And so, with four windows we can nudge them automatically in ways that make sure they all stay accessible to you. It really turned out to be a balanced solution.”
Which brings us to the fact that this blazing new feature is only available on the latest iPad Pro and iPad Air models. To be fair, Apple was pretty upfront about this in the keynote, opening this section with a note that the next features were only for iPads with M1 processors. I asked Federighi why only M1 could play with the stage manager. The first factor was “to maintain the responsiveness of the experience”—not breaking the metaphor mentioned above—and the need for the faster virtual memory swap that Apple uses to keep things moving on the M1 iPads. Did Apple try to get Stage Manager to work with other iPads?
“We started some of our prototypes incorporating those systems and it quickly became apparent that we could not deliver the experience we were designing with them. Of course, we wanted to bring something new to every device. Would love to, but we don’t want to hold back the definition of a new experience and build in that experience the best foundation for the future. And we could really only do that by building on M1.”
This year appears to be a bigger year for the iPad than last year – although it also brought some important updates. “Sometimes there are features that take years to build. Every year is a big year for what we’ve been working hard on. Sometimes things come up and show their head in a big way at a certain point in time: Characteristics, like Stage Manager, lay a lot of the groundwork in the long run. And so it’s been delightful that we’ve been able to unleash all of the engineering potential over a long period of time. But yes, I think it’s a big year for the iPad.”
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