iPad Pro 2018 wish list 10/26/18

According to rumors, Apple is likely to announce new iPads on Tuesday. As an owner of an iPad Pro from last year, I’ve been thinking about what upgrades I’d like to see in a new model, and I’ve come down to two big wishes. Now to be clear, I’m not making predictions, this is purely me dreaming.

Precision pointer support

I’ve enjoyed using keyboards with iPads for years now. Typing is less error prone and the ergonomics are far superior to using the on-screen keyboard. Mostly that’s because you aren’t forced to look down at the screen while typing. However, one big ergonomic wrinkle remains, you can’t place your iPad at the proper height or distance from your eyes while still comfortably reaching the screen for touch input.

Precision pointer support would fix that issue. Ideally we would get a trackpad on the Smart Keyboard, and support for external Bluetooth trackpads and mice so we could be as far from our iPad screens as we’d like.

There would be other benefits aside from ergonomics. Text selection would be much faster. It also opens up the possibility of using external monitors that wouldn’t necessarily have touch capabilities, and perhaps most importantly it would allow for …

Mac Safari

In some ways, the iPad is the best way to browse the web. Safari on the iPad is fast and fluid. Scrolling a page with your finger is satisfying in a way that using a mouse wheel or track pad is not. However, the experience is not without downsides. Many websites classify the iPad as a phone type device, and deliver mobile optimized sites when it’s not necessary and actually hampers the experience. Sometimes these mobile websites have cut down content, overly compressed images, and navigation hidden behind hamburger menus even though the iPad has the screen real estate and speed for the more expansive.

It would be great if we could get these websites to all change their ways and stop degrading their sites on the iPad, but I think it’s far more pragmatic to come from the other side. Apple should have a mode, a separate browser, or something that allows iOS Safari to act like it’s Safari cousin on the Mac.

Precision pointer support is a key prerequisite here. Lot’s of desktop websites and web apps assume you have the ability to hover over links and buttons, and that’s not possible without a pointer.

Bringing over Mac Safari could have other benefits as well, like the ability to use powerful web apps like Figma, Google Docs ¹, Pixlr, and Cloud 9. Apple could even bring over the inspector tools and make web development possible on an iPad.