It’s not everyday that Apple releases a brand new product and a brand new platform. Vision Pro looks to be one of Apple’s most ambitious products to date, and makes a bold statement about Apple’s vision for the future of computing. I’m more of a software guy, so VisionOS has been more of my focus the past week or so since the reviews started coming out. It’s hard to not to look at VisionOS and see a lot of influence of the work Apple has been doing with iPadOS over the past few years. Based on the way Apple tends to work, it not hard to imagine how the existence of Vision Pro may help the iPad going forward.

Like having an iPad on your face

While VisionOS, of course, has many specific accommodations for Spatial Computing, in some ways it looks very much like a derivative of iPadOS. In fact, Apple has been apparently telling reviewers that VisionOS is based on iPadOS, and that, in and of itself, is interesting. When the iPhone was announced, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed iPhone runs OS X. And while the OS was renamed iPhone OS for the product’s launch, it’s interesting that we haven’t had another Apple OS that has been directly derived from MacOS. Newer operating systems have been derived from iOS, or in the case of Vision Pro, iPadOS.

This connection is evident in some specific interactions that seem to have been carried over to VisionOS.

(I’ll caveat this section by saying I don’t have a Vision Pro and haven’t gone for a demo, so what I’m about to talk about is based on the VisionOS 1.0 simulator running on my Mac.)

Looking at the windowing system, we can see that VisionOS uses the same style of grab handle for resizing window as iPad does in Stage Manager. You do get the added improvement of being able to grab the window from either the left or right size, which is nice. Interestingly, resizing of iPad apps appears much more limited than I expected. You can sort of stretch a window out to be larger, but you’re not able to shrink the apps down into their “tall, skinny iPhone app form” like on iPad. It would probably look weird, but the option would be nice to allow a user to fit more apps in their working space. I do appreciate that the actually window resizing is smoother than it has been on iPadOS in the past, where you can kind of the see the app switching between the different sizes classes it supports as you resize. I do find it amusing that, like on iPadOS, the Settings app is not at all resizable.

With a bluetooth keyboard attached, you’re also able to hold down the command key and view all of an app’s available keyboard shortcuts via the pseudo menu bar from iPadOS. Interestingly, this interaction works for both native VisionOS apps, and iPad apps.

In VisonOS 1.0, there is no mouse support, but if and when that does come, I would imagine it would look more like the cursor in iPadOS than the cursor on MacOS.

The App Situation

With the reported lack of developer interest in building native apps, Mac apps only available though essentially remoting into a nearby Mac,the highest end apps that will likely be available for this hardware (for awhile) are iPad apps.

This is another instance of iPad apps seemingly being a key part of Apple’s software strategy. In 2018, Apple launched an initiative called Mac Catalyst, which provided tooling for developers to take their existing iPad apps and more easily port them to the Mac (and not the other way around). The idea was that it would encourage developers to build higher quality and more feature rich iPad apps, and which in turn would fuel more native (ish) Mac apps. While there is no “iPad Catalyst” for Vision Pro, the pathway to getting your iPad app onto VisionOS can be as “simple” as not unchecking a checkbox. As VisionOS uses and extends the same frameworks that iPadOS and iOS use, it’s also relatively easier to convert a native iPad app into a native VisionOS app.

From a developer’s perspective, it may make more sense to continue to invest in their iPad apps vs making a bespoke VisionOS app. At least until we get a sense of Vision Pro sales numbers. For each platform an app runs on, the developer is potentially incurring additional support and maintenance costs which may be harder to justify on a nascent platform with such high entry price.

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman hypothesized that Vision Pro would run Apple’s Pro apps, Final Cut and Logic, via their iPad app versions. Supporting an additional platform gives Apple both an opportunity to potentially collect more subscription revenue, and further incentive them to continue to build out these apps. If Apple is going to have to lean heavily on iPad apps to provide content for Vision Pro, then it behooves them to continue making their iPad apps more capable, and providing the means for developers to do the same.

This also helps justify continuing to improve iPadOS. As we’ve seen with iPad, there’s a very vocal contingent of computer users that are obsessed with productivity and getting things done (you do know that people use computers for more than just work thought, right?). If Apple’s newest and most ambitions platform is to be taken seriously, it needs productivity features beyond “it can be a display for your MacBook”. Vision Pro needs to be a standalone device like Apple’s other computers. With the shared lineage of iPadOS and VisionOS, it makes more financial sense from an ROI perspective it makes sense that more pro-level features and apps would be developed and added to both, likely starting with iPad and coming to Vision Pro. Of course, it could happen the other way around, which would also work because of the….

The Virtuous Circle

After the iPad was released, Apple held a fall Mac even entitled “Back to the Mac”. He spoke about how Apple took Mac OS X and built iPhone OS/iOS for the iPhone. They then took that work, extended and improved it, and built iPad. From there, Apple took some of things they learned building those products, and brought those innovations back to the Mac. For the past decade plus, improvements in one platform are often adapted and brought to others to improve other products. The parallax effect of App icons on tvOS becomes the 3d app icon effect in Vision Pro. The picture-in-picture implementation from iPad eventually made its way to iPhone. Control Center from iPadOS and iOS eventually made its way to MacOS (hard to believe Mac didn’t have something like this for so long). I would anticipate this trend will continue, and we’ll see some of the improvements and innovations in VisionOS come to iPadOS (and other platforms). I’d love to see the drag handle flexibility from VisionOS come to iPad, may even the bottom window bar might make sense for Stage Manager as well? I’d also love to see App icons on iPadOS and iOS get the same depth effect that they have on Vision Pro.

Conclusion

I hope to get my hands on a Vision Pro one day, even if it’s just a demo at an Apple Store. It’s an interesting looking into Apple’s vision for the future of computing. But just as iPhone and iPad didn’t obsolete the Mac, Vision Pro won’t be sending any of Apple’s other computers to the dumpster. Each platform will continue to feed new ideas and features to the other and all of their products will continue to improve. And users will have to choice of which computers make sense for their and their specific needs.