Opinion: Fixes to the operating system and more might give us the 2-in-1 device so many want but haven’t quite had yet, writes navalang
The other day, as I waited for the photographer to finish finessing the passport photo he just took, I watched him poke gingerly at his Microsoft Surface with a finger — sometimes missing the mark, and then sighing at how long it took to do something.That was the pitch for Microsoft’s Surface lineup, wasn’t it? You could have all the productivity of a laptop blended with the convenience and approachability of a tablet.
Despite never quite reaching that goal, to its credit Microsoft has really turned things around with its Surface lineup. But those same reviews almost always say the same thing about the Surface 2-in-1s: close, but not quite. With the iPad, Apple has the opposite problem: an operating system that works brilliantly for basic tablet functions but that still often feels hamstrung for more demanding or specialized work.
As with a laptop, Apple may add the ability to resize windows, so that instead of apps taking up the whole screen or being squished into awkward segments, they would work the way they do on MacOS or Windows. That is the Holy Grail of computing, and not just because a bigwig at Microsoft said it was. Rather, it’s that in melding a computer that is both powerful but also accessible, one makes computing available to more people, while also letting them do more.