Craig Federighi on iPadOS 26 and why there is no macOS for iPad #WWDC2025

It's one of the good ones. It certainly is.

Yeah. And I think we did it right for iPad because you're always aware when it's happening. You can cancel it, you can monitor progress, and the system can manage it so it won't get in the way of iPad's interactive performance, which is so important to the iPad experience, of course.

Well, I mean, this has been unprecedented for us. You know, over the years we've had a lot of designing for one platform, figuring out what would work for the other, and moving kind of year to year over long term, kind of converging together. This was the first time we did take on the audacious goal of can we do it all at once. But we were really inspired by visionOS and some work we'd done in materials and realized that with Liquid Glass we had something that we could scale, but in the right way. You know, how it manifests itself on Watch is quite different than how it manifests itself on, say, the Mac, but it really did scale in this beautiful way and show up, you know, how it feels on CarPlay. I think when we first took the design that where we were starting really a lot on phone and brought it to CarPlay, and we were like, wow, this feels also, you know, almost in its own unique way felt great even though it's built on these same materials. I think Liquid Glass is just so versatile that it's proven to be a great solution across a wide range.

Well, I think, I mean, iPad is an absolutely beloved device. It has a huge number of users who love it as the ultimate touch experience and one that scales from something that can be so simple. You know, for many people it's their first device, whether they're a child or even an older person where computing kind of passed them by and then they find they're empowered by iPad. And I think part of it is that it's a device that you can hold in your hand. You can interact with in this incredibly fluid way. The entire model of the system is really simple. You know, when you wind the clock back to when we did iPad, you know, the Mac had been the computer for the rest of us, so amazingly easy with graphical computing. But with the iPad, we took away whole layers of complexity about how you would manage files versus managing applications and so forth. We want to retain all the simplicity of the iPad but still allow iPad users who want to go deeper and go further to push it at their own pace to doing more. I think with Mac OS, you know, you'd lose what makes iPad iPad, which is the ultimate touch device. But there are lots of things the two platforms can learn from one another and that's where we've, you know, adapted our best ideas to each.

So, absolutely. Yeah. And of course we do, you know, there's some users who will want to just keep using iPad in an exclusively full screen way. And the iPad's a great device to use with complete immersion, but if you do want to get into many windows and now really almost an unlimited number of windows working together, we give you all that as well.

Well, there are, as I say, that for many users iPad is the simplest device possible for them and even the presence of that resize control in the corner, you know, they might accidentally trigger it and they might wonder like what happens? How do I get back? How do I change this? And you know, when we first introduced Split View to iPad at the time, we thought, oh well, this is great. If you want to use Split View, you know, you might drag a tab from Safari out to the side and you could have that in Split View. What we found there was some of our users who did that accidentally and then were saying, 'Oh my gosh, what happened to my device?' You know, someone's grandfather's calling them and saying, 'My iPad, something's happened to it. What do I do?' And you're doing tech support. And so we realized for that class of user, you know, they're not ready for it or that's not what they want from the iPad. Give them a simple experience they can rely on where an errant gesture isn't going to cause something to happen that they don't understand. And yet if you're like one of us who wants to push our iPad further and further, you know, pull off all of the training wheels and let us go.

It's, you know, very much analogous to where it fits in on the Mac. So, I'm a Stage Manager user both on iPad and on the Mac. The Mac has long had multi-window, you know, very user-managed window system with an unlimited number of windows. But I found that I like to focus from sometimes having almost a project I'm working on where I'm gonna have, you know, an Xcode window and some supporting documentation or some emails that I'm consulting for a document I'm working on. And so I like setting up groups of windows and then moving between them without building up a ton of clutter. Well, now on iPad, just like on Mac, you have the choice. You can do windowing and have, you know, 10 windows all piled on top of each other and manage them exactly how you want. Or you can add Stage Manager into the mix, still have all the flexibility to have as many windows per stage as you want, still have the flexibility to put the windows wherever you want, but now have the additional power to set up different window sets and have a focused mode to move between them as you wish. And that's how I prefer to run, but many, many people prefer internally to run in the new mode just with keep adding windows.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Well, so yes and no. So as you know on the Mac with its origins in Mac OS 10 and its underlying sort of unlimited background execution model, any app you launch could be, even when it's offscreen and you're not using it, without you even realizing it might be consuming resources on the system doing work sometimes in a way that you benefit from and sometimes in a way that's just, you know, maybe draining your battery or making the system less responsive. We wanted to make sure with multitasking and background on iPad that the user was always aware of what was going on in the background and knew the status of what was happening, how long it was going to take and so forth. And so with background processing on iPad, it's always visible. So if an app says, I want to do something in the background, it has to tell the system, here's a background task I want to run. Here's what it's called. Here's how long it's going to take. Here's my progress on it. They have to make it so that the user can cancel it. And so you'll always see it come up. You'll know it's happening. It'll move into a little live activity up in your status bar. You can always check in on it if you want. And you can always cancel it. And so in that sense, they can run as many of those as they want. You can have many apps that are running many of those. So no limits in that respect, but you're always going to be aware of and in control instead of it just sort of happening endlessly potentially draining your battery when you didn't realize it.

Nice to meet you. Thanks so much.