Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26:

“We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federighi begins. Seeing the confused look on my face, he continues: “I don’t know if you have those in Italy. Someone said, “If a spoon’s great, a fork’s great, then let’s combine them into a single utensil, right?” It turns out it’s not a good spoon and it’s not a good fork. It’s a bad idea. And so we don’t want to build sporks”. [...]

By and large, one could argue that Apple has created one such convertible product with the iPad Pro, but Federighi strongly believes in the Mac and iPad each having their own reasons to exist. “The Mac lets the iPad be iPad”, Federighi notes, adding that Apple’s objective “has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job”. [...]

I don’t need to ask Federighi the perennial question of running macOS on the iPad, since he goes there on his own. “I don’t think the iPad should run macOS, but I think the iPad can be inspired by elements of the Mac”, Federighi tells me. “I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that’s happened a great deal”.

I think Apple has tied itself into knots in the past decade trying to make the iPad more useful to more advanced users without making it resemble the Mac at a superficial level. But it’s been obvious all along that it should resemble the Mac at a superficial level. Apple solved windowing in 1984. Use that.

Peter Steinberger (Mastodon): SwiftUI provides SettingsLink for opening settings[…] Simple, right? Except it doesn’t work reliably in MenuBarExtra. The documentation doesn’t mention this limitation.[…]The root issue is that NSApplication treats menu bar apps as background utilities, not foreground applications. This affects how windows are ordered and receive events.[…]Apple provides an openSettings environment action for programmatic […]

What’s new in SwiftUI: Learn what’s new in SwiftUI to build great apps for any Apple platform. We’ll explore how to give your app a brand new look and feel with Liquid Glass. Discover how to boost performance with framework enhancements and new instruments, and integrate advanced capabilities like web content and rich text editing. […]

Peter Steinberger: Remember when SwiftUI came out and we all marveled at how views automatically updated when @Published properties changed? Well, Apple has been quietly working on bringing that same magic to UIKit and AppKit. The best part? It shipped in iOS 18/macOS 15, but hardly anyone knows about it. You don’t even need Xcode […]

You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.

We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.