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.