from Hacker News

The UX failures of desktopOS-on-tablet

by juliendorra on 10/8/24, 10:03 AM with 1 comments

Reacting to a recent post here that pushed people to wish for MacOS on iPad. A fascinating part of Arno Gourdol's memories about designing PenMac is that he and his team ended up clearly understanding that adapting a desktop OS to a tablet computer caused severe issues and subpar UX.

Yet, 10 years later, Microsoft tried the exact same thing with Tablet PC, and failed. They didn't knew about the internal PenMac UX designers struggles, probably, but they were also blind to the failure of 1992 Microsoft own attempt of bolting pen computing on top of Windows 3.1 : "Microsoft Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing 1.0"

https://www.arno.org/penmac

  • by ankurdhama on 10/9/24, 5:17 AM

    To me the the idea of "macOS on iPad" is more about making the iPadOS more open and capable like macOS (instead of directly running macOS on iPad). And probably also have the ability to run macOS apps on iPadOS so that you can use them with the traditional mouse/keyboard input. This will never happen especially after Apple has learned to make lots of money by locking down their platforms and using app store model.