WWDC, Xbox and dual screens

Instruction Set, June 13th

Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for Friday, June 13th.

Giant week for news, so let’s get right into it.

It kicked off with WWDC, of course, and while there wasn’t anything new on the hardware front, Apple did have some big updates for each of its operating systems. The show was refreshingly restrained after last year’s vapourware bonanza; virtually everything that was announced is available to use right now through developer betas.

I’ve installed the first beta of iPadOS 26 — for that is now its name — on my M1 iPad Pro. It’s extremely rough, so I won’t be doing the same on my iPhone or Mac until at least the first public beta next month. Performance is terrible and there are graphical glitches everywhere.

That said, I like the new Liquid Glass style. There are definitely readability issues, but they don’t seem as jarring in actual use when you have the context of what’s on your own screen. It frankly isn’t a huge design overhaul — I got used to it very quickly, and now my Mac and iPhone are starting to look a little old. (I do wonder how it will look on nanotexture glass.)

But what is a huge design overhaul is the new multitasking system for the iPad. I think they finally nailed it, folks. The way apps default to fullscreen unless you tell them not to, and then just stay that way until you change them again, is exactly how this should have worked all along.

It’s so much less of a mental load not to have to think about which apps are paired and where they’re going to go when you do something else. This UI gets out of your way until you need it. It’s great, and it’s easily my favourite thing to come out of WWDC.

Ars Technica has a good interview with Apple’s Craig Federighi on why it took so long to get to an interface like this. I’m not sure I totally buy it all — it feels like they just went in the wrong direction altogether with Stage Manager — but it’s useful insight.

Here are some other bits and bobs that were relevant to my interests: