The same guys who were interviewed by Joanna Stern were also interviewed by Brian Tong on his YouTube channel. He asked the same question about macOS and you can hear Borger’s complete answer here, which is basically what he told Stern. You can pretty much guarantee there will be no macOS coming in June because they see the iPad as an overlapping device with Macs that do a lot of things Macs cannot do. They emphasized the touch first aspect of the iPad over the indirect input paradigm of a mouse and the ability of the iPad to thrive without a keyboard or mouse. To me, that means if iPad does get more desktop-like features, they will continue to emphasize that they will be in touch-oriented incarnations. That tells me there will also not be any ability to run Mac programs on iPadOS. Their vision for the iPad remains touch first with the flexibility to be completely untethered from any external inputs. I know this will disappoint some, but will hearten others that Apple’s iPad vision remains unchanged.
A couple other things they talked about is confirming why the Apple Pencil Pro doesn’t work on older iPads. They said what we theorized. By moving the camera to the landscape position, they had to completely redesign the charging system necessitating the new Pencil Pro design.
To no one’s surprise, I get the impression WWDC will be wall-to-wall AI.
When asked why M4 in the IPP, they also confirmed that only the M4 has the ability to drive that tandem OLED display. They also mentioned ZBrush, a high end professional program, will be coming to iPad specifically because of the new features in the M4 along with a new version of Procreate which will require the M4 for some of their new features. So is M4 overkill? Sure, it’s overkill for some people just as an M1 is overkill in the MacBook Air for some people. But for others, these advanced processors are essential. If your apps don’t take advantage of these new features, that’s the fault of those app developers. Apple can only provide the APIs and can’t hand hold them.
Here’s the interview if you want to see it yourself: