With Apple’s WWDC25 approaching this week, my unrealistic(!) hope is that something akin to macOS’s Terminal could be among the several macOS-like improvements promised for iPadOS.

When I was a child, the bulky desktop monitor-keyboard setup was the norm. Some today would call this setup “vintage.” Yet, it was on this “vintage” computer that I was introduced to programs that can help create tables of data and clusters of sentences such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, two of the public’s go-to applications for productivity even in 2025. This was in the early 2000s. “The reign of the PC.”

In the late 2000s and into the 2010s, things began to change. I noticed schools across New York replacing PCs with white Macintosh desktops as they followed the growing market shift from PCs to Apple products. Apple quickly became part of the 21st century zeitgeist. And macOS offered a clean, intuitive interface, required much less updates and restarts, and posed minimal concerns when it came to viruses and malware.

Further, macOS is built on a UNIX foundation. Nothing makes me happier than efficiently running commands on a Mac Terminal when I need to install packages with homebrew or run a Python script.

This is where I’m, at times, conflicted. I grew up on Windows but found convenience in macOS. Which OS would better serve my creative and technical needs?

macOS clearly has numerous advantages. But, Windows PC laptops appear to be finding their footing in the market again and are catching up in innovation with their AMOLED touch screen displays, 2-in-1 form factors, and more in addition to their readily available and customizable software (e.g., Microsoft Office applications with their built-in macro system via VBA, Windows CMD coupled with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)). Broadly speaking, I would say it’s a close competition at minimum.

Moving forward, I’d be excited to see Apple expand upon the qualities that made its devices so popular to begin with: simplicity and ultraportability. One way to do so would be to harness the capabilities of the M chips and bring more macOS-like features such as the Terminal to iPadOS. This decision could turn the iPad into a powerful and lightweight tablet-computer hybrid reminiscent of the revolutionary 2008 Macbook Air–if done well, that is. The latest iPad Pro model already has a stunning OLED display. If Apple improves the software this time around, it might be able to match Windows PCs’ 2-in-1 form factor at the very least and even signal a return to form of sorts. Although, Apple would then need to contend with the following: how much of an overlap between macOS and iPadOS would be justifiable from a development standpoint and in light of consumers’ typical use cases?

Could Apple really make a “game-changing” move tomorrow? If so, could we see a merging of iPadOS and macOS some time in the future?

Screenshot from https://9to5mac.com/2025/04/13/ipados-19-be-more-like-macos-overhaul/

UPDATE on June 9, 2025: Wow, they actually brought iPadOS closer to macOS than ever before. Still no Terminal though… Maybe next year?