Last Monday, at the WWDC opening keynote, Apple announced that starting from the next major software upgrade the iPad will have its own software. To some extent, that’s a surprise. A new universal version of iOS that would fix the iPad’s software shortcomings was most users’ guess, while a proper fork into another device-specific version was all but a given. 
So, going forward, the iPhone will still rely on iOS while the iPad will run its own firmware—which makes a lot of sense in the great scheme of all things Apple. The company had already renamed each product’s firmware to reflect the respective device name (watchOS, tvOS, macOS).  The goal was to keep its widening line-up organized and understandable.

iPadOS comes with many interesting new features that finally make Apple’s tablet step out of the iPhone’s shadow. The most important one is the new the Files app, which is now a proper surrogate - albeit still restricted in scope - of the Mac’s Finder. The iPad will be able, for example, to use the Mac’s column view when browsing files, even with some limited support of file previews. USB sticks and SD Cards are now showing up in Files too, making it finally easier to transfer files into and out of the iPad. 

The new Files app is the main indicator of how much of the iPad’s product experience is software-dependent: while the hardware was ready at least since October with the release of the impressive new iPad Pros, iOS 12 was still temporary solution that was limiting the device’s true potential. That’s a great testament of how Apple’s design process encompasses different phases of hardware and software upgrades. In the end, though, it’s ultimately always the software’s duty to close the full design circle. 

What’s really impressive about the launch of iPadOS is how much the software will be able to change the nature of the device, which will finally start to live up to its original call as a new paradigm for portable computing. A “true nature” that brings the iPad inevitably closer to the Mac and away from the hyper-simplification of the iPhone, made necessary by the smartphone’s smaller screen. 

That’s especially visible in two new interesting iPad features: one is Sidecar, the other is Project Catalyst. Sidecar is a Mac app (available in macOS Catalina, which will ship in October along with iPad OS) that transforms the iPad Pro into an external interactive monitor for Apple’s computers. That might sound like a diminishing task for the mighty iPad Pro, but the tablet won’t be just a passive monitor, as it retains the Pencil input to control apps on the screen. The iPad, thanks to a “simple” software update, is officially becoming a direct competitor of professional products such as Wacom’s Cintiq line of graphic tablet. With Project Catalyst, Apple is making it easier to port apps from the iPad to the Mac, thus giving software developer a powerful and easy-to-use tool to unify their offering within a broader computing ecosystem.

In conclusion, iPadOS made clear once again how powerful software can be. Up to the point where, semantically, the “soft” part of the word even becomes confusing when you realize how much code can change the physical “hard” nature of hardware. While industrial design still plays a fundamental role in everything Apple does, it’s the design of human interfaces that makes the company’s devices really shine. This tight integration has always been Apple’s signature, but iPadOS brings it to a whole new level, by proving the importanza of software as one of the strongest product design tool in Apple Design Team’s toolbox. Unsurprisingly, there’s a visionary quote from Steve Jobs that sums that up perfectly: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”