IPadOS Got a Mouse.

If you follow the technical news at all out there, you will have seen that Apple has done something that no one has ever done before. It is mind-boggling how revolutionary this is. All the Apple news forums have it. They can't stop talking about it. Many have never seen anything like it. Words like 'Fabulous' and 'Amazing'. Phrases like 'It Just Works' have been resurrected for this glorious new day in tech.

iPadOS as of 13.4 has .... wait for it... mouse/trackpad support.

That's never been done before! Apple is a freaking genius!

I don't get it. How much money did Apple pay to get that kind of mindless coverage?

I have two iPad's. I am an Apple person. I write on my Mac and Macbook Pro all day long every day. I love MacOS. I have a Mac Mini and an iMac. Apple is the dominant OS at my house. We do not allow MS Windows in here.

But really? Apple finally fixed a long-standing issue with the iPad. Why isn't the coverage 'finally' and 'It's about time'? What is with all the brain dead hype?

MacOS / OS.X

MacOS (back when it was called OS.X) gave rise to the OS for the iPhone. To make it all work back then, Apple stripped out all sorts of things, including mouse support. it made no sense in that tiny original iPhone screen anyway, and Steve Job's made a 'point' about the finger being the natural pointer anyway.

If you had any doubt back then about the roots of the OS, you jailbroke your phone and ran all the tools and utilities to see all the same BSD / Mach stuff that was in OS.X. Where the iPhone came from is clear.

Then Came the iPad

A lot of people thought the iPad was just on oversized iPhone that couldn't make phone calls. Any apps that were written for iPhone only worked because Apple made the screen a multiple of the iPhone's which made it easy to just double everything X and Y and have a full-screen app on the iPad of the day.

It was more than that because big screen.

But the OS was so stripped down that it was not even remotely considered a Mac replacement. It was a Mac companion.

Then Came ...

After that, we got Mini's and Pro's and faster hardware, to the point the OS was in no way keeping up with the hardware. My 12.9 Pro has a beautiful screen. Netflix looks amazing on it... With my Logitech Keyboard, it's even handy for carrying around and typing things in on it. With the LTE fucntionality, I always have the Internet.

I stopped doing that in favor of my 2015 MacBook. It can use the iPad's Internet. It has a good screen. The keyboard is not worse than the iPad's Logitech. Sidebar: I bought the Apple keyboard. I took it back and got the Logitech. The Apple iPad one was awful. The Macbook butterfly one light years better. The MacBook had a trackpad and (wait for it) mouse support. It also runs ALL the software and has a real file system. You know: Where you can store things. Unlike the iPad, where you are forced more or less to put it in the Cloud.

I keep reading how the 'file' app finally fixed that issue on iPadOS. No. It didn't. Not unless you store all your files in a cloud space. To Apples credit it does not have to be iCloud. In fact, Scrivener only works with Dropbox. But 'files' can see that, and OneDrive and whatever today's name for Google Drive is. I swear they change that based on today's price of gas.

Try to look at SD cards using 3rd party adapters. Nope. Try to look at files stored by apps. Nope.

Mouse Support

Now the iPad has Mouse support. I tested it. It works... OK. It works like any other mouse support in the history of ever. Rollback to a first-gen Lisa or Macintosh. Oh. Look. Mouse support. Windows 3. Mouse support. GEM. Mouse support. Xerox Park. Hey: They invented the mouse support I hear. My Android tablets have had mouse support always. Android has never hidden its Linux roots but Apple pretends iPadOS never had BSD/Mach roots. Never had mouse support before they took it out. 

What is so bloody damn amazing that the iPad FINALLY got it? That Apple woke up? Said 'Hey! we have a faster bit of kit here, and a nice screen: We should add mouse support!' That is not revolutionary. That does not deserve all the accolades. That deserves 'About time: No maybe they will fix all the other things.'

But they won't, because Apple doesn't want to tear down the wall. They want people to be forced to use the App Store, and forced to use iCloud. Mouse support is OK, but it's kinda trojan horsey. Pay no attention to our walled garden: come on in, the OS is fine. They do not even try ot hide it. Every press conference they say they are trying to make more money on services. How do they do that? Well, by channeling you into a service. With a walled garden.

Mouse support on the iPad is fine. It's a tablet OS on tablet hardware doing tablet things. It's a better tablet than the Surface is because the Surface hardware limited to running much more power-hungry chipsets with a much less efficient OS. When I killed off our household's last MS Windows device, it was an ASUS Convertible laptop / tablet. Windows ran horribly on it. The i3 processor and 8GB of RAM were just not enough. With Linux on it, it is a speed demon. Windows is slow. Windows can't help it: if it could, they'd already have an ARM version of it, but they have tried that over and over, and THAT keeps failing too.

Even the Surface has mouse support though. 

My point here is only that I do not get the hype. iPadOS got mouse support. And it works. And thats good.

All the breathless hyperbole? Why?