It seems like so much core functionality is hidden behind gestures and 3D-touch. What a change for the company that shunned even the right click for many years because it hid functionality.
Can't completely agree there. Contextual menus by right-click (or ctrl-click) have been core since OS X came out in 2000. (I would distinguish between "core" meaning extremely useful and effective, as opposed to "essential" meaning the only possible way to accomplish a task. Right click is still not "essential," just very useful.)
And back in the pre OS X days, tons of functionality was "hidden" with the option key. Things like saving the printer profile default were done by holding down option when clicking on the OK button. Again, not "essential" functionality, but very useful and known by those who had been using the system for years.
I think this type of hidden, but not essential to use, functionality goes waaaaay back in the DNA of Mac.
Shift-Option-Volume up/down (or Brightness up/down): Adjust the volume or brightness in finer-grained increments
The option-resize window trick is crucial when you come across a monitor/video card bug that doesn't let you touch the edge of the window that you need to drag in order to bring the window on-screen. Just option-drag the opposite edge as a workaround.
Contextual menus were in Classic Mac OS since at least OS 8.0. If memory serves, there were also extensions (who remembers those?!) which provided them prior to 8.
A right-click under NeXTSTEP brought up the full menu, which could also have sub-menus 'torn off' and pinned to the screen. The NeXTSTEP menu system was remarkably advanced and efficient.
Even the smartest and most technically capable people I know are confused by 3D Touch, almost all of whom eventually turned it off. What is it for? Why is it better than an alternative or a long press? How does it make anything better or more intuitive? How is it predictable in any way?
iOS has been consistently confusing and less intuitive ever since iOS 7, and iOS 10 and iOS 11 are only more so particularly the lock screens which are outright bizarre. They feel very much like they were built for designers, not for end users.
Come to think of it, a lot of what Apple does today feels like it was built for their own designers and not for users. Removing critical ports, 3D Touch, endless dongles, confusing UI and UX, the Touch Bar, awful low travel keyboards, etc etc
Apple used to pride itself in everything being obvious and everything just working as you would expect it to. Perhaps the biggest change in Apple post-Jobs is how that is missing.
I'd much rather have arrow keys to move the cursor around. They're always in the same spot and you only need one finger to use them.
Unfortunately, if you replace the keyboard on iOS you lose the quick dictation key because Apple doesn't let the third party keyboard initiate dictation.
Speaking of dictation, Windows is finally going to bring a dictation key to their virtual keyboard this fall so I'll probably switch from iPad to Windows for my tablet needs. I really hate all of the web browsers on iOS and Android.
Apple put left and right arrow keys in the landscape mode of their default keyboard for iPhone+ models ― which you probably haven't heard off because it truly is as awful as that sounds. Yet another bullet point that Apple's UX design quality has taken a dive the past few years
That's correlation not causation; the iPads don't have 3D touch but still have cursor control in the default keyboard.
Indeed Apple tying 3D touch to cursor control on the iPhones makes me resent it more because they then removed the feature from the iPhones without 3D Touch.
Might not be entirely obvious and intuitive, but it's not required as well. I mean, iOS did without it for 10 years.
People complain about iOS not being for 'power users', but when they add features in like a secondary click or more fine-grained control, people complain about it not being obvious. How obvious is right clicking on a computer to bring up special features?
> How obvious is right clicking on a computer to bring up special features?
Well considering that most mice have 2 or 3 obvious physical buttons I would say the right-click on a mouse is pretty obvious. It has also be deeply ingrained in every Windows user since Windows 3.11 (maybe earlier?)
I would try spending time with an "average user". They do not use right click, nor keyboard shortcuts (which have also been around for ages). The average user is a basic user.
I would say that wanting to select text efficiently and effectively is not limited to enthusiasts. I get what you're saying, I just don't think it applies to a lot of the enigmatic UI/UX of post-Jobs (post-Forstall?) iOS.
The new lock screen makes a lot of sense on the newer iPhones. They have raise to wake, and the newer touch ID sensors are so fast that you can't press the home button without unlocking it immediately.
If you want to see your notifications, just pick up the phone and swipe down from the top (since the screen will turn on automatically).
> The new lock screen makes a lot of sense on the newer iPhones.
Sure, but have you used it on an older phone?
Just recently I was trying to explain how to unlock an iPhone 6 hand-me-down to a relative by pressing on the Home button now that slide to unlock is gone. They initiated Siri 90% of the time instead of unlocking the phone. Is that good UX?
I know the “user is never wrong”, but sometimes it is up to the user to learn how to use an interface. I’m not saying I don’t have relatives with the same issue, but I would hope that we don’t design interfaces to cater to those who don’t care to learn the difference between “hold” and “press”. These verbs aren’t even technology-specific.
The new lock screen/notification center combo is an abomination. I have an iPhone 6S Plus and am considering downgrading to iOS10 or jailbreaking solely because of the notification center fubar.
For the longest time, and made better in iOS10 - our primary mode of unfolding UI was directional. You swipe up and you get the control center. Swipe down to see your notifications.
Now we have this half brained implementation where direction is now secondary to virtual anchors. Swipe up to see your lock screen and last few notifications. Then swipe up to see older notifications. But don't swipe up from too far down or else you get your control center.
This is ironic given how terrible the iOS10 control center was with it's multi-direction paginating views. They appeared to learn their lesson and fixed the usability issue in their latest major revision. But here we are again, and it's terrible.
>at is it for? Why is it better than an alternative or a long press? How does it make anything better or more intuitive? How is it predictable in any way?
3D touch is totally different, and better than a long press. With a long press, you're stuck waiting on an animation to finish to continue with what you want to do. With 3D touch, you are able to instantly get to the menu you want.
I can admit that discover-ability is an issue, but this should be solvable by UX designers embracing the feature and highlighting when it would be useful to users.
> Even the smartest and most technically capable people I know are confused by 3D Touch
I think you may need to find yourself a new crowd to roll with. 3D Touch becomes pretty intuitive after just a few hours of playing with a 3D Touch enabled device. It especially shines on the Apple Watch but it's also fantastic on the iPhone. Sadly, it's missing from iPad.
I hate things that have a different function for long press vs. 3D touch. It wasn't until 3D touch came out that I noticed I had always been applying pressure during a long press, and that led to a lot of confusion. Still does.
I've always found installing apps on desktop completely unintuitive as well. You double-click a downloaded package, see a window containing the app icon (...why?), drag and drop the icon into your app folder usually with no feedback after then you have to manually launch the app e.g. using cmd+space. Why not just have a "do you want to install this app?" dialog when you click on the app file the app launches after?
This surely depends on how the author has packaged the app - I've installed 3 apps recently which came as `.pkg` files that popped up a "Installing this app" dialog (and then offered to put the `.pkg` in the trash when they was done.)
Other apps come as a DMG which launches an installer; some are just DMGs with files to drag to Applications.
I'm confused why Apple hasn't pushed for a simple default installer that most downloaded apps use then. It adds to user confusion as well when installers behave differently.
It's just not intuitive though is the point. You've already double clicked the app icon, now a window appears with the same icon that you have to double click again to launch it? I moved from Windows to Mac after a long time hearing about how great Apple usability was and I could never understand the logic behind the app install workflow.
You didn't double click the app icon - you double clicked the container that contains the app you are about to open or move/install to your apps folder. I think the drag and drop approach to installing apps is as easy as it gets.
No because ZIP files serve a completely different purpose so require a different workflow.
> You didn't double click the app icon - you double clicked the container that contains the app you are about to open or move/install to your apps folder. I think the drag and drop approach to installing apps is as easy as it gets.
Having a dialog walk you through the install is clearly requires less steps and less prior knowledge than having to teach the user they just opened a container and not an app (how would they know this?) and that they have to drag and drop to install.
Have you tried installing an APK file on Android? You get asked if you want to install it and you're done.
And this awkwardness is why windows apps have installers instead of being distributed in zip files. Double click -> click install,
way easier than dragging anything anywhere
Frankly, I prefer the ability to install and, almost more importantly, uninstall apps via drag and drop. I understand, it depends on the software, but installers that have the potential to install all kinds of services and files in other places just feel less...clean. It often feels like an unnecessary deep intervention.
It used to be the case that Cmd-E ejected, but you rarely wanted just to eject (i.e. just remove the disk from the Mac), usually you wanted to Put Away, and that was Cmd-Y.
Nostalgia's a funny thing though. Remember the 'bomb' dialog box with the reset button that didn't always work? Cooperative multitasking allowing apps to lock the computer?
Very much. Having Tetris and MacWrite Pro open simultaneously would cause a bomb, every time. It genuinely did wonders for my productivity.
I remember System 7.1 most for its purity of interface. Everything from 7.5 onwards seemed to be bolting on more bells and whistles in a faintly uncoordinated fashion, and OS X has continued that. 7.0/7.1 were simple, efficient and fast. Much of the featuritis in the last 25 years has been good, of course, but I would still kill to have the old Spatial Finder back.
If you hide the toolbar in the OS X finder, you can get Spatial Finder back (!). When the toolbar is hidden, double-clicking folders springs them open to new windows, and folder windows remember their position after closing them.
If you turn on the Status Bar, when the toolbar is hidden, it hops up to the top of the window. Just like the old days. sniff
Yep, I hide the toolbar all the time. But OS X has a habit of bringing it back randomly, often when you open a folder you've not visited before, or when you insert a removable volume. I wish there were a defaults switch I could use to kill it forever.
Not as messy as you might think! Holding down 'alt' while navigating causes the previous window to close as you go along. It makes keeping the windows that you'd like to go back to very easy, instead of having to just hit 'back' or 'up' a lot to get back to where you wanted to go.
First, Apple shunned right click because it was difficult (in early computing era 80s and early 90s) for the common user to use -- in tests few used it, and even today, even in Windows land, most common folk can't master it.
Not because it "hid functionality". It was the inverse cause and effect actually: since Apple only had single-button mouse, they didn't want developers to make things only available in context menus, so they forced them to make them easily available for left button access. But the first consideration was how users interact with the mouse (and lack of right click skills in the average non computing savvy masses), not the hiding of functionality. They still offered control-click for right click and supported optional two button mice for advanced users since like forever.
Second, regarding hiding functionality Apple has since forever had all kinds of hidden options in menus, only available when you open the menu and press Option/Alt or click Option/Alt somewhere -- and other such cases of advanced (but hidden) features.
They never had an issue with having such hidden functionality, that you could use only once you knew it was there, meant for more advanced users.
I tried iOS 11 on the latest version of the iPad Pro 9.7" and iPhone 6S. I've actually downgraded back to iOS 10 because the beta was still too buggy for day-to-day use.
The existing 'multi-tasking' on the iPad Pro is fiddly, and this was no easier. Apps were locking themselves to the Dock and I couldn't work out how to remove them. Switching between apps was far from "Cmd + Tab" of the desktop. A lot of apps that I still use but haven't been updated in years broke because they're not 64 bit. And it was very slow. Even native apps like Settings and Notes were just hanging for seconds at a time.
The hardest bit is the sheer number of different ways of doing things. "You're in landscape mode, so if you slide down from the top and then slide left in the resulting screen you can see the last notification that popped up a second ago."
I did like the new keyboard, where I could just swipe down to get a capital letter or special character. And the control screen was good, as I could enable "Battery Saver Mode" and the "Personal Hotpoint" more quickly.
But I'll need to see a lot more polish to the Dock before re-upgrading.
Must of the previous IOS beta have had similar poor performance. I dont know if some debug mode i running in the background or whats going on, but final version, is always much more performant.
I upgraded to the iOS 10 beta almost immediately as it came out (only on the iPhone) and it felt very polished. There were a few performance issues, but I was able to live with them - this time around it was unusable.
> A lot of apps that I still use but haven't been updated in years broke because they're not 64 bit.
While your other points are valid for a beta OS, this one can't really be used as criticism towards Apple. You can't blame them for developers that abandone their apps.
Apple has more resources to build a 32-bit emulator, compared to the resources of a developer who released a small but useful app 8 years ago but now needs it to be 64 bit.
The current app-switching tech in iOS 10 is mostly unusable for multitasking because they animate it into some kind of bullshit coverflow control that looks pretty but is slow and has every app you've ever started on the ipad to page through. Is it any snappier/easier to use now? Can you do the whole 'I'll just switch over to the other app to copy something and switch back' in a second or two yet? Even the weird 'you can use this app on the side' multitasking tech they've had for a while has been slow as hell and doesn't solve the copy/paste problem.
It's hard to say, as the apps have to support it, and not many of them do yet. But the Dock felt like a really intrusive gimmick - it looks like macOS, but doesn't work like it at all.
I agree that the current 'slide in from the right and find the app you want' method to be hard work. But the new one is trying to shoehorn the desktop experience into a tablet, and it fails miserably from what I've seen so far.
3d touch on the far left of the iPhone, and it'll go into the app switcher. If you swipe fast to the right you'll switch straight to the next app. Again, no idea how you're meant to discover it.
Well obviously you go into settings, then general, then multitasking even though it's not really multitasking, and then you notice that under the gestures on/off slider thing there's a description of the 4/5 finger gestures. Btw the others are pinch to home screen and swipe up to app switcher. I only knew about the swipe left/right one .. I think I probably saw it on an advert maybe? I have no idea how you're supposed to discover it.
I'm slightly terrified that this update is going to confuse the hell out of my ageing parents, who find the simplicity, lack of meaningful support for multitasking, and absence of the Dock, to be key selling points of their iPad.
You posted exactly what I was thinking. I recently gave my parents my iPad Air 4th gen and orienting them to it was an eye-opening experience. They are retired but they both worked as programmers (think COBOL-era). I've owned an iPad since launch day and so many features that feel instinctive -- double-tap home button to bring up apps, slide-down-from-top to see notifications -- are decidedly not. And that's before you get to the confusion of what's the difference between logging into email via the browser, versus a specialized app.
And then there's me. I got myself an iPad Pro, one of the 9.7 inch models that Apple didn't see fit to put 3D-touch on. It took me a long time to realize that the reason I couldn't delete items from the core TV app was because the delete functionality, which used to work on a long touch, was deprecated for 3D-touch. The amount of no-shits given by Apple designers toward long-time users with year-old devices still amazes me. Making iOS more like a computer is appealing to me, but I feel bad for the non-professionals who are likely to be super confused.
I think I'm going to sell my existing 9.7" to get the new 10.5" to get a bit more space to work with on this new version of iOS.
I can't wait until I can really use iOS the way I use my mac. Which at this point really is based on either mobileOrg getting better or some app coming out where I can easily manage a rich personal knowledge base/wiki on the iPad.
I'm in the process of switching from vimwiki to the built in Notes.app.
The big change is switching from links for organization to folders.
In vimwiki, I did a lot of scripting to manage/edit plaintext notes. Notes.app on the desktop has pretty good applescript support, so scripting is still an option although it is more cumbersome than operating on a directory of text files.
However, it is very nice to have an iOS app designed to view/edit my notes. I'm also really enjoying using the apple pencil to take notes and having them integrated into my computer text notes. Notes has a lot of integrations throughout iOS and macOS so that has been nice too.
Honestly, if I could just make links easily between notes I'd be pretty set with Notes.app except for the fact that code is kind of hard to write in it. i.e. snippets, etc.
I tried using it because you're right, it's one of the better experiences on iOS/macOS since it's been designed to be well done from the ground up. I should probably try the new iOS 11 one before completely writing it off because I heard on Gruber's latest podcast that the app has gotten way better now with the big iPad productivity push.
Have you found/tried Trunk Notes before? It's literally a wiki, with light scripting capability. There's also Editorial, which includes Python for scripting, though I'm not sure how well it will work as a wiki/knowledge base.
Yes, I have it, but most of what I do isn't so much writing, which I believe it's a great tool for. Most of the writing tools out there are mainly for writers and not more researchers like me (learning stuff about development and etc.).
I have actually now started to think maybe I use DEVONThink instead and I get all the features I wanted, but I guess the UI on the mac isn't the nicest. Then again going from Emacs to this is probably nicer.
Ugh so many options. I like OrgMode and Emacs as it is! Why can't I just use one thing and focus on all the things I need to write down and figure out.
read the article. not much there. very fluffy. as usual apple made old work flows different. as usual, people will be confused at first. as usual, not much to write home about.
"Before IOS 11 we arbitrarily limited the apps in your dock to 6. Today we will allow up to 8!" <cheers from the crowd>.
They've been dripping out features, that they could have delivered in 2010 but for reasons like Courage chose to hold back.
The article doesn't support the headline. Unless that also means 'Your ipad will still be the same old iPad, but you will find it more awkward to use"
Mouse integration on the iPad would be a disastrous blunder. It just wouldn't fit with any aspect of the interaction model and would represent a dire loss of the plot on Apple's part. So I think that would have the greater impact.
I don't know why it would be a blunder. On a jailbroken iPad it's a god send to be able to have a tablet with a mouse and keyboard with a battery that lasts forever. Touching the screen gets "gorilla arm" fast and also makes it dirty. Could also lead to tablet cases with built in track pads. But I can see the "this doesn't apply to me so it's dumb" narrative that seems to circle around Apple opinions so much.
I'd argue that the iPad Keyboard Cover already represents a loss of the plot. Gorilla arm fatigue is real. Either Apple go whole hog and provide a trackpad in that keyboard cover (not necessarily enabling a mouse cursor mind you [1]) or Apple should sufficiently innovate their software keyboard so we don't need a keyboard cover to begin with.
Win10 on ARM devices are already announced for Q4 this year, assuming Intel doesn't sue Microsoft and get a stay on the Win10 x86 translation layer.
Pretty easy to conceive of scenarios where these devices would have real impact, if the translation is fast enough. Imagine a $300 10" windows laptop with a 10 hour battery life and roughly ivy bridge i3 level performance.
In comparison, Apple hasn't even hinted they'd allow mouse input on iOS. If you need that level of precision, they want you to use their stylus.
For what it's worth: you can get a $100-200 10" Windows 10 laptop (well, 2-in-1 tablet) with an Atom. (Battery life as a laptop is closer to 3 than 10, at least for me.)
MS has already hit that price point/form factor, and is working on making it more efficient/performant.
Windows 10 ARM would certainly happen quicker, not sure that mouse on iOS will ever happen. As far as impact - x86 emulation on ARM, if good enough, can significantly undercut Intel, which may end x86 dominance on the desktop eventually.
Intel is already going to be facing tough competition from AMD's Zen architecture too. AMD actually also make powerful ARM chips for servers, so I wonder if they might seize the chance for another angle of attack if it makes sense for them.
Not necessarily. Intel could easily walk away from some of its margin. Even the latest Qualcomm SoCs aren't particularly fast compared to modern intel CPUs, so intel would still maintain its high-end.
That doesn't mean ARM is inherently slow. Apple's SoCs are much faster on single threaded tasks than Qualcomm and Samsung's, easily approaching modern intel CPUs.
I'm planning to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro because Android and iOS tablets have very limited Operating Systems. So I think that some of this changes go in the right direction, for tablets at least.
On long trips, to Japan or the USA, I usually travel with an iPad and a Macbook (1 or 2 phones, 2 digital cameras). It has worked well. Next time I'm trying to get around with just one device that allows me to move around the city with all the information I need, and that I can use to do some more advanced stuff when I get to the hotel (Classify pictures and videos, edit and process them, upload them to Google Pictures/Facebook/...). Let's see how that goes.
I understand that Apple doesn't want to scare current customers offering something that they don't need/want. But I need it now. :)
Speaking as someone using 11 on an iPad Pro 12.5", I would take this (and will be taking this) over my Surface Pro 3. The screen is amazing, the new multitasking features are great, the battery life even on the beta destroys the Surface, I could keep going on but really this is a very laptop replacing device, for me. As usual YMMV, but seriously this can cover probably 90% of what I use my laptop for in a mobile setting.
Addressing my itch of curiousness: Why carry 2 phones?
Until I hear that Xcode for iPad Pro is in the works I'll be holding onto my first gen Air. Otherwise there's no point spending a grand when my $200 touchscreen convertible Chromebook does all the tablety things I need and runs Linux beautifully.
What the parent is saying is that it is useless to buy a new iPad, because he already has a Chromebook. If iOS 11 brought XCode, then he would buy a new one, because it would have one more important feature (XCode).
This is what I expect 'iOS laptop edition' is. As ChromeOS is 'Android laptop edition' and Win10 already is Windows laptop edition.
With the addition of WSL to Win10 it makes it more developer friendly for me. Very much like MacOS always has been, drop into terminal and blam, there is all of UNIX.
And all of it makes Canonical's "one Ubuntu across three platforms" pitch seem pretty prophetic.
Very fun to watch excellent designers try these things out in the market.
Honestly, I see very little appeal in working with iOS as a professional software developer. Both from a form-factor to OS perspective, I'd feel very limited and would not be as productive as I can be with a Mac or PC.
Even so my concern is more about how one could possibly set up in iOS the local environment needed for developing (terminals, local packages, browser extensions, tools, finder, etc).
I don't know about Adobe stuff, but Xcode on the iPad is not so simple.
First, the iPad has to be powerful enough to do fast compilations etc. But even if we give it that, it is a looooong way from being used as a computer. How are you going to use Xcode when you don't have Finder, a terminal with a compiler?
I don't know if I would like to use an iPad for that anyway, even if all the currently existing problems were not there.
>First, the iPad has to be powerful enough to do fast compilations etc.
It already is, and has been for a while. The iPad Pro is faster than the MacBook Air and is approaching the MacBook Pro.
>How are you going to use Xcode when you don't have Finder
Files.app++
>a terminal with a compiler
When I mean Xcode, I mean the whole package with LLVM, Bash, Brew and a Terminal emulator. Apple is already allowing “programming environments”[1] in the App Store. I can see a Dev Mode that allows you to fork and do all the things we are used to.
the part of being able to measure items "AR" style is going to be amazing for businesses, both in direct in the home work and allowing customers to do their own measurements and such
Unless you're doing something either destructive or hard to reverse ARKit will be plenty accurate for things like knowing if a piece of furniture will fit through a door or something will hang on a wall.
It'll also help make the ("it's a 55.5inch TV" + "No, it's clearly just a 30 inch one") argument much easier to settle.
lol the discussion at the bottom of the article is about why macos isn't on ipad, reminds me of when people said it was impossible to put macos on x86. My $.02 is that macos has a lot of bloated garbage hanging around and iOS is likely more slim for the task. However I'm sure it's got it's own garbage after 10 years.
I don't think that is coming. The fact that it took so many years to add some "desktop os" features to iOS shows, that they try to keep those branches separate from the UI model. From the underlying OS technologies, they are very close together. E.g. APFS, while introduced on iOS is coming to macOS with High Sierra.
So for the next years, I would expect iOS and macOS to share, what makes sense, but keep the UI separate, where it matters (touch/pen vs mouse/keyboard).
I don't see why/how – they are _completely_ different UI interaction models. Superficially it looks similar, but the one thing that really set iOS apart, was to build UI concepts that targeted finger interaction first (UINavigationController and UITableView are stroke of genius).
Everything from how big the area for a tap is, to how to work with highlights, how dragging work, how things are aligned, what deliberate limitation etc, are different between macOS and iOS.
I hope so. I feel like this has been Apple's end game for quite while but they have been squeezing out the profit from the movement towards that in the interim. I mean, the new Macbook ribbon thing, what a piece of crap compared to the innovation of a Surface Pro.
But if you can give me a Macbook's power with a touchscreen and detachable keyboard - "Here, take my money!" :)
They are certainly experimenting with which features might make sense on the "other" OS. But until your post, I had almost forgotten that the launcher still exists on macOS. Likewise, Dashboard still exists, but does not get much attention any more. But even with the new iOS giving more "desktop" powers to the iPad, Apple still seems to aim for a UI model quite different to macOS. So this seems to be intended.
That launcher may be indication Apple was thinking that way, but look at their latest U-turns on pro hardware and reinforcing their commitment to laptop/desktop. I don't believe they're going that way anymore.
Also. Did you ever see anyone using that launcher as primary interaction?
Touch screens are just slower, less accurate, and more cumbersome than a cursor and a good hardware keyboard for the vast majority of professional applications and use cases.
The only really important question is whether it does anything better than other tablet operating systems. For the iPad, that's what really matters - becoming the best tablet OS it can be. Anything else would be a distraction.
Microsoft would disagree, and they have been astonishingly successful with the Surface Pro line.
The iOS11 desktop features are a vindication of Microsoft's original Windows 8 vision. Microsoft didn't /execute/ on that vision particularly well in either Win8 or Win10, but the convergence between handheld and desktop does offer some tangible advantages. It isn't all marketing BS.
Astonishingly successful? IPads out sell surface by 6 to 1 in revenue and 10 to 1 in units. And unlike surface, people actually use them primarily as tablets. Surface's success is almost entirely as a laptop with a secondary and relatively little used tablet mode. That's hardly been threatening to the iPad.
Microsofts vision of that convergence, of how to provide desktop class features in a tablet, is literally to put the WIMP desktop into a tablet. That's a completely different and fundamentally incompatible vision of how to make an advanced tablet UI to what we see in iOS 11, which is a complete and utter refutation of Microsoft's approach.
I have a Windows 10 tablet (well, a "2-in-1" since it came with a keyboard using a Surface-style connector), and it seems to behave reasonably as both a tablet and laptop.
It's certainly more integrated than my experience has been with other OSs on tablets: Android doesn't do well as a laptop, nor does iOS; Windows 10 is a desktop operating system, and works reasonably as a tablet. (I don't like Windows 10 for other reasons that have nothing do with mode switching.)
I'm curious why you think Windows 10 didn't execute well on the idea.
My take is this. Win8 was actually an excellent tablet OS, but compromised, deliberately compromised in many cases, its desktop experience to get there.
In sharp contrast Win10 took the opposite approach-- it is markedly less pleasant to use exclusively with touch, but a great desktop with mouse+keyboard. They didn't /try/ to compromise touch, but they didn't put much effort into it either.
I wouldn't say the desktop experience was 'compromised'. 'Depreciated' (i.e. made legacy) or 'encapsulated' would be the description I'd use.
Consider how the transition from command-line interfaces to GUI was made. Even today you can open up the Command Prompt in Windows (or Terminal in OSX) and run legacy MS Dos apps. Well Balmer saw Jobs heralding the iPad as the future of computing, the launch lines, and the early spectacular growth and he freaked out. So, following the old interface transition playbook, Win8 was designed as a touch-first UI and then the desktop UI was squirreled away as an app (and the command prompt inside that desktop app ― inception). Win8 was an excellent tablet/touch designed OS and also purists could configure Win8 to bypass the touch stuff and skip straight to the desktop at launch... however Balmer had made a bad bet.
In the broader picture, the future of computers hasn't turned out to be touch tablets. The iPad peaked and the traditional laptop formfactor is still going strong. So Balmer's bet on a touch first Windows wasn't worth it. Moreover the execution was lacking. While Win8 was an excellently designed touch/tablet OS, it was not fully implemented so there were many leaky abstractions back to the desktop interface. Most notably there were many settings that could not be configured in the touch/tablet interface ― the system would randomly throw the user into the desktop app ― and all the Microsoft Office apps (except One Note) could only be used in the desktop interface. There was no way to completely disable the desktop app and hand over a Win8 tablet that worked exactly as an iPad.
Win10 went back to the drawing board and presents touch and desktop UI as complementary options side-by-side instead of a touch-first UI. That unfortunately meant removing some of the system wide Win8 touch designs that didn't quite work well with mouse+keyboard.
Agree. "Deprecated" implies that they ignored it, didn't improve it, that it remained essentially unchanged. That was not the case in Win8, which offered a markedly inferior desktop UX when compared to Win7.
Just for fun I'll summarize
1. tweaked notification layout. confusing
2. tweaked messages app. ugly
3. tweaked siri voice
4. can play gifs (not kidding.. 2017 that's a feature)
5. on a different newer device, new codecs
6. indoor maps, in apple maps
7. no airplay2 yet.
8. tweaked App store layout (for the record, new website design is not a feature. A new _store_ website design is even less than that)
9. All your SMS's are automatically copied to Apple computers for surveillance or safe keeping, one or the other
10. The phone will now be able to delete apps for you without your permissions. Purge.
11. Your phone will prompt you to share your Wifi password when another iPhone tries to access your WiFi network.
I wish I made all of those up. But after reviewing, and evaluating, that's the list of cool features. Sigh.
