There’s a lot set to arrive in iOS 19, but the one feature that’s really piqued my interest is the prospect of improved external display support. According to leaker Majin Bu, iOS 19 will let USB-C iPhones connect to external displays to extend the amount of screen space on offer.
Apparently this isn’t a full desktop mode like Samsung’s DeX. Instead Bu claims it’ll be a way to extend your phone’s screen space, while simultaneously adding a “Stage Manager like interface” to the whole setup.
Considering iOS 18 only offers basic screen mirroring, that’s quite the improvement. Especially with Stage Manager helping to keep all the windows organized.
I have some concerns about this, considering Apple’s increasingly confused productivity portfolio. But the more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t actually care. All phones (and tablets) should have some form of desktop mode and external screen support.
iOS 19 desktop mode: What we know
Majin Bu claims that the new external display support on iOS 19 isn’t a full desktop mode. It’s a way to extend the screen space of your iPhone, which they claim is “great for presentations, editing or enhanced viewing”.
From the sounds of things it means that everything will be firmly iOS. I suspect that means your external monitor will feel a lot like using an iPad — minus the touch screen element. After all, as much as Apple has tried to turn iPadOS into its own thing, it still looks and feels like a bigger version of iOS.
The reported inclusion of a Stage Manager-like interface only furthers that assumption. Since Stage Manager has made window management and multitasking on premium iPads that much easier and more organized.
Interestingly 9to5Mac speculates that Stage Manager may not be exclusive to external displays. It may be a necessary part of making the foldable iPhone work, since the larger internal display is going to have to function a lot like an iPad. Having more iPad features, like Stage Manager, available on iPhone is going to make the transition to foldables a little bit smoother.
Bu mentions there “may be some limitations”, either in resolution or the number of apps you can have open. Which makes sense, and is probably to be expected. After all, you wouldn’t want the iPhone to cannibalize too much on the iPad market would you?
Apple has a productivity device problem
Unfortunately that could be a very real problem. Ever since its inception, Apple seems at a loss on what to do with the iPad. At first it was that larger interactive screen, offering an experience you couldn’t get on the much smaller iPhone. iPhones have grown in size since then, but even the largest iPhone is over an inch smaller than the smallest iPad.
Apple’s also been trying to market the iPad as a productivity device over the past several years. Particularly the more expensive devices like iPad Pro, which are as close as you can get to having a touchscreen MacBook right now. The problem is that this doesn’t quite work the way Apple may have initially hoped.
For starters the cheaper iPads are very underpowered, and honestly aren’t that great for productivity beyond their large screens. I’ve tried working on an iPad 10th generation and it isn’t much fun, let me tell you. So they’re basically just big iPhones with stylus support for reading, writing, and watching videos.
More powerful iPads can certainly hold their own, especially in the display department, but they’re still not full replacements to the Macbook. Tom’s Guide Senior Computing Writer Tony Polanco tried using the 2024 iPad Pro as a laptop for a week last year, and he concluded that the best Macbooks aren’t at risk of being replaced by iPads anytime soon.
Not only are the most expensive iPads are actually more expensive than the cheaper Macbooks, iPadOS just doesn’t lend itself well to productivity at the moment. Maybe things will be different if an iPad ever lands running macOS, which has been rumored for years now. But for now, that’s not the case.
Right now the iPad is in that weird middle ground where it’s not quite an iPhone, but it’s also not quite good enough to usurp the Macbook. Throwing productivity features into an iPhone, and offering the chance to have more iPad-like experiences on non-folding phones, will end up complicating matters even more.
It certainly wouldn’t be a full iPad replacement, but it might prove useful enough in certain situations that it runs the risk of eating into iPad sales. And there’s only so many times Apple can wind up competing with itself before people start asking questions.
You know what, none of that matters
But, as it happens, I actually don’t care about any of that. If Apple wants its product line-up to look like a Venn diagram of uses, then that’s Apple’s decision to make. The fact is, iPhone users shouldn’t be deprived of a potentially useful feature on the off-chance that it might stop someone buying other Apple products.
If anything, having a desktop mode in iOS 19 will only make the iPhone a more valuable and appealing product. The more people are able to use their iPhones in different situations, the more likely they are to keep using and buying them.
The iPhone is the single most important product Apple makes. In fact, of the $124.3 billion Apple earned in its Q1 financial quarter, $69.1 billion of that was from iPhone sales. That’s over 55% of its revenue. It doesn’t matter whether the iPhone eats into iPad sales, because the iPhone matters a lot more.
Me? I personally don’t care about how obscenely rich the iPhone is making Apple. All I want is the opportunity to make my phone more versatile and useful — especially when I’m not at home. The fact is, the mere act of being able to extend a phone to a larger screen is useful for a whole bunch of reasons.
Just last week I had an issue trying to use a Roku stick on a hotel TV, because the specialist power and wireless cable decided to break on me — rendering the stick itself useless. Had I been able to plug my phone in instead, I could have been streaming right away instead of watching whatever junk was on broadcast TV at the time.
On top of that, if Apple offers a competent desktop mode on the iPhone we may see it spread to other companies. Right now only Samsung offers anything remotely similar, with DeX, and even that has been mostly ignored in recent memory.
Considering how shameless some phone makers are in copying everything Apple does, having desktop mode on an iPhone can only be a good thing for everyone.
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