One of the defining moments of Apple's WWDC keynote earlier this week was when Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, declared that the iPad would now have its own operating system. "The time has come to recognize the platform in a special way," he said.

This new operating system comes with a new name: iPadOS. Never mind that this new nomenclature had been leaked just hours before the reveal, when it appeared in the language of Apple's own licensing agreement. The bigger picture remains: The iPad is getting its own native operating system. When iPadOS arrives this fall, it will be a pivotal moment for Apple's tablet. The iPad will no longer run iOS and will no longer be just a giant iPhone. It will become, at last, something else.

But if you happen to go into Settings on an iPad running the not-yet-released iPadOS and look up which software version it's running, it will say iOS 13. Not iPadOS. (At least, that's what it says right now on a demo unit I saw; that may change when it launches in the fall.) The iPad's new software shares the same kernel as iOS and macOS, and it supports the same app framework as iOS. It is still, effectively, iOS. So why call it "iPadOS"?

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It's easy to view iPadOS as just a fun name, another one of Apple's catchy coinages. But in this case it's also not just a name.

For years, Apple has been gesturing toward a future in which the iPad becomes your primary computer—both because its processing power rivals a desktop's and because younger consumers just won't know the difference between a "mobile device" and a "computer." Last fall, the hardware upgrades Apple made to the iPad Pro were far more impressive than the been-there components bestowed upon the new MacBook Air. At the time of that event, CEO Tim Cook called the iPad the "most popular computer in the world." Not tablet, but computer.

Now the iPad's software will catch up to those hardware announcements, making it even more laptop-like. iPadOS will let users pin widgets on the home screen of the iPad. It's not quite desktop-level window manipulation, but it's ... something. Apps will "fan" out from the sidebar on the iPad, enabling easier app switching. And you can run two instances of iPad apps side by side, similar to the way you might keep a couple browser tabs open for the same website (whether you realize it or, if your tab organization is like mine, not).

App Expose, the macOS feature which shows you all of your open apps, will soon work on the iPad. The Files app will have a column view with a preview window, similar to the way Finder works on the Mac. The iPadOS demo at WWDC reached a kind of crescendo when a virtual thumb drive appeared on the giant screen behind Federighi, illustrating that the Files app on iPad will now recognize external drives and devices. Hello, 1998!

Apple also showed an enhanced version of the Safari web browser made for iPadOS. It was during this portion of the keynote that Federighi, perhaps unintentionally, underscored what has been the iPad's inherent problem. "When you look at the web today it's split into two categories," he said. "On the one hand, you have the mobile web, designed for the small screen, and desktop sites designed for large screens, like your Mac. And often websites will serve up the wrong thing for iPad." The blame was firmly placed on web designers, but really: The iPad has always been a tweener. iPadOS is supposed to change this.