Federico on the Connected podcast:
Something that I heard from a couple of people a few months ago sort of mentioned to me just casually, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you could have a mouse cursors on iPad as an accessibility feature?”
And:
But then I started doing some research and I learned that actually it’s already possible, if you have right accessibility hardware like special joysticks and motors, to have some kind of cursor on iOS. This is already possible and has been possible for years.
But what I heard from sources is that without any adapter you will be able to use a USB-C mouse, on your iPad, as an accessibility device.
And then this followup:
https://www.twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1120447708215554049
I am fascinated by this possibility. Is this purely for accessibility, or is this a step towards a truly universal merging of iOS and macOS?
Apple makes no USB mouses—I don’t even know of –any– Type-C mouses; what about Bluetooth? And if BT==1, what about the other non-Pro iPads?
Sigh.. NO, this does not mean iOS and macOS will merge (seriously, what IS it with that trope?).
What it does mean, though, is that if you use a keyboard attached to an iPad it would be much easier to select and edit text, etc. One of the main issues in using an iPad for work for some people is that positioning a cursor, selecting text and other relatively precision pointing operations is very hard to do on an iPad compared to doing them on a Mac.
I’d bet that they ship a keyboard accessory with a trackpad or some kind of pointer control and enable USB-C, leaving it to others to decide whether to produce a type C mouse (or just buy a dongle for it).