Apple wants to keep positioning iOS on iPad as the de-facto post-pc "get work done" platform and to do so the UI needs to feel less constrained, more capable an

Apple wants to keep positioning iOS on iPad as the de-facto post-pc "get work done" platform and to do so the UI needs to feel less constrained, more capable and appeal slightly more to "post-pc power users". Choosing to add UI like this to the iPad form-factor while omitting it from the iPhone screen size is likely proof that Apple believes the iPhone still needs a more constrained, more friendly and extremely low cognitive overhead UX while the iPad will start dabbling into more "multi-task enabling" UX. One other thought: I think the author is a bit harsh on this particular UX on iPad primarily because the author is omitting (or forgetting) the fact that when a user enters the app switcher he or she will likely already be anticipating the primary area of focus on the screen that appears and will tunnel-vision his/her focus to only that region of the screen. In other words, after using the new app switcher a dozen or so times the user will unconsciously focus on only the region of that screen they know contains the actions he/she is looking for and they will do this in a anticipatory fashion since we are, after all, relentless pattern recognition machines. So I argue that what the designers have done here is to maximize instantaneously available information density while simultaneously utilizing classic visual design cues (such as "items in closer proximity to each other have similar purpose") to create 3 primary regions in which, per any given usage of the app switcher, a user is likely only focusing on one region. Here's a quick visualization I've done, a sort of heatmap of how user's would likely process this UI: http://imgur.com/a/FC1k5 http://imgur.com/a/FC1k5 The light areas are the areas which users are most likely to focus on and they'll only be focusing on one of three regions most the time. The darker areas are there as increased available information density but the overall UI design is done well enough so that these darker areas should not negatively impact the "80% of the time" lighter areas but instead only serve to help the user during the "20% of the time" scenarios.