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Comment by davemp | Hacker News Reader

It's such a shame that there's no thunderbolt 3 in the iPad Pro. I would love to ditch my MBP to just plug an iPad into a TB3 monitor and get a mouse, keyboard, drawing tablet, and charging with 1 wire. I can get close to that with a MBP. The only downsides are a MBP is heavier for mobile use and I'd have to buy an expensive tablet.

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The USB-C spec supports that, you don't need TB3 for these features. Of course I don't know whether Apple actually implemented all of that. I have a WQHD USB-C monitor (Lenovo P24h) with 45W power delivery, a USB 3 hub, and audio out at home, and it does this without TB3. So it might also be possible with this new iPad Pro.

You're right. I was working under the assumption that Apple would have just went for TB3 if they supported those features. I'm not going to claim that I know too much about the crazy USB-C/TB3 specs though.

I’m not clear what USB-C support will be like yet, but is it possible that will work anyway? The dongles and docks that are available for other USB-C devices (e.g. https://www.owcdigital.com/products/usb-c-dock and similar) might work.

They seemed to show the iPad Pro getting plugged into what appeared to my eye like an LG ultrafine display using USB-C and using it as a display, I'm guessing you could plug a keyboard into one of the USB-C ports in the back of the ultrafine display (or a BT). Obviously not a mouse, and I'd be surprised if a drawing tablet would work.

As someone researching drawing tablets, am curious why you would plug in additional drawing tablet instead of just drawing on the iPad?

I would only do that with along side my MBP. I don't currently use a tablet though.

Do iPads support mouse (trackpads) yet? That would be huge.

Exactly this is needed as well as being able to run full XCode and VS Code

Nope. Apple would need to do a pretty decent amount of work on iOS to support desktop like behavior. I'm not sure if there's much sales incentive either. Which is a shame because Apple got where it is by pushing the best possible user experiences. Not blind sales maximization.

Am I going crazy? Didn't they support mice pointers when the iPad originally launched?

No, mice were never supported.

Maybe you're thinking of the iOS Simulator on macOS?

There was a jailbreak hack that added bluetooth mouse and pointer support to iOS. With another hack that added multi-window support you could turn an iPad into a buggy and slow version of macOS

Surely getting iOS apps working on macOS (Marzipan) is laying some of this ground, they are having to adapt iOS UI widgets for it, what would it take to feed this back to iOS?

I see no real reason to feed it back to iOS. If Apple manages to integrate iOS apps into macOS well, I can see them shipping iPads/iPhones with i+macOS. Both OS's run the same kernel anyways so why not just tweak them a bit, glue the environments together, and have one run a superset of apps?

Apple's superior UX team and control over app distribution makes them much more likely to succeed than when MS tried to go down a similar road. Even their long-term investment in LLVM helps here. One can only hope us consumers don't end up with a more locked down macOS as a result.

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