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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

It takes so little Apple to make it possible for iPads to be usable for development work, but they do not. Maybe because it will cannibalize mac sales.

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Maybe but Apple tended to (in the past) be a focused company. They decided to not support development in the past so they straight up ran from it, supporting zero parts of it, gaining security benefits. They know the iPad as-is isn't designed for it and have no intent to do it. Now, when they eventually come around, I'm sure it will be in a big, all or nothing, way.

That's kinda the best thing about Apple, they are brutally focused on solving a problem at any cost. Thats why AirPods are so small, the apple watch is so incredibly featured and why they build their own CPUs. Making choices like that sometimes means realizing opportunity cost, you can't have the best of everything.

Meanwhile, in fairness, the Mac is actually a pretty great development platform.

"Meanwhile, in fairness, the Mac is actually a pretty great development platform.

Especially with the Macbook Pro they seem a little confused whether it should be a good dev machine or a super thin high end laptop.

Thin and light is what a portable computer is supposed to be. If you wanted something non-portable you could get an iMac, or a mac mini, but to compromise the products for other use cases would just be poor design.

They already have the Air to be lightweight and thin. Makes sense. But there are plenty of people who need a portable high power laptop so it would make sense to have a Pro that has plenty of connectors, is powerful and doesn't need to be as lightweight.

Oh go away. Can we stop pretending that no one wants thin and light laptops. Almost everyone does.

> they are brutally focused on solving a problem at any cost.

Except replaceable batteries, anything related to right to repair, or even calculator apps that reliably work beyond 1 digit per second

These are among the costs they're happy to pay in pursuit of the vision they prioritize, which seems to usually involve small/light/thin, pretty, and convenient (for certain values of convenient).

Which can be a great experience if/when you fit their priority profile. If you don't, they're permanently frustrating.

*externalized costs

The mac is great but the iPad is smaller, lighter, and better battery. They already have git client apps, file manager apps, and code editor apps (even js and python interpreters). They just all work together very poorly.

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