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Comment by Tinfoilhat666 | Hacker News Reader

Instead of switching macOS to arm, they could promote iPadOS to laptops. They already added a file manager and advanced windowing to it.

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The ironic thing is, that the question isn't so much one of hardware, but software. With the iPad Pro, Apple has an almost perfect piece of hardware, that could be used as an ultralight laptop alternative. The problem is, Apple does not allow the use of an iPad as a computer. File handling - though a little bit improved on iPadOS - is still extremely limited and even more so is the software. There are no real development environments on the iPad because of the app store limitations, there is no Termux for the iPad. Even if fully sandboxed, that could increase the productivity as a computer a lot.

So the simplest way for Apple to get a ARM-based computer would be allowing the iPad to be more of a computer. Alternatively, they do it the hard way and launch ARM-based Macbooks. That would be nice too. But putting iPadOS onto a Macbook would rather go in the wrong direction. MacOS should run well on ARMs anyway.

Have you tried iSH? It’s kind of like Termux

I have heard about it, but not tried it. It is sad how many heroics iSH has to go through, if Apple could just provide a sandboxed Termux.

iSH is a x86 emulator running on an ARM phone. It’s crazy.

A nice proof of concept, but I don’t think it’s the right path for a serious tool.

True, most stuff doesn’t work and it’s very slow. But it runs youtube-dl well enough which is something.

No re-encoding I hope :)

Not reencoding but it can remux separated streams quickly using ffmpeg

I expect within the next five years you’re going to see some sort of convergence between Apple’s phone/tablet and traditional computer lines.

At least on the level of the 13 inch devices, this would absolutely make sense. The Macbook competitors nowadays offer touch and some even pen input, which the Macbook lacks, the iPad has those and plenty of cpu power and is ultralight, has no fan and is more energy efficient. The iPad Pro could replace a laptop for most usages, if were not limited by iOS/iPadOS.

Personally, I would refresh my iPad much more often, without the limitations. And it is not very realistic from Apple to expect people to carry both a laptop and a tablet. So forcing the customers to choose between those device types is not very customer friendly.

Actually, I am currently considering to get the Samsung Galaxy Book S, which seems to be a very interesting, ARM-powered laptop. Of course I would prefer a new iPad Pro, if not for its limitations.

And Apple won’t maintain a whole separate hardware/software design stream. The pro-oriented users will have to accept the confines of a consumer-optimized set of designs or switch to another platform. This is already true to a degree of course but I expect we’ll see a real crossroads.

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