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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> It’s a clever design, one that pushes the center of gravity of the combined unit forward, making it more stable (and requiring less weight to counterbalance it). But the result isn’t some new, weird floating-screen category of computer. The result is a laptop.

> This is a good thing.

But it's a laptop that runs iOS instead of MacOS. This is not a good thing.

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It depends on your use cases. I think it's a good thing overall. I like the iOS app model much better than the desktop model.

I resent that desktop apps can basically reach into any part of my computer, take 20 seconds to close when I tell them to exit, prevent my computer from shutting down, hog all my resources when I'm not using them, actively steal focus if they decide, fail to run because of some "missing dependency", and do a half-assed job uninstalling themselves.

You also lose the ability to install any software you want on your own hardware. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.

FWIW, I hate having to wait a minute or two for email and messages to sync when I open my laptop. I also hate that app developers can roll their own software update. And I hate that apps can run in the background. If Excel on iPad worked well with the kinds of spreadsheets I use, this would be compelling for me.

MacOS is not optimized for touchscreen. In that sense, iOS is more advanced.

I think a lot of iOS developers would switch to this setup if Apple would just port Xcode.

Out of curiosity, how would developers run git in a Xcode-on-iPad scenario?

UPDATE: Regarding the GUI git apps and Xcode's built-in git support, do you think that’s enough? In my anecdotal experience these are normally used as an accompaniment to CLI git, not a replacement?

Xcode has git support.

This is great:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/working-copy-git-client/id8966...

Edit: but if Xcode has it built in even better!!

Unnecessary work - and in my opinion that includes most corporate iOS apps - is exactly what's going to be severely cut due to corona.

Conversely a lot of corporate iOS apps enable remote work, so...

Why do you think that?

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