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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Curious if there will be any headline announcements. Anyone wants to guesses from that one image in the release what’s Apple key updates might be? Outside of iOS, macOS?

There were a lot of speculations with iPhone 11 about Apple’s new U1 chip and what it planned to do with UWB technology. The Apple “tile” was never released. Then there is the new lidar in iPad.

I’m curious if we’ll see some new AR update that combines all these into an integrated experience.

If there was a time to go big on AR or VR, this lockdown times would be the best time, at least to grab the imaginations of millions locked down in homes.

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A credible leak has been that Xcode is coming to iPad (and iOS?). Not sure how I feel about it, I'd prefer more time be spent improving it for Mac use (where, in my opinion, 99% of developers will do their work anyway).

My guesses from the software side:

- A new game framework, or a massive overhaul to SceneKit. It hasn't seen much love lately, and RealityComposer has a really nice API, but is only for AR. Something new is needed or SceneKit is dead IMO.

- SwiftUI will probably see a massive amount of changes. For new controls I think we'll see a collection view and color picker. Hopefully a lot more - it's nice but has a lot of rough edges/hacks currently.

I'm really looking forward to seeing SwiftUI mature. After the initial release of Swift it's the most exciting part of iOS development that I'm looking forward to.

> A credible leak has been that Xcode is coming to iPad (and iOS?). Not sure how I feel about it, I'd prefer more time be spend on improving it for Mac use (where, in my opinion, 99% of developers will do their work anyway).

This would be a good step into making the iPad an actual productivity device.

If they also added a linux VM on the iPad, that would be the real game changer for being able to do programming on it IMO.

Anyone heard of a Hypervisor API being added to iOS?

Not sure of an API, but rumors point to a new ARM chip with EL2, although it’s probably destined for Macs.

Why?

Because Linux is in most ways an ideal development environment for backend code that is going to run on a Linux server in production.

But iPad OS is already a UNIX operating system. Sure, it's not identical to Linux, but it's good enough to do web development on.

iPad OS doesn't, as far as I can tell so far, actually have a command-line environment on it. But the one on macOS is impoverished compared to Linux and it has enough quirky differences that the process of really digging in and automating your workflow on it is mostly identical to the process of learning the specific quirks of one vendor's operating system. I know. I've tried. And I reached the point where I said to myself, "macOS system administration is never going to be a useful transferrable skill for me, so I would rather work in Linux".

I'm hoping the SwiftUI updates will include a TextView that can handle attributed strings.

It appears that RealityKit is going to be that replacement to SceneKit. In the Apple forums, Apple engineers/employees are pushing RealityKit in nonAR camera mode as a multithreaded SceneKit replacement.

Guesss Xcode on ARM might be a good and necessary step towards ARM MacBooks?

SwiftUI documentation.

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