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Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I really wanted them to announce containers on iPadOS in a vein similar to how ChromeOS does it.

Having them later in the presentation say "Hey look at all these ARM containers running on Apple chips on macOS" was an especial kick in the teeth.

I used my potato-tier iPad with a Logic Folio as my main computer for a couple of months while my MacBook was getting replaced and it was honestly a vastly better experience for me save for not being able to get work done because of the absence of spinning up a Linux workspace.

Even if they artificially limited it to iPad Pro (it's Apple after all) I'd still be happy.

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Current iPads just don’t have the hardware support to make this possible. Hence why the DTK won’t support all the features mentioned in the keynote. (It’s using the iPad chip.)

Even if Docker wasn’t possible (because no virt), a sandboxed terminal with enough utilities to bootstrap Brew is just a software problem. It wouldn’t require special hardware stuff, just as chroot doesn’t. As long as it could be accessed by other apps and stay alive in the background, it’d be a great way to code on the go.

They can make something work if Swift Playgrounds works (which is a pretty silly experience anyway. “Hey kid, great job learning Swift. Want to make a real app? Buy a $1200 MacBook and get to work!”

You mean $899, right? I guess $1200 was a typo.

Or hyperbole. Macs are “expensive” or “overpriced”, at least to the populi.

I’ve always found that strange given the demographic of HN. I’ve never considered good tools to be expensive. Continuous lost productivity is usually more costly than “Apple Tax”.

I don't think the cost of the MacBook is the point. Pay us more money because of artificial restrictions we put in place is the point.

What exactly is missing from an iPad that would allow this to happen?

ARM EL2.

And 4KB page support is missing on A12X/Z too.

Right, but I’m sure someone would just recompile Linux with the right page size :) And I guess I’ll figure out what magic the DTK is doing to make 4K pages work once it arrives.

Nothing.

Some people have said ARM EL2, but virtualization in hardware isn't required if we can get a terminal with a jailed environment (akin to chroot) with brew. At worst you could spin up a Linux kernel in userspace if you needed to.

You might find iSH interesting, though it’s a bit slow.

I love iSH, but it frustrates me for being unnecessarily slow.

It forces emulation of x86. If only it could cut QEMU out of the equation it would be perfect.

iSH actually uses a homegrown emulator, not QEMU.

In any case, I’d love iSH if it could just give me an arm64 workspace without emulation.

Sadly, this is a bit difficult to do on iOS.

A touchbar

A mouse pointer. macOS was designed for the mouse / trackpad.

A mouse pointer.

iPads work with standard mice, and have an on-screen mouse pointer. I used mine with an old mouse I had lying around a couple of weeks ago. Works fine.

I had an iPad2 which I jailbroke and used with a bluetooth mouse back then (mostly just because I could).

I can't imagine it's still impossible for them to add similar functionality if it's the only thing holding it back from running macOS.

iPad OS does have mouse support actually. I'm really not sure why they haven't made it possible to develop on iPads yet, I know I would get a 13 inch iPad Pro in a heartbeat if I could develop on it and sideload apps onto it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211008

Apple’s iPad Magic keyboard?

Why would I need a pointer to run a container?

It's not ready yet, but it's pretty clear that that's where they're headed.

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