Hacker News Reader

I still raise an eyebrow whenever Apple pushes running iOS apps on Mac as a big plank of its desktop strategy. SwiftUI is still incomplete, badly documented, and a bit of an arse to work with. A shame, because it has the potential to be really enjoyable to work with. But until they sort that out, this whole strategy of theirs seems half baked.

Not sure if you're seeing the bigger picture here. SwiftUI is not necessary. You can build an iOS app entirely in UIKit and target the Mac via Catalyst. In addition to that, any iOS apps that don't target Catalyst will be runnable on an ARM Mac, unless the developer opts out.

I thought Catalyst was a shorter term solution for existing apps, but greenfield apps are being pushed to SwiftUI? I admit I find the overlap between the two to still be confusing.

It is confusing until you use any Catalyst app.

They are utter garbage; there isn't a single good Catalyst app, they're all putrefactive shit on the Mac. The JIRA app — which Apple demo'd on stage when they unveiled Catalyst — is hands-down the worst app I have ever used on the Mac, and I've been using the Mac since I was like 13 and my mom had an SE30, and I also spent 2000-2008 as a developer of Mac apps (iGet, iGet Mobile, and worked on some others).

SwiftUI is still kind of painful, but way less painful then it was at launch. SwiftUI is an interesting new paradigm, and it really does seem that it will be good someday, and even possibly soon. It's already awesome if you happen to not hit the (many) areas where it is still lacking.

Catalyst will never be good, and Apple will kill it as soon as they possibly can.

Hear hear! Even Apple's own Catalyst apps are no good. They're turning the Mac into an iPad Plus :(

Yes, but it's pretty clearly transitional tech. Apple knows that it's shit. It's a stopgap until SwiftUI matures — and you can tell because SwiftUI is maturing fast.

Macs running Apple Silicon can run iOS apps unchanged.

It's the legacy Intel Macs that need Catalyst.

The strategy is not had-baked, it’s just half-implemented (i.e. they aren’t finished yet).

This is just like the Carbon/Cocoa issue back in the original OS X.

5 years from now it will be obvious to everyone that SwiftUI has been a huge leap, but with some normal transitional bumps along the way.

The guys on the ATP podcast talked about this a couple weeks ago (last week maybe?) and it’s a great conversation - I highly recommend it.

While many of these are still half baked technologies, they are still better than wrapping up an electron app and calling it a day.

They will run unmodified on Apple Silicon.

>I still raise an eyebrow whenever Apple pushes running iOS apps on Mac

Microsoft certainly attempted to create an Android subsystem for Windows, it just didn't work.

This is the only part of their strategy to me that I don't understand. Running unmodified iOS apps on a Mac is going to be such a terrible experience and there's no way around it. Why? Just because they can?

Shipping an unmodified iOS apps for Mac is a really easy way for developers to validate market demand. If there's enough demand, they can invest in Mac-specific improvements and hopefully grow their market share. If not, at least the cost of discovery was low.

I’m guessing mostly for the sake of absorbing the iOS games ecosystem. Especially the ones that already have game pad support.

There's a lot of great tooling for making iOS apps without using Swift or Swift UI (Flutter, ReactNative, etc). I'm a JavaScript developer, and I hate Electron apps as much as anybody. The ability to use ReactNative to compile to an iOS app that runs on the desktop opens up a LOT of possibilities for me.

Ipad apps on a mac laptop with touchscreen would be great. And some of the design changes in MacOS 11 look like they are making mac UI elements touch accessible.

also a transformer to macbook way thinkpad had their models with keyboard folding to the back also would be nice.

> For the consumer market, the ability to run iOS apps becomes an additional huge benefit.

I see it more as a stepping stone. It's difficult to imagine how a UI designed for iOS would ever not feel strange on a laptop. But SwiftUI seems like a great tool for sharing large amounts of code between platforms, with some branching to cater properly to each platform.

However given the current dominance of web interfaces for desktop software it's hard to imagine iOS apps becoming relevant on mac anytime soon aside from a few special cases.

I agree. I don't think the experience is great, if you just run a mobile app on a desktop machine, but the great points are, that a) it is possible at all, so if nothing else works, you can run the mobile app on your computer, for many purposes, that is enough, and b) this gives a big incentive to the app developers to offer a proper Mac version too, which probably requires less work than ever before.

> this gives a big incentive to the app developers to offer a proper Mac version too

Maybe but I'm not totally convinced it's enough. For small apps which are only currently on iOS this might be interesting, but for the large pool of applications which currently target web, iOS and Android, doing extra work to support a mac branch of the application is still that: extra.

Those users are already supported by your web application, and even if it's relatively less work than creating a separate native mac application, adding a mac branch of your iOS app will still add effort and complexity to implement and maintain. And that would be to serve what's probably a tiny minority of your active users.

In the classic sense of an SCM ‘branch’ you would be correct, however with SwiftUI you don’t need a branch to support MacOS. At worst you need a few #ifdefs.

I mean a branch in the sense of branch of execution (#ifdef would be one way to do this) not in the sense of a source control branch.

>It's difficult to imagine how a UI designed for iOS would ever not feel strange on a laptop.

What is Apple offers a touch screen? Then it becomes essentially an iPad with a keyboard..

At one point I owned a tablet laptop and switching to pen input was extremely awkward.

Edit: imaging lifting your hand from the table and poking screen for several minutes. Screen wobbles each time. Your hand gets tired from being suspended, but putting it back is almost too much work. Apple might invent something, but there is only so much to be done with certain form factors.

All my laptop and desktop screens are touch screens, and the laptops have pens. It's not awkward or tiring if you have it set up well. Lifting my hand from the keyboard up to the desktop touch screen to tap something is often quicker than moving there with a mouse.

What kind of screens do you use for desktop?

Either all-in-ones by HP, or Dell external touch screen monitors. There are other options available, but I've ended up with multiple of each of these, as they're available and work well IME.

When was the last time you tried a tablet laptop? Microsoft now has a series of very good 2-1 under their Surface brand. I'm writing this on a Surface Book 2, the display can be detached from the keyboard by pressing one button, and that works really really well. The display is very stable in laptop mode, the pen is attached via magnet on the side so I can quickly grab it and just draw or write something. It also has the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop (though that's of course completely subjective).

You may want to try one in a store, I personally changed my mind on the 2-in-1 form factor after using one for a few minutes.

The main issue is that Windows 10 is quite bad at dealing with the transition between laptop and tablet mode, similar to when you connect an external display the screen blinks a few times, everything resize hysterically, so you have to wait a few seconds for the UI to transition.

Edit: the touch display is just way too practical when you want to quickly scroll a page or touch a button located on the opposite side of the screen. IMHO it doesn't have to be something you use all the time to be worth it.

I lift a hand a few seconds in a minute, not for several minutes because mainly use trackpad and sometimes use touchscreen. It's still useful.

Totally agree, I had a Dell XPS 15 touchscreen laptop, and while I found Windows too unproductive to replace my MacBook Pro for development work, going back to the dumb non-touch screen made the Mac frustrating.

I would use the mouse/pad/keyboard 90% or maybe 95% of the time — but the inability to just tap the button or pinch-zoom or whatever the other 5% of the time... it's just stupid.

All 5-year-olds perceive screens that you can't directly interact with to be broken... and they're right.

I was forced to get a touchscreen by dell to get 4k. I never touch it, have an external keyboard and mouse. When I clean it, it produces a lot of erroneous input.

Perhaps you should turn off the touchscreen so you don’t accidentally trigger it.

Interesting, happens rarely so never thought of it:

    xinput list
    xinput disable 11

I have an XPS 13 with a 4K touch screen. I view it as an anti-feature that I occasionally brush with weird unwanted effects.

iPad Pro uses a mouse cursor now. It feels completely natural.

I don‘t see how running an iPad app native on a Macbook would „be difficult to imagine“.

I wouldn’t say it’s completely natural, but it’s still pretty nice, all things considered. Some apps still make it awkward, especially games.

I saw someone attempt to play Slither while testing an iPad Pro with a mouse recently. It looked fairly awkward and unnatural.

I have a $230 ~12" Chromebook[1], I agree with your premise of portable fan-less computer, benefits of running mobile applications and if the performance of Apple's current A series chipsets are of any indicator then one in the ARM MacBook ought to be several times better than anything intel has in this category.

But, I doubt if the macOS on Apple silicon in upcoming MacBook would even fulfil all the needs of a generic consumer, if not the developers. Newer macOS releases on even current Macs have been ridden with bugs and it takes couple of major updates to fix them(the case with newer iOS releases have been worse). Many developers have stopped updating their macOS to the latest iteration and are sticking with older versions till the security updates lasts (or if Xcode support is dropped).

So, IMO it's going to be a while till macOS on ARM achieves stability and the $800 is the subsidised early adopter fee to put up with its quirks.

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/reviewing-the-chromebook-google-s...

I would assume that the bad quality of Catalina and iOS 13 when they were released had to do with the restructuring of the development teams and the general code changes in preparation of the move to Apple Silicon. While iOS was based on a fork of macOS, those code bases had drifted apart for a while. It seems that Apple remerged the common parts for Big Sur. There is hope, that Big Sur doesn't start as bad as Catalina. So I wouldn't see why the MacBook wouldn't fufil the needs of a customer or developer.

I see a steep increase of demand for macOS developers from my perspective. I cannot vouch it's a coincidence or not but I believe there's more interest to bring applications to Apple desktops.

SwiftUI is really nice, but it's incomplete. So you really need an engineer that understands macOS to offer a complete solution for anything that goes deeper than a to-do app.

> So when bying a laptop to go along with your smartphone, the Mac running Apple Silicon has a huge benefit, as it integrates more seamless than ever with your smartphone.

I don’t really think the connection here is so strong. Having the same ISA means very little.

The ISA alone doesn't mean much, but there's OS compatibility too. MacOS will run iOS applications out of the box.

First of all, Big Sur on the Apple Silicon allows to run iOS apps unmodified, so that requires no work, and secondly, the UI redesign of Big Sur means, that iOS/iPadOS apps are easier to port, as the basic look and feel is the same.

I bought a 2019 Mbp 15 and found it too heavy to bring around. After struggle I bought a 2018 new stock macbook 12. It is really great. I am using the Mac mini arm version and it is good so far. May get a arm macbook 12 ...

The only thing that holds me back from believing the above is that it would certainly cannibalize their sales of their iPad Pro.

Apple always has treated the iPad as a very different platform from the Mac, and the software has quite some differences. The iPad as a tablet still has a lot of differentiation features. Also, the iPad market size is way bigger than the Mac. Finally, as they keep the margins on all the products they sell pretty close to each other, why would they care if people bought a few MacBooks instead of the iPads? Here, more the marketshare vs. PC laptops would be the incentive for Apple to be very competitive on the MacBook price. With the Apple Silicon, no longer a substential part of the device revenue goes to Intel.

One way to avoid cannibalism among products is have the revenue and profits align so you don’t care what people choose. In that sense, the MacBook at 800 is less than a comparable iPad Pro plus magic keyboard-but you’re also locked in to a keyboard and trackpad.

Personally, I always liked the MacBook Air and MacBook form factors but never purchased them. I went for iPads instead and left power use to a MBP or Mac mini. I could see the MacBook being more compelling if it’s the only way to develop, but they’re moving Xcode to the iPad I think down the road...

Or maybe they think of the MBA and MB as legacy formats. That could make them not directly competitive at all and potentially complimentary.

Has Apple ever shown an aversion to cannabilizing itself?

When Jobs first came back, he eliminated every product that put Apple in competition with itself. I feel like that motivation stuck around for a while, though I think it may have been gone even before Jobs’ passing.

That was to simplify the product line. They had multiple consumer “Performa” Macs. They were about to go bankrupt.

Under Jobs they also introduced the iPod Nano and killed the iPod Mini even though it was the best selling iPod.

Of course they introduced the iPhone at the height of the iPods popularity.

The iPad overtook the popularity and revenue of the Mac while he was CEO.

I was not following Apple closely back then, but I heard, that when Steve Jobs came back, the whole product lineup was a mess with many directly competing offerings. The iPad and the MacBook are not such a direct competition. Also, before the iPhone was introduced, but the rumor mills were already running hot, many people doubted that Apple would make a phone which could cannibalize their cash-cow back then, the iPod. Well, they did, they actually placed it in direct competition, and we know how that ended up :).

While the price point would be huge, I have a hard time believing a laptop will cost less than their phone.

Bottom of the line laptop cheaper than top of the line phone isn’t too hard to believe... it’s still more than double the price of their cheapest phone

That is due to how 4G/5G tech structure their patents cost which is cheaper for non-smartphone devices. You will be adding at least $200+ to Apple's MSRP for Modem and Patents on Smartphone alone.

The 256GB iPad Air is $649, the High Memory Model are the high margin products. And that is already cheaper iPhone. As a matter of fact I am surprised how everyone think $799 is a bargain or great pricing. Swapping the cost of camera, gyroscope, Touch Screen, to Track Pad and A14X.

I am expecting it more to be $699. With an 16GB RAM, 512GB version for $899. With a future 14" Model being $100 more.

Edit: Actually thinking about it may be that is why the 12" starts at $799, it will lower the price to $699 a year later to make way for $14".

The cheapest air is already cheaper than some higher-spec iPhones. But it will be interesting, whether they bring cellular connectivity to their laptops with Apple Silicon or whether that stays exclusive to iPhone and iPad.