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Comment by smasher164 | Hacker News Reader

To me, it doesn't matter how powerful the iPad is if the software experience is subpar. Multitasking is cumbrous enough that it might as well not exist, multi-display setups can only mirror at a fixed aspect ratio, it lacks multiple user profiles requiring a family to be under a single user, and the few apps that take advantage of the keyboard/trackpad are nowhere similar to their desktop counterparts.

Take Excel for example. Try right-clicking on a cell or dragging down a formula, and you'll see that it only picks it up a fraction of the time, and you have to click multiple times with gesture-like latencies in between to get it to work.

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> "...gesture-like latencies in between to get it to work."

i hate that animations on ios are i/o blocking.

every single time i have to enter my passcode, it misses at least one if not two of my keypresses, which means i have to erase the whole thing and do it more slowly since the missing keypresses are essentially random (not just the final one or two).

another related annoyance is alert popups that occur more than once. the bounce animation takes over a second, so if you have multiple of these coming in succession, which happens constantly, it's a collossal waste of focus and time.

i want to take a sledgehammer to my idevices every time these things happen.

"Pro" used to mean "professional" for Apple. Now it just means "expensive".

It’s been at least 13 years that the meaning has changed. Since the introduction of the 13 inch MacBook Pro.

While I do feel they should've continued the plain old "MacBook" designation for the 13" beyond 2008, I've got to admit the 2009-2012 13" MBP was a solid workhorse for a moderately professional user.

In my experience with that whole line I really feel like only the 17" truly deserved the "pro" moniker since it got better options (processors, matte display) than the others.

My 2015 MBPs (I have 2) rock. Ports galore, too. Hence why I've never upgraded.

You've never upgraded because it has a non-upgradeable RAM and SSD. :-|

The SSD can be replaced. I loved my 2015 MBP to death, but the CPU has not aged well for heavyweight languages like C++ and Swift. Switched to an M1 Air with the same 1 TB of storage and 16 GB of RAM.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...

The iPad Pro is the only one with the ProMotion 120Hz display. The higher refresh rate is a big deal for pro users who want the pencil to be as low latency as possible.

Yes, this is why the default iPhone calculator app is completely useless.

These forced animations make tasks take the same amount of time regardless of how fast the hardware gets. I would love to be able to turn off all animations in iphone/ipad UIs.

right. it's even more frustrating in light of the amazing advances in parallel processing for these devices over the years, which are essentially being ignored. at the very least, they could offload the animation to secondary threads/processes and unblock the i/o, which would allow the keypresses to be registered correctly even as you wait for the UI to catch up. instead, you're forced to wait for the animation to finish before registering the next input.

the computer should serve the whims of the user, not the other way around.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem being described, but I just tried this and it is impossible for me to type so fast in the iphone calculator app that it misses inputs. The animation completes in the background but does not block anything.

If I type "3 + 6 + 9" as fast as I can, then hit "=", I only get 18 about half the time. Sometimes I get 12, sometimes 15, occasionally something else. This is with a iPhone 11 Pro on iOS 14.4.2. It's ridiculous. I always hear the same number of clicks, though.

I must have never run into this because I don't calculate fast enough, but I just tried it and confirmed it really happens.

Somehow got the "6" key is stuck lit up, and despite having definitely registered a tap, it wasn't included in the addition.

https://i.imgur.com/onkcv59.png

That is extremely strange. Weighing in from an iPhone XS here on the latest iOS, I cannot understand how it is humanly possible to type the numbers fast enough they aren't picked up. I just tried to do it, pressing 3+6+9= as fast as I could, and I could not manage to get it to not detect my taps. I wonder if you have a defective screen? I have no other explanation

Just tested this a few times on an XS Max 14.4.2 and got 18 every time.

Happens to me all the time, especially when repeating the same numbers.

> Yes, this is why the default iPhone calculator app is completely useless.

Well, it's already made pretty useless by not showing you what's it's calculating…

Probably that's the reason there isn't one on iPad. Let that sink in. There's no calculator on a $1000+ 'Pro' device.

Let what sink in? There are plenty of better third party calculators available than the system calc on iPhone. So much of the angst and frustration comes from self-imposed rules on what is acceptable rather than calmly finding solutions.

There used to be a jailbreak tweak called Accelerate that would speed up animations.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/11/12/accelerate/

I still use an iPhone 4S, and thanks to this tweak, I don't feel like my phone is any slower than newer models. Pity I can't browse half the web though (https died due to TLS).

You can. Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion

Workaround. It should capture the touches and send it anyway. Like on macOS for example

It's not perfect though, and it only makes the OS marginally more snappy since it replaces many animations with equally slow fades.

That setting only changes the moving animations into fades but doesn't actually make anything faster.

Animations still take the same amount of time blocking interactivity.

Thanks for articulating this as I never understood why iOS suffers from this phenomenon. The only other place I've seen "typing too fast" result in garbled input is on Android based VoIP phone handsets, where if you try to "type" numbers too fast some of them get dropped - an amazing example of a device with many orders of magnitude more computing power than what it replaced still managing to be less performant.

Are you sure it isn't that you are sliding your finger enough for iOS to think you are doing a "scroll gesture" instead of a click?

I hate iOS because the movement limit before a tap gets cancelled is too small for my tastes - simulating "virtual" clicks at 10px limit of motion worked better for my tastes using a browser. Maybe I am just lazy, maybe the capacitance or shape of my fingers is the problem, or maybe I have some motor issue. However I don't on Android devices. I have to allow myself time on iOS devices to make taps work reliably.

I notice it especially on the home screen of my iPad where lazy tapping an app won't open it... Grrrr - there is no other function to a "slight" scroll on the homescreen!

I have seen others have the same issue, so it isn't just me.

yah that also happens to me sometimes too (and it's maddening), but that's definitely not it here. in these cases, the ui isn't responsive because of the animations.

I don't swype, and I get my passcode wrong on iOS all the time. It doesn't register the first press if you do it too quickly.

Ohh, so that's why entering the passcode on my ipad feels so wonky.

I guess this is some kind of legacy thing because the first iphone wouldn't have been able to handle it? Because this seems like an exceptionally bad decision, unless absolutely necessary for some reason.

Must be deep-rooted like the UI render refresh issue on Android. No matter how fast the hardware of an android phone, it will always will be a bit clunky/laggy. "Android has a difficult time dealing with the touch interface because it handles rendering "on the main thread with normal priority," as opposed to iOS, which treats UI rendering with real-time priority." https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/07/former_google_int... Also try endlessly scrolling your photos on your iphone and on an android device - the difference in memory management will be apparent.

No matter how fast I type 3 + 6 + 9 into the stock Android calculator (on a Pixel 3a, 2 years old), I can't replicate keypresses getting ignored or laggy, input-blocking animations.

There's also zero lag scrolling through Google Photos. I don't have an iPhone to compare to, but I can't imagine how it could get any better.

If this is actually still a problem 10 years after the linked article was posted, I'd say the main problem is then instead the variety of processing in Android devices. I'd guess I'd see these issues on cheaper phones (maybe I can dig up one of my $79 burners to try with), but I doubt this problem exists on any phones of comparable pricing to iPhones.

Comparing iOS to "Android" might show some clunky/laggy UI in cheaper models, but comparing iOS to iPhone-priced Android phones most certainly won't (most of the time).

[*]: Though, obviously, I expect the sheer amount of variety in Android phones to still produce some expensive, low-power phones that would be an exception here.

From my primitive understanding, many of the iOS animations are basically pre-rendered and played at the right time to cover up any CPU-intensive activities that are happening under the hood. Rather than display a laggy, stuttering input box that captures every keypress (eventually), they've chosen to lock you out from input entirely, force you to sit back and watch the beautiful transition, then allow you to input when the device is fully ready to accept that input.

It's a frustrating design decision to me as well, maybe because I'd much rather prefer a barebones, stripped-down, streamlined experience, but I'm sure it's more psychologically soothing for more people when compared to the laggy experience on some competing devices.

yes, i've heard at least a variation of that explanation before, and it made sense for the first few iterations of idevices, but not so much anymore. apple devices are among the most powerful personal computers ever available. it really shouldn't be that way at this point.

iOS animations are not pre-rendered, and more and more they are even interruptible, even interactive. For example, if you start swiping the home screen you can catch the swipe at any point.

That is not necessarily evidence that the swiping animation is not pre-rendered. It just means that if it's pre-rendered, it can be slowed down, sped up and reversed based on the user's finger's motion.

I can tell you for certain that the OS swipe animations are not pre-rendered (you can easily tell, sometimes one or both of the views involved are animated for example), and I highly doubt anyone would do that. What would be the purpose? It's much more complex to handle, and there's no benefit.

Have never noticed this, but I have "Reduce Motion" enabled in Accessibility settings.

i've tested that setting at some point in the past and found it doesn't help in these cases. from what i remember, the UI still wastes the same amount of time either way.

> every single time i have to enter my passcode, it misses at least one if not two of my keypresses

Wow, I have the same trouble, but I thought it was because my iPhone was old and thus the screen was damaged.

well, to be fair, that could still be, but at least in my case, it's definitely because the default speed at which i enter my passcode is just a little too fast for the UI. i have an old iphone and an ipad pro, and it happens on both.

Thank you! I somehow manage to get my iPhone code wrong half the time. I'm glad it's not only me.

Yeah, I saw this announcement and was thinking, “Why do I need more power?” coming from a 2018 iPad Pro. All this power is cool, but, the design of iPadOS is just not conducive to me wanting to get anything done on it. I know that’s ambiguous and hand wavey. Part of it is certainly the multitasking. Part of it is the keyboard. Part of it is no local Unix or build tools or good code editor. Yeah, I can SSH into another machine, even using mosh on a local network so it feels entirely local. But given the choice I’ll bounce and use my Macbook or desktop instead and I always make that choice because I’m not in an iPad vacuum.

It seems like they have everything lined up to put MacOS on the iPad, but it would be so unlike them to do it. What’ll they say, you can dual boot but you only boot MacOS if you have their expensive keyboard case attached? They wouldn’t do that.

Maybe someone will hack it on there eventually. An M1 MacOS on an M1 iPad “hackintosh” doesn’t seem impossible.

Apple should let users alternate between iOS and macOS on this device. They should also enable touch on the iMac and let users run iOS on that as well.

Agreed. They can already support mice, why can't I just use it as a computer when I want!

If Apple allowed macOS on the iPad, I wonder if they’d allow Rosetta?

I would've thought this was a really silly notion until now, when they're not just running on similar chips but on the same chip.

I do not doubt that this may become a thing in the future

I actually do doubt it. They want to sell multiple devices, and they have this vague notion of "minimalism" that still dictates design. The idea of running two operating systems on the same device probably gives someone at Apple a stomach flu. They want to merge the two. But I don't. I want the best of both worlds which means differentiation and just - more -.

Give it like, five more years.

Big Sur already takes a lot of design cues from iOS - they're prepping the merge. They're just making sure the frog doesn't realize the pot is starting to boil.

Agreed. They can do it nicely, too, by extending the "Handoff" concept to further replicate application state between macOS and iPad OS apps.

It would probably be an opt-in thing for apps, but even without any fancy state replication it'd be just fine.

Dual boot is not even needed M1 can virtualize, you could run both side by side. Previous iPad Pros could virtualize too, it was disabled in hardware.

This is the first iPad Pro with hardware virtualization support.

Even the hardware isn't ideal for MacOS though. I don't want top-heavy laptops with all the hardware behind the screen. I want an actual laptop... like the MacBook.

I view Apple devices as devices for developers AND artists. Sometimes artists are better served.

Did you see the new iMac? It’s just a huge tablet now.

12.9 inch iPad is starting to look like a 12 inch MacBook. All you need is the OS upgrade.

It going to be really interesting to see if/how/when they unify their entire ecosystem.

Yeah. Exactly the same sentiment. I have a 2018 ipad pro too, and... it runs anything I can throw at it. Admittedly, I don't try to do, I dunno, video editing or something on it. But unless they release xcode for the ipad, or put macos on it, or something that actually uses all that juice they keep shoving inside, I just... don't see the point.

maybe for gamers?

> Admittedly, I don't try to do, I dunno, video editing or something

> something that actually uses all that juice they keep shoving inside, I just... don't see the point

Is this a joke or something? Video and image editing was actually the biggest selling point shown repeatedly all over the keynote.

As an IT "Pro" the only thing I can use "professionally" (apart from testing iPad apps) is the SSH client, and that works fine on my iPad 1.

Sheesh, the browser doesn't even have devtools.

(only grouchy because I'd love to get one if it wasn't so crippled)

The presentation contained a funny mission impossible video where Tim Cook stole a M1 from a Macbook Air and put it in an iPad pro. I think it could be a hint to having MacOS on top of the iPad pro. WWDC is coming and they have been preparing for the same apps to run both on iOS and Mac OSX.

Things I do on an iPad, ranked by how unlikely I am to do them on another computer:

- Draw. This is the big one. I'm no fine artist, but I do a bit of calligraphy now and then, and Procreate is amazing.

- Make memes. It might not be more "productive" to caption funny pictures on my iPad than it would be to do it on desktop, but it's more fun. It feels more natural to manipulate images on a tablet.

- Read PDFs. the 12.9" iPad is carefully sized to make US letter and A4 documents readable. I'll load a PDF up in one of the zones of my wide monitor if I'm using it as a reference for a slide deck or whatever, but if I'm just reading it, it's the iPad for me.

- Edit video. I doubt I would stick with this work flow if I were a dedicated content creator. But I'm not, and stitching some footage off my mirrorless camera together, putting a soundtrack to it: the iPad makes this pleasant.

- Look at photos. Also, showing them to other people. A couple weeks ago I took my iPad with me to the mechanic to show some pictures I had taken of my front bumper, lamentably separated from the rest of the vehicle in a fender bender. A phone might have sufficed, but a tablet is obviously better and I have one. When I'm in the mood to scroll through my memories, the iPad is the place to do it.

- Twitter. This is the inflection point! I had a phase of taking my Twitter time on the tablet, and went back to using my laptop. Scrolling with a flick of the pencil is nice, but inputting text is very much not its strong suit, and there are ads. I don't like ads.

Edited to add: I'm heavy on the gizmos. If I had to ditch one, it would be the iPad, and I have no interest in upgrading my 3rd gen whatsoever. But I'm glad I don't have to ditch it! For what it's good for, it really shines. I'm fond of it.

Pretty similar for me.

- reading pdf and books

- import and watch photos

- write notes and draw sketches and plans with the pencil

- bring along in the shop

I also use it as a laptop sometimes, with an external keyboard. As a linux/vim user, anything with an ssh client is good enough to get work done anyway. I still find it preferable to a windows machine.

I think the idea is: for most of these, extra horsepower isn't much of a selling point (video editing being the big exception). Not that it's bad - it means your device will stay capable for longer, if nothing else - it's just a weird thing to focus on in marketing materials

>- Draw. This is the big one. I'm no fine artist, but I do a bit of calligraphy now and then, and Procreate is amazing.

Same, and this is how the iPad really shines, except for one huge drawback: limited RAM means I either have to reduce my art to sub-4k quality or limit it to 30-ish layers.

Both options suck. It was very disappointing to see no mention of RAM anywhere in this announcement. Maybe for some applications processing speed is a limiting factor, but it certainly isn't the bottleneck for artists, so this announcement is a bit of a letdown.

Wait there was a mention of RAM today - up to 16Gb!

Tada! Apple officially announced that RAM capacity is 8GB/16GB (for the first time to announce it?)

For me the iPad (2018) was just the cheapest entry to the tablet + pen combo. I love digital pen input and the tablet for reading documents. For a moment I liked the app ecosystem and thought maybe the Apple hype is valid. Now, I hate the stupid limitations of iPadOS, the Appstore and the commercialisation of every god damn aspect of the iPad experience.

I would kill for a good Linux tablet with low latency pen input. Xournal++ and Krita would be completely sufficient.

Most apps and ideas I initially liked on the iPad, would be much better FOSS. So many apps ultimately fail for me because the developers trying hard to wall some garden, instead of implementing export/import of an open standard.

Oh and ofc, horrible file management and no code execution.

Fuck this shit. Stallman was right...

It's be pretty great to see Final Cut Pro on the iPad Pro. I'm surprised it doesn't already exist. Maybe the workflows there are incompatible with the iPad UX?

I think they are banking on Lumafusion to be good enough for that use case

For me the overall experience just doesn't work as a productivity device. The gestures to multitask are too complex. Every edge and corner has a different meaning, and swiping does several different things depending on direction.

It's not natural to have your monitor and keyboard super close together, and to have your monitor sitting directly on a desk.

It's not comfortable to poke a semi-vertical touchscreen over a long period of time where you have to support your whole arm while also making precise movements with your fingers.

Fingers are not precise enough to interact with basic elements like text fields and buttons.

I'm sitting here at my desk with its large monitor on an arm, mechanical keyboard and precision mouse and appreciating the years of thought that went into making this setup work. I think there is a possibility of something better with an iPad like device, but Apple would need to be far more ambitious than they've been so far.

Productivity takes many shapes and forms. The use cases highlighted in the video were about capturing video podcasts, rendering previews in the field, etc. you can be productive without fitting into the traditional mold of productive computing. Thats what ipad is after.

ipad's limitations are arbitrary and have no strong reason to exist. I've been an apple fan for years, and bought my first PC in nearly 20 years recently because I shouldn't have to buy two very expensive apple devices (a mac, and an ipad) to cover all of my use cases.

Exactly, the Mac has very biased defaults but is open to customization. The iPad is very biased period. It’s „you’re using it wrong“ taken to the extreme. The device should work for the user. Every time I see a convoluted iPad remote webdev setup I can’t help but think the user is working for the device. (I have the same feeling towards using VIM as a general purpose IDE. It works but requires much more work than, say, using VSCode with a VI plug-in).

It’s been gratifying to see I’m not the only one with these issues! That said, lineage wise the limitations and issues aren’t arbitrary - iPadOS is basically a slightly upsized clone of iOS, and just like you wouldn’t be using your phone for precision data/pointing (or if you were it wouldn’t be as buy a deal, because you’d just be using a finger/thumb and not reaching across a keyboard), the original nature of iPad interactions are similar.

Obviously seeing some improvements, but for instance copying 50GB of high precision photos (without potentially mangling them/importing them because it’s a dataset not a bunch of snapshots!) is a terrible experience in iPadOS - and a trivial exercise in every laptop/pc OS out there.

They’ve got a long way to go, unfortunately, especially for enterprise use cases. The hardware really has potential though!

yeah, I love the limitations in ios for my phone, but not for my computer!

If ipad’s limitations were arbitrary they wouldn’t exist. The product design is shaped by the use cases it optimizes for. This is no different than saying a GPU has arbitrary limitations for running general C++ code. In some sense yes, you could make a single thread c++ compiler target the GPU, but 1) it wouldnt fit the design well and 2) changing the design to make it work well would mess up the original intended use case.

That's fair, arbitrary wasn't the right word. They were chosen for the use case of a smart phone, not a general purpose computer. People pretending that they are reasonable for a general purpose computer are missing the boat IMO.

But some things are arbitrary. For example, only allowing one web browser engine is 100% arbitrary (or worse, an abuse of monopoly power).

MacOS allows arbitrary web browser engines, yet I just use safari. My mac has never felt less like a general purpose computer because of this. How is this related?

I’m a developer that often does web work. I need to test on multiple browsers, which is literally impossible on the iPad for no good reason.

Additionally: I have this beautiful device with great computing power but I can't install my favorite extensions on its browser.

Yes those people are missing the boat. We don’t have to worry about them though. Let’em suffer the pain of ignorance ;)

The limitations were born of hardware weaknesses when mobile devices were brought to market. The do seem arbitrary now, but they made sense 10 years ago. Those hardware weaknesses are long gone (it's not just Apple Silicon that is blazing fast in ARM land). Maybe it's time to rethink the whole mobile OS thing.

The precious use case of ripping 30% off all the cash flow in the ecosystem.

> It's not comfortable to poke a semi-vertical touchscreen over a long period of time where you have to support your whole arm while also making precise movements with your fingers.

To be fair I think Apple knows this too, which is why trackpad/mouse support is now a first class feature rather than an accessibility option.

And also probably why they have never released touch Macs.

This is something I've been saying: Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon and compare the same on a pinephone with a decade old budget SoC.

One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations.

You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone.

EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.

> Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon

OK but you are describing something that 99.8% of iThing owners will never do.

sharing and building code is an important aspect of computing and making computers fundamental to people's lives while working to make them difficult to understand is very wrong. They don;t do it partly because it's so unpleasant.

Watch a commercial for the iPad. It is not marketed as a computing device, to do CLI programming or spreadsheets on. It's selling points are stuff like Procreate and Lightroom...both 'work' apps but for the 'creative economy'.

That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.

I'm a computer nerd at heart, and I've _never_ wanted to pull a repository or compile a project with a phone. Ever.

(Ok, there was this one time with a Nokia N900, but it was just a phase =) )

Do you write notes? Where do you keep them? In some cloud with no version control, under some proprietary binary format? Good luck with that.

You're just not living in the real world.

My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.

They will likewise also not care about the increased computational power here.

Based on the way you phrased this I'm legitimately unsure which one gets painfully hot and which one does what you ask in your example.

Peak Hacker News. Comparing an iPad Pro with a Pinephone to do something 99.9% of iPad Pro target audience wouldn’t even know the meaning of.

If you're not going to do anything where performance matters why pay a premium for it?

Video and photo editing are common iPad Pro use cases where performance matters.

I always assumed that safari/youtube/netflix were the common use cases. Do numerically many people actually video/photo editing on these devices to make it "common"?

As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things.

I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?

You are not alone. :)

Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.

Well, now, that's interesting. I legitimately did not know that, even though I own three Blackmagic PCC4k video cameras and take quite an interest in 'playback technology', whether audio or imagery. I do know that my horrifyingly over-expensive iMac Pro has a good screen, but not Pro Display XDR good. I'd assumed the iPads were basically consumer grade.

So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.

People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.

The screen is honestly amazing. Puts everything else in its field (and most pc / laptop monitors) to shame.

That was before the M1 laptops. I would say that most desktop users would be better served keeping their workflow than moving to a tablet workflow.

I do all my audio editing on the iPad. And I generate artwork (generally by mangling stock photos) on there. I also do a little bit of video editing but not enough to count it as a common use case.

It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).

For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.

It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.

Do you really think apple would be making pro level devices for that exact purpose if people werent?

I make a (good) living working as an iOS developer on the video editing app (LumaFusion) shown several times in today's event. We have a very solid userbase, including plenty of people using it for professional work. Apple chose to use the app as a featured example in marketing the new iPad. To me, that's all evidence that video/photo editing is indeed a "common" use case for these devices.

Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.

Haven't you heard? Programming is the only "pro" or performance-intensive thing that exists.

I don't even understand why programmers are always so up in arms about devices like the iPad. Why on earth does one want to program on a handheld touchscreen device anyway? I have zero expectations for that, much like I have zero expectations for the laptop I do program on to be a good drawing device.

I don't get the huge blind spot there, either, and it's pervasive on here every time the iPad comes up.

"I can't boot an OpenBSD VM on it so it must only be for watching YouTube, for sheeple consumers, not godlike 'creators' like me".

Meanwhile it's plainly great for all kinds of creation-oriented activities, especially where the real-world meets the digital. The sensors are great. Pencil is great. It's a really good companion-tool for all kinds of real-world work, better than a laptop (though actually iPhones often beat both iPads and "real" computers, in that regard, just because of the form factor) Plus it's got some damn good, often-interactive educational apps, some of which work better on a tablet than they would anywhere else. Much the hell better for several of those things than any laptop running a "real OS for Serious Work".

But no, it's just a Netflix console for drooling morons, because you can't easily HAX0R it to replace the lock screen with a port of DOOM, since if you can't do that then it must not be any use for creating things. Give me a break.

Amen.

The whole "this device isn't meant for programmers" argument is a red herring. I don't like how the discussion ultimately boils down to complete control over the OS. That's not going happen, and likely requires a different mental model around OS abstractions, so we should put that aside.

My original point was that productivity apps, whether its photo/video/audio editing, word processing, or 3D modeling, all categorically benefit from features like better file management, IPC, background processing, working with external displays, easier keyboard/trackpad navigation, etc...

I saw some things in the presentation around external storage and thunderbolt devices which look like steps in the right direction, but the OS is really not doing it any favors. I would guess that the iPad is successful among this demographic despite iPadOS, not because of it.

Don't forget only UNIX guys are programmers, the rest of us using XCode and similar tooling are just muggles.

Well yeah, you are. We real programmers program by fabricating our own NMOS transistors and wiring them together by hand.

I hear this argument a lot, but I don't buy it. Let's flip it around, 99% of people will want to do something with their computer that will turn out to be a giant pain in the ass with an ipad compared to a mac or windows laptop.

If you had a friend/relative that didn't have much money, and was asking you for advice about which "computer" to get and they can only have one. Would you recommend an ipad? There is no chance I would recommend an ipad in this context.

Jobs liked to describe computers as bicycles for the mind. The ipad is a unicycle for the mind.

No, and you know what, neither would Apple, otherwise they wouldn't offer M1 Macs. The mistake is that everyone thinks Apple wants its product to be everything, just because their marketing tends to encompass and emphasize bold claims of universality. The reality is that Apple knows pretty well its segmentation. The Pro in the iPad Pro is the same Pro of the iPhone, it simply doesn't mean what the average hackernews reader thinks it means. The Pro is a videographer, a photographer, an influencer, a consultant and so on. In general, a subset of the creative professions or someone that needs a slick device to show its presentations on. I'm lucky enough to review tech products for a living and I've been through the last seven generations of iPads. iPad Pro is a product of its own league. It's perfect for low-distraction pro tasks like writing, for example, with light research on the side, but it's absolutely the best device I've ever used for professional photography workflows. I have, indeed, suggested to many photographers to absolutely buy the iPad Pro, as it's simply a game changer. The quality of the screen paired with the speed of the the AXX chips is unrivaled on Macs, unless you spend quite some money to buy a Eizo monitor or some other professional device. So here's a simple "Pro" definition that in my book is way more effective at explaining why the iPad Pro does not need to be what so many users here think it should be.

I agree that the target market might be different. However, even though multimedia workflows work pretty well on the iPad, some of the same restrictions that apply to development apply there.

For example, there's no notion of rendering a video in the background, organizing project files independent of the application, a plugin ecosystem for creative software, and proper IPC between these apps. So even though the market is different, there's still a lot to be done to come close to desktop editing workflows.

I've always desired an iPad Pro for displaying PDFs of piano sheet music while practicing, because it's light enough to not damage the piano stand, and has a high resolution display. But then I realize the iPad Pro is kind of overkill if I don't intend to use it for anything else. Can you recommend a cheaper alternative? Maybe one of those e-paper things, or some other light tablet?

Why not a non pro iPad?

I've tried that, unfortunately regular iPads are just too small for full-page display of musical notation. Actually right now I just prop up my MacBook Air, but then the keyboard sticks out, and similarly it only displays 1/2 page at a time, and so forth.

gotcha, that makes sense. You might be able to get a cheap chromebook with a big enough screen that folds into a tablet form. One thing to be careful with on these is the brightness of the screens if you want to use it outside.

iPad Air? But any non-Pro iPad is ok if you don’t mind much about the bezels and the less spectacular display. In general, if you have just one intended use for a tablet as a “smart lightweight device with a display”, and that use isn’t tied to an App Store app, then Android tablets are worth checking. The high-quality display might be a bit more of a problem, though, unless you go for a product with a similar price range. If you have other Apple products, the ecosystem advantage is huge.

Ah I didn't mention, for music purposes a big screen is ideal for reading letter/A4-sized sheets of fine-print music for long periods of time. It's a pretty niche use case, I guess.

That's a pretty food idea! I've just been printing it out. I feel like most e-readers are too small though.

How is that different from any other computer?

Point is, the limitation is software. Even an extremely underpowered niche toy beats the iPad in a common, intuitive task for such a device.

iSH is an x86 emulator.

But yes I would love it if the iPad Pro could just run macOS and i could actually use it as a software development environment, but also run iOS apps. I'd buy that device yesterday

Well, I might say it's not fair because iSH is not your only choice on the iPhone, at least if your goal is "checking out a git repo and editing files." Running git clone using an actual iOS native git client like Working Copy is pretty fast. And because Working Copy is an iOS file provider, you can edit files in a repo directly in a native iOS text editor like Textastic. If we're talking about doing web development, pair that with a cheap Linode or Digital Ocean VPS, the Blink terminal app and/or Secure ShellFish (an SSH client that also hooks in SFTP/SCP in as a file provider along with Shortcuts automation) and you're probably doing pretty darn well.

Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :)

(Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)

As a heavy Working Copy user, with all the respect I have for its great developer, it is just a bad UX; Buggy, slow as hell, and you need to constantly wait for it as you can't minimize the app as the dumb iOS will kill it.

SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)

I'm not a huge fan of Working Copy's UI, although to be fair to it, I find a lot of desktop GUI Git clients to be pretty arcane as well. My experience with Blink has been pretty good on the whole, though. In any case, I was focusing on iSH specifically -- I'm just not convinced that "when I run this terminal program which is a clever hack to allow console Linux apps to run in x86 emulation, it's a poor experience" is a great argument against the iPad's utility. :)

But, I'll take gentle issue with

> the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro

I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.

I own a pinkebook pro and it can't survive a kernel compilation (which is quite a normal thing to do for this device because it doesn't run on mainline kernel and requires patching) without dying from the battery drainage while plugged in.

Exactly the same here, coming from a 2017 one.

There hasn’t been a moment I lacked computing power or battery life or anything else. The software experience has been lacking.

I was really hoping iPadOS would bring us closer to MacOS. There was even some hope that an M1 iPad would come with MacOS.

I just want to be able to do things without needing an expensive app or a really shitty work around. If it wasn’t for needing the pencil, I’d have stepped away quite some years ago.

My thoughts exactly. Apple might have the apps, but actually getting stuff done on it feels cumbersome and strange. I'm not sure why they continue to stretch the iPad in so many directions when they could just be focusing on a good tablet experience.

It is a great tablet experience! They could have a dual boot option where you get a MacOS for real work. Otherwise you are right, don't try to make real work happen in the current form. SO MUCH FRICTION to copy and move a file around for example.

The bulk of my use is strictly tablet stuff and I think it is really great at that.

Exactly. The OP complaining that it’s cumbersome to use Excel, well yeah, but the things tablets are designed for; dragging, drawing, tapping etc. It excels at (pun intended)

Sure, but I think the overall sentiment is that Apple hasn't really pushed the iPad any further as an input device. It still does those drawing, dragging and tapping things well, but why haven't they pushed those gestures to work with context menus or have some unified purpose? In some ways, the iPad is still the bare minimum of being a tablet, but it's mastered that concept. As Apple continues to market it as a "computer" though, they have a responsibility to improve the computer aspects of it: file management, improved user control, and developer solutions are all weak or missing links in the chain here. Sure it does tablet well, but it sucks at computer.

Hard agree. M1 on the iPad is great from a technical perspective (having the same CPU/CPU arch on desktop and mobile platforms is a game-changer), but doesn't really do anything for me right now when things like Google Sheets are a pain to use on it.

It does chew through a fair bit of your IT budget though, but yeah no doubt its a cool device.

But, for the asking price of the iPad Pro I'd rather get a nice PC laptop with latest gen Ryzen and Nvidia hardware.

Guess I'm just not in the target group for the iPad Pro.

I can think of one use case where it could be nice - content creators.

For example I like to noodle on guitar and frankly guitar interface + iPad > laptop.

Likewise for video editing, photo touchups, etc.

I can see iPad for creatives using more processing power

The iPad is great for musicians. I use mine for sheet music and also for noodling on the guitar but here’s what I don’t like about it:

- you need a dongle to plug the interface and the charger together (maybe other interfaces can supply power but mine cannot)

- my interface also behaves as an usb audio device (I suspect all of them do) but iOS does not let you choose audio out through internal speakers or airplay if the usb audio device is present

- some apps don’t support multiple inputs and default to the first input (which on my interface is mic in), GarageBand does not have this problem

Of course this is not a problem for things like digital pianos that just explore midi over Bluetooth.

I can’t speak to these issues, however it would be excellent to have one of these running a full OSX. I’d certainly get one if I had that level of control to develop on it and choose which software I installed without an App Store. As things stand these devices aren’t for us, so judging them on the needs of hacker news user vs more standard consumers isn’t really a fair fight. They are deliberately limited to appeal to your gran and your 6 year old and your casual user without too many issues.

I should mention that my frustration only came out of trying to switch my parents over from an old 32-bit Windows laptop to the iPad. They're already iPhone users and most of their time is either spent in a web browser or in document processing. So I figured that an iPad Pro with a magic keyboard would be perfect for them.

Even still, the level of finesse they have with Excel and productivity software on a desktop OS was just not replicable on the iPad. It pained me to see my Dad work on his spreadsheets on the old laptop again.

The silver lining to this is at least the iPad is good for watching videos and pretty decent at web browsing. They still use the device casually.

My issue is that an $800 iPad Pro with keyboard and pencil ($1200 including the accessories) should be in a whole different class in terms of productivity than the $329 base iPad. But it's not. They both do the same thing (good for consumption, decent for creativity, pretty crappy for productivity)

A $2000 PC isn't any different from a $900 one either. It's just faster/more memory/more SSD/better graphics card. It still runs the same Office/Photoshop/Chrome/whatever people use.

I'm still skeptical that Apple wants it to be a general-purpose computer.

It doesn’t. It is more a consumer console than personal computer IMO

Personally, if they make it a general-purpose computer, I'll be eagerly waiting for them or someone else to create the next iPad. It's already gone too far that way, IMO—I like it as a slab of smart glass that can become, entirely, a whole bunch of different, separate, specific tools, not as yet another complex, generic, multi-tasking computer. In that respect, it's mostly been going downhill since iOS 6, IMO, as far as the OS interface and behavior.

Why can't it let you just choose which experience you want?

We tried to build a universal app for two sides of a job board once. The app offered different workflows depending on whether you're a job seeker or a recruiter. Man, managing that UX- and code-wise was a pain the ass. Imagine doing that for the whole OS.

This is a common workflow? two views talking to the same backend.

I like it better if 100% of the software on the device operates under the same constraints, so the developer of some app that I really need/want can't decide "no, you need to be in desktop-alike mode for this to run, because I just don't feel like dealing with tablet mode". It's basically the same problem as allowing multiple app stores, in that it'd fragment the experience and leave me having to choose between "do what the developer of this app wanted, which isn't what I wanted" and "don't have the app". I prefer that everyone has to deliver software the same way, under the same constraints, for predictability and user control of their environment (that is, I want the device to work like a traditional tablet, period, so I prefer that developers have to treat it that way, as it results in the device always working the way I want it to, for all software that runs on it)

And in fact, I can currently choose the experience I want if I decide I want a typical multitasking desktop—by putting down the iPad and going over to a Mac (or Linux, or Windows, or FreeBSD machine, or whatever). Or, to extend the "I like a tablet that becomes things, modally" way of thinking about it, by putting the iPad in Remote Desktop mode and connecting over VNC or SSH or RDP to a traditional desktop or server.

As I wrote the above comment, I was thinking along a similar line of thought re: "no, you need to be in desktop-alike mode for this to run."

I do agree that this is an issue, but I wonder how much of one. I feel like there is quite a bit of inertia behind iOS style "apps" right now that a sizable mass userbase will not use your service if it is a desktop-style interface, because that sort of interface is unfamiliar to them.

Only for very niche apps would you be able to survive on desktop app alone. Many fo those niche uses would be geared towards power-users who are likely more used to a desktop environment.

I think that's what Windows 8 was going for, to be able to choose between a tablet experience and a desktop experience based on which app you use. The problem was that they pushed the app experience too hard without a clear option to choose between the modes. Win 10 has walked this back pretty well, but I still find myself using desktop apps 99% of the time (even when using the Surface as a tablet).

I don't know that it would have to be a full general-purpose computer. For the most part, if they found a way for Xcode to run on an iPad, I feel like MacOS would be (eventually, slowly) doomed.

iPad is a "computer" for people who just browse internet, watch YouTube and play games. Bringing the whole macOS experience to iPad would be a distracting endeavour IMO. Yeah, it'd be dope for some people, but the number of those people is overestimated.

Remember the Apple ad with the little girl who replies... 'What's a computer?' The ad ended with the tag line...

“Imagine what your computer could do if it was an iPad Pro”.

disappointingly limited, it turns out.

If you look at it in the abstract, using a computer is equivalent to programming it (ad-hoc), whether the computation and memory live in your head, on a clipboard, or in some app. If the whole "low-code"/visual programming trend is any indication, we need to collectively raise the power of tools and narrow the gap between usage and programming.

Apple should be trying to empower users with safe abstractions, not lock them down even more.

Really, at this point the only things keeping me from replacing my everyday-use personal laptop with an iPad Pro or iPad Air are:

- The lack of a true development environment local to the device

- The lack of true background app support for things that need persistent connections (ssh clients, etc)

I honestly think there is a great opportunity for a Linux tablet plus pen input (high dpi; precision and low latency). People just don't know yet, that's what they want. FOSS would thrive there.

I’ve been working from an iPad as my main machine for the past couple of years now. Definitely doable (but as other have said, there’s _is_ pain when working local only).

I keep an AWS box spinning that runs docker and my dev env (vim as editor), then connect to this via Blink shell. This lets me port forward via SSH. If I need L2 I then use ZeroTier. My SSH key lives in my local Secure Enclave and then forwards via ssh-agent when needed on the external box (eg pushing commits). Background offloading is avoiding by enabling the geo lock, which also has the bonus of tearing down any SSH connections if the device leaves the lock area. Ends up as a pretty neat setup.

I hope they are making these changes in order to take iPad into MacOS direction. Based on MacOS big sur UI changes (icons are now rounded corner iPad like, menu bar has more spacing and iPad like controls etc), I think they are prepping for it.

Multitask UI is still horrible. I sometimes creates new Safari windows in mistake, closing them and return to correct window is not an easy task.

The software experience is the one thing I wish Apple would improve upon faster. It's got quite good as of late, but there's still a lot of things that could be way better all around.

I can certainly agree that Excel on iPad is an awful experience, though. I gave up using my iPad for Excel stuff at work in short order.

What I do these days is use an iPad Pro and use a cloud-based virtual desktop [1] so I have the best of both worlds with me. The caveat is that you can't do this without internet access.

[1] https://shells.com/

This is a neat idea, but I feel like an iPad Pro is overkill for accessing a virtual desktop. You could set up something similar with an old laptop for a fraction of the price.

Or an old regular iPad, if you like the form factor.

I personally think multitasking works great, but I guess that's subjective. The claim about external screens is not true though, as a developer you can put anything you want on an external screen, mirroring is just the fallback behaviour.

Almost all apps obviously take advantage of the keyboard, and 100% of apps where it makes sense. The trackpad can also be used in all apps, although it is true that not all apps are optimised for it yet, but all standard UI elements support it automatically.

Not sure why you'd expect iPad apps to be similar to the desktop variants, it seems that would be pretty pointless no? You might not like the iPad UX, but many people prefer it.

> as a developer you can put anything you want on an external screen

as a developer, not a user. I can’t have two different apps running on different displays, nor can I take advantage of the display’s resolution. In practice, everything is mirrored.

> Almost all apps obviously take advantage of the keyboard

When I say take advantage of the keyboard and mouse, I mean to offer shortcuts/navigation akin to what you’d find on a desktop.

I don’t mean to say that apps should be exactly like desktop apps, but the iPad UX is making it harder to use the current iteration of document/spreadsheet apps.

There are things the iPad does strictly better, of course. But I don’t see these experiences as mutually exclusive.

It is true that the second screen is controlled by the current app, but I don’t think there are any other limitations.

There are absolutely keyboard shortcuts. Obviously this is up to developers, a lot of apps like Things, Shapr3d etc have excellent shortcut support.

It takes a while to optimise UX in a new interface paradigm, amd again this is obviously up to developers. There are few technical limitations. And considering how little Excel on the PC has changed over the last 20 years, we should be happy. And look at Numbers and Pages on iPad, really good UX.

>Multitasking is cumbrous enough that it might as well not exist

iPad OS desperately needs a persistent dock or taskbar, like we see on macOS and Windows. The gesture system is too cumbersome to be effective.

Yeah I seriously don't understand Apple here.

The Microsoft Surface Pro is such a great example in contrast, offering a full OS in a tablet form. I had a Pro for about 6 months and I loved that thing, the only problem was the hardware was subpar and failed on me twice so I gave up on it.

An iPad Pro M1 running OS X would be my dream portable machine.

iOS is such a waste on this device. A crippled, mobile OS that barely lets you do any productivity work. Why, Apple, why.

True. But this is also what I am so exciting about what will be next on iPadOS on WWDC this year, hardware has already over Mac, it’s time to software.

The problem is that nobody has really found a way to bridge the chasm between touchscreen UI design and mouse/keyboard UI design.

Attempts to get there tend to dumb down and limit the functionality of the mouse+keyboard experience.

I guess the obvious option would be to let Pro users switch an iPad into a 'MacOS mode' with the full desktop interface, mostly relying on an additional keyboard+mouse. But I can't see Apple going for anything like that. They're more likely to push the desktop interface more in the direction of iOS...

Windows 10 does it perfectly.

If you haven't used a Windows 10 tablet for any amount of time, I'd suggest trying it out. I've used small and large Windows tablets for many years and have yet to find any big complaints about the UX.

In your opinion ofcourse. I find Windows 10 tablet mode ghastly, especially compared to ipados or ios. The only nice thing is that you have a real OS. If this iPad would run macos or windows, I would leave laptops and phones behind from that moment in. But alas. Maybe the 2nd gen surface X?

I suppose everybody here should always preface their comment with IMO...

Good thing that if you don't like the way Windows 10 looks, you can easily change it. Other than that, functionally, everything just works and I'd challenge you to say what doesn't.

I don’t get why you complain anout the OS and then have hopes for the more polished hardware platform. Is it due to it being ARM based? That would impact on performance and battery at most, UX wise...

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