I wonder if something big will be announced about iPad software. I feel like there should be a reason why they put M1 into iPad Pros with a big jump in memory (from 6GB to 8/16GB) and processing power.
I guess it means I'm at least pretty future proofed if Apple ever decides to give iPadOS the attention it deserves.
(And add me to the list of people who thinks they should just port macOS to the iPad already. I don't think they ever will, though.)
Even the A12X (which benchmarks nowhere close to the M1) is overkill by a very long way. Especially now, given that it gathers dust most of the time.
Multi-user would at least a little more useful.
Honestly I'm going with Occam's Razor. I think the M1 iPad Pro exists for the same reason as the 2021 Apple TV. They had the chips.
Sadly, I think that may be a ways down the line, but I would love to be wrong.
So if they make the ipads too capable, they eat their own laptop sales.
A company like samsung does not have as strong vendor lock in, so they may as well make their tablets fully capable computers, because they are not competing with themselves.
This isn't to say that they don't like vendor lock-in, of course. If you do buy both an iPad and a MacBook they'll be happy to take your money. :) But I think they're positioning the Pro as a genuine laptop alternative -- just not for developers. (Or speaking from personal experience, technical writers.)
I have a family member replacing her grad school MacBook Air with an iPad Pro now that she's returned to the industry and has a work computer again for her programming/bioinformatics needs. And a lot of her workflow could be done in Jupyter Notebooks, honestly.
Programmer for over 15 years. Only reasons I bother to have any personal (non-work-supplied) computers other than an iPad or two (Pro + a Mini, if I had two) and an iPhone are: 1) I can't quite let go of PC gaming, 2) the Preview app on Mac (yes, really), and 3) frankly, piracy and related activities (setting up Kodi or Jellyfin stuff, emulation, major metadata-fixing sessions, that sort of thing)
On that last one, I'm increasingly unsure it's actually worth it. If that weren't the only (reasonable) way to get/enjoy certain things that I like quite a bit that point would probably go away and I'd have to seriously consider whether the other two were worth the cost, hassle, & space.
So I've gotta either give up on 100% of those things forever, or manage a bunch of files & either local disks or a couple cloud storage providers (and, ugh, that extra expense), plus keep whatever I need to actually use those files working... indefinitely. If I choose the latter option, that's easiest on a Real Computer.
I wish someone would hurry up and get us nigh-indestructible, 100+ year lifespan, non-rewritable data crystals or something, so I can stop screwing around with storage and its ongoing costs and constant risk of failure or destruction-by-user-error, for anything that I want to keep long-term. Write two crystals, keep one to use and have a friend store the other in case of a fire. Done. Spend zero time worrying about it or spending more money on it unless one of the crystals (or whatever they are) is destroyed, which may very well never happen.
Oh, and then there's family photos and videos. Sure I can stick mine in iCloud and Dropbox easily enough, but what about ones coming in from family? That's a pain to manage all on iOS devices and stick in the same cloud storage as my auto-uploaded phone backups. So I'm back to managing disks or redundant bulk cloud file storage of some kind.
Sometimes I think I need to get some more Buddhism in my life and just accept not keeping all this stuff, and never experiencing any of it again. Let it all go. Everything dies, nothing's permanent.
[0] Example: Certain TV shows with the original music, that's been replaced in home/streaming releases over rights issues (similar things have happened too some games, too). Cuts/versions of movies that essentially don't exist outside the world of piracy (e.g. anything very close to the original theatrical version of Star Wars)
[1] Example: Any older console video game that's only available on used, physical media for the original, rapidly-aging-and-increasingly-annoying/expensive-to-keep-working-and-hooked-up-to-a-TV console. Say, Goldeneye on the N64, to pick a fairly famous example.
Can you elaborate on this? Surely two tablets, a case, and a keyboard is not going to be smaller / more compact than a laptop. I also can't think of any contexts where I would prefer a setup I need to set up and "break down".
Meanwhile, they have been moving macOS to have more of the libraries and look and feel of iPadOS, and having catalyst be both a build target for making mac apps, and to reuse the libraries for running iOS/iPadOS-compiled apps on M1.
So I don't suspect they use it for anything like virtualizing macOS - they seem to instead be trying to build that part of the bridging functionality into the mac.
I suspect instead it is about giving the Pro model enough head room for more serious porting of "pro apps" to the iPad.
"If you already love iPadOS, well, you’re in luck — go out and buy a new iPad Pro and I assure you, you’ll be delighted. For the rest of us, I have a feeling we need to see iPadOS 15 before we experience the true potential of these new (or any recent) iPad Pros.
Three weeks until WWDC. "
In March they release significant changes and additions which do not have significant breaking impact. These are often targeting educational/business features (MDM management, classroom management, iPad usage), specifically because of the annual educational buying cycle requires the ability to evaluate in April/May to plan fall purchasing. This is also considered the last chance to deprecate functionality on the current version.
In June they announce new features and changes that will have breaking impacts on existing code in their annual September major release.
If Apple doesn't have new iPadOS functionality announced in a few weeks, the expectation is that the next significant functionality would be March 2022, and that still would be limited to things which do not break existing iPadOS code.
It is indeed very strange that Apple is shipping new iPads every year, each revision making iPadOS even more comically out of touch with the hardware on which it runs.
I'm sure Apple is planning something but we could just as easily be waiting another 2 years before iPadOS takes advantage of hardware capabilities, since Apple does plan ahead but they never tell us what they're planning.
iPad-buyers are clearly fine with the current state of iPadOS, and Apple is clearly happy with the number of iPad-buyers. They're in no rush.
https://twitter.com/never_released/status/125053374055785267...