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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Around 10 years ago, Steve Jobs said the iPad was the most important product of his career and it seems like Apple is still looking at the iPad the same way. They have invested a ton of R&D into the hardware and they’re cautiously developing a tablet UI from the ground up.

I’m using both an iPad Pro and a MacBook Air and iPadOS is more modern and more fun to use in literally every way. I will ditch the Mac immediately when Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS reaches parity with Xcode. That will probably be 5-10 years from now.

I honestly believe that Apple wanted to relegate the Mac to be a platform for legacy apps and Xcode but they realized they were getting ahead of themselves. They needed to cater to developers, of course so they began the focus on the Mac again around 2015-2016 and now here we are …

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Steve jobs sales talent is so great it’s often called a reality distortion field

I don’t know if sales type statements should given that much weight

On another note The iPod and iTunes are what pulled the company out of bankruptcy

>On another note The iPod and iTunes are what pulled the company out of bankruptcy

Sure, but they were already working on the iPad in 2002. They only stopped because they got inertial scrolling working and decided to make a phone.

Agreed. I think the long term strategy is to continue to iterate on iPadOS until it's close to feature parity with macOS and then drop macOS. It may take a decade or longer. Instead of rethinking the desktop UI to fit touch interactions, they're rethinking the touch UI to fit pointer interactions. The last major hurdle to clear is windowing, which you can see small steps towards in iPadOS 15.

I don't think people give enough credit to iPadOS's adaptive pointer. It's a complete rethinking of what a mouse should be in the context of current tech. It's a pointer that can adapt its resolution in different contexts. For UI's that do not need high resolution accuracy, it's much faster to target and click elements.

I agree. I am happier using my iPad Pro, and some languages are supported (Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, LispPad (nice Scheme implementation) and there is always using Blink as a mosh client for using servers).

I think that Playgrounds will be a good app development environment sooner than you think. The problem is that Swift is by far not my favorite language (those would be Common Lisp, Racket Scheme, Haskell). I don’t doubt that the iPad Pro will soon be a very good Swift and SwiftUI dev kit. Off topic, but I started wring a Swift artificial intelligence book, but I put it on hold. Swift just does not give me the joy that Lisp languages do. However, for most Apple platform developers, Swift and SwiftUI is all they need.

They could have put Xcode on the iPad this whole time, at this point I'm fairly convinced they never will. Eventually they'll kill the Mac off and you'll be expected to use CI artifacts from your feature branches to test your code.

> They have invested a ton of R&D into the hardware and they’re cautiously developing a tablet UI from the ground up.

They’ve meticulously developed a tablet UX, where multitouch, pointer and keyboard-based interactions are treated as first class citizens.

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