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Comment by oblak | Hacker News Reader

Unless things have changed over the last few years, I think having 8/16 is a bit of an overkill for an OS this restricted. It says they all have 15W TDB but I'd hope that's just the just max they have been configured to work at. Hence me thinks even the 4/8 5425C should be plenty for web browsing and running android apps for many, many years.

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Good hardware restricted by software reminded me once again of the thing that iPadOS is. Despite excellent processors, the software is essentially iOS, with all its restrictions. Though chrome os is Linux based at least.

Question for any curious or innovative HN readers - what would you suggest to do with iPadOS' restrictions? I'm speaking both as an ipad owner disappointed with the software but also as an M1/Ax chip fan.

Potential solutions I can easily think of are: 1. Jailbreak - but it needs specific software and can be finicky, and very likely forces you to not get security updates

2. Physically remove the storage and *do something*. Except I don't know what even is possible, assuming that you're okay performing BGA soldering on a $$$ device.

Sadly, to fully use the M1/Ax processors I think the best thing to do with it is to sell it and buy a MacBook, and encourage others to not buy the high end iPads right now.

That is what I too think, however there are 2 issues that come to mind immediately: 1. There is a market for tablets - for note taking or reading magazines, it really is convenient. You could probably switch to a Samsung tablet and likely get a very decent experience, but a lot of the "good" apps are still iOS-only (Procreate, Goodnotes, Notability etc). Not to mention a decent aspect ratio.
2. If buying a proper computer, personally unless you only use MacOS it's prudent to get an x64 chip. Intel's 12th gen chips are (fortunately, finally!) again competitive even with M1s. An Intel/AMD chip can run Windows/Linux/MacOS/BSD/most OSes, but M1 Macs unfortunately can't.
Ironically I plan to upgrade from my Air to a Pro for the high refresh rate. Getting a 90hz phone really spoiled me in the most first-world way possible.

- Things 3 is another classic example of an app that would be very easy to port to other platforms if so wished, but the devs aren't interested in going outside Apple's Walled Garden. And if it makes them good money I can't even blame them.

The base iPad with an Apple Pencil under $500. I find 64gb to be workable, but if you want 256gb, it’s another $150 (ouch).

Granted, it’s not Samsung tablet cheap.

Samsung also makes very expensive and very high quality tablets. All they're missing imo is a bit more processor oomph.

> Things 3 is another classic example of an app that would be very easy to port to other platforms if so wished, but the devs aren't interested in going outside Apple's Walled Garden. And if it makes them good money I can't even blame them.

A big factor is likely the quality of the UI frameworks on other platforms. On Windows, only the older "legacy" frameworks come close to the depth of AppKit but are a bear to work with (and in questionable maintenance status). GTK isn't the worst, but version 3 and up makes no attempt to fit in on non-Linux desktops. Qt probably comes closest but it comes with the caveat of being tied to C++ or Python, and distribution can be a pain. With Electron you have to bring your own everything.

I follow some Apple platform devs (on top of being one myself) and there's will from them to produce software for other platforms, but only once there's an option as nice as AppKit/UIKit to do so with.

Yeah that's quite understandable. I just wish Microsoft/Google would attempt to improve this aspect - they probably already are doing things but from the sound of it not enough.

(Replying because I can't edit - the italics are accidental, I intended to use an asterisk for the Things 3 point)

A touch screen and pen support is just too good to pass up sometimes. I would love an M1 class android tablet that had all of this - thankfully we're getting close.

> and encourage others to not buy the high end iPads right now.

My entire group at work bought iPads as dedicated Zoom devices at the start of the pandemic. Did we make a mistake because our needs are different from yours?

You probably did make a mistake if you paid for top storage specs, keyboards and pencils, all exclusively for zoom.

Nope! Specifically meant this advice in the context of people who looked at the top of the line iPads and were hankering "to fully use the M1/Ax processors" to the point where they had considered cracking the hardware open or jailbreaking it. If you are looking for a computing appliance on the happy path then an iPad could be perfect.

Personally I would say I don't really know what the top of the line iPads are _for_ that the midrange ones can't handle but I can imagine there are apps out there that stress them when multitasking. My point is that if you want a general purpose computer to fully use the hardware we should just buy those instead of trying to make an iPad one of those.

Ah, I had no idea that's what you meant. Thanks for explaining.

Wait and hope somewhere like the EU forces Apple to open up the software/store restrictions has seemed the most realistically hopeful path to me. Alternatives are wait for someone to find a way to hack the bootloader open and add Asahi support for it (for this and every device that comes out for the rest of time). Or Apple to allow the bootloader to be opened like they do on the PC counterparts but obviously that's not what Apple wants to do or they wouldn't have released the M1 iPad fully locked.

Even better, Apple could port MacOS to the M1 iPad. Maybe they could have both iOS and Mac OS merged together and allow people to switch between tablet and desktop mode (like what they have done with Samsung devices). They could sell an external keyboard + trackpad for the desktop mode.

They probably won't ever fully merge the UIs of macOS and iOS, but given that the underpinnings of the two are so similar it would make a lot of sense for iPadOS to be able to suspend its touch-based userland and boot up a macOS-based KB+mouse userland.

Mac Catalyst is basically UiKit userland for macOS. I think Springboard and Finder will remain discrete UI paradigms but I think iPadOS might be going towards a place where it can use either depending on what it has connected (see: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/06/apple-patent-ipad-with-...).

I would be entirely unsurprised if Apple doesn’t already have macOS builds targeting the M1 iPad…

For sure, there were A14 based mac minis given to devs during the switch. The only "missing" components are drivers for the display/speakers etc which is the smallest part of getting a working system (compared to the OS + kernel).

It's also this thing that infuriates me to some extent. Apple can do amazing things if it wanted but... it doesn't appear to care about consumer benefit.

More freedom for users is less money in their pocket.

A12Z-based.

Why is that even conjecture?

It’s the same processor as in the M1 Mac and the dev ARM kits had A14s.

> Question for any curious or innovative HN readers - what would you suggest to do with iPadOS' restrictions?

Sell it and get a proper computer.

If ipad os is restrictive for you then the ipad is not for you.

True but I already have a normal windows laptop. I just wish something as capable as the iPad could reach its potential.

> I think having 8/16 is a bit of an overkill for an OS this restricted.

Restricted? It's capable of running:

* android apps directly from google play

* multiple linux containers (lxc)

* gpu accelerated linux gui apps (wyaland/lxc)

* docker containers inside lxc

* kvm virtual machines capable of linux, windows and even macOS guests

I have an 8 core CPU + 32GB RAM + 1TB Chromebook and it's my daily driver. I have ~100 tabs open, ~2 intellij projects open, some streaming service like youtube, netflix, hulu, etc. I run builds that pin the CPU such that if I had twice the cores I'd absolutely notice it.

I'd be very happy to see 16 core Chromebooks tbh, I definitely make heavy use of all 8 of mine today.

At these specs I expect the price to be pretty hefty, what was your reason to go for a Chromebook instead of another laptop + Linux?

It’s really surprising to me when people suggest that ChromeOS is worse than some other Linux. To me it’s head and shoulders above all the rest, because all the drivers always work perfectly, the touchpad works perfectly when other Linux developers are still putting out press releases every time they fix something trivial in their incredibly broken multitouch input stacks, and all the binaries including the kernel are peak-optimized with profile guidance for every specific CPU platform. There is no Linux distribution that can touch ChromeOS.

Can you use it for ‘regular’ computer stuff like compile python modules or run random binaries?

I had a cheap ChromeBook I used for quite a while, basically until the battery gave out and it turned into a desktop machine, but chromeOS was pretty limited back then so I just threw fedora on it. Almost all my Blender dev work was on that poor little underpowered thing…

Yes, on most[1] hardware: https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

[1] Released since 2019 plus these: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chro...

Yep, and it's incredibly easy to install. You just tap one button in the settings and wait a moment.

How well does it work without a Google account? Are there degoogled distributions that are likely to work, and alternative stores?

That would seem like the wrong tool for the job. I always say you pick your application, then the best operating system for it, then the best hardware for that, and I don't see any way to start from no Google account and end at ChromeOS. Using the Linux environment requires a signed-in (not guest) session and the only identity provider for ChromeOS of which I am aware is Google.

It was like 3,400 or something like that.

It's a work laptop, although I use it almost exclusively these days since I can easily use a "personal" profile. It's very easy to manage things like SSO/device policies on Chromebooks because of the GSuite integration.

There's pretty much nothing that it's "worse" at, other than in some niche scenarios - like there's a bug where the VM will return an invalid code for a specific CPUID, and it doesn't support nested virtualization, etc. Pretty niche stuff.

Otherwise... it works. Funny enough I'm now in quite a pickle with my Ubuntu laptop, which updated to a new kernel, failed, and now I can't roll back to the previous kernel. Because of this, virtually no drivers are working, so I can't connect to the internet... making it really really fun to deal with! Stuff like this doesn't really happen on my Chromebook.

What's changed is that web pages, whether you like it or not, are full blown applications, written in JavaScript, so an OS restricted to browsing web pages still has has performance needs especially at the top end of the market.

Yes, people still underestimate the value of single core perf and overestimate the value over multi core perf.

In practise: what matters to users of these devices is web browsing performance (which is still mostly a single core job - perhaps a second core can be practical in some browser/OS combos).

We're talking Chrome here, it'll happily chew through all the cores.

Also, remember, this "restricted" OS is more than capable of bringing up a full Debian container.

In fact it's capable of bringing up many. You can create N VMs and M containers if you want to.

Chome on a Chromebook is much more efficient than Chrome on other OSs.

It's the exact same codebase.

That codebase has to integrate with all sorts of GPUs and desktop environments. Unless you carefully tune everything in the software stack, it ends up being a slow power hog. ChromeOS comes pre-tuned.

(Disclaimer: I prefer Firefox. Sometimes I compare it to chrome. They're usually comparable, but on some machines, one completely blows the other out of the water.)

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