The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.
I still find it sad that:
a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.
This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).
The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.
Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.
Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.
These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.
Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.
Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.
But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.
The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.
The crux of all this is having the option to run the software you want on the hardware you own. No, I don't do 3D modelling, CAD, scientific simulation or gaming on a daily basis. But I do use that software sometimes, and a device that excludes the possibility of running any of them doesn't sound fun or "limitless" to me. It all leads to the feeling that the iPad is a Disney-fied version of a professional workflow.
I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.
I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…
Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
I disagree. A gesture-based workflow won't replace Pro Tools' keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.
After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.
Let's check in again in a few device generations.
Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)
But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.