Hacker News Reader

Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

> It’s a terrible shame because I think there really is value in a computer that fills the space between a phone and a “real” computer.

Apple has the technical capability to make a Macbook that is separable. The screen comes off and makes an iPad.

It also has the technical capability to make a bi-modal OS.

OSX with a HW toggle switch that allows OSX/iPadOS modes. The switch could be nearly seamless. The unlimited freedom OSX mode is an overlay FS on the iPadOS mode. Change anything you want, run anything you want and when you flip the switch, the OSX apps are frozen to disk, the overlayfs unmounted, and you still have any iPadOS apps running. Flip it back, and the OSX world resumes as it was.

But you can't have this product, because the marketers at Apple know that you would never buy an iPad again if you had this.

View on HN

To be fair Microsoft has their own version of an iPad that converts into a laptop and it doesn’t work that well from what I heard.

It's been about 10 years since I used my surface pro at uni. The main problems that I remember were

1) top heavy, because all the hardware is on the screen portion, so it's difficult to balance and use it on your lap

2) lack of processing power due to the form factor and thermal limitations

3) lack of touch friendly windows apps that can make it truly useful as a tablet

1 probably can't be helped, but 2 and 3 should definitely be better now especially since Apple silicon and iOS exist, if they choose to make something like this...

Not really for 2. I have a MBA and it heats up when I do an OCR of a scanned book. And I don’t want touch friendly app on MacOs, I actually like the dense UI found in IDEs and graphic softwares because, they’re very efficient with the mouse. 13-14 inch is the perfect screen size for me (16 if I wanted to work on the go). But it would be unwieldy as a tablet.

This reply comes to you via a Surface Pro on my lap as I lay on a couch. #1 is true but not as bad as it might come across to someone who hasn't used one. If they used a friction hinge range than a true flap this would be largely ameliorated, but I don't know if you can pull it off without ruining the form factor.

#2 is subjective and depends on your use-case. I find that for mine (circuit design, PDF markup, email/web, low-requirements mechanical CAD, casual gaming) it's totally fine.

#3 is very real. I don't use the Surface Pro as a pure tablet almost ever. The only exception is if I'm stuck on a plane and there's no room for the keyboard and all I'm doing is reading.

I really wish the keyboard could talk wirelessly back to the tablet so that I could put the keyboard behind the screen and still type on it every now and then when I'm primarily drawing with the computer.

I've got a Microsoft Surface Book (3rd gen), and it works great. It works just how you'd expect in any configuration (laptop, tablet, or with the screen mounted backwards). The stylus has fantastic battery life too; I've only replaced the AAAA (quadruple A) battery once in 3 years. My main complaint is that I got the 15", and a 15" tablet is awkwardly large. In retrospect I probably would have been happier if I had gotten the 13".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com