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Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

Apple Silicon M2+ has hardware support for nested virtualization.

It's rumored [1] that 2024 iPad Pro will see price hikes of $500-$700 to cover the OLED screen and increases in base memory/storage. If a new iPad Magic Keyboard gains [2] an aluminum shell that looks like a Macbook, that could put iPad Pro into the price tier of Macbook Pros.

If 2024 iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard costs > Macbook Air + Mac Mini, that may allow Apple to untie iPad Pro M3 nested virt for iOS, macOS and Linux VMs.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ipad-pro-2024

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/3/23857409/ipad-aluminum-mag...

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I am a person outside of apple ecosystem that has to use iPhone and occasionally iPad for work.

Question : how do you manage your files?

My wife hears a primeval scream from our home office every 3 months when I determine to try to get files off my iPhone (voice memos, photos, downloads, whatever) or God forbid put files on.

Even worse screams when I try to manage files on device such as "delete all photos" (cannot.be.done).

And I degenerate into gurgles when I try to find or manage different files (a downloaded jpeg is "not" a photo and cannot be found via photos app,has been my bitterly learned experience. Because reasons).

I know modern generations are more comfy outside of hierarchical folder / file structure and treat their device like a massive database, which, fine in principle. But after 4 years of iphone usage I still see it as a massive black hole where files go in but don't come out. So I... Cringe with terrified shakes when people talk about iPads for work. How do your organize your files on them? How do you manage and transfer and version control?

Or am I a dinosaur and everybody's files are emephereally in the google or apple cloud and it's just not a problem, things are magically right and where they need to be?

No, people just suffer in silence.

There are famous Youtubers like MKBHD that more or less every year say:

"The new iPad is great, the hardware is awesome, I use the iPad a ton, but I can't use it to replace a laptop because of the lack of file management/window management/...".

I have heard this text in similar forms for at least 3 years.

You can make do, but it is as awkward as you'd expect.

The only winning entity is Apple, that gets people to also buy laptops and to be even more locked into this crippled setup, since as you said, younger generations aren't as aware of the possibilities, anymore.

I don’t think MacOS is a crippled system. Agreed that trying to use an iPad as a primary device is torture. But, compared to Windows, MacOS is comparably accommodating of my needs as a developer.

Is it though? I mean, I do remember the same, but I just booted into Win 11 after buying a GPD Win and it looks nice. Microsoft seems to have resigned itself to the fact that as a developer you should use WSL2.

If you do any kind of docker related development you will inevitably install something similar to WSL2 using docker desktop or whatever. Technically it now supports native containers, but we're not there yet.

WSL2 is also a virtual machine isn't it? It virtualizes x86 linux on x86 windows, kinda seamlessly, but still that's all it is.

Which is exactly what docker desktop on macOS does as well. Unless you're doing iOS or macOS development, contrary to common belief WSL2 is actually integrated better than it's mac counterparts. You can even mount other linux partitions into WSL.

Docker desktop is a piece of crap on macOS. It allocates half your ram for a linux VM and then allocates other linux VMs inside it. If you're doing servers, that's 7+ Gb of ram wasted since your work VMs will at most use hundreds of megabytes.

I sure hope WSL does better :)

Docker desktop works fine. You can change the memory settings, you realize?

No i don't realize anything. I had it on just to reproduce a backend and connect to it with my stuff for a while. I just copied whatever the linux (which doesn't have the same problem) backend had and did my work.

Defaults matter. And wasteful defaults denote a certain mindset. Not a good one.

With Docker on MacOS (and Windows), it needs to start a Linux VM so containers can run. This is transparent to the user. With Linux, they run natively, so no VM needed.

VMs require an upfront memory allocation, so this is the reason for the difference. You could also Google "Mac Docker Desktop Memory" and look at the first link.

There is no reason to preallocate 8 Gb though. I've explained how it works myself, but you rushed to justify their decision without reading my full post.

So lower the setting. I don't understand your complaints.

I like the MBP hardware. I think once I feel comfortable relying on Asahi it would be nice to run that instead of MacOS.

I meant kids aren't even moving to full blown computers and stay on crippled touch platforms like the iPad.

I manage files on my iPad (and iPhone) with Files and iCloud Drive. It’s been around for a while! The problem is that many apps are still stuck in 2015. But for apps that support it, using the Files file picker is no different than using the Mac file picker and Finder. You open files, you save them, they sync. Some apps do default to their own folder in iCloud Drive, but that folder can be accessed by any other app and is also available on the desktop.

Sadly third-party support for Files plugins is not what it should be (Google Drive is so incomplete I don’t know why they even bother). The major cloud services want you using their apps, I guess.

But Secure Shellfish does it perfectly so my Windows media server is available as a “file system” on my iPhone and iPad via SFTP.

The Files app allows storing files locally, and mounting network shares. You can also seamlessly copy and paste files (via handoff) between macOS and iOS.

I typically just hit Cmd+C on the Mac and long press+Paste on Files on the iPhone. If you are using the iPad with an external mouse or trackpad you can also drag and drop it directly to the Mac.

As for the distinction between random JPEG files and the Photos app, I think that's actually quite good. I don't get my gallery littered with random images, and it also supports non destructive editing, among other features. Moving between the two is also fairly easy, you can use the Share sheet or just drag and drop.

The one thing I would change is that screenshots end up in Photos.app by default, I'd rather have them go to Files.

Thx for your reply!

>> As for the distinction between random JPEG files and the Photos app, I think that's actually quite good.

Please don't take this personally, but that always terrifies me. It's like modern apple owner "sour grapes" fable - "I actually love this random limits tion, it makes my life much easier " and I hear it a lot! If I right click and save photo in some apps or websites it is in photos app, but in random other apps that same file is no longer a photo. How's that good? There are a million ways to "not clutter" that are better. Folder might be one but if that's anathema, then albums or tags. It's a completely random subset of things that end up being photos vs not, seemingly based on location or tags that arr neither visible or accessible to me as a user. I get that this is "good" for some people, I am clearly not in that group though.

Re ease of copying files, does any of that work if you don't have a Mac? Context of conversation here is iPhone / iPad as independent working devices and ability to transfer files without a Mac OS device. I am readily convinced that if I bought whole heartedly into apple ecosystem and only apple,my life would be easier along some axis, but that's not a life I lead - I have the black box of iphone and I cannot for example delete all photos on it in any way that I could find including in the app, in the settings, via apple support or apple store creepily smiling people :-/.

It seems like you want to delete all of the photos on your iPhone.

I have not tested this because I don't want to delete all my photos and I don't have a 2nd set of systems to try this out with, but I think this can be done by creating a "shortcut" to do it. (Shortcuts are like AppleScript for the iOS ecosystem).

To do this, search for the "Shortcuts" app and run it (it usually isn't visible).

- Create a new shortcut - Add the "Find Photos" action - Add the "Delete Photos" action

This should connect the two actions together. You can then run it using the play button.

This will take a very long time to run if you've got a lot of photos and it will ask to confirm using a popup. It might be worth trying to remove items in smaller chunks by using a filter (perhaps based on date or some other criteria).

I hope this helps.

Not taking it personally, :-) I 100% understand why you might also prefer it the other way.

The weird "some apps save it to Photos while others save it to Files" situation is a consequence of Files being a relatively late addition to the iOS ecosystem. A lot of apps are poorly maintained, use some cross platform framework that doesn't support the Files feature well, or the developers are simply unaware of the distinction. It will probably get better over time.

One thing Apple could do in the mean time is to also expose Photos as a folder view inside of Files (they do this on macOS, to some extent, on the file pickers. I've never actually used it)

Re: Transferring it to a PC, the one thing that won't work is the seamless copy and paste via handoff. You can plug in a USB stick into an iPad or iPhone (using an adapter for pre-15 models, or if the USB stick is USB-A) formatted as exFAT and it should just work.

AFAIK, there isn't a single button to delete all photos, probably to avoid people doing it accidentally. You'll need to manually select all photos and hit delete. Or you can also write a small script via the Shortcuts app to delete them for you.

The Files app can connect to various cloud services / local servers by adding locations.

For example, you can add a location for a folder shared via SMB from your Windows based computer.

https://osxdaily.com/2019/11/04/how-connect-smb-share-iphone...

For photos, either Photos app or Lightroom cloud is what I have used. I have a usb-c sd card reader that I use to upload photos onto the iPad. From there they end up on all my devices. The nice thing is this works if I instead upload them onto my MBP or took pictures with my iPhone.

For files, iCloud has worked fine.

Personally, I don't want to think about moving files from one device to another. I want them available on all devices regardless of where they were created/added.

I use KDE-Connect. Connects my Linux desktop and any Android or iOS device. It's originally a Linux Application but runs on Windows and MacOS as well.

You can send/receive files, photos, clipboard, notifications etc. On Linux I can also use it to control media and use my phone as mouse or keyboard.

The pairing is painless via QR-Code. You decide what is shared and what isn't. It works directly over your local network. No cloud servers are involved.

> Or am I a dinosaur and everybody's files are emephereally in the google or apple cloud and it's just not a problem, things are magically right and where they need to be?

Yep! Use iCloud and unburden yourself from ever thinking about files again.

Re: delete all photos, did you know that - if you are viewing a list of photos in an ‘album’ - you can click the Select button at the top right corner of the screen and then drag-select all the files? It’s quite tricky to do - you have to tap to select the first file, then touch and immediately drag to do the second file onwards. Took me years to discover this by accident - it’s the most fiddly/weird/hidden feature in an operating system that has become increasingly full of them.

I thank you for your reply, but are you trying to tell me drag selecting 50k photos is the way to go?

(And if people start screaming "why do you have 50k on your phone??!?", I'll start screaming right back "because I cannot offload or manage or delete them!!!" :-)

I have a shared iCloud folder with my dad with a few .mp4s in it that will consistently cause a hard crash on any iOS device by just…viewing the folder in Files. It crashes so hard that the entire system locks up and you can’t close the app, and holding down the power button doesn’t work to restart. You have to wait for the device to actually overheat and then shut itself off to cool down before you can bring it up again.

Why do you need files out? Just buy more iCloud storage. Or how is it supposed to work in iEcoSystem?

I assume you're sarcastic but I already pay for Icloud and it doesn't help me meaningfully manage files or move them out of apple ecosystem :-(

iCloud.

Dropbox is a close 2nd, but won’t do everything you described (like download folder) - but iCloud will.

I spent yesterday recovering some files that had silently reverted to October 2023 versions on - no kidding - December 24th. I only noticed it yesterday morning when I opened a spreadsheet and was absolutely baffled.

This is the second time iCloud has fucked me. As much as I want to use it I no longer trust it.

"Icloud" and... Then what? I pay for Icloud and I still cannot manage files or offload them easily. I have 50k photos by now because I've struggled for years, so any tip that starts with "drag select photos and then..." can bugger off :-))))

I've installed the monster of iTunes on my windows and that shucked remaining life out of me. Then I installed Icloud for Windows or whatever it was called and I oscillated between murdering myself and others. It just doesn't work. At best I was able to slowly drag and select 1000 photos at a time to get crippled small version of the files.

pay apple again to be able to manage your own files, lol..

iCloud is free (up to 5GB). That seems fair.

https://www.apple.com/icloud/#:~:text=Is%20there%20a%20free%....

Which mobile platform provides unlimited/better for no cost?

> Which mobile platform provides unlimited/better for no cost?

For one, Android. I use Syncthing; my phone reports that I've synced 27gb of local state to my PC and laptop without me paying a dime.

Caveat being, you have to use a mobile platform that doesn't prevent third-parties from integrating with the OS. iCloud's quality is almost besides the point when Apple uses their software control to ensure a feature-complete alternative can't exist.

Your phone manufacturer gave you a box with syncthing + storage for free with purchase of your device?

Nextcloud also works on iOS, integrates with the Files app and was always able to sync photos right after I took them.

>Which mobile platform provides unlimited/better for no cost?

Could you explain how it is free?

I mean, could it be possible that the actual cost of the 'free' icloud is built into the prices/ cost of the device(s) you originally purchased (so that you can store your stuff in the icloud)?

icloud keeps everything synced across my devices seamlessly - M1 Air, iPhone, and iPad.

Why would you use an iPhone if you don't want to use iCloud? That is the entire point of buying into the Apple ecosystem.

so you have to pay apple an ongoing fee to be able to manage your own files?

does that seem rational?

also such a weird line of thought that buying a single apple product isn't enough to be able to use it properly, and that any criticism of apple is just "us plebs using it wrong and not paying them more money"

You don’t have to pay Apple to manage your files. You can manage them with a traditional file manager if you’d like akin to any other device.

If you want cloud storage, Apple provides free iCloud storage that will keep everything synced across your devices. There is an upper limit to the free tier space, at which you can purchase additional storage or move to a cloud platform of your choice.

Considering how much of a premium you pay for the iPhones, that upper limit is stingy like hell.

And Apple's marketing ain't great either. They push your photos to iCloud by default, which fills the free space instantly, then when you try to turn that off they give you a vague and threatening message that your photos will be lost.

Marketing by threats will make me to at best give money to the competition.

Do you have the text from the message that says all of your photos will be lost? I’ve never seen it.

Yeah right, I'm hallucinating and so is my wife. More likely, you consider this type of sales copy normal and didn't notice it.

I use the Apple one family plan which is 2TB of storage so I’ve likely simply never seen it.

But I do have and pay for Icloud.

And then what? There's a dozen messages here that say "Icloud" and I guess that's the point, people use cloud and done care for details. But I do! I want to offload the files and put them on my NAS and on my backup off site drive and manage and organize them. Icloud is not a step in that direction (maybe it is if you have a Mac laptop but while point here is discussing iphone and iPad as their own devices.).

It's rumored [1] that 2024 iPad Pro will see price hikes of $500-$700 to cover the OLED screen and increases in base memory/storage.

I am surprised that such a price hike is necessary. You can buy a new Galaxy Tab S9 with an excellent OLED screen from Amazon for $740.

If 2024 iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard costs as much as Macbook Air + Mac Mini, hopefully that will allow Apple to untie the iPad and allow it to run iOS, macOS and Linux VMs.

Unlikely. Apple is in the business of selling you a MacBook, iPhone and iPad. Even more now update cycles are slowing down. So, it's pretty unlikely that they'd go the route of Samsung DeX (which allows you to use a phone or tablet as a desktop).

(Yes, I know that you can hook up an iPad to an external screen, but it is not really a full desktop experience.)

It’s rumored that the OLED panel used in the new iPad revision won’t be a bog standard OLED, but instead a variant that emphasizes longevity and burn-in resistance by stacking two OLED layers atop each other (on top of the usual binning Apple does). That makes the price hike sound more plausible.

> I am surprised that such a price hike is necessary.

They are adding a 12.9 inch iPad Air, so they have an opportunity to differentiate iPad Pros from Air to justify the price difference, https://www.imore.com/ipad/ipad-air/129-inch-ipad-air-on-tra...

  The grand plans include a supersized iPad Air for the first time, and it seems like we're on track to see it launch in March 2024. Display analyst Ross Young has confirmed that the display shipments of the 12.9-inch iPad Air began in December.

> you can hook up an iPad to an external screen, but it is not really a full desktop experience.

Stage Manager does inch closer to a desktop experience, with apps in movable windows. Imagine a macOS VM in a large window on external monitor, alongside a small iOS app/VM window. With a cheap USB-C capture card, an external video or camera input can appear in an app window.

> Apple is in the business of selling you a Macbook, iPhone and iPad

If Apple can get same-or-better margins/revenue than Macbook+iPad with an iPad Pro, with less physical hardware thanks to virtualization, why not save on atoms and shipping? The iPad Pro has long been overpowered for the few iOS-approved use cases. Virtualization would finally unlock that power. Avoids carrying multiple devices. Eliminates any dependency on sidecar Raspberry Pi or cloud VM for Linux workloads.

> (Yes, I know that you can hook up an iPad to an external screen, but it is not really a full desktop experience.)

I have defaulted to iPad as mobile computer for a while now, instead of carrying a laptop around. It works well enough for most office tasks, with some trickery even for light on-call support. And it’s definitely improving over time. The major pain point for me is currently file management.

Why not just use a MacBook Air or something? It's basically the same price.

I tried switching to iPad and the only thing I keep thinking about was "this is just my Mac, but worse in every single way"

> Why not just use a MacBook Air or something? It's basically the same price.

Not the person you posed the question to, but my reasoning is mostly that my MacBook Air is docked with my desktop peripherals when I'm home, and it's cumbersome to undock/redock it all the time, so I use my iPad if I'm not at my desk. If I need to do something that I can't do on my iPad, then I walk to my desk where I have a proper mouse/keyboard/monitor. I only undock my MacBook every few months when I'm travelling and need a real computer on the go.

I use the small iPad Pro, even the MacBook Air doesn’t come close in terms of weight and form factor. I did use the tiny MacBook Air, and I’d love a 12” MacBook, but they no longer exist.

On top of that, the combination of iPad, pen and paperlike screen protector is really nice for taking notes. The option to undock from the keyboard and just take the tablet is also nice.

I agree that it’s worse on pretty much every other metric and that it’s an optimization for one specific metric, but it’s workable.

And plugged into a decent screen, it’s pretty ok for most office tasks.

Of course it's not necessary, but when apple sees a way to gouge for more money, they do it.

$500-$700 rumour sounds like something to get you to click and share their article rather than an honest estimate. Their logic for the two numbers is the panel is estimated to cost $250-$350 (depending on size) and they estimate a 50% profit margin on the iPads so the base model will be 2*$[250,350]=$[500,700] more... which means they must calculate the existing screen to be completely free? They don't mention anything about the base specs increasing in that root article but even if they did that's not clear to be an actual increase in production cost. It's a newer device after all.

I expect a price increase of some sort, it's the safe thing to bet on and anybody else could safely write about that too, but I'm already disappointed how much time I've spent talking about a clickbait future Apple device rumour news article which attempts to create the worst possible number they think they can get away with claiming as realistic.

I don't understand why they're trying to turn iPads into laptops. Just start from their existing laptops and make them more mobile instead of trying to inflate a phone OS into something that does the job? Is this about control over the apps people can run?

In many ways, an iPad with a keyboard is probably the perfect home computer for people who don't really care about computers and just have simple requirements. The apps that people generally expect to find are there and a keyboard just makes it that bit more comfortable to sit and bash out an email or letter.

Sure, if you want to breed even more generations of computer illiterates. We should be encouraging people to learn about the computers they use so they can do actually useful stuff with it later in their life. Not just "hey here's an app, now go make me more money by looking at ads"

Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done is far from computer illiterate. For the majority of the population computers are a tool. Knowing deeply how they work is about as important as knowing deeply how their car works.

If all they ever have access to is phones then their world consists solely of software they have been allowed to install by their platform overlords. Even if they had the urge to try and create something themselves, they would be forbidden from doing so.

Just keep consuming those ads and don't think about it.

> their world consists solely of software they have been allowed to install by their platform overlords

The same will be true of most cars within a generation, and is effectively true for most car owners now; they do not really know how to do much with their car beyond drive it, use the infotainment as-is and bring it in for repair when anything seems off.

Yes, everything is being fucked by the drive for profit.

> Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done is far from computer illiterate.

Full literacy involves writing, not just reading. At one point the same held for computer literacy. I would not call someone "literate" if they could only read words they already recognized from viewing forms and their writing ability was limited to filling out those forms using a limited but appropriate vocabulary. I would likewise not consider someone computer literate if they were limited to using software written by others.

For more eloquent words in this vein:

https://citejournal.org/volume-2/issue-3-02/seminal-articles...

> Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done

... if you don't get a lot of things done.

The main quality of a laptop is the keyboard is solidly attached to the screen. That means you can use it anywhere and you don't need to dedicate a desk like space for the keyboard.

With an iPad you need a stand, space for the keyboard and then you're close to the space taken by a monitor with peripherals and a desktop under the desk. Might as well get a desktop then since it's more powerful.

It may be useful for tasks that only need a keyboard 1% of the time though.

Does this apply to cars/appliances/medical equipment/any other tools?

I don’t see anything wrong with people excelling at some tasks, such as CAD/medicine/construction/editing media/law/etc, and not excelling at understanding all the details about how their tools work.

Yes. Cars are turning into pieces of shit that need a subscription because techbros made them too complicated for an average person to understand. Appliances, same story. Techbros are turning goddamn printers into a subscription service.

I guess I will have to disagree. My cars have been lasting longer and longer, and the cost per mile keeps going down.

My appliances have also been working fine for 5+ years. LG inverter motor is dead silent in my fridge, and I get the benefits of having a French door fridge on top and freezer drawer on the bottom. Same for all the other appliances I have too. I don’t expect them to last 20 years, but as long as I get 5 to 10, I’m ok with it considering the price I paid.

My brother printers have been working fine for many years, and at least as of 2021, the MFC printers did not need a subscription.

Maybe things have changed and I haven’t needed to buy anything in the last couple years.

> Maybe things have changed and I haven’t needed to buy anything in the last couple years.

It has. Good luck finding a new printer that doesn't (figuratively) spit in your face repeatedly.

I have this one and it works great. No subscription needed or any funny business.

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/mfcl2710dw

Requires DRMd ink cartridges since a recent firmware upgrade[1] and tries to upsell you to a subscription service

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/11nnkix/brot...

That is sad, and shame on Brother.

Yeah not to mention it’s way easier to use than macOS.

Macs used to be so easy to use on Classic Mac OS. Mac OS X really left a lot of people behind on the usability front. It became much more of a power user OS. Then iPads came along and stole that group (of ordinary users) away.

But now it seems they’re adding more and more power user features to iOS, complicating things again (with even less discoverability due to complex gestures). History seems to be repeating itself.

As someone who’s never used MacOS fulltime, what did OS9 do better than X? I’ve found modern MacOS fairly similar to windows in common tasks and interface.

Going somewhat off-topic here but classic Mac OS had very precise human interface guidelines[1] which strongly emphasised repeatable behaviours and recognisable patterns. For that matter, so did earlier versions of Windows[2]. A lot of thought went into visual cues and design elements so that things looked and acted predictably system-wide and they were designed so that it would always be obvious which elements were and weren't interactive.

Both Apple and Microsoft have regressed in this respect. Minimalism and prettiness have taken priority over usability in both modern macOS and modern Windows and they are far more inconsistent and harder to learn to use as a result. Often something that you learn in one place place or app now doesn't work in another.

In Apple's case this has been mostly as a result of their efforts to make macOS and iOS more alike and to share applications/components across the two, which often creates weird-feeling results and awkward app designs. In Microsoft's case this is mostly because they have more UI frameworks than sense and each new one introduces more problems than solutions. Electron-adjacent apps probably don't help matters either, since they also generally break all of the platform rules and implement their own UI controls anyway.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/573097 [2] https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...

That's the problem. For example modern MacOS has in your face notifications and allows applications in the background to steal focus.

I gather classic Mac OS was done so you can get on with whatever you're doing and nothing bothered you.

This is easily remedied.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-a-focus-on-or-...

No. It should be the default. And I bet it only refers to notifications, not to other applications stealing focus (as in bring themselves to the foreground) from the one you're into because they think they're damn important.

Do Not Disturb by default is a question of taste and use case, they probably brought to the desktop what people seemed to like on mobile devices.

Applications stealing focus is a plague though. Maybe Apple will finally figure out that it's not worth having in their API.

The Classic Mac OS Finder used a spatial metaphor. When Apple moved to OS X, they copied Windows by switching to a browser metaphor [1]. For many Classic fans this was Apple's biggest mistake. Ever since then people generally go out of their way to avoid using the Finder altogether because it's so unpredictable and opaque.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

I use a combo of desktop computers with giant screens and an iPad. I like this better than having a laptop. I don’t think the traditional multi-window paradigm works well on a very small screen (though I am aware it was invented for tiny screens!). When I’m mobile I prefer to have just one app at a time, or at most Stage Manager.

The biggest problems I run into with iPadOS are not related to the OS, but stripped-down apps, or apps that don’t use the file picker and other iPad features. In a few cases I have to use web apps (which work perfectly) instead of iPad apps, for example with Google Docs, since the iPad apps are more like stripped-down phone apps.

Agree that my biggest gripe with iPadOS is third party apps that don’t take advantage of the platform. Cross-platform apps are the most notorious, usually being stretched out phone apps rather than proper tablet apps.

It’s still a far sight better than the Android tablet situation though, where stretched out phone apps are the norm instead of the exception.

How would you make a laptop more mobile? I think they've gone too small and too thin in the past, now settling on larger laptops.

If i didn't need to program on my computer, i'd use an ipad as a single computing device for everything. It's perfect for couch consumption, and with stage manager, an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it's more than adequate for anything else you'd expect from a computer: office, photo and video editing and watching, internet browsing, email, etc.

For 95% of all use cases, the ipad already is the best laptop.

Perhaps they are turning laptops into iPads. The price/performance of Apple Silicon laptops was a descendant of early iPad Pro SoCs, with current iPad Pros on M2. A couple of years ago, MacOS on Apple Silicon gained the ability to run iOS apps, either via the Mac appstore or by copying .ipa files.

ipad touchscreen is good for reading documents and the like. While I've been a bit of a "make Macbooks with touchscreens you cowards" person, iOS (iPad OS but w/e) has a _lot_ of nice affordances that are centered around getting you quickly to your work in a couple of taps, and not futzing about with typing things in.

The thing I always think about: how fast it is to play an MP3 from "device in pocket" state with an MP3 player vs a computer (or my phone!). iOS affordances around that are good.

Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there. They seem to be trying with some changes though I don't really enjoy the changes so far

> The thing I always think about: how fast it is to play an MP3 from "device in pocket" state with an MP3 player vs a computer (or my phone!). iOS affordances around that are good.

This is a very important metric! Jeff Hawkins famously walked around with a piece of wood in his pocket the planned size of the Palm Pilot, and when he wanted to do something (write down a note) he would work through how many key presses it would take on the new device. His limit was three.

When I tried a BlackBerry I was infuriated by how many key presses everything took. What a horrible experience.

> Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there

Like it or not, Apple’s plan for this remains Siri.

> hopefully that will allow Apple to untie the iPad and allow it to run iOS, macOS and Linux VMs.

Why would they do that ? They want their 30% on everything you install on iOS.

> 30% on everything you install on iOS

That's likely changing soon in EU and Japan.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-d...

> The Japanese government sees this model as solidifying the companies' dominance in the mobile market. The legislation aims to force them to allow third-party app stores and payment systems as long as they are secure and protect user privacy. Japanese companies would be able to run dedicated game stores on iOS devices, as well as use payment systems with lower fees from Japanese fintech companies.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3711375/coming-soon-to...

> You download an app from Apple’s App Store and then use it to access the enterprise app store. There’s still a step where Apple inserts itself — the enterprise app store is itself an app that Apple has vetted and allowed in its own App Store. Most likely Apple will want alternatives to its App Store to work the same way.

likely they want to support using Xcode to develop apps on iPad

That changed years ago.

Most developers now see a 15% hit, only going to 30% once they’ve hit certain thresholds.

While that's somewhat not as horrible for new developers I wonder how far that actually puts Apple's average cut from 30% (in terms of revenue not developer count) or how much it changes the point that it's nowhere near 0%.

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