Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

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Apple Silicon M2+ has hardware support for nested virtualization, presently unused.

It's rumored that iPad Pro M3 will see price hikes of $500-$700 to cover OLED screens and higher base memory/storage [1]. If Magic Keyboard gains an aluminum shell in MacBook style [2], iPad Pro M3 could move upmarket to MacBook Pro pricing. A 12.9" iPad Air could occupy the lower price tier [3].

If iPad Pro M3 can earn same-or-better margins/revenue as MacBook+iPad, with less physical hardware thanks to virtualization, why not save on atoms and shipping? iPad Pro has long been overpowered for the few iOS-approved use cases. Virtualization could unlock that power, freeing customers from carrying multiple devices to run multiple OSes.

  [1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ipad-pro-2024
  [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/3/23857409/ipad-aluminum-magic-keyboard-apple-ipad-pro
  [3] https://www.imore.com/ipad/ipad-air/129-inch-ipad-air-on-track-for-march-launch-as-display-panel-shipments-begin

They’ll need something to justify those prices. I bought a 12.9” in 2018 and wouldn’t do it again even at the old price.

Counterbalancing anecdote: I've purchased every 12.9" iPad Pro model with my own money, and will keep doing so.

There's no better mobile daily driver computer value for dollar available today.

I do really like it as a paper-sized replacement for handwritten notes and sketching, but the folio keyboard is junk (material starts peeling quickly, and the whole thing stopped working not long after the one year warranty expired).

Maybe the magic keyboard is better built, but that's another $350 on top of an expensive tablet. My bad experience with the cheaper (but still $200) keyboard accessory has probably had an outsized effect on how I feel about the product as a whole.

If you want to draw and watch movies and read emails it's great for that. I've given up on using it much for productivity, where its most powerful function is having a remote desktop client if I need to connect to a real computer.

Personally I spent the extra money thinking "I could do some real work on this" but unless your work is mostly marking up PDFs (it's really great for that) and sending plaintext emails I can't recommend it. The only work tasks I use mine for regularly anymore are quick sketches/markups (synced via OneNote and screenshot into an email that I'm writing on the computer) and quickly flipping through my inbox to either deleting or flag new messages, again for me to actually deal with on the computer.

Why limit yourself to an iPad specific keyboard? I use low-profile mechanical keyboards which offer much better typing experience, and are just as portable. When traveling the Nuphy air 75 fits in any bag, at home I pair it with a slightly larger keychain k15 pro, due to its ergonomic layout.

How’s that work with the iPad on your lap?

Not, but I don’t do much typing on my lap anyways, typing is usually on a desk or table, when using an iPad on my lap it’s mostly for media consumption, better without a keyboard.

Magic Keyboard is in a class by itself, sometimes it can be found on eBay at a reasonable price.

Fascinating, please tell us more?

My muscle memory is tied to keyboards and multiple windows so I just couldn’t get productive on an iPad and found the 12.9 a bit heavy and awkward for a couch computer. I see where the money went: M2, amazing screen but it’s not my first choice. Curious about your usage. eg how do you use the (janky imho) windowing and multitasking?

The thing I dislike the most is the keyboard shortcuts and workflows are just different enough in iOS that its not quite interchangable enough.

That’s been my experience. Death by a thousand paper cuts from iOS reminding you how it isn’t a “real” OS like Mac or Windows.

Which is not surprising. Apple wants you to buy an iPad and a MacBook.

Use Apple's Magic Keyboard with backlit keys and trackpad (which is also a USB-C charging dock).

For multi-tasking, use Stage Manager to have thumbs of screens along the left side of the screen, and use the window affordances to resize windows with overlaps to have 2 or 3 applications open at the same time per thumbnail (a thumbnail isn't an app, it's a space or desktop).

Windows can 1/2 overlap the thumbs, so it doesn't take much screen space, and you can also overlap or leave showing the dock across the bottom.

This also works with a second monitor which can extend the desktop space instead of mirroring to it, then you can have a half dozen apps open at once.

Of course the killer feature is 5G, all day battery, and paper-notebook level of portability.

The MS Surface tablets at least used to be pretty good, and you're not locked to running just "app store" approved software.

So, Blender runs on on them, unlike on IPads. :/

That being said, I haven't used a Surface tablet in years so I have no idea if they're still as good as they used to be.

I'm writing this reply on a Surface Pro 9 - the hardware is underpowered but is also the only reasonable option if you need a tablet that runs a "real" PC OS. But MS has had a heck of a time convincing ISV's to make software for the platform - and even apps (like Adobe's Lightroom) that have tablet modes hide them away - so almost no one knows about them. iPads are better at being tablets, but can't run apps like Lightroom (the non cloudclown version) at all, so it's definitely a tradeoff.

For the last class I taught, I ended up using both the Surface and an iPad Pro (10"). The Surface was used in situations where I needed a full OS (as it turned out running VM's was part of that) and the iPad got used during lecture as it was simply superior for presenting slides with sketched overlays in real time.

Thanks, yeah that makes sense. :)

If you could only pick a single tablet instead of being able to use two, which one would you have gone with?

>computer

Has always felt like a stretch to me for a device I'm not allowed to run my own code on.

This of course hasn't been true for years, eg: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/index.html

And you can run a C compiler (or anything) inside https://ish.app/ too.

>Counterbalancing anecdote: I've purchased every 12.9" iPad Pro model with my own money, and will keep doing so.

>There's no better mobile daily driver computer value for dollar available today.

I experimented with using an iPad as a daily driver (web browser plus mosh/ssh sessions) some years ago, and iOS constantly unloading apps (even when briefly switching away from them), and not restoring state exactly, drove me nuts. Has iOS improved on this?

Alas, still sucks.

Although my 2018 model has 4 GB of memory while the 2022 is now 8 (or 16 if you buy 1 or 2 TB version). So maybe that helps.

There’s a special entitlement for apps to request additional RAM so I would hope that having more memory means more apps can stay resident, since most apps aren’t going to request extra RAM. But iOS seems really aggressive about this even when you wouldn’t think it should be a problem so I half expect it to know you have 12 GB available and still kill recently used apps.

I've been using a 12.9" M2 iPad Pro as a daily driver for six months. It is almost perfect - the only big issue I have is a problem in WebKit where a two-finger-tap on a trackpad procs both the system contextual menu and the web app context menu. It makes using VSCode, Google Docs, etc. highly annoying and remains unresolved.

Here's the issue in bugzilla: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260722

Outside of that, I love using it and actively prefer it over a regular desktop OS for all tasks outside of software development (and with the bug fixed even that would be better)

>It's rumored that iPad Pro M3 will see price hikes of $500-$700 to cover OLED screens and higher base memory/storage [1]. If Magic Keyboard gains an aluminum shell in MacBook style [2], iPad Pro M3 could move upmarket to MacBook Pro pricing.

Ain't gonna happen (such a hike, not the specs). You read it here first.

Yeah, those rumors seem super off-base, there isn't enough demand for iPads in general (mostly I think because they last so long - still using a 2018 iPad Pro here daily for web browsing and video watching here) to justify it. Jacking up the price is just going to mean they would sell even fewer...

Seems more likely that they'd upgrade the screen at higher tiers instead.

They did something similar with the M1/2 iPad Pros had 8GB of RAM while the expensive 1/2TB models ($1500/1800 for the 11/12.9") got a quiet bump up to 16GB.

Why don't they make 2-in-1 MacBooks? You have multiple Windows and a decent keyboard when you need and a touch screen in tablet mode.

I really liked using 2-in-1 Windows ultrabooks such as HP Elitebook x360. I only switched to a MacBook Pro for battery life.

Hopefully HP/Dell/Lenovo Arm laptops based on Qualcomm Oryon will offer 2-in-1 and good battery life -- forcing Apple to compete.

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