Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think people want to fudge the different interaction styles together. I think they just want to have both experiences out of the same hardware.

I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware.

It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience.

It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!).

macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason.

There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)

I thought Apple had the perfect groundwork, at least from UI elements, to make the single device work.

My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode.

It seemed like Apple was laying a lot of ground work, and it made so much sense to me that they’d do this. This was many, many years ago. I’ve since given up thinking they’ll do this.

I thought the same thing about the iPhone, even before the iPad. Once it got fast enough, allow it to plugin to a dock and use a normal desktop with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Some Android devices have since come out that do this, but I think Apple is in a much better position to make something happen.

That was probably thought about at some point but the thing is that Apple makes way too much money as it is to try anything, because they don't have to, at least for now. I'm pretty sure Apple's leadership knows about this possibility and there are even some prototypes most likely but they conveniently rejected the idea because it would mean selling less devices. Even if they price the combo higher than their laptops current it would still make less money overall (especially since they already got the prices so high there is very little room to push for more, as falling mac sales attest). This is basically the same reason the iPad never got a multi-user mode even though it should be relatively easy to implement since they have all the basics in macOS already.

I think Apple is blinded with money and is being way too complacent, ignoring that they are in fact losing customers to more modern 2/3-in-1 devices, especially in the young/students demographics, just like they lost customers because of their lack of interest in PC gaming. And since they make it extremely hard to integrate their stuff with other products, people won't renew their Apple hardware overtime, since it's an easy decision considering for how much they sell their stuff.

And I think they are way too proud to admit that Microsoft was actually right with their Surface, for most people it is actually a much better device since a tablet isn't that useful in the end. If all you want is entertainment, a cheap Android tablet with a decent screen is all you need. The iPad Pros as they exist, are way too overpriced for their real capabilities and at this point are terrible value.

If Intel or AMD successfully make a competent power efficient chip in the near future, they will be only Apps left as an "advantage". Considering many of the powerful iPad apps are stripped down versions of the fully featured versions available on "legacy" computing platforms, that's not saying much.

  competent power efficient chip in the near future

2024 HP/Dell/Lenovo Windows+Linux Arm laptops, with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, by ex-Apple Silicon team members.

> My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode.

AKA Windows 8.

That's how you got the worst of both worlds. First thermal issues. Then a whole slew of conditional statements. And one of the things I like about desktop apps is having multiple windows because you don't have to make everything big for touch interaction.

Windows 8 seemed to force it more with the full screen start menu and all the other stuff, even when the user didn't have a touch screen.

I rarely, if ever, use full screen apps in macOS, so in the model I described, I wouldn't notice any changes (in theory). Similarly, someone who only used a touch device shouldn't see any major differences vs normal iPadOS. Though I'm sure when fulling vetting this out and looking into all the edge cases, there would likely be a lot of little issues that would need to be solved or lead to compromises.

Windows 8 went overboard and tried to force the touch idea, even when it didn't make sense... like removing the start button from Windows Server and relying on hot corners, which was hell with RDP.

> "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!)

Historically, that was basically coping with the fact that mobile devices would ship with low amounts of RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage, so they couldn't really have swap space. One would think that the latter factor is a lot less important nowadays, since storage size and quality has improved with things like UFS.

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