Apple finally, finally delivers a personal computer for the masses.
Techies nitpick every aspect of its OS because it wasn't made for them.
Techies nitpick every aspect of its OS because it wasn't made for them.
E: I'm not saying that people are wrong to like it as an app slate. Maybe that's what most people want. I just want to distinguish it from a personal computer, which is a tool that lets users write and run applications of their choosing.
Bit by bit more tasks can be done on it as well as some new ones that aren't suited to traditional PCs. Just like we see today with phones, laptops, desktops, mainframes and the like - there are already people who can do all of their computing on just one device.
As for the complaints, everything is fair game, but most of the complaints about the iPad seem to be rooted in what it can't do in comparison to a laptop computer, or more specifically macOS. This is often given with the flimsy validation that the product is labelled "pro".
However it seems clear that it has "pro" in the title because it's far more capable than other iPads, not because it is peers to the Mac Pro computer. I also think it's borderline absurd to base an argument on marketing nomenclature. (Especially as there is an iPhone Pro, Airpods Pro etc.)
It seems clear (to me), that in order to make a thin, light, and performant device, that some compromises would need to be made - otherwise why aren't the laptops similarly thin and light. A cursory review of the specs between an iPad Pro and a MacBook Pro tell the story in better detail.
Perhaps one day iPads will have limitless background processing functionality, but there should be no expectation that the iPad of the day would match the functionality of the laptop or desktop of the day.
That doesn't seem to make sense though, as the iPad Pro hardware is completely able to do what the err... macOS-wanters er... want. It's the software side (OS mostly) completely blocking forward progress.
The laptops have significantly larger batteries and active cooling, while not being as light, thin or running a display against the main heat producing components, while the iPad is thinner than an iPod nano.
But by all means promote a trivially debunked conspiracy theory.
Where's this debunking you're speaking of, or are you mistakenly thinking your mention of batteries and cooling is somehow that?
Go on, where's your evidence.
The keyboard, trackpad, and fans, mostly.
read that again, but slowly.
I'm not sure who the iPad Pro is supposed to be for, but it ain't "the masses".
I really would love to have the best screen on the planet, heck yes, but with the you-probably-want-this upsells (nano screen along with it's mandatory storage upgrades) this is a $2500 setup. Adding insult to injury is iPadOS existing at such an infantile proto-computing level, as detailed here & elsewhere (ex, yesterday's blog, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40349347).
Need a powerful device to take with you everywhere, mainly used for communication and consuming media, buy an iPhone. Want a device for doing actual work, buy a Mac. iPad Pro now has Apple's most powerful processor, but nowhere close to being able to do the job of a less powerful Mac due to software limitations.
It's not really clear who the iPad Pro is for, aside from people who want to watch videos on the best screen.
How well the iPad / Apple Pencil work for drawing very much adds color to posts here berating the iPads for being a content consumption device.
Guilty. I bought the first M1 12.9" iPad Pro not because of the M1, but because of the miniLED. Now I have a superb screen anywhere I want it, without worrying about damage like I would with a laptop.
If the answer is that this VM program is the only one that never gets killed under memory pressure, bear in mind most iPads still have only 8G RAM so the OS will have to get even less than that, not leaving very much for any workflows on either the host or guest from that point on. Even that is still less capable than macOS on the same 8G RAM because at least macOS can use swap.
It's egregious that you can still buy laptops with 8G RAM today, but at least all of that is available to the OS all the time, it doesn't just abort under memory pressure, and it can swap.
Virtualization may make more sense with a different host or guest platform, but in this particular combination, memory will always be a problem. The lack of swap compounds that further. (I'm not sure about memory compression in iOS but you can't exactly rely on that for already-compressed data)
Even if the host and guest share memory to avoid the hard cutoff, there still needs to be a way for the iPad to free up memory on demand, given that it cannot use swap.