Could I use the iPad as my only computer? | Hacker News Reader

Could I use the iPad as my only computer?

thejollyteapot.com

32 pointsdelaugust47 comments

The struggle with the iPad is Apple doesn't want to cannibalize its laptop sales. There is simply no reason that the iPad couldn't switch to the MacOS UI when plugged into a hardware keyboard and mouse. So it will remain in this halfway up halfway down state until the winds change.

This is actually Apple's weakness. Right now Apple wants to sell you 3 devices, a phone, a tablet, and a laptop. The reality is that there is no reason why your iPhone when plugged into a keyboard, mouse, and display couldn't present a MacOS UI. Similarly for the iPad.

If someone could exploit this weakness then Apple could be placed in an uncomfortable position.

And a watch! Watches could be potentially very interesting, and they could make phones largely redundant for those who don't like using apps all the time.

Personally, I hate phones, and I prefer computation at two extremes: Desktop and watch. Sadly, Apple Watch can't be owned without one of their phones.

This is not true. Apple is all about cannibalizing its products.

> But doesn't Apple run the risk of cannibalizing its own products? "It's not a danger," Schiller said in response to Rose. "It's almost by design."

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-on-cannibalization-201...

Based on Apple saying that they would certainly never gimp their products just to keep selling another one?

The more they make the iPad Pro a laptop, the less convinced I am that we couldn't have a touchscreen laptop with Apple Pencil support.

How do you think that would happen though? Boot two operating systems in parallel and switch between them upon connecting periphery? How would you keep app states in sync between tablet and "docked" then? How do you handle open windows once you disconnect periphery? What if you just worked on Terminal.app and then disconnect keyboard & trackpad? Does it just disappear? Do you suddenly have a potential root shell on your iPad?

I think there's a good reason this kind of desktop mobile hybrid hasn't really gained any traction yet.

DeX is a decent hack but nothing more. ChromeOS is still struggling with running Linux/Android/web apps in parallel without it feeling awkward.

> The reality is that there is no reason why your iPhone when plugged into a keyboard, mouse, and display couldn't present a MacOS UI.

> If someone could exploit this weakness then Apple could be placed in an uncomfortable position.

Motorola Lapdock, Continuum, Samsung Dex.

It didn't catch the mainstream adoption. Sure, that's mobile OSes (and Google failed miserably (if it did even try) on Android desktop) but still it didn't catch enough.

The reason is simple, though, most users (not uber front-end l33t hax0r with a mech keyboard) are served by the phone itself more than enough. Those who needs a proper computer would take a proper computer anyway (along with a phone). There is no unfulfilled gap there what would bring in billions for anyone who would attempt to make it work.

Oh, and there was one attempt which actually tried to bridge both ecosystems. Microsoft is still ridiculed about Win8.

I recently bought the M4 iPad Pro with the nano texture glass, etc. My goal in buying an iPad was to have a device that helps me focus more when doing certain kinds of work. I have ADHD and so my life is a constant struggle against distraction. A fully functional, fully customizable computer with overlapping windows and instant access to anything is totally counterproductive much of the time.

I am probably using the iPad about 25% of the time for work now. During this focused time, I am far better at responding to emails and reading long documents than when I am back on my chaos machine - an M2 MacBook Pro with the Studio Display. Yes, I got the keyboard and the pencil; without a keyboard, I couldn’t be productive on the device.

I’m not much of an artist, but I am gradually growing to love having the pencil. I’ve started using GoodNotes with the pencil to make diagrams like mind maps and to do brainstorms. My handwriting is awful so forget about handwriting with the pencil. It’s more useful for drawing pictures.

If you are an attention-starved person like me, maybe give it a shot? You could do worse.

I have to say I also feel a whole lot more secure on the iPad. MacOS security is really good, but the infinite flexibility to install whatever software you want exposes you to making bad decisions. On an iPad, if you’re going to be exploited, it is nation state level hacking by comparison.

The iPad is the „you’re holding it wrong“ philosophy applied to the whole OS. The problem is Apple is unable to make tradeoffs, which is exemplified by the lack of a calculator app because „you can’t just take the iPhone calculator and resize it for the iPad“ (yes you can and it’s better than not having a calculator so at all).

They could have EASILY done it back at the original launch. They had everything necessary to get it done, except for common sense.

Even with the skeuomorphic design, split half for the history, half for a regular calculator. Flip it sideways, get a scientific calculator

On the other hand, I'll argue pretty strongly that the determination of the Wintel ecosystem to make a one-size fits all tablet/laptop compromise is precisely one of the major reasons why such a device never really took off--including in the case of the Microsoft Surface.

I dunno.

I've bought more pen computers running Windows than I can easily count (and am still salty that Apple has yet to make a replacement for my Newton --- an iPhone w/ Apple Pencil support would be pretty close).

The big problem is that they've followed Apple/Android's lead in "dumbing down" the stylus input to an 11th touch input for many cases --- even now, in Windows 11 I have to leave the Settings app open on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 so that I can toggle stylus modes between working w/ legacy apps (Macromedia Freehand/MX) and current applications (OpenSCAD Graph Editor).

That aid, I've gotten to the point where I'm about to give up -- most likely my next major tech purchase will be either a Wacom Movink 13 or a Wacom One 13" (Gen2) w/ Touch and a Raspberry Pi 5.

Definitely. XP/Vista tablets had more weaknesses than strengths, and while Windows 8/10/11 tablets corrected many of the missteps of their predecessors the overall experience still wasn’t as compelling as that of an iPad, despite the versatility of Windows and limitations of iPadOS.

Part of that was due to x86 tablets either being hot and noisy with awful battery life or severely underpowered, though. While there would still be software issues (like traditional Windows apps not being touch-friendly) and privacy concerns (Recall), Snapdragon X powered tablets might finally fix at least the hardware woes of Windows tablets.

My wife is on her third Surface because she can work on them. Meanwhile her iPad is used for YouTube and Netflix. The surface is a bad tablet but a great computer. I think the iPad has potential to be the tablet computer and it doesn’t need a dual boot into MacOS to achieve it, but the current app model with files as second class citizens, no real background processing and no child processes is just too restrictive for most professional workflows. In the end most apps need to export their result to a real computer, which means the iPad is not a real computer.

Which is why there always have been hundreds of calculator apps, from the crudest to the most polished. How is that a problem? Sure, it’s nice to have one out of the box, but is this really a problem?

I wrote an article about the lack of calculator for the ipad, and an actual port of the ios calculator as a PWA, if anybody misses this app on the ipad. Free, no ads.

https://mejuto.co/the-ipad-did-not-have-a-calculator-so-i-po...

> The problem is Apple is unable to make tradeoffs

I think the problem is they're very conscious of cannabalizing their own product line.

If the average person could use a $500 iPad ($399 + keyboard + mouse) instead of a bare minimum macbook air ($1000+), they would.

I agree, but this is a new problem for Apple. The iPhone was famously introduced as a cannibalizing product.

I've actually been giving this a bit of thought. Not because I think I could/would want to replace my Macs with an iPad but because my old 11" iPad broke and I was debating whether to replace it. I also found myself on a month-long trip hauling around the old MacBook Pro I use for travel and it weighs a fair bit and I didn't use it that much.

I did have an 11" Chromebook but it's way out of support and there's nothing on the market that would be my ideal replacement.

So I'll probably end up with an iPad Air for travel going forward. It's fine for any writing or work along those lines I would do--don't really do any programming or heavy duty picture editing/cataloging on the road. The external keyboard on the current iPads actually let you use the combined system in your lap which was one of my past complaints.

So not a general replacement for me but I think it's probably a better compromise for me traveling than a laptop that otherwise duplicated functionality of the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro I'd be using when I wasn't traveling.

I don’t mind that iPadOS is limited, my gripe is that Apple limits Mac hardware to protect the iPad. Where’s my 11” OLED MacBook with eSIM? Where’s my Mac with hinged screen and Apple Pencil support? My mac with tolerable cameras?

I bet we’d have seen at least some of these if not for a decade of trying to make the iPad answer the “what’s a computer?” question.

You could, but it's much less useful and much more expensive than many laptops. So I'm not sure why you would want to. Even in the Apple ecosystem, a Macbook or Macbook Air would make far more sense.

You’ve replied to the headline, though the article is about the software gap between iOS and Mac.

No. Next question?

I love my iPad Pro. It’s a fantastic device that I carried around the house for constant use. I later gave it to my kid in college who uses it for note taking, writing papers, and all the normal college stuff. It’s brilliant for that.

But it’s good if and only if you never, ever want to do anything that’s not built in or readily available in the App Store. You’re buying and using the device as-is. Forget building your own tooling unless it’s something you can script up in Shortcuts. That doesn’t seem like the end of the world, yet it made me realize exactly how much of my environment I tend to customize with my own tools. It’s all the little stuff, like making macros in Keyboard Maestro that call out to shell scripts or Python to do a thing. (I implemented an Emacs-style push/pop-point feature in BBEdit, which doesn’t support that natively.) Or writing the forementioned shell scripts and Python. Or running from jobs to do things periodically. None of those are critical for most people, but they’re important to me. And if I can’t do that on an iPad — and I can’t — then I don’t want it. All the butting of heads against the garden walls made me resentful of this perfectly fine little device.

Apple sells a gazillion of them so I can’t say they’re wrong about what users want. They sure are wrong about what I want though.

>Apps like Procreate thrive on a touch interface, and they can utilise all the power of an iPad Pro with an M4 chip.

Isn't the main sticking point for Procreate the RAM, which isn't really improved with the M4 over the M2 or even the M1? Meanwhile apps like Final Cut Pro aren't really able to take advantage of the M4 because they can't video encode in the background while you use the rest of the chip to do other things.

The point about the iPad not having to do "desktop-class" things is also watered down by Apple promoting "desktop-class apps" during WWDC 2022 and adding features like Stage Manager.

Couple of days back, I saw a video and I believe it has the right terms. I like that.

- MacBook (desktop) is my work computer.

- iPhone (Mobile) is my mobile computer.

- iPad is my Hobby Computer - photography, sketching, note-taking, etc. A very costly one but right now with its power and lack of App and a dumbed-down OS, it is at best a Hobby computer.

> iPad is my Hobby Computer - photography, sketching, note-taking, etc. A very costly one but right now with its power and lack of App and a dumbed-down OS, it is at best a Hobby computer.

Except, of course, if sketching and note taking is your job or part of it. Or reading or annotating PDFs, and things like writing and proofreading, etc. There are many non-hobby things that can be done on an iPad.

Sure, it is a bit of a specialised tool, but you having no professional use for it does not make it “at best a Hobby computer”.

Sold on the idea. I had ipad +-5 years ago. Then when get broken didn't buy a new one - was expensive toy (for me). Power is there - the M3/M4 looks amazing, but real productivity ?

Keeping eye on the development and still unfortunately not there: (also recently posted on HN) https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

On-the-go coding on an iPad with Blink Shell and VS Code https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsbQxSUdUOw

*If anyone has perfect solution which will beat old rusty x230 for dev on the go, i did love to see

I needed a light machine to do some web design work on figma. My first instinct was to get a Chromebook but my designer found an iPad air with m1 for cheaper. I checked and figma was available for iPad so I authorized.

A couple days later we get the iPad and it does have the figma app but it is view only! You can still use figma but it has to be the web version. It works but because apple has terrible PWA support the experience is much inferior than in a much weaker Chromebook.

The Apps for iPad are just weak on general. Often the only available app is the one for iphone, and you can still install but it renders in a third of the screen as a phone App with big black bars on the sides.

We returned it the same day.

Honestly this comes back to the refrain I've been hearing lately: what iPadOS needs is the desktop version of Safari! That would let us run Figma just fine! Figjam runs great on iPad, it's actually a fully native experience and I love it. But if they'd just give us a first-class Safari experience, we'd be good here.

There's a 3rd party app the run the Figma editor inside. You can also run it through browser, but it's more ideal on a 13".

Totally agree though, in this day and age 1st party Figma should be on there.

I could if it can run Steam games, you can sshfs the filesystems of other computers with it and vice versa, it supports transferring files between mass storage devices, supports connecting a mechanical keyboard, if you can easily switch between many different application windows and browser tabs on it, have multiple windows visible at the same time, and use all the expected development tools like clang, gdb, JS minifiers, and you can connect displays and headphones with jack to it

EDIT: forgot to add, run firefox with plugins and chrome with devtools

From this list the only thing it can’t do is Steam and running a dev env (though you can do that via a remote shell or VM).

It already supports SMB, mechanical keyboards, storage, alt-tab via keyboard, multiple windows with stage manager or split screen, extended display, and headphones.

iOS/iPadOS (as well as macOS, tvOS, and visionOS though they’re not relevant in this discussion) also have shockingly good game controller support. All the major controllers (DualSense/DualShock, Xbox, Joycons, Switch Pro, etc) are supported over both USB and Bluetooth (the latter complete with battery status), and are fully configurable in Settings.

Meanwhile on Windows, the king of gaming, you don’t get a config UI or battery status even on Microsoft’s own Xbox controllers and have to install Steam for a reasonable controller experience. The situation is totally reverse to what one might expect.

I admire the iPad from a hardware perspective; it's a beautiful piece of equipment. And I have also been pulled into think, "Hey, maybe I need one of these things" but invariably I come to the conclusion that I would have virtually no use case for it so I can't justify spending the money on it and having it sit collecting dust on my desk, particularly when it costs more than the Macbook Air I rely on most of the time. Between my MacBook Air and iPhone I don't see where the iPad fits into my life and work.

I've had an iPad since the month they came out, and over that time 3 full sized and one mini.

The mini was by far the best for me. Small enough to be one-hand able without strain, and bigger than a phone for browsing, reading, and mail. It's dead, replaced by a mostly unused series 6 full sized one, but it's too big. Screen is to big for typing without strain, unless it's down on a table. Split keyboard is ok, but then tapping on the url bar is a strain.

Phones are too small for my eyes without glasses, and I don't like mobile browsing. Mobile sites have decided that because there's no physical space, all the margins need to be super huge so nothing fits on screen. (though, that's also an issue with some mobile apps, like @ my bank) Maybe on a Pro/Plus it would be ok, and I'll probably go for one next time. Either that or I'll go low end for the phone and try to put all my mobile stuff on the next mini. If I could just get the phone hardware/software on the mini.

Even if an iPad could run MacOS, it's just more comfortable to do it on an Air. On the lap, the keyboard holds up the display.

Outside of software development, the real problem with iPadOS isn't just that it's not as capable as macOS (though that is a problem). It's that it's badly implemented. All of the features they added to justify the "iPadOS" rebrand[0] have significant bugs or UI issues that Apple hasn't really stopped to fix.

Things like:

* The file picker arbitrarily[1] locking you out of picking whole folders on third-party file providers (e.g. Dropbox)

* Mouse support occasionally bugging out and just not working, or snapping to widgets nowhere near your mouse cursor, or not letting you click the maximize widget on PiP videos

* SMB shares on the Files app occasionally taking down the daemon responsible for managing them and, in turn, freezing every app that tries to open a file picker until you restart your iPad

Missing features, software lockouts, and stereotypical Apple fussiness over not giving you things you want but won't enjoy using are one thing. I'd totally love to see touch-friendly versions of all the other things Macs can do. But that's a lower priority than just making iPadOS a functioning piece of software again.

The iPad feels like an Apple vanity project that just so happened to get pushed into production... because it is. Jobs had some engineers make him a tablet specifically so he could spite a friend of his at Microsoft that was bullish on Windows XP tablets. All of Apple's idiosyncracies regarding mouse and touch input, and them refusing to replace iPadOS with an operating system that actually works is downstream of Jobs' insistence that iPad software not require a stylus to operate. The problem is that iPad doesn't actually pay the bills at Apple, so none of the bugs in iPadOS actually get fixed, and it mostly gets hand-me-down features from iOS.

[0] Yes, I meant rebrand. iOS and iPadOS are the same thing internally - hell the SDKs still call it iPhoneOS. If you jailbreak an iPhone you can enable Stage Manager and it Just Works.

[1] Ok, this might not be 100% Apple's fault, since I have seen file providers that do let you pick folders, but the whole point of this being locked down is so that Apple can put a gun to developers heads' and force them to do things The Apple Way.

People really tie their brains in knots trying to justify iPad OS.

It's terribly limited -- a lot of the software people use regularly cannot run on it, and it also does not allow various typical workflows.

> so maybe it should be able to run MacOS... Their vision isn’t very clear the more one thinks about it

Come now. I think it's only unclear if you plug your ears and say "La, la, la, la!" loud enough.

We all get it: fat fingers can't hit small click targets like a mouse pointer can. Some apps really need a physical keyboard. So go into "iPad mode" when a pointing device and keyboard isn't connected, which can be similar to the current iPadOS interface. Or perhaps make use of some of the nice assistive technologies that are already in macOS. Point is, there are solutions, and no one said the macOS side of it couldn't be optional.

"What's a computer?"

That said, no, not unless your only computing is consuming streamed media content and social media. If you actually need to type things, make things, etc, it will not work.

iPad: probably not. Windows 2-in-1's (for example, Surface Pro) _somewhat_ fit the bill: heavier than a tablet but still a full-blown computer when you need it.

They don't even need to be heavier --- I'm still sad that I wasn't able to replace my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 w/ an equivalent (but newer) device.

Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40349347

I use my iPad pro mostly to read pdfs. Neither my laptop nor my phone are practical for that. Otherwise I didn't find many things the iPad was better at.

Honestly the iPad is great for content consumption, sketching, and light creativity tasks.

When I want to do anything serious, I pull out my MacBook Air...

I would be happy to have my iPad switch into 'macOS mode' when I put it into the keyboard/trackpad folio case, so I could have the best of both worlds. Or just have it so I can swap between booting macOS and iPad OS whenever I want.

But instead, I'm stuck with two portable devices, and the iPad is usually relegated when I go on a trip, because it's the less useful of the two.

I sought out to do this a year or so ago when my 10-year old "ultrabook" was finally getting unbearable to use. I'm not a heavy on-the-go user so I found a used M1 iPad Pro. I have no doubt it has the power I need, and even Safari in "desktop mode" has been great. I have two issues

1) so many apps are still locked to "iPhone mode". enabling Stage Manager at least adds some layout flexibility, but it's meh at best

2) if there's no app or suitable web version, you're stuck. it's still a very live and die by the app world

When I saw the M4 iPad Pro, it convinced me that surely the next iPad OS is going to finally do something to help us out. I can only hope that my "old" M1 gets the full feature suite now...

Well, although I've got admit that I haven't spent too much time looking into it, and also that I'm not familiar beyond a basic knowledge with Apple computers, I'm still unsure whether there is a sane way to get software of my own to run on ipads. Because without that, what's the point of using a computer?

More specifically, we were given two ipads by the in-laws. And I think they could be very fun devices for our small-ish kids - I've got quite a few ideas for little programs that I could make for them to play around with or that could accompany stuff they learn in school. Of course, there's lots of educational software out there, but I don't like all of them for one, and also just as a matter of principal, I would find it very useful to be able to actually use these devices in the way I want, i.e., with small apps that cater exactly to my kids' interests and their parents' educational preferences.

But as far as I can tell, it is super difficult to develop software for these devices, at least compared to the traditional ways of writting little programs: fire up editor, compile, debug, share. And by "share" I don't mean "deploy to the app store and await review".

At some point I thought I had found the ultimate work-around: just write every "app" as a stand-alone HTML page instead. Sure, you'd have to do JavaScript or use something that compiles to it, but hey, webbrowsers are super-powerful today, so that certainly work for little kids' apps that I just want to develop quickly and that probably end up having a half-life of days or weeks at most... But no! Even that is not possible, it seems: you cannot open a local HTML page that's stored on the device in Safari on the ipad. To that's that.

Again, I'm not an expert at all of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were functioning work-arounds to all of this. But the mere fact that you have to jump through hoops for something so simple is already such a big turn-off that I don't even feel like exploring possible alternatives. Such built-in hostility for DIY programmers who just want to create something for their own personal enjoyment really makes ipads pretty uninteresting devices for myself. And I kinda suspect for a lot of other hackers, too.

Do you have any tips for me? Please post them!

I'm so tired of this same experiment over and over.

If youre so tired, why bother to comment in the first place? Why not simply ignore the post and read something else?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com