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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> They gain nothing by blocking this specific app.

I dunno, I think there's an obvious thing Apple would be worried about by allowing PC emulators on iOS (iPadOS specifically): the only thing that stops an iPad Pro from being the only computer of, say, a software engineer these days, is that iPadOS doesn't function as an non-inter-app-sandboxed parallel-multitasking development platform in the way that a desktop OS does.

But a (performant) PC emulator on iPadOS would fix that. You could buy an iPad Pro with a keyboard case, boot up a Windows or Linux (or maybe even macOS) VM, and work inside that — running shells, editors/IDEs, compilers, Docker containers, etc. And then swipe back over to (less-heavyweight) iPad apps when you're just taking notes / watching videos.

Honestly, it's something I've personally wanted for a long time. Despite loving my laptop, I'd love to be able to pack only an iPad when travelling to e.g. conferences. Right now I can't, because what if prod goes down and I need to investigate + develop a critical bugfix + deploy it? If I could run a PC VM on my iPad, I could do all that and more.

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Would be very funny to see someone emulating a PC on an iPad to Linux so they can use Wine to run windows apps.

Use Wine to run Dolphin, running an SNES emulator, running the Gameboy player, playing Tetris

Or more specifically, Doom implemented in Tetris.

When Nintendo sues, do they start at the top or the bottom of the stack?

Nintendo legal is massively concurrent, and sues all simultaneously.

There are public domain Tetris versions for the GB.

I don't understand this:

Would they rather someone buy a Thinkpad and run Linux on it, than someone buy an iPad and run Linux on it?

What's there to be scared of someone buying their own hardware?

Apple would rather people buy an iPad and a cheaper Mac, e.g. a Macbook Air. And many of their customers do — despite only needing the Mac for one or two things.

These customers, in my personal experience, mostly end up gravitating toward using the Mac more and the iPad less — despite often saying they enjoy using the iPad more. They try to use the iPad for more things, but when there's something they need to do on their laptop, they switch over to using it — and then forget to switch back. Eventually, they give up on the "iPad experiment", and the iPad sits there gathering dust.

But they still did buy it. And likely have had it for long enough that they can't just return it. And they might even (probably mistakenly) think they'll pick it up again someday, maybe when a new iPadOS update makes it more functional and solves their pain-points.

And that line of thinking makes Apple very, very happy. "Buying an iPad you don't end up using because you also bought a Mac" is a situation Apple emphatically does not want to help anyone avoid. In fact, they do everything they can in their advertising to subtly guide customers into bad expectations about iPadOS capabilities, so that they'll end up in that situation.

Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.

IPad is great for direct manipulation, such as drawing / painting / rearranging things visually. In this regard, it far outstrips any macbooks.

And outside of a very small portion of the user base, how much of most people's time is spent in those activities?

And of those people, how many of them would prefer full-fat Photoshop on a Surface Pro or drawing tablet?

Not many; the iPad Pro + Apple Pencil Pro is considered by many to be the best-in-class drawing tablet. And the Surface Pro frankly sucks for digital illustration — it's far less responsive, with far less control. The next-best option after an iPad Pro is a Wacom pad plugged into a PC.

Also, there's no point in using Photoshop for drawing on a tablet. (It's not impossible to use it for that, but it's not what I'd call a good experience.) You really want domain-specific digital-illustration software that puts the artist in direct control of brushes, color-mixing, and layers (either by direct-manipulation gestures, or in floating palettes, ring menus, etc); and then gets everything else out of the way (or doesn't include it at all.) You use such software to draw the things you want, as separate layer-groups or images — and then, when you're done, you throw those drawings into an app like Photoshop to clean them up, put them together, and otherwise transform your "drawings" into "artwork."

If you're familiar with audio production: think of Photoshop as a DAW, and illustration as a performance. Even a solo musician doesn't touch their DAW while they're playing an instrument; the only thing they're touching is their instrument. Digital-illustration software is an instrument.

FWIW, I have both a Wacom and a Surface Pro on-hand right now. The Wacom tablet is great (unbeaten latency-wise) but the Surface Pro has an equally nice digitizer and a perfectly usable screen. I took notes on it for a few years before moving to markdown and typing everything.

The point I'm trying to make is that this artificial product category distinction people want to illustrate doesn't exist. Both of these hardware platforms can do both tasks equally well; all Apple has to do is provide both and let their customers decide for themselves. As time goes on, it feels increasingly easy to reverse-engineer Apple's design philosophy:

- Identify a problem (I need to install apps; I need a heartrate monitor; I want to draw on my Mac)

- Design a best-path solution (What if there was an app for that? What if all your vitals were monitored? What if drawing was tactile?)

- Take that solution and engineer it into an expensive auxiliary product (App Store/Developer Program; Apple Watch; Apple Pencil/iPad)

- Deny competitors market access specifically so they can't fix self-imposed limitations (Still Apple refuses to sign benign apps; Apple Health is all-or-nothing without Apple Watch, competitors are scary and can't be trusted; touchscreen Macs are "impossible" and Apple Pencil can only be made by licensing our tech)

Maybe I'm being too creative and optimistic, but are there not thousands of people on this site that would readily give up their Mac for an iPad with decent Linux support? The only person stopping people from having their cake and eating it too is Apple. And you know it's not because the iPad is in some way different from the Macbook and shouldn't have an open bootloader. It's because that would stop people from buying Macs. For the love of God, I hate Steve Jobs like the devil but I would probably go get a used iPad Pro if Apple announced they were publishing Linux drivers for it.

You have drunk the Youtuber Kool-Aid way too much. Also, quit the Apple superiority complexe.

There are plenty of professional illustrators using tools other than iPad Pros, in fact most serious ones are still using Wacoms and the likes as you mentioned. The Surfaces devices and the likes are just as competent as iPads (if not more) they just don't have the same halo effect and there are people like you spitting a lot of bullshit to keep the superiority complexe alive.

Apple would like people to see the iPad Pro as the only good illustration tool, but the truth is, considering the price and software support it's actually not a great one. Since a "real" computer is going to be needed for work before delivery, if you don't need the extreme mobility, it's pretty stupid to buy an iPad instead of a traditional drawing surface.

But it doesn't matter, since Apple doesn't sell their devices to rational people, it's all about emotional marketing so whatever...

They aren't all that scared of a small subset of geeks running Linux directly on their iPad and using that as a regular Linux-ey thing, I don't think. The number of people who want to do this is very small, and they don't expect any support for that. And that's not possible from the app store, anyway.

But they've always been scared of emulators in the IOS app stores, and the reason for that seems to be a combination of things:

1. The user experience with emulators can be awful, which is a contrast to the "It Just Works" way of doing things with IOS. This doesn't jive with the image they sell, or that they wish to support.

2. By letting anyone run real software easily on an iPad, this cuts into their sales of MacBooks. This is obviously not in their interest, since they'd rather sell two machines instead of one machine.

For point 1 I'm not sure how may people are going to fire up Window on an emulator, find it doesn't handle touch events very well, and go "iPads suck". However, there are a number of people who have gone "I'd like to do X on the iPad but there's no good way to do it, iPads suck", especially in the developer realm.

This is especially true on the "Pro" version of the iPad, where the OS feels like a major constraint on what would otherwise be a very capable device.

> find it doesn't handle touch events very well

You don't need to touch your Windows VM. The iPad Magic Keyboard cases have trackpads on them; and iPads also support Bluetooth mice.

(And a user of iPadOS VM software probably wouldn't even be trying to touch the screen to interact with the software anyway. After all, why boot up such software if not for productivity? And who would attempt productivity on an iPad without putting it into its "productivity orientation", with the iPad docked onto a keyboard case?)

You forgot #3: By letting anyone run mouse software on iPad, they have to use a stylus to operate it, which made Steve Jobs mad at Microsoft's pen computing division back in 2001.

I honestly believe this to be way more important of a reason to Apple than anything else. The point of making you buy two computers is not to get twice as much money out of you, it's to get app developers to port their apps over to UIKit and make you re-buy all your apps twice.

I tried UTM SE a while back. Using it with the Magic Keyboard was almost the Real Deal Laptop Experience, but if I ever took my iPad out of its Magic Keyboard then I'd have to use some really annoying mouse and keyboard emulation to use the same software. Apple's the kind of company that will absolutely put guns to the heads of their users to force them to not have a bad computing experience.

> They aren't all that scared of a small subset of geeks running Linux directly on their iPad and using that as a regular Linux-ey thing, I don't think.

I don't think they are worried about a few geeks running bash or docker. They should worry about Valve Software, and millions of non-geeks discovering that Steam works on iPads. Even if only a small subset of the Steam library works, that could be a collection of thousands of games going back decades that don't pay the App Store tax.

Unfettered PC emulation threatens billions of dollars of Apple revenue.

1) Things don't "Just Work" with IOS. I regularly have to help people figure out how to connect their i* to work network, install 2FA apps, find missing 2FA notifications, find freshly installed app icons..."It Just Works" if you have done it 100s of times before and know what to do. 2) That is just plain and simple user hostile behavior that is not tolerated in case of any other company except Apple by Apple users.

1. I don't have any trouble with IOS. My experience is very limited: I've got an old iPad Pro that runs the current IOS, and that I've had for a couple of years. It Just Works* -- it lets me watch dumb shit on YouTube, check the weather, and remotely operate a digital mixer, and that's all I really want from it. Previously, with a gap of about a decade, I had a minty-fresh OG iPod Touch that also Just Worked* (until it died a couple of years later during battery replacement surgery). Despite my limited experience, in both cases I've found the interface to be adequately intuitive and don't recall ever really seeking any guidance.

2. Some people like the walled garden. I'm not really amongst them, but I do tolerate the walls. (For those who absolutely abhor walls, there's rootable Android devices out there that can satisfy an itch to tinker with something in compact portable electronics. That's a lot of fun, too, but it's heading in the opposite opposite direction of Just Works.)

*: They "just work" within their limitations, which can be severe. It frustrates me that I can't install real Firefox on the iPad so I can use uBlock Origin, and it frustrated me that the iPod Touch didn't even come with the ability to install apps or even copy-and-paste text out of the box**. But in both cases, the devices behaved very well with the functions they were permitted to utilize.

**: I jailbroke the iPod Touch and went pretty far off the reservation with it (adding a clipboard, installable apps, multitasking, and a useful userland) because that was fun for me at that time, but by no means did I have to do any of that -- it was a very fine touchscreen music player with 802.11 and a web browser all by itself without any of that kind of help, and that's pretty much what it was promised to be able to do. And that was a long time ago; during the gap, I'd forgotten more about IOS than I ever knew.

I would have also thought:

3. It lets users get software on to the ipad without going through the App Store (thereby escaping apples ability to clip the ticket on the way through).

iSH is already on the App Store and lets you run x86 Linux apps.

My guess is that the thing Apple is actually objecting to is graphical user output, specifically mouse software being utilized on a touchscreen. UTM (and iDOS) does that, iSH only gives you a terminal. Terminal software is touch-friendly, so it's allowed, even though iSH has to do the same threaded code dance UTM SE does.

(And of course there's also a-Shell which runs WASM/WASI binaries in Safari...)

My understanding was that iSH is the same kind of thing that e.g. Swift Playground for iPadOS is: both ship with an internal userland of binaries, including a compiler toolchain, embedded into the app (that Apple can audit); and both allow code to be compiled and executed locally. But in neither case can you download and install arbitrary non-Apple-audited third-party packages into the sandbox.

This is why iSH calls itself a "Linux-like environment." There's no package manager! If Apple allowed it, iSH would almost certainly just be a wrapped-up Debian VM. But it's not. (And this is why iSH has always been considered a toy by people wanting to do real software development, rather than being something anyone would recommend you use as part of your workflow.)

False. I've been using iSH before it became available on the App Store. Downloading and executing arbitrary binaries is always possible. Just go install iSH and run any command-line binary to see for yourself.

The reason it's considered a toy is because of the sheer number of bugs in its Linux syscall simulation layer as well as in its implementation of Forth-style threaded code, not because of a package manager. After all its GitHub page says "This code is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm."

iSH has nothing stopping you, the user, from wgetting arbitrary scripts or binaries and running them in the VM[0]. It also exposes a file provider so you can drop arbitrary x86 binaries into it if you so choose.

Also, iSH does have a package manager. It used to actually be modified to pull packages from the App Store but now they use a separate server. I don't remember if it's the Alpine Linux package repo or a custom thing for iSH.

[0] In fact, this was the excuse Apple used to ban it a few years ago

> iSH has nothing stopping you, the user, from wgetting arbitrary scripts or binaries and running them in the VM[0]

"Nothing stopping you" in the same sense that there's nothing stopping someone from using a sequence of specific gamepad button-presses to turn Super Mario World into Flappy Bird.

In vulnerability-exploitation terms, sure, the attack surface is there.

But in "would anyone actually spend time doing this" terms: no. The advantages don't outweigh the labor costs. (Especially if you're doing this for work, in anger, and you want to install an app to let you solve a problem right now by popping open a Linux terminal, and installing all the packages you need — including some arbitrary non-packaged SDKs that depend on dev-dependencies from specific known Linux flavors.)

Mind you, in theory, someone could make it easier for everyone else to do this, by writing a bootstrap script that wgets a bunch of stuff and effectively turns your iSH environment into e.g. Debian. But nobody has done this.

Why? I can't say for sure, but I suspect it's precisely because the iSH "sandbox" isn't actually a VM containing a Linux kernel, but rather an older technique — I think involving a userland of binaries compiled to use Darwin libraries; or maybe more likely, a userland linked to some Linux-on-XNU virtualization layer (custom libc, libresolv, etc.) And that's just not a "flavor" of Linux that you can find Debian packages for, or even third-party APKs for. Even if you built up your own apt base-packages repo to allow debootstrap to work, that wouldn't magically enable you to then find install deb packages from arbitrary apt repos that weren't compiled for the iSH "arch".

And I think that iSH continuing to exist on iPadOS, but persisting in doing this complex kind of virtualization rather than switching over to being "just VM software hard-coded to use a specific Linux VM", is perhaps on purpose. I'm guessing that Apple wouldn't allow "just a Linux VM" on the App Store any more than they allow UTM — again, precisely because it would unlock the capability to efficiently utilize arbitrary third-party packages, and thereby to actually use the iPad "in anger" for software-development business productivity. It would be "enough" of a development environment that some businesses might consider buying their employees iPads instead of Macs. And Apple really wants to avoid that.

> Also, iSH does have a package manager. It used to actually be modified to pull packages from the App Store but now they use a separate server. I don't remember if it's the Alpine Linux package repo or a custom thing for iSH.

It's a semi-custom thing for iSH, in that it's a custom "arch", with all the packages containing binaries compiled for the iSH virtualization layer. So you can't switch over/add on any third party repo; binaries from ordinary arm64 APKs wouldn't run. Third parties would need to create an iSH-arch release of their package specifically. And AFAIK there's no published infrastructure to enable third parties to do that.

In essence, though, the packages in this repo are still a "part of" the app. Despite being hosted on a third-party server, those packages still have to be signed — and I have a strong feeling that Apple, not the iSH dev, holds those signing keys. So Apple, not the iSH dev, gets final say over what APKs end up available in the iSH userland. (And that's why those APKs haven't been updated in a while — the iSH dev likely has to go back-and-forth with Apple when pushing out updates to their own repo — just as if they were publishing a new version of the app.)

If you're curious, iSH's source is public: https://github.com/ish-app/ish

You're correct that there is no Linux kernel emulation. They went with reimplementation for that. However, the userland is very much emulated x86 binaries. You can even compile your own C code inside iSH and run it. When you syscall, control passes from the threaded code[0] interpreter into the Linux reimplementation.

The reason why they aren't shipping Debian is that the threaded code technique being used as a JIT substitute in both iSH and UTM SE is far too slow to run a full Debian derivative. Believe me, I tried installing Ubuntu on UTM SE and it took literal hours and flattened my iPad battery in the process. iSH uses Alpine Linux because it's very lightweight[1].

As far as I'm aware there's no secret deal with Apple to lock iSH down. The only limitations I've ran into have to do with MySQL, which wants unaligned atomics, which you can't do on ARM64 without compromising the performance of the emulator. I actually had a discussion with the developer of iSH about this and put in a PR to make MySQL stop crashing iSH.

[0] return-oriented programming

[1] So lightweight it doesn't even ship anything GNU, making it one of the few genuine "Linux distros" with no slash or plus or "I would just like to interject"

iSH does allow you to download packages from the Alpine package repo, but they maintain their own mirror. The only issue is that they haven't updated it in a while, so its stuck at Alpine 3.14, and there's no (at least straightforward) option to upgrade to the later versions or to Alpine edge. I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though.

This isn't real "arbitrary package downloading", though — Apple still audits all the code that goes into these repos (which is why they can't just keep them up-to-date.) It's essentially just offloading of some of the app's packaged code into separate "DLC" modules, to make the base app download more lightweight.

> I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though.

I would highly suspect that this wouldn't work.

Maybe it would have in some prior version, back when there was the technical barrier of it being very hard to cross-compile Linux binaries for arm64.

But I would guess, upon the popularization of things like the Raspberry Pi, that Apple required the developer of iSH to modify the version of apk(1) that ships with the tool to only work with APKs that have been signed by Apple.

You can already achieve the same workflow with Shadow PC, even though you need a permanent low latency network connection.

Sure, you can... but you never would.

The whole point of an adult owning an iPad as a separate second device (besides using it as a drawing tablet or as a touch-control surface for professional production apps) is that it's a lightweight and more "rugged" portable computer than a laptop is, focused on enabling consumption and light computing tasks in situations where you either would worry about bringing a laptop, or just wouldn't care to deal with bringing a laptop.

The comparative advantage of an iPad over a laptop is found by just throwing it in your bag when you're going "out" and not planning to do work, and then pulling it out: in a coffee shop; at a park; on a beach; on a bus/train/plane; etc. Into, in other words, exactly the sorts of situations where you don't have a "permanent low latency network connection."

Any environment where relying on a remote desktop would make sense, is also an environment where the iPad has no comparative advantage. If you're in such an environment constantly, you'd just buy a laptop and never even consider an iPad!

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