Nice Things that Apple doesn't let us have (on an iPad)
taoofmac.com
taoofmac.com
I think if Steve had lived another decade (or longer) the Mac would be dead, wholesale replaced with iOS. iOS and iPasOS are very much the kind of managed environment that Steve preferred. He wanted to give users the whole package. If you could mess things up by getting to an error state or not know how to solve a problem, they failed.
I am pleased that we didn’t go down that road. I think though, that is why the iPad is still not entirely sure what its role is in the lineup.
Sure, you are right: Apple loves iPadOS and macOS for having closed App Store ecosystems that funnel 30% of that entire economy to their coffers.
But at the same time the discussion has become tiring because it’s a bunch of people who aren’t iPad customers telling iPad customers what they should want in their device.
The vast majority of iPad owners are just using it to derp around with entertainment apps and shove Baby Shark in front of their toddler.
The tiny sliver of power users that buy the pro models are in creative fields like art and video where the iPad’s shortcomings on the “computer” side don’t really matter. An iPad with ProCreate is then best artist’s tablet on the market and that’s pretty much the end of that story.
At some point we should just let the iPad be what it is.
Sell Apple Linux for $100 in the Apple App Store. Apple keeps 100% of VM revenue, not just 30%. Problem solved.
Or, create a "VM Store" and take 30% of revenue from that, with a minimum price per VM.
Is Linux already used by Apple for new hardware bringup?
offline web/iOS clients + Linux backend VM
app ecosystem for 2 billion iOS devices
4:3 retina OLED display
active secondary market
portable, efficient, fast
many years of security updates
Android devices certainly have an active secondary market.
https://swappa.com/catalog/type/tablet?platform=android
Qualcomm-based Android devices are most certainly portable, efficient, fast.
Android provides many years of security updates especially for recently purchased devices. For example, the pixel tablet guarantees security updates until at least 2028. Apple doesn’t actually make any guarantee, they’ve just had a good track record until this point. More modern releases of Android separate security updates from feature updates so that there’s less dependency on vendor support. They also separate play services updates from OS feature updates.
Thanks for the pointer to Google Pixel Tablet, didn't notice that was launched in 2023. Looks promising for experimentation because it claims to support Android Virtualization Framework. Sadly, it's missing an external keyboard that connects via magnetic/wired pins like the Apple Magic Keyboard, instead of insecure Bluetooth. Perhaps the Pixel Tablet 2 will improve the keyboard.
IMO there isn't a strong reason to be worried about security on modern Bluetooth keyboards to the point of it being part of a purchase decision. The most realistic attacks require physical device access or snooping during the pairing process. Heck, if you start using a password manager/Passkeys and SSH keys instead of typing in passwords it becomes a relatively useless attack vector.
Let's not forget that Android has been far more flexible on USB devices than iOS. If you want a physically connected keyboard, Android has supported you for decades without any vendor lock-in. Apple has only recently delivered something resembling an open USB experience on the iPad.
I own an iPad for my kitchen as a recipe and web browsing/YouTube machine. I paid under $400 for it and it is a great appliance for that job.
But people who want more functionality shouldn’t buy it.
Buy the product that is shipped, not the product that you want it to be in the future.
Apple can thank the creative imagination of past iPhone users for present iPhone product.
iPad was improved by competition with Microsoft Surface.
Qualcomm (ex-Apple Nuvia) Oryon 2-in-1 devices can influence future iPad Pro products.
Yes, it's great for sketching, entertainment apps and most web browsing. But if you go outside those use cases at all it's a horrible frustrating experience. Seriously, there are tasks that are easier to do on an Amazon Fire. That should not be the case when an iPad is multitudes more powerful and more expensive.
It's a nice product for the handful of approved tasks but even for those its really easy to run into problems especially if ANYTHING requires managing more than 2 files or features from multiple apps. The iPad could be a lot more and a lot more peoples one device.
That’s why I think this is tiring…the people who want it to be more than it is should just take their money elsewhere. Samsung will happily sell you an iPad clone that has more power user capability and is a great product.
It's also really tiring to hear "YoU'Re just NoT an iPAD CusTOmer!" when any valid criticism is raised.
At the same time, I’m not going to buy a Honda Civic and complain that it doesn’t rock crawl as well as a Jeep Wrangler.
Most iPad models are basically keyboardless MBAs with touch screens and pen support. Same CPUs, same RAM, same SSDs. And you can easily add the keyboard and mouse back.
Why ship something better when you can keep selling both a tablet and a laptop?
Why be excellent when you can be mediocre?
Someone at Apple must have the business imagination to monetize unscheduled customer demand for an existing product.
Apple under and since Jobs has been all about selling appliances, not computers. A bicycle for the mind, but one that gets serviced at the bicycle dealership. And while technical users would love to use their devices as the general purpose computers that they are, that goes contrary to the device’s designated purpose. The iPad is not supposed to run desktop software because that’s not what it’s supposed to do. You don’t see a lot of complaints that you can’t play Doom on your smart fridge, but it’s the same thing, except for the fact that the iPad is such an awesome form factor and combination of hardware. But once it stops being an appliance, that opens it up to a whole class of support issues and usability problems that don’t affect it in its current state.
As soon as you put a toggle in settings that says “yes, let me break things”, then you get YouTube videos that tell kids to go in and turn on the toggle so they can mod a game, or install some spyware, and break their iPad, and the one to bear the brunt of the blame for the iPad being broken is not the random YouTuber, but Apple, for allowing their product to break. That’s how the general public sees it.
Apple is not a hardware company, or a software company, they are both. The two are tightly integrated. That is one of the best things about the entire Apple ecosystem, the amount of iron-fisted, high-walled control they exercise means that the level of integration between their devices is unmatched anywhere else in the industry. Break that bond, and a lot of the appeal in Apple products goes away because yes, the hardware is overpriced. But if you look at it from the standpoint of a product that is a tightly integrated bundle of hardware and software, and that you are paying for the software as well, when you compare it to a lot of the other commercial offerings out there it starts to look like not such a bad deal.
All this is to say: if you don’t like it, then buy something else. Requiring jailbreaks is by design, not just because Apple is greedy or lazy, but because it completely changes the purpose and usage of their product to allow the installation of general-purpose software.
I did, but someone convinced _them_ it was a good idea to take out the headphone jack and removable battery too.
Many of Apple's decisions end up having a blast radius large enough to affect people who never buy their products.
I don't buy this argument at all. If Apple is indeed a top tech company, then they can also figure out how to have advanced PRO toggles that don't easily result in breaking things. Otherwise why do they call their devices with the "PRO" suffix?
Assuming that locking everything down till you aren't even able to change a ringtone or a wallpaper, is the only way to prevent the user form braking something is just lazy: lazy engineering on behalf of Apple, and lazy form their apologists who defend such a baseless claim.
That's like saying, the only way the state can guarantee your security is to put a policeman in each of your homes following you everywhere and tap all your wires. Very lazy explanation to justify what is ultimately a nefarious policy.
Complaining about the lack of freedom you have in Apple’s ecosystem is like moving to a totalitarian country where the streets are clean and the buses run on time and then complaining about the lack of freedom of speech.
To increase sales for self-perceived pro's?
...I always try to follow the monies.
>Very lazy explanation to justify what is ultimately a nefarious policy.
Absolutely this, too.
Do I have to remind you about the "what's a computer?" advertising from Apple, implying the iPad can replace a computer?
I'm sure many HN participants can recount personal stories of how childhood computers purchased by their families for "average user" purposes ended up becoming things that expanded their horizons far beyond initial expectations. It sucks that current generations are being deprived of that experience by people who can't possibly imagine that anyone would ever use a computing device for any purpose other than the narrow use cases the manufacturer conceived of in advance.
Freedom for you often means freedom for others, including those with bad intentions or a disinterest in maintaining your safety.
The same philosophy applies to any ecosystem such as programming language design, package managers, app stores, etc…
Maximum freedom is not always desirable because it invites in scammers and abusers of the commons.
It's 2024, so AAPL is a multi-trillion dollar corporation.
>If you don’t like [not being able to easily jailbreak], then buy something else.
Contemplating the hacker mindset, I am disappoint.
At least Apple allows developers to sow in their walled garden, even if they ultimately get to decide what is allowed to grow.
That basically never happens. Something about the Apple ecosystem is good enough that people who honestly should not be using Apple - because they want freedom and configurability - continue to use it anyway.
Case in point, the latest iPad Pro has an M4 chip which no other Apple device has.
The problem is Apple just don’t want to give any of those demographics the ability to run what they want - instead only what Apple thinks they should run.
As somebody who has recently (within the last year) replaced his Android devices with Apple equivalents, I initially lamented the lack of some of my favorite apps, but at this point I actually appreciate the functionality and quality of the apps I’ve replaced more than the ones that I miss.
Apple blocks JIT, causing the iSH and aShell emulators to make the iPad too hot to touch, and too hot for the battery to safely charge (you'll get a message that charging has been stopped until the iPad can cool down).
Apple blocks VMs (removed in 16.4).
As a company you have to be the one making yourself obsolete all the time to innovate and survive, because if you don't, then other companies will.
Fear of cannibalizing existing profitable products with new ones, is what killed Nokia, Kodak, SGI, Blackberry, Philips, etc. leaving them as husks leapfrogged by more brash competitors.
If Apple are losing a sale, they want to lose it to themselves. I'm not sure they'd be worried about being unable to extract more money from the customer, that's an area in which they seem flush with ideas (perhaps, an iPad Ultra with encrusted diamond frame?)
It's just a waste of oxygen constantly discussing this.
Granted, I wouldn't expect Apple to support a software issue after doing this but at least you could technically use your hardware for anything you want if you're dedicated enough.
*or $100 Apple Linux VM sold in App Store
Even with EU sideloading, some will pay for Apple VMs.
That should check most of the boxes. They want everyone to buy one of each thing in their store and they want to skew them so you buy a more expensive version each time until you only buy the top tier of each for reasons.
Because jailbreaking basically unlocks access to some pretty shitty hacky apps in an overall pretty shitty and unstable experience.
Like, it’s cool, and I support the idea, but as a daily driver why not buy the OS that gives you more freedom in the first place?
Most of the issues were solved with a 5% or 10% battery dead emulator screen off to keep me from losing my jailbreak.
You then get to have features you want well before everyone else on the latest iOS and maintain high quality components of Apple with a very long update cycle.
I’ve had iOS features that Apple removed. Much more freedom to do development on them too where more money is on iOS. New update breaks features with an app, roll back to any version you want instead of waiting for a fix.
Other than eBay, any recommendations for an iPad with blobs for iOS 16.x with hypervisor framework?
So annoying, so frustrating. More so because I know that Apple *intentionally* did this.