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Comment by heyitsnick | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me as an entirely natural development and something that will appeal to many consumers.

I get the feeling Apple have always wanted iPad to be an extra - an extension to the desktop experience. But the divisions between phone, tablet, "ultralight laptop" and "main laptop" are arbitrary and increasingly opaque. Many people are starting to see tablets and real possible replacements: for light users, it handles 90% of their computer usage (internet browser, video and photo viewing). Even for "serious" computer users, tablets offer many advantages. They are quiet, keep cool, look good, super portable, and last a long time. People seem quite content with the lower processing power if they afforded these big pluses.

This Surface with integrated keyboard and support for regular win 8 apps could take it the extra 10% for a lot of people.

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I've always thought Apple was pretty clear in the direction they were headed when Jobs made his car and trucks analogy at All Things D. The iPad is meant for the 90% of current users as their main device. The PC is for the heavy lifting for those in fields such as audio, video and science. There may be a time where a tablet can meet these needs but I certainly don't think we're close yet.

One thing about Jobs... he was good at saying, "XYZ is a bad idea" right up until the day he announces "we're doing XYZ and it will change the world".

Once Apple can get iOS working well on x86, they'll do the same.

From what I understand, the problem with x68 is the lack of processors that can compete with ARM on battery life, which is one of the most important aspects of a portable device.

Intel has and is shipping x86 SoC processors which can compete (perhaps not beat) with ARM power efficiency. [1]

On the flip side, ARM doesn't scale as well as x86 to higher power outputs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28system_on_chip%29

> Once Apple can get iOS working well on x86

I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that iOS already works well on x86 and has never not worked well on x86. After all, the core OS maintains ongoing heritage with an x86 OS, and every single app in the store has already been successfully compiled for x86...

> every single app in the store has already been successfully compiled for x86

Really!?

Theoretically it would be possible develop your app in Xcode and only ever compile it for ARM and test on the actual device.

But if you use the iOS simulator to develop/test your app (which I imagine every developer does), then you're running your iOS app natively on OS X, linked against a version of all the iOS libraries compiled for x86.

No, actually. There are a couple of third-party development tools for iOS which only compile to ARM (and which therefore can't run in the iOS simulator), notably Adobe Air for mobile, and that Delphi for iOS thing. 99.999%, though; anything written in Xcode, and anything written with the majority of third-party tools, has been run in the simulator.

Every app that has been run in the "simulator" has been compiled on x86. The simulator is not one. It's really a cross-compiling trick.

> The simulator is not one. It's really a cross-compiling trick.

Uh? No, that's the exact opposite, the simulator is exactly a simulator. What it's not is an emulator: it does not emulate an ARM device, it simulates an iPhone by running iOS/x86.

Possibly a naive question: what's the difference between a simulator and an emulator?

Presumably an emulator copies the actual instruction set, while a simulator... only pretends to copy the instruction set?

An emulator does exactly as it says: it emulates. It creates an environment that appears to a running program to be identical to the real thing. This is done by emulating the hardware (e.g. BSNES), emulating the runtime environment for a native binary (e.g. VMware), or most commonly, a mixture of both.

A simulator -- at least in the world of Apple iOS development -- does not attempt to emulate iOS hardware, or even the iOS operating system. All the simulator does is provide a virtual display and launches an instance of Launchpad.app. Your app then runs within that virtual display, and talks with natively compiled copies of the iOS APIs, but otherwise it's a normal Mac OS X process that can be viewed and poked with Activity Monitor, or top, or whatever.

The simulator doesn't need to "boot up". There are no virtual drivers. There's no memory management. There's no emulated silicon whatsoever.

The only downside to this approach I can see is that the simulator can't be used to test some things like resource limits, and some things behave very differently, like OpenGL. But you have to test on real hardware anyway, and Apple have made native testing just as easy as simulated.

Thanks a lot for bringing up this subject. I feel unimaginably ashamed for never considering iOS Simulator was in fact, as the name might suggest, a simulator!

In the iOS sense of the question:

An emulator would be binary compatible with the actual device by emulating the ARM instruction set on top of x86. The iOS simulator doesn't do this but instead runs a flavor[1] of iOS natively directly on x86 that is API compatible but not binary compatible (i.e. compiled binaries for the simulator cannot be ran on the devices).

[1] The simulator OS also has distinct limitations that diverge from the real device or what you would expect from a truly emulated environment. There's no motion detection, no GPU performance, no accelerometer or compass, location data is simulated, multitouch input is limited, some frameworks are not available, etc).

Even if the environment was "truly emulated", there would still be no motion detection, accelerometer, compass, location data or multitouch input.

Nor is it likely for the emulated environment to be able to provide a sufficiently accurate performance analogue to the devices' CPU and GPU.

The simulator is the ideal development environment: stupidly fast, and completely reliable for most day-to-day development tasks. For Apple to provide more accuracy in the simulator would be a waste of their time, when you can just as easily run your app on a device.

If you look at many iOS libs they are actually fat binaries, meaning they usually have x86, armv6, and armv7 executable code in them.

On iOS cross-compilation only occurs when you target an iOS device such as an iPhone which generates armv6 and armv7 code.

> I certainly don't think we're close yet

Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience. I'd assert that an iPad -- perhaps with a bluetooth keyboard -- is already enough computer for 70% of western world.

If computing history has shown as anything, nothing really is 'enough' for any part of the world.

> Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience.

I'd say especially for the HN audience.

A lot of people around here live most of their lives in the terminal, using Vi and Git. They have no reason to work on a beefy machine, as long as they can access more hardware somewhere else. It could be a server in the closet, or "the cloud".

When I bought my first laptop and started doing webdev in 2001, I noticed that all I needed was enough power to play music, edit text and run a web/database server. It worked great with win2k WAMP on a P2 266 MHz, 96 MB, 4 GB. My much more powerful desktop was suddenly left powered off most of the time.

In fact the only total, absolute, complete deal breaker is Cmd+Tab instead of reaching for the home button+screen.

There is no disappearing division between devices, there is rather a stronger division between mobile platforms (including tablet and phone) and PC platforms. And that division is only going to get stronger.

Maemo and Meego are dead. Chromebooks are not likely to blow up. If small ARM machines get popular it will be by running some weird mobile-type OS. Native apps seem to be much more commercially attractive than pure HTML5 apps. On the other hand, I don't see evidence that iOS and Android are going to become plausible PC platforms. Netbook sales have slowed way down. All the buzz is about expensive mobile devices like tablets, and expensive laptops, and these two categories are not converging. It only appears that a convergence is coming because mobile platforms are cannibalizing the casual uses for PCs and netbooks.

I agree. The division is stronger. Well, the only reason why people build native apps is because it is faster to build native apps. Even when HTML5 is completely published, if you have to write a game on the browser, it can take forever to actually find out the bug you have. Browser bugs are not fun to learn!

Chrome will die, and replaced by Android. Google can't have both.

I don't give a damn about these electronics anymore. I use my iPad for video and books, and my computer for gaming and everything else. I say the new MS tablet will be more convenient to use...

And I think it makes a big difference that they're meaningfully aiming to transcend the iPad, not just imitate it.

My biggest takeaway from the announcement was that this was a very Microsoft-like approach to the tablet market, and I mean that in a good way.

When I think of an iPad, I think of something that's a natural progression from the iPod and iPhone, running bigger and better versions of the apps you can get from the Apple walled garden. It's a fantastic piece of hardware and a tight ecosystem.

Microsoft isn't just trying to compete by offering its own similar piece of hardware to run its own similar apps. They are looking to offer high-performance hardware (an Ivy Bridge chip in a tablet!) with great design, and they're looking to run full-fledged Windows applications.

They're not just competing with iPad, they're offering a possible desktop replacement tablet. That's a bold move.

Admittedly details are everything but isn't the desktop replacement tablet Microsoft's vision all along？I mean Bill Gates back in the early 2000s promoted the concept heavily.

This is much slicker and powerful enough to amount another try, but "bold"? More like stubborn.

The Ivy Bridge won't offer anywhere near the battery life of an ARM tablet, though. At best it will be half of that.

What it will offer though is a full compatibility to existing windows application. People might be ready to lose a few hours of battery life for that.

what windows app exactly will people trade for few hours of battery life?

seriously, other than PC games, I don't know a single windows app I want to run on a tablet form factor.

Maybe not, but they designed it so that it's a tablet/ultrabook hybrid. Do your research on the couch in tablet format, then move to the kitchen table to write it up in Microsoft Word. Read and write emails during a bathroom break, then create an insightful business presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint (don't forget to wash your hands)!

So what will happen when you have Word open in "ultrabook"/desktop mode, but then start using the Surface in tablet mode? Is the same instance of Word still open? Is its interface the same? These are the type of things that MS hasn't proven themselves good at designing. MS tends to overcomplicate their UI (Ribbon etc) and in my opinion, a tablet tends to benefit best from focus and simplicity.

That's just battery life... wait until we see what the heat will be like! Seriously, even my Macbook Air gets hot under mild load -- the only reason I tolerate it is because it sits on a desk.

Fans and vents on a tablet... I just can't see that catching on for many people. The ARM model is more promising, but this competes much more closely with the iPad.

Also, the video was very funny with the pen input -- his palm interferes with the initial demo and 20 seconds later he's talking about their amazing palm rejection technology. Don't even get me started on the fact that none of the presenters seemed able to get the swipe-in-from-the-side gesture to work on the first try.

Nor is it likely to be priced at or under $499.

And it was a "bold move" the last 3 or 4 times they've tried it as well. This move just convinces me that MS is a one trick pony.

MS has so many products in so many different markets that I can't help but laugh at calling them a "one trick pony".

I do wonder a bit, how will this blurring of the laptop/tablet line affect their cash cow, Microsoft Office? The business world is trained to believe: they NEED office, and office == productivity. The iPad, long without these apps, challenged this ideal. How would the tablet world spilling into the laptop world affect Office sales...

For people who want productivity software suits like Office from lighter computers, they have online versions of Office.

Probably not too badly, considering this tablet will likely be inescapably bundled with Office, if it isn't a core part of the system by now.

I believe I heard in the video that Office is bundled with the RT version of the laptop

Necessary disclaimer: Microsoft employee Addendum: I did not work on this machine, and did not know about it (I don't think?) until today.

Even my boss and my partner, died-in-the-wool Windows fans, are well aware of OpenOffice. The idea that MS Office is necessary for productivity simply does not exist. Anyone in an office still using Windows has at least considered the possibility of seeing Linux or Mac on their desktop. Maybe not seriously, but the thought has crossed their mind.

> The idea that MS Office is necessary for productivity simply does not exist.

If you have thousands of pre-existing spreadsheets in your office, many of them running fairly complex VBA macros, the idea that MS Office is necessary certainly does exist. And I've never worked anywhere where that isn't the case.

And at organizations of this type, the licensing cost of Office per desktop is peanuts. Can't remember what the prices were, but I was shocked how little it costs large organizations.

That's probably a bit different. Anyone who writes or manages "fairly complex VBA macros" (and I have consulted for a company that did) is well aware there are many ways to skin that cat. That's not a definition of necessity. That's a definition of percieved cost of change.

From the "About" section: Create, collaborate, and get stuff done with Office

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