I already had an iPad Pro + smart keyboard + pencil once... and got rid of it and switched to a Surface Pro. We still have an old 10" iPad 2 + an older iPad Mini in the house and they get use for typical iPad consumer stuff.
When I add up this new iPad in the minimum 128GB/Wifi/11" config this one is about $400 more than I paid for the Surface Pro + KB cover + MS Pen. (Which is i5/8GB/128GB/Wifi-only)
The Surface has been so much more useful due to it's "real" software ecosystem and ability to just plug devices & memory cards right into it. 4 years on it seems like this new iPad Pro is no better except for even slicker hardware + touchpad.
Not there for me till they fix the software and make it a lot easier to do real world tasks that require working with files on other pieces of hardware you have local.
Some of the use cases like traveling and doing photography or video on the road have just been so much easier with the Surface Pro. Even just doing things like downloading a spreadsheet from the bank. Maybe you can do that now but you couldn't when I had my iPad Pro. Safari wouldn't let you download a file and open it in the app of your choice. So even though Numbers (or Excel) would have been fine to do finances there was no way to get the files. If the bank had made it so the app could generate a spreadsheet and then let you share it with Numbers that would work, but those use cases never got enabled, and there were so many cases like that.
The surface pro can do everything, but for most things the tablet mode experience is somewhere between dismal and unusable. The ipad pro can't do a handful of tasks, but for everything else the experience is excellent in both tablet and laptop mode.
Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche (now that working with files is well supported), and are solvable limitations. The software problem on the surface pro is pervasive and unsolvable. They've done their best, but you can't make every piece of software written for Windows suddenly not require the precision of a mouse or suddenly support navigational gestures.
I had a surface book 2, but got rid of it in favor of an ipad pro after using one for a while. I have a desktop that I use for gaming, but I would have that either way for the sheer power of it.
The only thing that the ipad can't do well that I'd use it for is programming. This is not a dealbreaker for me, as I don't like programming on the go anyway, and if I really needed to then I can remote into a desktop to do it.
You had a desktop computer, which makes life much easier for you. As someone who was (and will soon be again) in the market for my one and only computer, the iPad is a non-starter. It's SO limited.
* Software development, with the best will in the world, isn't really possible on it.
* No quick ways to open up multiple windows, alt-tab between them, snap them side by side etc.
* No mouse support (Admittedly, I tried them a while back, but by all accounts, the mouse support until this update was still bolted on).
* Shitty af file system (Admittedly another thing that is moving in the right direction).
* Woeful stand. The previous folio was a joke, especially at it's price. It was unstable, lacked a trackpad, and personally, I hated the typing feel.
It was all rather disappointing, because I was so tempted by it. A sub-1 kg setup that one could pack in one's bag and forget, with a proper aspect ratio, with touch support, with great battery life, with the Apple quality etc.
> Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche
Software development doesn't feel niche to me. It feels like it should be possible to publish a usable, high quality iPad app using nothing but an iPad.
When you're in the niche, it's hard to see out. I'm old enough to remember encountering the first computer magazine that didn't feature program listings (SoftTalk) and thinking who would want this thing? Programming is very much a niche activity (although I imagine that it's more a question of when rather than if that we'll see some sort of XCode for iOS).
My take on this is that programming may be niche now, but it shouldn't be. Simple scripting is useful and lets you easily perform tasks that would otherwise be repetitive.
I'm not saying everyone should be able to build a large application, but you shouldn't be stopped from building things on it, otherwise how will you even get started?
Computers that stop you from inspecting them and learning how they work build a moat between the users and developers of the system. That's the opposite of what I think we should be encouraging.
I've got both the Surface Pro and an iPad Pro 10.5. They excel at different things but that is to be expected, they are converging on something else and that was unexpected. When I travel I bring both.
I am a heavy user of Cellular connectivity with my iPad Pro. It is my go to device on the road and while travelling, open it up and it just works. It runs a long time on a charge and it has apps that respond quickly for movies, reading, browsing, mapping, and note taking (all things I do while traveling).
The Surface Pro is where I do development (generally in WSL2 these days) once I've arrived somewhere that there is free WiFi and access to AC power. I will typically use it with a USB device or two as well (such as flash drives, wireless connections, and embedded development boards) Its ability to drive a couple of 2K screens and give me a "full up" developer experience is appreciated.
I sketch more on my iPad even though I like the drawing "feel" of the Surface Pro better. The SP feels "clunky" when I try to use it in tablet mode.
When I use them together its generally the iPad for reference materials and background music while I'm writing code on the SP.
When I go to a place where people are working--an office, a university library, a coffee shop--I see a sea of laptops and no iPads. Even in places such as Stanford libraries, where it is a sea of MacBooks, the people who provably buy lots of expensive Apple products don't buy iPads for work.
And iPads have been outselling Macs on a unit basis for a decade, so even people who buy iPads don't seem to find them suitable for general office/school-type work (as opposed to use as specialty terminals carried by inspectors or mounted on fast food counters).
Some combination of form factor and iOS's "you'll only hurt yourself with tools, so we've replaced them with lots of fun ways to buy entertainment" design ethos has so far failed to make iPad the computer replacement that Apple always claims it is. Instead, it's more of a personal entertainment center.
The iPad is useful for certain things. If you're trying to share a document with another person and discuss it, it works much better on an iPad. Both people can hold it, scroll it, etc and it feels much less awkward than discussing things on a laptop.
It's also a bit better than a laptop for digging in and highlighting reading material.
I would not use it as my main PC, though, that's for sure. The apps just aren't there yet.
I really don't think it's that "apps aren't there yet". The platform is more than a decade old and has an order of magnitude more apps and app development than the Mac ever had. I really think that the reason people who own Macs and iPads keep ignoring their iPads when planning to do real work is not that there hasn't been enough effort yet put into creating apps for iOS. It's that the form factor and OS were designed together for one-finger selection from a portable menu of amusements, not for plugging in a standard thumb drive and flexibly deploying a combination of ordinary work tools on a project folder full of productive work.
There is also a lack of desktop OS features. I tried using my image management software, Mylio, and I had to keep the iPad pro on and unlocked for images to sync to the cloud, and it did it a lot slower than my 6 year old macbook pro. Same with SD card imports and other general multitasking tasks.
Web browsing on the ipad pro with a keyboard cover although is pretty good!
The biggest problem is third-party software support. iPads are great right now for a lot of creative work, and in theory capable of a lot more in their current incarnation, but if you can only afford one computer and you know e.g. your history course next semester is going to force you to install IE6 and log in to some crusty web thing that relies on popups and embedded ActiveX controls (exaggerating, but you get the point), what are you going to buy? It's not really a choice at all, when you think about it.
Techy use cases like building and running "custom" code are unsupported on a more fundamental level, but I'd call that a special case. Slightly more concerning is how tightly locked-down the app store is.
I've recently acquired a used Surface Pro 5 with Cellular connectivity as a replacement for my old iPad (many apps don't work yet on the newer Surface Pro X, the successor with Cellular connectivity to Surface Pro 5). I take it with me everywhere nowadays and I'm very happy with it.
I agree that Tablet Mode in Windows isn't as good as iOS on iPad. On the other hand, I just want to carry with me one mobile computer/tablet, not two.
It does support files on external storage devices now with the USB-C port. It also supports SMB shares, which is great since I keep most of my stuff on a NAS and can access it over my VPN.
Developer tools are an obvious weak point, but FWIW I sold my Surface to buy an iPad Pro a few years ago and I'm happier with this. Considering an upgrade from 2016 model (9.7" with lightning) to the new ones.
It wouldn't work as my only computer, but I have a much beefier desktop for gaming and whatever workloads the iPad isn't suited for. That list of workloads is getting smaller and smaller though.
Yah.. USB-C, so I carry a dongle with the iPad Pro that I don't have to carry with my Surface Pro. I wouldn't have to buy the dongle cause I already have a great collection of them because I have a USB-C-only MacBook Pro. But I still have bought 0 actual devices that have USB-C.
And it's not just external storage devices. It was always such a mess.
E.x. with the Camera connection kit on the iPad Pro:
- My Canon 5D worked
- Go Pro cameras did not work
- My external card readers didn't work (which could take the
cards from the GoPro), sounds like maybe they fixed this
I could go on and on, Apple chips away a little by little at what works and what doesn't work. But meanwhile life goes on with OSX and Windows where everything just works. I used the iPad Pro for 2-3 years.. stuff just improves glacially on the iPad, that's the issue, they fix like one or two things in a year and you still have a list of 25 things that are a PITA.
Some of this stuff with USB-C is tough. There's no way I'm going to buy a new $3000+ camera to get USB-C for example.
I tried to aggressively go Type C exclusively starting in 2017 and have pretty much been there for about 18 months. There are two devices that need an adaptor which I simply glued onto the cable, but then again a lot of devices have gone completely wireless.
People had the same problem with the 30-pin to lightning transition, ADB to USB type A, the super messy VGA->various kinds of DVI and DisplayPort -> (mostly) HDMI and the like. They've been worth it in the end.
I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files. You wouldn't need a new camera, just an $8 cable like this one:
Or if you want to use a card reader, you get one that plugs into a USB-C port and toss it in the bag with the iPad, just like you would with a USB-A card reader and a Surface.
I don't know about the GoPro since I don't have one, but if it's a normal filesystem they ought to show up in the Files app as well.
Since you already have a USB-C MacBook Pro in sounds like either the cable or the reader would work on both devices.
EDIT: slightly outdated from iPadOS Beta 5, but this blog reports that the Files app shows RAW files and can preview them, but doesn't generate thumbnail icons. Not sure whether this is still the case https://numericcitizen.me/2019/08/01/browsing-raw-images-in-...
> I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files.
Does the iPad not support HFS+ and Apple File System?
The camera connection kit is a quirky weird stepchild for Apple.
It works well with about anything on the iPhone - although some devices require a powered lightning cable.
On iPad, the same devices will all work, but it's a lot fussier about what powered lightning cable you use.
For example - I have a USB-C to lightning cable and a USB-PD charger. If I use those with the camera connection kit, my iPhone will access any USB storage device I've connected. It won't work on the iPad. But if use a USB-A to lightning cable to a 2 amp power supply, the same devices work fine on the ipad. go figure.
Anything where they try to stuff a large amount of data over the lightning connector has been finicky, there are a lot of complaints about the HDMI adapters too.
Wish they’d just change everything to USB-C, but with them releasing new accessories regularly that charge with lightning, it doesn’t feel likely. Most recently PowerBeats 4 a couple of days ago.
This is why I don't understand how there's even a market for the iPad Pro (outside the Apple superfans). I like iOS, but it seems like if you want to any real work it's an uphill battle, and for the money there are plenty of alternatives.
I’d wager that much of your incredulity regarding the suitability of iPads to doing “real work” hinges very sensitively upon what your conception of “real work” is, and that your judgement of utility follows suit.
I’ve been using a succession of iPads as my main computing platforms since the first iteration was released ten years ago. Initial releases were a bit of a compromise, but the arrival of multitasking, multi-view, and filesystem access (latterly with iPadOS) have come a long way towards ensuring that I have nothing to miss. The addition of native support for an in-built trackpad further accentuates this trend.
Sure, I cannot develop or compile natively on the iPad, but that is something I do very rarely.
It seems like they're slowly implementing paradigm safe versions of features from Desktop OSes into iPadOS in order to gradually bleed off the MacOS userbase since locking MacOS down to the App Store paradigm didn't pan out.
I like how you've seamlessly switched from the decade-old conspiracy theory that has become untenable to this legend where it "didn't pan out". (Just barely, and probably thanks to opposition in the far corners of the internet)
The alternative explanation, which has far fewer moving parts and doesn't require an assumption of bad faith, is that the Mac App Store was obvious after the iOS Store success, and so was a major push in security/sandboxing beyond chmod -R 600.
It's five years since SIP was introduced, and none of the dire predictions were correct. The mechanism to disable it has not changed even incrementally. But almost no one bothers to disable it because it doesn't actually stop you from doing anything, while it does seem to be effective at stopping malware.
> I like how you've seamlessly switched from the decade-old conspiracy theory that has become untenable to this legend where it "didn't pan out".
I'm not really sure what you're talking about but sure.
Apple was hoping they'd introduce the MacStore everyone would flock to it in droves. Unfortunately the revenue sharing scheme and onerous requirements and restrictions put upon the Developers have made it an undesirable distribution mechanism for anything that isn't given away free.
Apple's improvements to MacOS have all been about locking down and protecting the user because for years they claimed it was immune to malware and virus right up until the problem was too big to ignore. The past few releases of MacOS have been reminiscent of Windows Vista.
Apple would love to lock the platform down to be like iOS but the users have spoken with a resounding "f*ck you". So instead they're gradually developing a competing platform that is build from the ground up to be the unprivileged walled garden with a big ass toll booth at ever point of entry.
And you're sitting here taking the Apple approach of deny deny deny right up until you switch and say "it's better this way".
Which is why I hope this doesn't pan out either. I like desktop OSes and I like having major OSes that are not locked down by ridiculous app stores. Stop doing app stores.
They work in Linux because they're open package repos, we can add our own tress/signatures in and can have a lot of control over them. App stores are bastardizations of this concept. They offer some additional security for the non-tech user (maybe? It's questionable) but it also makes your devices not your own.
> They offer some additional security for the non-tech user (maybe? It's questionable)
It’s not questionable at all, the App Store has been a cornerstone of the iOS security model for years. You can look at how many millions of Android users are constantly infected because it turns out that most people have zero concept of when to trust a third party or not.
Either way Apple does let you run your own apps if you jump through some hoops with MDM and Xcode and whatnot. So it’s not completely locked down either.
It’s locked down enough that I feel comfortable that the average user would be secure and taken care of when using iOS.
> It’s not questionable at all, the App Store has been a cornerstone of the iOS security model for years.
It's pretty questionable. The most obvious reason iOS has better security than Android is because iOS has far better sandboxing than Android.
I don't necessarily dismiss claims that moderation reduces malware, but I am at least skeptical of those claims. I haven't seen compelling statistics that moderation on the scale of the iOS App Store has specifically made an impact beyond banning a few high-publicity, wildly bad actors. The evidence I have seen suggests that moderation is likely not a scalable solution to malware.
More to the point, what we do know pretty conclusively is that app stores on their own are not a magic bullet. We can look at Windows, Chrome, and Android and see that app stores don't automatically improve security.
I think you can make a strong case that iOS shows why having a locked down OS in general helps -- the restrictions around the filesystem in particular close off entire classes of malware. But I think it's mostly conjecture to try and separate the App Store from those other improvements and credit it in specific.
You see sand boxing and app stores as two different things, but they’re not—the iOS security model relies on this sequence of steps:
1. The application developer creates a manifest that lists the privileges the app wants, and includes it as part of the code-signing request;
2. Apple’s App Store review team audits the application more thoroughly according to the privileges it has claimed;
3. Apple only code-signs the app bundle if the app stays on the strait-and-narrow;
4. The OS (through Gatekeeper) enforces the content of a code-signed app bundle, and therefore makes any included capability manifest immutable (in the sense that, if you change it, Gatekeeper considers the app considered and won’t start it);
5. The OS (through the capabilities system) enforces the restrictions from any included capabilities manifest on any high-level framework calls.
Note that there’s no actual linkage going on between code-signing and the capabilities manifest, in a way you’d expect from e.g. a Docker image. There’s no real “application sandbox” here. There’s just an Apple signature on the app bundle, telling you Apple saw this app as-is and approved it; and then, separately, an entirely optional opt-in capabilities system for which an app can claim any capabilities it wants.
If you take Apple out of the picture as a central signer, then 1. apps could claim any capabilities they liked, and nobody could tell them different (this is more like Android, where installing something presents you with a list of the capabilities it claims); but more importantly, 2. apps wouldn’t even need to use the capability system at all. Like I said, it’s opt-in; regular binaries run on macOS (and iOS!) just fine without living in an app-bundle with a paired capabilities manifest.
So, the whole security model of iOS (and macOS under Gatekeeper strict mode) comes down to “Apple verifies that apps are doing the right thing at some point.” Without that, there’s pretty much no sandboxing on either OS beyond what little you get from BSD user privileges and Mach port ACLs.
When people talk about app store moderation, they're talking about a moderation team deciding which apps are abusive and which ones aren't. They're not talking about the underlying mechanism of, "there's a system that verifies an app doesn't violate its manifest."
The relevant part of the app store that people in this thread are talking about are the decisions about, "should a specific app that asks for location permissions be allowed on the store?" Code signing doesn't have anything to do with that decision. It's an implementation detail. The important part is not "Facebook is signed to a specific manifest", it's "Facebook's app will be rejected if it's submitted with a manifest that asks for privileges that aren't consumer-friendly."
The decision about which apps are allowed on the store is the part of the App Store that's relevant. When people question whether or not app stores improve security, what they're asking is, "does a centralized malware filter improve security?"
You could have a Gatekeeper model that worked the exact same way as Android, where the Manifest was required and the user confirmed the Manifest. Even in that world, Apple's sandboxing would still be better than Android's, because the capabilities Apple offers in the manifest are more intelligently split up, and can be granted in more limited degrees.
The question is whether Apple's security stats are due to moderation, or largely due to having a better set of permissions. I strongly maintain that there is not enough clear data for anyone to claim that the moderation is objectively the main contributor to those stats.
And that's really the only claim that djsumdog was ever making -- that it's questionable whether every company adding an app store to every platform is actually going to make most people safer.
IMHO if you had “a Gatekeeper model that worked the exact same way as Android”, then the granularity of the permissions in iOS wouldn’t help you, because developers (and especially malicious developers) would have no incentive to use the fine-grained capabilities.
The only reason anyone bothers with the finickyness of capabilities manifests in the first place, is that Apple forces developers to take exactly the capabilities they need, and rejects apps that ask for more than they need, or ask for capabilities that are too coarse-grained for what they need. Without Apple there to do that human-intelligence-complete task of determining whether an app “needs” the permissions it’s asking for, devs would have a much simpler incentive: to avoid work (and “you must re-approve this app” prompts) by just using as far-reaching of capabilities claims as they can. Just as Android-ecosystem apps do today!
And so you’d have iOS malware that simply asks for permission to rootkit you and then rootkits you (just like on Android), and it wouldn’t look out of place, since everything would ask for those same permissions. (Yes, system-equivalent capabilities like that exist in iOS. Apple doesn’t issue them to third parties, but they exist for the sake of system apps. Without a curator, nothing would stop any random app from putting those root-kit-y capabilities in its list, and then socially engineering people into thinking they were sensible things for said app to need.)
tl;dr: The security of an ecosystem doesn’t just come from its mechanics, but also its economics. If nobody has any reason to “only claim what they need”, then why would they? Right now, Apple (and their rejection of apps that are too coarse-grained in their capabilities requests) is that reason.
> If nobody has any reason to “only claim what they need”, then why would they?
That's a reasonable question that at first glance seems to have an obvious answer.
And yet, the web works. The web works brilliantly -- the web isn't perfect by any metric, but it is still almost objectively the most secure general-user computing platform that we have today. There are a lot of reasons for that, including just locking down capabilities in general, but where permissions are specifically concerned:
- The current permissions model that platforms including iOS are moving towards is granting permissions piece-meal post-install. Asking for lots of permissions up-front looks a lot more skeezy in this world, which reduces user trust. I particularly respect that iOS pops up reminders of what permissions you've granted apps, I think that's a brilliant UX move, and I wish other platforms would copy it.
- The more sophisticated model that Firefox/Chrome are starting to play with (and that I suspect more platforms are going to adopt in the future) is that apps can't ask for permissions directly, users need to grant them themselves by going out of their way, which helps cut down on people mindlessly clicking OK on everything that pops up and introduces a UX/development cost for apps that want to enable tons of permissions, because they now need to explain to users what to click on.
- The really sophisticated model that people are looking into for stuff like filesystem access is that the app never knows whether or not a permission was granted. If it asks for location, it gets an incorrect answer. If it asks for access to your media files, it gets a blank folder with nothing in it. Under this model, the app is completely isolated by default, and never knows how many permissions the user has granted it, so it never knows whether or not to ask for more of them.
So this is one of those questions that intuitively points towards moderation, but in practice we're starting to learn that with good UX there are a lot of ways to teach ordinary people to be safe, and there are a lot of ways to restrict apps without encouraging users to circumvent those restrictions.
Of course, I don't think it's impossible that app store moderation helps security. I mean, certainly moderation helps on some level. I suspect it doesn't help as much as people assume, just based on what moderation looks like across the entire industry right now. But I'm not going to die on that hill.
I just don't think people should blanketly assume that's the case. MacOS also has a better security track record than Windows even when you're not running Gatekeeper apps, and even though MacOS doesn't force apps to go through a moderator. Any user can bypass Gatekeeper, but through a combination of multiple factors, MacOS still has less malware than Windows/Android.
People look at iOS and Android and make very strong claims based on two environments that are substantially different on multiple security axes: in terms of sandboxing, in terms of market share, in terms of userbase demographics. There's a lot of stuff at play here, and there are multiple ways that platforms (including iOS) are trying to create the economics you're talking about. Even iOS is not all-in on moderation, even iOS is trying to train its users at least to some degree to think about their own security.
> Under this model, the app is completely isolated by default, and never knows how many permissions the user has granted it, so it never knows whether or not to ask for more of them.
This model has benefits, but it also has a major downside: if the app doesn't know it doesn't have privileges, it can't inform the user of that fact. The user has to realize on their own that the reason their search for a local bakery returned something on the other side of the country is that they forgot to enable location permissions.
But the OS can. So if photos are accessed for example, the OS can popup the same old dialog asking for permissions as always and you as the user can decide.
> More to the point, what we do know pretty conclusively is that app stores on their own are not a magic bullet. We can look at Windows, Chrome, and Android and see that app stores don't automatically improve security.
I've yet to see evidence that those stores actively review apps in the way that Apple does. You never see articles like "my app was rejected from the Chrome store". It's less about having a store and more about having a decent review process.
In any case, there are no silver bullets in security. Not one.
The parent comment very clearly and explicitly described how one can work around that lockdown on iOS and iPadOS with MDM and Xcode or something like TestFlight functionality. They weren't talking about macOS, because you can run whatever you want on it after disabling a couple of toggles in the security settings once (just like on Windows10).
I would argue that this is by design. If you cannot figure how to do it, despite fairly simple and quick instructions, you probably shouldn't be sideloading apps on your phone.
Sideloading an App is non trivial and not something that one would expect their userbase to undertake and it requires the user to have access to a Mac to perform it.
It is more about bleeding off the Windows userbase than the Mac userbase for Apple. Also, the MacOS App Store not panning out is far from over. It's hard to imagine an endpoint for MacOS where the App Store doesn't succeed. While most see the App Store as a destination for discovering and installing apps, it's really a secure distribution technology that will succeed because the market has already proven it necessary for safe and secure computing at scale.
As an illustrator, the workflow on the iPad Pro using a tool like Procreate is amazingly simple, quick and portable.
Compared to something like my old com tablet, I am much more likely to grab the iPad and pencil and draw, then go to my studio where my computer is setup and draw.
Even the difference between wacom/graphics tablet and iPad with the pencil is almost night and day, no lag or parallax on the iPads is a huge draw card.
For an illustrator, the iPad is a perfect (digital) tool.
The wacoms with bonded glass (everything except the cheap cintiq 16) are better than the ipad but its very close. The ipad is more than good enough, its good.
Meanwhile the portability of the ipad and apps like procreate have made the ipad a very compelling tool for artists.
Most professional digital artists I know of use both a large cintiq in studio and an ipad.
There are a trillion comparisons on youtube. Also a contender (but a smaller size) is the ipad air 3 which also has a bonded glass display.
What counts as 'real work' to you? A friend of a mine is a barrister and uses an iPad pro to take and use notes. He's definitely doing 'real work' just fine on his iPad.
It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.
I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.
Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.
Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).
Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.
I’m in the same boat: Wolfram Language has enlightened me (or you may say, corrupted me completely), so a prerequisite for any new computing device is that it can ran Mathematica.
Which is way I had to switch back from OpenBSD (which doesn’t run it) and Linux (which until today’s update, didn’t have HiDPI support) back to Mac OS.
I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.
A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further.
I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.
I have relied on my small iPad Pro with the older Prompt SSH app for occasional light programming while traveling. For more regular SSHing, a laptop or Chromebook is better. That said, I love my iPad Pro and I admit a positive bias that may not face honest analysis.
Stop shutting your brain off because you don't like peoples terminology.
This argument pops up regularly on HN and it's always the same - it's all people talking past each other. One half is saying "iPads don't cover as many use cases as laptops" and the other half is saying "but look, my specific anecdotal use case is covered". You're not even disagreeing with each other, just missing the point.
He's not being a barrister on his iPad though, he's just taking notes. And I question whether an iPad pro gives you anything over the cheaper options for that.
My point is the barrister does most of their work outside of the software - taking notes is not unique to being a barrister. A software engineer, or artist, or architect, or CAD modeller, or audio engineer, or accountant (just some examples of the kind of work I'm thinking of) do the majority of their work in software. Some of these workflows are doable on an iPad, some of them are not. All of them are doable to a professional level on a regular PC or Mac though.
Actually, handwritten note taking in particular is a professional task that you can not do on a regular PC or Mac. As a theoretical physicist, doing math "on paper" is not something I can do on a PC or Mac, and doing it on an iPad is orders of magnitude better than using actual paper, as it allows for moving things around and revising.
It makes a ton of sense if the iPad is cheaper than the Surface. It stops making sense because of Apple's pricing model.
The original argument for tablet computers in the first place was that sometimes you don't need a full-fledged computer, so you pocket $400-500 and get something cheap instead that's a limited but still quality device. And I think that would still be true with the iPad Pro. You want something that's closer to a full computer, with a real keyboard, but you still want to pocket some money.
Except... the pricing is awful.
It's like they designed a product for a real niche, and then stopped thinking about that niche as soon as they got out of the design phase and started working on implementation.
As a point of comparison, even if you hate Windows with a passion, you can get the new Macbook Air they just announced for basically the same exact cost as an iPad Pro + keyboard, and that comes with a full-featured OS. Is a Macbook Air as portable? Maybe not, but it's still pretty darn portable.
You're giving up the pencil, but you're getting a better OS on a computer with better specs. But I guess if you're a digital artist, and you prefer the iPad pencil over the Surface pen or Wacom tablets, and having a full OS doesn't matter for you -- this might be exciting. That seems like it would be a narrow demographic, but what do I know? I'm sure it'll sell well.
Of all the product lines Apple has, the iPad is their product line with the most flexible pricing. Everything from the $250 base model up to the iPad Pro at $1000 ($1,350 with the keyboard). If you don't need the iPad Pro, there are three other models below that.
Even their highest priced iPads aren't very expensive. If you are a business buying a computer, it's less than one week's wages for the most expensive iPad.
> It's like they designed a product for a real niche
You have this almost exactly the opposite. The iPad is the mainstream product and the PC is the niche product. The overwhelming majority of people can do everything they need on the iPad. It's the niche users (Developers, Video Editors, etc) who require the additional flexibility a PC offers.
> you can get the new Macbook Air they just announced for basically the same exact cost as an iPad Pro + keyboard, and that comes with a full-featured OS.
Fundamentally, you get a MacBook (or Windows/ Linux) if you need the flexibility of having a desktop PC. A lot of people prefer the simplicity iPadOS offers.
Also, it's not just the most expensive iPad Pro versus the least expensive Mac. If you don't need the pencil or the nicer keyboard, you could get the iPad Air or the base iPad for significantly less.
> but you're getting a better OS on a computer with better specs.
You are confusing more flexible for better. The two operating systems target different purposes. For a lot of people the iPad OS is the better experience. Also, I haven't seen the benchmarks yet, but I suspect that like with the prior generation, this iPad Pro is significantly faster than the base MacBook Air.
Except the MacBook Air doesn’t have better specs than the iPad Pro. iPad processors have benchmarked comparably to laptop x86 processors for a while now. The iPad has a display which is around the same size but higher-resolution, 120Hz, and with support for touch and the pencil. Storage options are comparable. And the iPad has other random hardware like LTE, better cameras, and now LIDAR. On the other side, the MacBook does have more RAM, more ports, and a larger trackpad. But that’s not enough to call it a clear winner in specs.
That may have been the original argument for tablets, and if you want to save money by skipping the keyboard, pointing device, and overpowered processor, you can buy a new iPad for about $300.
The iPad Pro is expensive, but “Pro” implies you want a device that can do things which are useful to professionals.
As a developer, I am better served by an actual MBP for work and a cheap iPad for less-productive tasks, but not everyone is a developer.
I'm a developer and now that there's UTM for iOS I am going to be exploring the new ipad as a development machine, AWS Cloud9 already makes a great case for portability
I know a journalist who works almost exclusively on iPad and iPhone. Their salary is somewhere in the mid 6-figures thanks to employees owning half of the publisher. About 2 million people read a text she wrote on her balcony last week.
But, somehow, that's not "real work", apparently.
From what I was able to gleam from similar comments over the last few months, I guess "real work" mostly involves regularly swapping hardware components, overclocking the CPU, daisy-chaining a dozen USB devices, micromanaging kernel compile flags, automating the micromanagement of kernel compile flags, aggregating optimisation metrics in a dashboard, running benchmarks, upgrading npm/homebrew/gem/go packages on a daily basis, and reorganising keyboard layout.
Me neither. The hardware they offer is absolutely fantastic. And some of the software (from e.g. Panic or OmniGroup).
But even running a decent terminal requires purchasing an app and setting up mosh on the other side. There's no Esc in their keyboards. There are too many roadblocks and glitches.
I wish I could buy an iPad and simply open a terminal and ssh to my machine of choice.
Right now, it's much easier to buy a Surface Go / Pro. And these run Linux natively really well.
Probably because developers and system operators, while a large majority here on Hacker News, actually represent a tiny minority of actual users. Developers’ workflows are essentially outliers.
Well beyond those (other) specialised use-cases (which are admittedly well catered-for by the current iPad hardware and software offerings), I find that the iPad Pro is a wonderful machine for most of my business workflow: constructing and editing spreadsheets in Numbers and Excel, writing documents in Pages and Word, doing serious computation using Wolfram Online (“Cloud-based Mathematica, irksome though it may be to not have a local computing instance), and of course the usual web-browsing & emailing kind of activity.
The device literally has the form factor of a thick notebook when folded inside its robust Logitech keyboard case, connects to the internet over 4G (if no WiFi is available), and is a perfect work environment.
Lots of use cases in many of these professions. In particular, there are a lot of professional artists/ illustrators have switched to the iPad. I also know there is an active community of iPad accessories and software for musicians.
Also, while many of the above mentioned professionals can't move their entire workflow to the iPad, quite of few of them have already moved big portions of their workflows to the iPad.
This isn't a zero sum game. For a lot of professionals there is room in their toolbox for multiple computers.
Sure, but a decent share of Apple's success was due to making OS X a very nice development platform. This attracted developers who created great desktop and mobile software. So I'd argue it's in Apple's best interest to keep developers happy.
Also, is it that hard for a giant of Apple's size to put a fully fledged terminal in iPadOS?
> Sure, but a decent share of Apple's success was due to making OS X a very nice development platform. This attracted developers who created great desktop and mobile software
Apple's customers are the >1 billion user install base it has for iOS and more broadly the Apple ecosystem.
Developers will develop great desktop and mobile software because that's the way to reach the incredibly valuable install base where consumer spend is 2x+ that of competing platforms.
You don't win developers purely by giving them nice developer features. You win them by giving them something worth developing for. Part of that is a nice developer ecosystem, but that not enough on its own.
> is it that hard for a giant of Apple’s size to put a fully fledged terminal in iPadOS?
Of course it isn’t. And that tells you that it’s a deliberate decision not to, because it’s miles from the platform’s intended use by the intended users.
Besides, it would be very confusing for users to have a terminal that can only connect to remote systems (which most people likely don’t have access to), because it’s rather improbable that Apple would choose to expose iPadOS through a shell.
OS X, now macOS, includes lots of applications that are "miles from the platform’s intended use by the intended users". A huge userbase will always have tons of different clusters, and it's good to serve them all.
Furthermore, the terminal could be simply running in a little Unix sandbox, like Termux, and that could be a great entry point for kids to lots of different interpreters to learn programming. Not exclusive to remote into other systems.
Why on earth should they go the extra mile of creating a sandboxed UNIX-like environment for the sake of a few power users who desire to run terminal commands which cannot (if they follow their own rules) affect other applications and/or interact in any stateful manner with the filesystem?
Even as a learning experience, why give (power)users the ability to acquaint themselves with a generic platform that is not tied to Apple’s own offerings? It makes no commercial or even pedagogical sense.
Try out iSH: https://ish.app It sounds like it’s what you want. Apple won’t be providing anything even remotely comparable for the foreseeable future, I’m sure.
Tiny, but very influential with deep pockets. Apple wouldn't be where it is today on their laptop business if developers haven't adopted en masse their macbooks.
[citation needed] — meaning that merely because developers perceive themselves as being directly influential doesn’t mean that they are necessarily. Sure, developers ultimately dictate the success or failure of a platform by choosing to populate its ecosystem of applications or give it a pass, but I assure you that if the only way to develop for iOS/iPadOS were a clunky UNIVAC fed with punched cards, developers would be hand-punching ‘em cards in order to get on the runaway bandwagon of the successful platform.
You're missing the point. We're not influential because we can make or break a platform. We're influential because we're early adopters and thus we can see where the future is going. And as early adopters we interface between a given technology and the general public. We're not just individuals working out of a dungeon. We have friends and family and a social cycle who turn to us for advice for their technology needs.
If there are any products in computing history that do not owe their success to the model you're describing, it's iPod/iPhone/iPad.
We got disintermediated with the very first iPod. Remember "less space than a Nomad. Lame!"? That was very much the attitude of the crowd you are describing.
I distinctly remember a pry-my-keyboard-from-my-dead-hands attitude when the iPhone came out. It's only benevolence that stops me from constantly reminding the "power user" among my friends that his first reaction was "Not even a stylus?"
While this is true, it doesn't follow that every product they produce should serve developers first and foremost. The Mac is the computer I use for development. The iPad is the computer I prefer to use for photo editing/ sketching/ house planning/ and casual use. If I wasn't a developer professionally, I suspect the iPad would be my "Big" computer.
We need to stop seeing the iPad Pro and Surface Pro as equals. iPad Pro is a luxury item, and it gives me so much more pleasure to use it. Aesthetics, design, the way I feel - these things matter. And they matter to most humans. We're not robots who only need to get a certain task accomplished. We need to feel happy.
They aren't equal products, but iPad Pro isn't "luxury" either. They are just different products with different value for different users and use cases. Both products make their own users very happy. Proof is in all the comments in this thread.
I would argue that Apple is a luxury brand, and iPad Pro is an Apple product. If you're saying the Surface Pro can make people happy too, I'll give you that. It doesn't make me happy though.
I bought one last Christmas. It broke my heart (and my wallet), but its only purpose is to serve as the CPU and screen for my wife's new ultrasound probe [1] that only has good support of iOS.
Even when you bundle the cost of both the probe and the iPad pro, it ended up being cheaper than the (much less portable) alternatives in the market.
As an artist, there's nothing even remotely close to the iPad's hardware quality and software environment anywhere near its price range. Even well beyond its price range, it's hard to beat the software quality and comfort with regards to usage.
Office and OneDrive work really well. The new files system is pretty functional and getting better. There’s a decent ecosystem of utility apps now. Pushbullet is pretty handy for example. For scripting Pythonista is awesome, and together with Working Copy has a decent Git work flow.
It really depends what your work is. My iPad is my main mobile computer. I do have a desktop, but use the iPad heavily. At work at various meetings there are regularly 2 to 5 of use taking notes or referring to material on iPads. Some with pencils, others with keyboard cases.
Of course it’s not right for everyone, it just needs to be really good at the things it’s good for. That’s all. If a laptop or Surface works better for you that’s cool.
Like all Apple products, Ipads "just work," which is the most important thing for regular users. My Surfacebook has a lot of network connectivity issues, and I recall that being an issue for all Surface products at the time.
Speaking for myself, it does one thing incredibly well: email.
It probably seems absurd to imagine it would do that thing better than other places where I can do that thing, but it's probably 20 or 30% better at email than my other options.
And I do a LOT of email.
I keep an iPad Pro (with keyboard) to the left, and when I want to do email, I look left and do it there. That keeps me focused on my main windows.
I do think that it would be possible for someone to write an email client that is as efficient as the iOS Outlook app is, and maybe it already exists for non-Outlook, but in my current corporate environment the iPad pro is a lifesaver.
It's best in class for digital illustration work. My partner uses her iPad Pro (along with Procreate) exclusively for her art, and the simplification of the workflow combined with the form factor are impossible to beat. Similar Wacom products require a computer, are more expensive, not as responsive, and not mobile. The Microsoft Surface does not perform as well, and does not have the same killer apps which make illustration so easy on the iPad Pro.
You're correct. The target demo for iPad Pro is (and has really always been) only for Apple superfans.
You can get something like an Asus Zenbook 13 for hundreds less, which has a real i7 CPU, supports much more software, has a dedicated GPU, etc. while weighing about the same and having about the same battery life.
Until you can run MacOS on it, it will always pale in comparison to a Surface pro.
You can do some things well on a iPad pro. But you can do anything on a Surface pro except run MacOS. Well I looked and it looks like some have installed MacOS or used vmware images.
This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens.
MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop.
Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding power. MS made gigantic missteps by trying to force a windowing OS to support touch.
Both are somewhat meeting in the middle, and now Surfaces have gotten pretty decent, but they started out bad.
The other thing to remember is that people buy tablets for touch, and Surface Pros are pretty decent laptop replacements but still so-so as an actual tablet.
Could you imagine "macOS" mode in iPad OS? It's simple: app screens in iPad OS turn into windows on macOS and vice versa in a easy to understand way. It remembers the window positioning and screen ordering as you switch between modes. The mouse automatically is added and removed when you switch between modes.
It would not ruin the iPad, it would ruin Apple's bottom line.
Macs aren't even 10% of Apple's revenue, so it can't do that much to their bottom line.
I don't think that would be a great experience, but if it made the iPad into a stronger competitor to Surface Pro and similar Windows convertibles, it might bring in enough new business to counteract any drop in Mac sales.
Apple has their Handoff feature for moving program state from one device to another, maybe that could be adapted for on-device handoff between a Mac and iPadOS version of the same software.
Another thought on this - Apple's push to state driven interfaces with SwiftUI would make it a lot easier, provided the Mac and iPad versions are structured in the same way.
Which they probably will be because there are maybe three development shops that will spend any time thinking about how to make their Mac interface better optimized for a destktop OS.
Still not saying this is a good idea, but it's an idea. Wouldn't be surprised if Apple were exploring it internally.
I wasn't fond of the windows start menu when they decided to replace the list style with the tiles. But that is long gone. Long live the windows start menu.
But seriously If ipadOS doesn't at least allow for backwards compatibility with the software from MacOS. The iPad will never be a replacement for your Mac computer. It will only be an expensive surrogate.
The windowing OS vs Touch OS is definitely a good point. But here we are coming full circle to adding a track pad to a touch os. Sound like apple is a bit confused about what they're offering also. I can't imagine them ever making the ipadOS on par with the Mac operating system. Unless we can start running any type of code on it. It will be the handicapped device.
The Surface pros make great tablets when you ditch the windows app store and run android APK's on them instead.
In my view, Apple doesn’t want to make an iPadOS-running iPad into a laptop replacement, they want to make it into an orthogonal alternative.
In some sense, for many categories of use, the App Store hosts superior offerings to what the Mac App Store does. Panic and Omni offer extremely sophisticated applications that I use on a daily basis. Office is likewise almost on par with the desktop equivalents (for most users, I’m well aware of the limitations in macros and plugins and so forth).
Many developers seem to be taking a “Mobile First” approach these days, and that is driving wind into the iPad’s sails.
I really would be more prudent before dismissing it.
May I ask how you manage to get into tablet mode unintentionally? I've never experienced this issue and it was my understanding that this is only possible to switch over by opening the action center and turning it on...both very deliberate actions that seem hard to do by accident. I'm not being sarcastic either, though. I work in a repair shop and one of the most common things people bring their devices in for is they accidentally put their device in tablet mode and have no idea what they're doing.
This might be confusion over what "tablet mode" means. I think he just means the non-Desktop interfaces, which in Windows 8 you could unintentionally get into very easily, famously by double-clicking an image file. And back then, going back to the desktop was a lot harder - this was before they made the taskbar and window frame appear when you moved the mouse to the edge of the screen; you had to use arcane gestures or press the Windows Logo Key and click "Desktop".
It's been years since I had one, but IIRC it could change based on folding the keyboard back behind the computer. I vaguely remember having connectivity issues with the keyboard (sometimes needing to remove and reattach it so that I could type), and that may also have caused issues for the automatic mode switching.
It may be the auto rotate. I think if the tilt of axis is over the angle to enable tablet mode it will enter it automatically and ask you if that's what you want. You have to choose a default and it won't ask again.
Windows 10 has a tablet mode, but it still sucks compared to Windows 8's "default mode". It is actually better to use tablets in regular, "windowing OS" mode than in Windows 10's tablet mode.
For me Windows 8 is an example showing one can make a decent mouse and tablet UI. Obviously it will be worse than the two, but at some point there is an advantage of having a common UI rather than specialized.
They don't want the legacy UI and code of macOS, they want iPadOS to be good enough that you don't need a Mac. Hence why the last couple years of iPadOS have been covering more and more use cases.
As a frontend web developer, I would love for them to cover my use case. A native terminal and desktop browser tools in iPadOS would get me to ditch my MacBook Pro in a heartbeat.
It seems more like they are pulling macOS and iOS together, so we will probably see some hybrid of both on both devices. Hopefully better than the Windows implementation though
I had the first five generations of Surface Pros. I agree that they can be your main computer. They have compromises but overall they work fine. For example, they don't have the computational power as the top end MacBook Pros but they are extremely portable and have a touch screen. I eventually went back to MacOS for work. My Macbook Pro is a great companion to my iPad Pro. I use both 50/50 depending on the scenario. For travel, I can leave the Macbook and access it if I need to via Jump on the iPad. Otherwise, everything is in the cloud either Apple's or Google's and the iPad works just fine. The major win for the iPad is battery life and note taking abilities in meetings. The new iPad keyboard with trackpad is a no brainer upgrade for me.
Also, Sidecar works amazingly well. I have found myself using the iPad as a second monitor more and more often. It is seamless and hasn't crashed yet. I recently took both Macbook and iPad on a trip and was loving the second screen. And for Logic Pro X, the iPad can act as a remote to control instruments or settings with indiscernible latency.
Well for the record, I enjoyed my Surfaces. I thought they were what Apple should have released at that time. I am also a fan of ThinkPads. I still have an X1 Carbon – great keyboard. Sold my X230 on a whim and still miss that little guy.
Ok. That's been the opposite experience of me. I got rid of the Surface Pro because it's a kludge. No matter how long Microsoft worked on touch/pen support to slap onto Windows, it still fails in being a good environment, at least for me. Plus, at the time, the battery life was abysmal. I'm not sure if they ever got better at that with the newer models. AND, no matter how much they played up that fricken kickstand, it was terrible in trying to use it on my lap. But then again, the iPad was the same.
Enter the iPad, which was built from the ground up as a touch interface. but now it looks like they're coming at it from a different directly....a touch interface incorporating mouse/touchpad support.
But, I'm for people using what they want to use. My use/need isn't the same.
The thing was absolutely terrible, I hated mine. It was extremely clumsy and unusable. We'll see about this new iPad Pro though, really excited about the trackpad support.
I remember observing when the iPad first came out one of its big selling points was is was a few hundred dollars cheaper than everyone expected and it kneecapped the competition who all had offerings in the pipeline that were sorta similar, not Apple and cost more.
I remember the pricing being a surprise, but the Android tablets that followed all came in at lower prices. Only the Blackberry Playbook and HP Touchpad (running already-obsolete OSes) tried to match Apple's pricing. Both were discontinued after terrible sales numbers.
Google botched Android 3.0 (the first "Tablet" version of Android), and developers mostly didn't bother trying to adapt their apps for tablet screens.
If it hadn't been for Samsung pushing the boundaries with pressure-sensitive screens, pen input (2014 Galaxy Tab pro line), Linux on DeX, and SoC improvements, there wouldn't be an Android tablet market beyond the disposable 7" tabs people buy for their kids.
I will definitely get this new iPad Pro (have been waiting for this configuration) but this doesn't contradict your point as, for example, I don't intend to plug much of anything into it. Perhaps an HDMI adaptor or ethernet dongle, both of which I already have for my MB.
By the sounds of the usual complaints my use case is quite uncommon (really I need a fast, multithreaded easy-for-demos device for a specific code base the engine of which runs on Linux/MacOS/iOS). It seems Apple is selling a boatload of iPads so they seem to think that few people want to plug things in. That seems absurd when I talk to my friends, but, well, I'm sure the usage data they get from people (like me) who enable that is telling them otherwise.
As for the Surface: I've seen a couple and the hardware looks quite nice but in terms of weight and usability the MBA has been just fine. I often find myself using my current iPad to do something and then put it down and switch to the laptop. The use cases seem disjoint, partially due to the inherent limitations of each platform vs the other in certain regards, so over the years I've given up on thinking that a unified device would be worth it.
I notice people have commented that some of your objections to the iPad have subsequently been rectified, but the core issues IMHO still remain. Another way to put it is that you now can do many laptop-like things on the iPad but it would hardly be your first choice, especially when it's so easy to switch to another device more adapted to things like filesystem manipulation. But if it's the only device you happen to have on your person you aren't stuck. Maybe Surface can find a way over that hump.
For me the iPad is best for music and that sort of creative segment. It handles touch better than windows imo, and the os handles low latency applications much better. Core Audio is really just an exceptional framework for audio.
The iPad only runs tablet apps, the Surface runs anything that works on Windows 10.
I came real close to ditching my Mac + Wacom combo for a Surface + external keyboard for my art work a couple years ago, but there was a constant lag problem somewhere between my stylus motions and Illustrator that made it unusable, even after a month of regular attempts to find the one magic setting somewhere deep in the ten different control panels related to Windows' stylus drivers.
Microsoft and Apple diverged down two evolutionary paths.
At release the Surface seemed ridiculous, adding touch and pen tools to a normal computer. Apple went the other way starting from scratch, touch only seemed the sensible choice.
Now year on year as Apple adds more and more laptop computer into the iPad and it's Mac line lacks any modern input flexibility it's starting to look absurd they went down this route and the Surface line is making more and more sense the further we go down this road.
They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge.
The front facing camera should be the premiere camera on the iPad, and should exist on the top and side, with triple microphone array (top, left, and right). Scrap two of the rear cameras to offset the cost.
The front camera is 7MP (close to 4K) and records 1080p. I don't know of any videoconferencing software that uses more than 1080p, and there's always massive compression applied anyways which would defeat image improvements. The quality is more than enough.
There's also very little practical issue with it being on the side when in landscape mode. It just means that your eyes appear to be looking sideways rather than downwards (arguably an improvement, as eyelids don't move down -- much closer to how people actually look in an in-person meeting when not looking directly at you) and that your head is about 10% off-center. So a non-issue. I've never seen anybody even notice it in a conference call, much less complain.
Finally who is taking selfies with their iPad? That's what phones are for. It's too big to hold with one hand.
The common use case for cameras in the iPad Pro is actually the rear camera. iPads are being increasingly used as professional tools in shooting production-quality video as well as all sorts of other commercial applications.
There is a lot more to quality than megapixels. What I care about for the front-facing camera is the sensor size and lens aperture. I want more light hitting the sensor for cleaner images.
I've had to do meetings and interviews using the front-facing camera in environments where I don't have control over the lighting and the results were not great.
There is a dramatic difference in how flattering the angle of a photo is. Portraits should always be taken minimally at eye level, never below. Having the camera any lower makes people look uglier on video or selfies.
Ah, good to know. I'll be slumming it with the 9570 for some time yet, I expect, so I'll probably just pick up a clip-on webcam if it bugs me too much.
Just wait until you try the front facing camera on a MacBook (in my case, the Air from 2019). It's so horrible compared to any recent iDevice from the last years. I don't understand why they don't improve them to match the mobile quality at least.
It would be nice if they improved it, but I think they have their priority right at least... people are taking a lot of actual photographs with their phone selfie camera while the computer camera is mostly for video conferencing.
It could just be a question of pricing. Maybe high quality phone cameras are available for very cheap, while USB 2.0 cameras with good image quality are not available for cheap from any vendors. There might not be any rational reason why this is beyond offer and demand.
Exactly. You want thinner bezel, slimmer Screen, and the trade off is simply the camera. Unfortunately there doesn't seems to be enough interest in it for Apple to innovate.
I guess Apple would be in a unique position here to use their experience from mobile to make a better integrated webcam in their computers as well, without most of those limitations.
I don't, but I see plenty of people who shoot pictures with their iPads. If the best camera was on the front, what would they use for a viewfinder?
Also, I used to be 100% remote, and I WFH plenty, so I'm on videoconferences all the time. I do not perceive the need for insanely good cameras for this.
Selfies, maybe, perhaps Instagram influencers need super-high-res selfie photos and movies.
All that being said, maybe there are uses I haven't even imagined for an iPad that has a better front-facing camera than rear-facing camera. But for my current use cases... I would say not.
With the new keyboard attachment the front camera isn't even at the top of the iPad, it is on the left/right edges. That's a large oversight.
As to video conferencing, it depends on what you're doing. If you're presenting a meeting and are being projected onto a conference room's TV/projector, the quality matters.
It clearly isn't an oversight. When people hold their pad they predominately use it in portrait mode. When people use it with a keyboard, they want it in landscape mode. This is pretty universal.
And, guessing, I would imagine people use this sans keyboard >95% of the time. So they gear it for that. Or should they put two cameras on it?
I highly doubt Apple was oblivious to this, but there are always compromises.
As to quality, the quality of this camera is equivalent or better than the overwhelming majority of webcams. Maybe people are doing xxx streams or something, but for a corporate meeting this is about three tiers above the average.
I have never seen a person take a picture with an iPad using the rear camera.
What I want from the front camera is mostly good light sensitivity and color rendition. I don't need more than 1080p video on it though. It feels like it should be possible without making it very expensive. If it isn't possible, then for an iPad I'd sacrifice ALL the rear camera functionality for just a slightly better front cam, in a heartbeat.
I’ve also seen it a lot at large scientific conferences where people take pictures of slides. This can be easier to work with on an iPad because they are probably also taking notes on it, so the picture get integrated into the notes.
This frustrated me to no end. I'm pretty sure the newest MacBook Pros have the exact same camera on my previous 2011 MacBook Pro (and likely earlier). I don't care all that much about resolution...just make the image quality better and work better in low light.
So it's hard to find tech-specs, but iSight was branding between 2005 and 2010. The branding changed in 2011 and forward to "FaceTime HD." At that time resolution did get bumped up to 720p, but since a camera's quality can depend on many other things like lens and sensor noise I hate to say for sure but I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2019 laptops all have the same camera. After getting a newer gen MacBook Pro and being instantly disappointed I went back to my 2011 and saw very similar performance and image quality.
In 2017 they did start shipping a 1080p camera on iMac Pros, but that hasn't made it to portables.
I agree. The software needs support for this too. I earnestly tried to use the iPad for a few weeks, and the placement of the camera was annoying (off center, angled up, no one looks good at this angle). But the software was the deal breaker. iOS and iPadOS disallow background camera use and there is no API to allow it except for FaceTime which does PiP in the corner when it’s backgrounded. Even side-by-side in the new iPadOS will disable the camera when you switch the input cursor to other app! Makes it impossible to review or take notes during video calls or look at reference materials.
I'm not sure who is taking selfies with an iPad, and videoconferencing has lots of quality concerns from compression and bandwidth issues that make camera quality kind of irrelevant.
If anything, I think videoconferencing really needs to move towards more abstracted forms of interaction instead of trying to accomplish crystal clear video. Evidently, remote classrooms are finding it easier to do lectures via Minecraft than Zoom or Skype.
With the kinds of advances in deepfakes and realistic looking face rendering we're getting, there isn't as much reason to be sending that much data over the network. You'd need a camera to capture things like writing on a markerboard, but just for conferencing and getting body language pseudo-MoCap would do fine.
> lots of quality concerns from compression and bandwidth issues that make camera quality kind of irrelevant
Better quality (lower noise) video reduces compression artefacts (or alternatively bandwidth requirements), because video codec doesn't need to waste bandwidth encoding all that high entropy noise.
Agreed. Even in television production, audio quality is seen as the most important part of the medium. If you lose video, the audience is not going to miss as much as if they lost audio (in most cases). This is even more true for conferencing. Of course, we didn't even have video in conferencing for the longest time.
Exactly. I've had iPads now since the 2nd model, and have used front camera about 2% of the time, and the rear about 98% of the time (great for snapping whiteboards). But, truly, I don't use the cameras much at all, and would prefer to not have fancy cameras on an iPad. The phone is where the fancy cameras should be. And, I also carry a 'pocket' camera with far better close-ups, better video, and more storage and effects which I don't use as much, but is indispensable when it is.
This is a device that doesn't support other browser rendering engines or even toy compilers, long way to go before something like VSCode could be possible, a product that let's you trivially slipstream in any renderer/script engine/compiler you want at a single click.
Plus would it really be an "iPad" with you sacrifice the whole security model to allow debugging?
VS Code has incredibly good "remote" debugging setups. [0]
You can install a VS Code "server" on e.g. your Linux developer machine, then connect to it via your VS Code "client" on your iPad. You get local intellisense and the like, but actual execution of code is done on your Linux server.
You can replace Linux server with Windows, or even containers (so you can have your "server" be a local Linux docker image if you're on Windows but want to develop locally on Linux, for example).
I realize this is a higher barrier to use, but I could seriously see using it in this way.
I am currently attempting to use an iPad Pro in this fashion (code server running on a DO droplet)... it is quite difficult and developer-hostile. For instance, until I upgraded the OS to iPadOS (it was on iOS 13.3), the cursor keys on my bluetooth keyboard did not move the cursor inside the code editor pane! Also, if you have anything at all copied to the iPad's clipboard, pressing the Escape key (say I'm using Vim inside the VSCode "terminal" pane) will reveal iPadOS's own clipboard popup. Overall, I strongly recommend staying away from this setup for any serious remote VSCode work.
> Plus would it really be an "iPad" with you sacrifice the whole security model to allow debugging?
The security model being that you need to be attached to a Mac to allow debugging? Other than that I'm totally with you. The ipad is far away from being a frictionless, general computation device.
The platform does support not only toy compilers but also full compilers, albeit through user mode emulation, so don’t even think about performance. See iSH: https://ish.app/
Debugging allows arbitrary code execution. Essentially you allow developers to debug running applications on their iPad, you allow them to run any code they want on it (maybe with extra steps, but that is the unavoidable inevitable result).
I'm not against it, but I am saying that's quite different from the iPad's current security model. You're giving developers root, maybe with extra steps, but root none the less.
> You're giving developers root, maybe with extra steps, but root none the less.
No you aren't. It's arbitrary code execution in the target app's sandbox which is already doing arbitrary code execution in the first place. You know, the thing that you compiled & ran before you ever attached a debugger? Every iOS app is already doing arbitrary code execution. That's the whole point of apps. And the security model holds up just fine.
iOS's restrictions on JIT'ing is about App Store control, not security.
That is only true under an odd definition of privilege. There are certainly hardening and auditing benefits of preventing arbitrary code execution, but defining code execution itself as a form of privilege in and of itself is unusual.
I understand why Apple does this, but having owned an iPad without ever successfully being productive on it I just wish I could get root if I really want to. I wish it were hackable.
Revoke my warranty, do whatever, just let me use the device I bought!
It's gotta be the most beautiful hardware of a machine I've seen. It's a shame the software is so anti-user.
Yeah and the iPad already allows code execution/debugging with Playgrounds, Pythonista, etc. You can even run a full Linux shell locally on an iPad with iSH (https://ish.app/).
Additionally, what is Apple’s vision for MacOS going forward? Presumably MacOS isn’t coming to the iPad, so is iPadOS coming to the Mac? I’m sad that MacOS may soon be meeting it’s end, and how in some weird ways, Microsoft is starting to be more Linuxy than Apple.
Is there a reason it has to be one or the other? MacOS is the best operating system for power users or content creators. iPadOS is the best operating system for personal computer users. That seems like the vision to me.
Agreed. But the dilemma is Apple is not encouraging content creation on macOS. E.g., no important content creation apps are Sandboxed[0], so they can't be in the Mac App Store. And their latest development push, Catalyst and SwiftUI, is about cross-platform parity of low-powered apps, it does nothing for high-powered content-creation apps.
With few exceptions, content creation has not been successful on iPadOS. And for the last ten years, Apple has made building content creation apps systemically more difficult on macOS, e.g., with Notarization, Sandboxing, restricted file-system access, restricting Apple Events, deprecating built-in scripting languages, neglecting AppKit, and replacing WebView with the incomplete WKWebView.
In the current situation, iPadOS has been a dead end, and the Mac is, depending on your perspective, either moving backwards, or at best treading water.
Final Cut and Logic are not sandboxed (not sure about Motion), they are only in the Mac App Store because Apple lets their own apps skirt the rules.
UPDATE: "Parasite" was also edited on Final Cut Pro 7, released in 2009, which is not only deadly commentary on Apple's failure to accommodate content creators on it's own, it also predates not just sandboxing (2011), but the entire Mac App Store (2010).
There’s still other issues like keyboard shortcuts that don’t work as expected. I can’t find the link right now but there was a long github issue about all the iPad problems.
Why? It's not really more expensive than an iPhone 11. Ipad 11 pro 128gb = e899, iphone 11 128gb = e859, just 40 euro difference. Why should it run a full os when price is almost equal?
I had to do a double take when I saw you’d written ‘VSCode’.
Are you serious? We should be starting with XCode, I mean, given all the rules and restrictions on the platform, it’ll be shocking enough when Apple finally gets XCode into action.
As for VSCode, I’m not even sure what you’d be compiling onto the device, as Swift or Obj-C in XCode is the only way to end up with a .ipa you can run...
But why does that have to be how it is? Why shouldnt I be able to compile c++ programs, go programs, etc? needing an ipa is an arbitrary restriction dev wise
Also you can run js, node, etc just fine right now on an iPad (but not node and that sucks)
I suppose if the iPad can't download other binaries to load in the background (like the C# or C++ dependencies), VSCode is never going to come to it.
It's still just a consumption / Etch-A-Sketch device despite all the marketing about how wonderful it is for creation. It's good for making basic music/practicing guitar for me, but other than that my iPad is just for reading/browsing.
Yup and it sucks becauee its completely arbitrary and apples decision that it isnt unleashed. If I could I would use my iPad like 9/10 times vs my Macbook
My wallet will hurt but damn this makes my 2018 keyboard folio look like a joke, much like how “a phone, an iPod, an Internet communication device” made previous phones look like a joke.
To be honest, even though it is extremely overpriced, it will be a great addition to my (new) iPad Pro.
This 11 inch iPad Pro has been my main machine since it was released in November 2018, and as such it has been great value for money.
I am a bit of an unusual case since I’ve been using iPads to cover (almost all of) my computing and workflow needs since the release of the first iPad in 2010. iPadOS has given the platform an enormous boost in utility. The new keyboard brings is a step closer to being a zero-regrets laptop alternative (i.e., an option orthogonal to as opposed to in replacement of) a laptop.
As pointed out by another, it is also a stand. Now I expect the mechanical work has to be pretty superb to guarantee it can keep the iPad at the angle you choose. I cannot wait for a tear down of the stand.
I am a bit confused by the usb-c port for pass through charging. I would have thought a great opportunity would be to have the stand be able to wireless charge the iPad while in use but I expect the power requirements of an iPad in use would exceed current standards.
Regardless, the interesting point to me is with keyboard, pencil, and such, the price point overlap with their laptop line makes we wonder about rumors of an ARM chipped line of Macs. Without the processor difference price comparisons are going to be much more difficult to blow off
> I am a bit confused by the usb-c port for pass through charging. I would have thought a great opportunity would be to have the stand be able to wireless charge the iPad while in use but I expect the power requirements of an iPad in use would exceed current standards.
Looking at the published photos, there doesn't appear to be a mechanical interface along the edge of the ipad to the stand.
I've never laid hands on an iPad Pro but photos show it has 3 pogo pads on the backside, is that enough to do data and power? I was under the impression that USB-3 required multiple pairs of data wires. Some sort of proprietary signaling?
On the previous iPad Pro keyboard page, they had this text: "The Smart Connector transfers both data and power between iPad Pro and the Smart Keyboard Folio — no batteries or charging required"
It's the same connector since the new one is backwards compatible with the old iPad Pro.
If you google "iPad Smart Connector pinout" you find previous discussion/speculation on the protocol
edit: the announcement specifically says the stand supports "pass-through charging, keeping the USB-C port on iPad Pro free for accessories including external drives and displays". So the pogo pins only have to have enough data bandwidth to send keystrokes, the stand won't give you USB 3 data
When Apple switched to Intel they rented developers a custom dev kit machine before the consumer products launched. If they change over to ARM, this could very well be the dev kit hardware.
With a much much faster processor. And macrumors is reporting that they all have 6 GB of memory (this was previously an unadvertised upgrade that game with 1 TB storage). Would be a bit less cramped to run macOS on compared to 4 GB in most of the 2018 models.
Kind of have to look at it as the whole package. You aren't buying an iPad and a keyboard, you are buying a 10.5" laptop for $1,100.
I went cheap on my older iPad Pro and just use an aftermarket bluetooth keyboard, but I've kept this guy for 4+ years now and spending a bit (Ok a LOT) more and having a really nice keyboard/ case/ trackpad affects the usefulness of the device for the entire time.
Still debating it, still not sure I'm upgrading my iPad yet, but I'm a lot more likely to pay the extra for the nicer setup this time around.
Macbook Air for $1k is not a very good tablet, battery life and screen are not as good.
It's not immediately clear which one is better. Depends on how you expect to use it.
For me, I need developer tools, multiple browser engines, and spreadsheets, so I'm going to be on a laptop or desktop as my main computer for a while yet. That's not true of everyone. Many people can use this as their main machine and there are certain advantages to it.
The CPU, speakers, cameras, and display on the iPad Pro are much better. You can also detach the iPad from the base instantly and have the best tablet on the market.
Seems like every generation of iPad & iPad OS makes the Mac a little less relevant. That said... if you need MacOS—for example you are a developer—you get a Mac.
It'll be interesting when Macs with ARM CPUs hit the market. Or for that matter... if they were to release MacOS for the iPad.
I am always baffled, when the keyboard + iPad issue is brought up, perhaps my use-case is unique. I use a Apple A1314 Keyboard, which has an ESC key, it is Bluetooth enabled with decent key travel, and cheap to acquire. It is just a matter of popping the iPad Pro 10.5 (2017) on an after market stand and/or propping it atop a stack of books if required, it is a good solution and works well, even for a touch-typist like myself.
However, I would appreciate better support for MX Master as opposed to the current solution via Accessibility.
I use the Magic Keyboard myself, or the Kanex MultiSync https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MZ2TKIR/ that has support for 3 devices and keyboard backlighting. What I really want is a proper mechanical keyboard with good BT support, hopefully the Keychron K6 I have on order will be the ticket.
Completely off-topic, but for everybody that maps Caps Lock to esc, how do you ctrl-tab? That's what my Caps Lock is mapped to, and I cannot understand how ctrl-tab can be any sort of comfortable to reach on a standard layout?
I haven't mapped my caps lock to anything else, but on my Mac I ⌘-tab, which is pretty natural for my thumb and fourth finger given the position of the ⌘ key next to the space bar.
To be honest it never really bothered me once I realised that a lot of iPad apps let me rebind the caps lock key to work as escape. I'd just love for them to make that option available globally like it is on the Mac.
Not only that, but also native KeyUp and KeyDown events[1] without needing a JavaScript hacks! This means keychord-type shortcuts are now also possible in an app that wants to use it (e.g. an IDE, if someone is building one), or app-specific key remapping (e.g. Blink.sh, which currently uses JavaScript to detect and remap the key)
I value an Escape key (being emacs/evil user) and use iPad Pro as my primary computer for the past 2 years. The trick is you just use a real keyboard with it (HHKB-BT in my case) :-)
I couldn't find any weight specifications for the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. For reference: the 12.9-inch Smart Keyboard Folio, without a trackpad and without scissor switches, weighs 407 grams. So, lets speculate the new keyboard, as a blind guess, weighs 500 grams. Adding this to the new iPad 12.9"'s weight of 642 grams, the total weight is over 1.2 kilograms, which already is in the range of the new MBA2020 with 1.29 kilograms. Why not take the full laptop instead, then?
because weight isn't everything and it is optional (i.e. i can put the keyboard in my bag): Pencil support, proper portrait support, reading on the ipad is easier once you remove the optional keyboard, much easier to hold on a commute
I have a $100+ Logitech keyboard for my existing iPad. It supports only one position; is not backlit; and has no integrated trackpad.
There's definitely an Apple tax here, but it's also a premium item, so that pricing doesn't seem ridiculous to me. Also, the existing Bluetooth options will still work, and the Apple Smart Folio keyboard is still an option at a lower price point.
Even the current one that's literally just a run-of-the-mill keyboard is £159 (£199 for the bigger iPad!). A plain keyboard should not cost more than the Pencil.
I remember when the iPhone X broke the $1000 barrier and made phones that cost even more than that suddenly acceptable. It seems Apple is successfully pushing up the acceptable price for things.
Well it's also a display stand, to raise the iPad Pro up (insert joke about Apple's 20K stand here). Anyone with a current Mac who's been using it for a while want to tel us how the keyboard is? I'm typing this on one of 2018 ones and it feels like I'm typing directly on a desk.
I have a current Macbook Pro that's mine and a butterfly-switch MBP from work. The butterfly is acceptable, although I've finally gotten a doubling key, x, which is a problem for doing cmd-x.
The new MBP keyboard is noticeably different in feel from the old scissor-switch keyboard, but not especially so. It's comfortable to type on and I'm happy with it.
It's only about $40 more than a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad 2. Toss in a cover which can act as a stand, and you're probably close to the same price.
Don't forget that it is backlit and because it has power in also adds effectively an additional USB C port, thow in a case and you are well over the top. The current Smart Keyboard Folio + Magic Trackpad 2 is $310.
No, it's Apple's scissor switch keyboard which is considered one of the best low-profile keyboards around. Lugging around even a compact mechanical keyboard for use with an iPad is a hassle.
a scissor keyboard? so it is a common chiclet which most of the cheap keyboards use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiclet_keyboard with very mild "clicking" feedback/feel. Well, it's been used in the industry for 30+ years because it actually works, in contrast to "batterfly". But it's nothing special to justify the price.
It's rich hearing mechanical keyboard fans panning Apple keyboards on price.
The sole reason mechanical keyboards are still sold is because some people prefer the feel of them and are willing to pay extra for that finger feel. Similarly, the reason people pay a premium for Apple's keyboards is because people prefer the feel of them. Prior to the butterfly keyboard, it was one of the big reasons people preferred Apple laptops.
Since few of the most die-hard mechanical keyboard fans are willing to haul around their bulky keyboards with sweet Cherry Blue switches, choices for good quality keyboards on the go is fairly limited and the Apple Magic keyboard is high on the list, and yes, people are willing to pay for that experience.
I can get behind the lightweight and simple design, but my main problem is if I own a laptop, I lug around 1 item. If I have an ipad with a keyboard, I now have 2 items.
It would be different if this was a device that could switch between MacOS and IpadOS. But it's not. So it really seems like Apple is continually reinforcing the fact that we should be carrying around 30 separate items with us all at once to be prepared when we need to do one particular thing.
I can't wait until Apple gets this stuff sorted around because frankly I"m sick of them doing this stuff. The past 5 years they've been doubling down moving us toward USB-C but also making sure we need like 10 dongles or separate devices for their machines. Whoever is currently in their design team clearly is getting more say in the manufacturing of the devices than anybody in engineering I can say that. They need to make something that saves me time, not something that annoys me just like a PC.
It is not my experience that keyboards are part of their garden wall. I have used bluetooth keyboards with my iPads going back to the first generation of iPad Mini.
What their keyboards do offer is tighter integration. That’s not a wall, it’s more like growing enticing apples in the orchard within the garden.
Not much different than the situation with upgrades for my Volvo. The Volvo stuff is tightly integrated. OEM stuff sometimes involves compromises, like plugging things into the port and fiddling with bluetooth.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, bluetooth & USB keyboards all work fine. I've used aftermarket keyboards exclusively for the past... 6 or so years on the iPad.
To follow up, yes, it does. But because iPadOS doesn’t support all the swipe gestures on my first generation Magic Trackpad that my Mac does—notably scrolling—I’m disconnecting it. If I’m going to have to touch the screen to scroll, why have the cursor?
Take a notice: it doesn't seem to be any contact pads on the new ipad.
If there is indeed no contact pads, then it's likely they had to develop some custom rf connection just to support the type-c without contact pads (usb 3.0 needs a ton of bandwidth,) and that ain't cheap.
I have tried very hard for the last few years to do Python development on the iPad Pro with a combination of Termius (to ssh into my home machine) and Pythonista. They are both great apps but it's not enough -- time and time again I ran into fussy little roadblocks that were taking too much time to resolve. I finally got flummoxed enough to buy a refurbished HP Elitebook 820 instead.
Mind you, I work on financial applications so YMMV. I love my Mac -- I wish the iPad was there, but it's not there yet. Great for watching Netflix though ...
There is exactly one attribute which will convince me the iPad Pro is a 'real' computer: when I can develop apps for the iPad on the iPad. Until then... nice, but ...
Same here. I like my (cheap) iPad and I use it a lot, but before I can develop software on it, it's definitely not a real computer. It's something which is nice to read, watch movies on etc.
I must say; if I could program on it, I probably would not have a laptop anymore. 2 years ago my laptop was being repaired and I had to spend 2 months (don't ask) with my iPad Pro; I worked with Termius + Remotix for developing apps + sites + api's and it works fine as long as the connection is good. I was in HK and the 4g internet is great all over the place, even on the ferry. It's not ideal but it's really quite good.
This is what blows my mind about their decisions regarding software priorities. Being able to build Macintosh apps on a Macintosh was fundamental to the survival of the platform. Hell, there isn't even a coherent story about developing client-side web applications on an iPad, something much simpler—the interpreter's already there!
Same here. My iPad mini is nice to read and annotate PDF (love the pencil) thanks to its retina display but that's it. And any task involving inputing more than two words is super painful anyway (pairing an external keyboard with bluetooth is painful too).
I've already ordered one. I sold off the last of my Apple products a few years ago. Since then, the MacBook Pro has improved, but MacOS was getting so buggy that I didn't really see he benefit over dealing with Windows (also, I love WSL). iPhones with lightning connectors and no headphone jack offend me. So no thanks. Besides, have you tried the Xperia 5?
But man I miss my iPad. My very expensive and high performance toy with the nearly endless choice of very high quality applications and games.
Android tablet apps are plain awful. There are a few good apps on Windows (6 of them and half haven't been updated in 3+ years) and there are always random lags and endless strange issues with Tablet mode. Never mind that a Windows machine often needs to wake up from suspend vs iPad instant on.
> I didn't really see he benefit over dealing with Windows
What possible nightmare bugs could macOS have that would lead you to this claim? I'm really curious. They'd have to be big ones because I've been developing on Lin/Win/Mac for 6 years and nothing comes close to the pain of developing on Windows.
The cat versions since Tiger were pretty much flawless upgrades and never had any issues. Then the mountains came, and upgrades never went as smoothly and problems would crop up. Display driver issues, Wifi would just disconnect, strange performance issues (I think caused by CPU throttling to keep the fan quiet), it was a while back. Then the display developed a bright yellow vertical line DURING the upgrade to Sierra. So annoying. The Apple store people said I needed a new motherboard. Nothing helped, downgraded to Mountain Lion. I don't like the new MacBook Pros that came out since, so I switch to a Surface. However, High Sierra came out so I pulled out the machine with its bright yellow line and upgraded. The line was gone.
Honestly, Apple software and machines have way too much magic locked away and hidden. This was acceptable to me when everything was perfect, but those days are gone. I check the Apple support forums from time to time. MacBook keyboards come to mind.
Oh, ok, these are anecdotal bugs and not something systemic and real, like, say the redesign of the file system or memory managers or the driver system.
I've had 3 macs over a decade and they've all been flawless. My 2013 MBP is still my trusty workhorse, my Mac Mini handles the living room.
Only issue ever was Catalina when my chinese 32-bit Alfa drivers stopped working, but I had two OSes worth of warnings. And my new iPhone 7 sometimes cannot make calls because the phone app crashes and I have to reboot (bahahahah wtf apple... YOU HAD ONE JOB!!!). SO there's that.
I've got dozens of anecdotal issues with windows though: I still have to sit and wait 60 seconds to see what is in my recycle bin (or any folder with large # files) for Explorer while it does a bunch of bloatware internet checks behind the scenes to tell me things I don't need to know. Or my system randomly grinding to a halt due to upgrades. Or the spontaneous 100% network usage associated with services that require me to get a coffee while they finish (because rebooting will kill an hour). Or the Device Manager that hasn't changed since Win2000. Oh, and I love the advertisements for games in my start menu. Or being able to actually stop windows updates (twist: even dinking with the registry still is undone).
Battle of opinions here, obviously: but the Candy Crush showing up my start menu really sealed the coffin on Windows being a serious platform.
Oh yea, if I wanted to really torture myself I could dev exclusively on windows with, like, the ARM toolchain for GNU. That would be insanity. I thought you meant cross compiling the other way: from linux/mac to windows.
Um, I'm talking writing the code on linux and targeting Windows using Linux cross compilation. The compilers are run on linux. The code is targeted at windows. You'd need windows to run it. Windows is the target.
Developing on windows has gotten much better recently. VSCode is my favorite IDE, and with wsl its easy to hop onto bash when I want to. Now that its easy to mount onto wsl there isn't much more I'd ask for.
I get the feeling that ChromeOS would break your heart like it does mine. It's like most of the iPad Experience, plus the android tablet app heartbreak plus WSL wrapped into what I personally think in V82 is the best terminal app I have ever seen. It's all kinds of 'THIS IS AMAZING' while also being 'THIS IS HORRIBLE'
I had high expectations that Google would figure out Chrome on tablets with Android. But they couldn't even make a good Chrome touch experience. The lag was pretty bad and then the whole effort was killed off.
Tough being a product at Google. They remind me of the turtles hatching on the beach and running for the ocean before being killed by the birds.
> The LiDAR Scanner measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 meters away, works both indoors and outdoors, and operates at the photon level at nano-second speeds.
Light travels 30cm in 1ns. That's not really a very exciting precision at 5m range. That's like 4bit resolution.
Are there any specs aside from this marketing blabber?
It's a ToF sensor array, so you wouldn't expect the range of a Leica Disto, not would it make sense in this use case. Think more of gestures like a Kinect, or realtors making floor plans by scanning a room around.
The new MacBook Air looks really nice as well. Here's hoping we see a new 13/14" MacBook Pro in the next day or two as well. I want to upgrade from my 15" but I don't want this form factor anymore. 14" in a slightly bigger 13" form factor would be ideal.
I loved the form factor of the 2015 MacBooks. It was perfect for college and I took it everywhere. It only lasted ~2 years before the mobo failed and it longer booted up. I think there was a known heating issue with these laptops.
That issue was actually recalled and given an extended service warranty period, I think. Otherwise, those 2015 ones responded well to being baked in the oven, if you still have yours.
I have here a 2015 1.2Ghz/8GB/512GB live and kicking. but for cpp development it was very slow.
but it was great form-factor. though my fav machine is still my MBA 2013" I have upgraded it with 2TB and it's still a great machine.
Tangentially, I was thinking of using an iPad as an ergonomic keyboard (free tap layout) because the magic keyboard has a layout which is very bad for RSI.
They actually do that a lot. They usually release A(n)X when there's already an A(n+1) available.
Usually, the X version (or in this case, the Z version) is the same architecture as a previous non-letter architecture but with optimized and improved multi-core performance achieved with new components and likely some overclocking. They are also likely optimized to handle workloads differently since they are put in devices that are meant to work differently than a handheld phone.
The X versions seem to be optimized to take full advantage of the larger batteries available in the iPads or for non-battery devices like the Apple TV.
I don't think there are X CPUs that were put in iPhones, so far (I could be wrong, though).
I think it's a timeline issue. They likely have skipped A13X due to TSMC's fast cadence of 7nm+ and are working on A14. I'm guessing that A14X is destined for the Mac and next iPad Pro but that's maybe 9 months out? This CPU should be an A12X + extra GPU performance, but who knows what it brings.
New iPhones always ship in September with an incremented A series chip. The single exception was the A5, which shipped with the iPad 2 six months before the iPhone 4S.
Apart from the iPad 2, new top-of-the-line iPads have almost always shipped with the existing highest-numbered A series chip in an X variant. The single exception was the first iPad Air, which shipped with a regular A7.
So this is indeed the first time that a new high-end iPad has shipped with a lower-numbered CPU than the most recent iPhone.
When the previous duo of iPad Pros was released the current iPhone was using A12 and respectively the iPads had A12X Bionic. iPad Pro is the most powerfull device in their mobile line, it's very starange that the are doing a step backwards with it.
My question was rather how A12z compares to A13. They have already explained many times how A(n) compares to A(n)X.
Love my 2018 iPad Pro, use it everyday for school work and for personal things. Hope to see more options for development on the iPad in the near future (requires Apple to open up developer options).
There are some cool apps that I think you guys would like. They don't have a lot of marketing behind them.. Carnets (offline Jupyter notebook) [free] and a-Shell (interactive terminal) [free].
Took some digging, but note that the new trackpad keyboard is compatible with the 2018 released iPad Pro models. Looks like the keys are bigger, resembling their laptop keyboard a bit more. I really enjoy typing on my smart folio so I hope the experience will be similar!
> iPad Pro is faster and more powerful than most Windows PC laptops
This is such a frustrating comparison that Apple continues to make.
They factor in that most Windows PC laptops are very low-spec and low-price. If you compared performance with similarly priced machines it would likely be a different story.
But come on, Apple. It's not 2001 anymore. You don't need to keep up with the 'us vs them' mentality.
Eh as someone who works in IT, there’s a lot of hate spread around. It’s an awful part of the entire industry. People neglect whole ecosystems of the industry and thus their career paths because of the Mac, windows, Linux hate war. If someone’s stuck to a single tribe they’re a lot less interesting as a professional. I take it as a sign of lack of experience and professionalism.
The late 2019 iPad Pro is faster and more powerful than the late 2019 Macbook Air. I bought both and tested. It made me wish for an iPad Pro hardware based Macbook Air but ultimately I sold the iPad Pro 4 weeks later since I never used it. My workflow is decidedly not tablet oriented.
I don't think trackpad support adds much value to the "serious" use cases of the iPad. If my work gets complex enough to require a trackpad, I get on my Mac. The trackpad looks more like a band-aid solution for those who are insistent on using the iPad as a serious computer (even though it's not), because nothing so-far-invented beats the traditional keyboard-mouse-window paradigm for productivity.
The only "serious" use cases for the iPad, which are actually better on iPad than on Mac are:
- Document review and annotation with tools like LiquidText or PDF Expert
- Sketching and drawing with apps like Paper
- Data collection and demonstration in the field (showing other people stuff, and asking them to enter info)
Anything else you "could" technically do on an iPad is just a dumbed-down version of what we already do better on a Mac. Lots of pretty marketing and very little productivity - I feel bad for the generation of college kids raised on this pretty piece of glass while being deprived of the experience of "real" computing.
Speaking to the 13" iPad w/keyboard combo, a MacBook Pro 15", and desktop multi monitor Macs which I use for working…
The desktops are the thing for writing code. This goes for iOS apps, Mac apps, or Posix type server systems. It could be done on smaller screens, but I like leaving the test system on its own screen and keeping log viewing windows visible to notice changes.
Communicating with people and extensive researching are almost exclusive on the iPad with keyboard. It's great for focused tasks and I can plop it down wherever I feel like being.
The MacBook mostly stays in my "had to go out of town" bag. It might go unused for months at a time, but when I'm away from the desktops and need do something code oriented it is invaluable. The versatility is an asset, (currently I've given the room with my home office desktop over to a family member sheltering with us, but a couple displays, a keyboard, a magic pad, and some odd cables and boom, another desktop on demand).
The thing I most dislike about working on the iPad is merrily keyboarding away and using the arrows to scroll, and then I need to poke something on the screen. I wouldn't call it "gorilla arm", but maybe "rhesus arm". My nicely supported arm has to rise and make a fairly accurate hit on the screen without any support, or add the extra step to make contact for accurate motion if it is more than a single touch. Definitely a modern third world problem, but turning touch and drags into simple thumb operations will be nice.
I can only speak for myself, I bought an 11" iPad Pro to have something much lighter and portable than my laptop that I could carry everywhere, write long form text on, and edit photos.
Importing and editing a single photo is easy, but if I want to work on a whole batch it becomes a pain trying to manage many files using file system.
So far the best solution I've found is to pay for Adobe cloud storage, import my photos to the Lightroom app (thus not polluting my camera roll) and let Adobe sync everything to my desktop where the photos eventually live on an external hard drive.
Side note: Despite this the actual act of manipulating photos on the iPad are fantastic. I love being able to shoot an event and then start editing a couple photos for promotional purposes right then and there. Overall I love my big expensive tablet.
If other people have developed iPad / iOS photography workflows I'd love to hear them!
Really wish they would stop hijacking the scrolling on their website. It's absolutely horrible to navigate and makes it hard to find information. I kept scrolling and scrolling and finally had enough and just closed the page.
I use a digital ocean droplet over mosh with tmux and vim for some things and that works pretty well but its annoying not having vscode or sublime to use for sure
Hard to say without knowing the component cost, but I would really like a non backfacing camera (or very cheap back camera) option in the future.
I could see myself having a beefy desktop, this iPad with the keyboard, and my phone. But if you're not into the whole AR-scene, the camera seems redundant as I always have my phone with me.
But I guess there's not enough people like me to justify that model...
What I really want to see is a (non-protruding) back camera in the centre and with a wide enough lens to be able to see through the screen 1:1 while pointing at a surface.
It would enable way more YouTube creators to be able to see properly while they’re recording.
Yes! I'm currently deciding between the new ReMarkable2 and an iPad Pro. Having a cheaper iPad Pro without these AR/Camera-Stuff as an option would make this decision easier.
Just get the 3rd generation iPad Pro on the inevitable discount when the new one becomes widely available, or refurbished units when people start using the trade-in program to upgrade.
The Remarkable2 seems rather expensive at $400 for a monochrome device that isn't as versatile as an iPad, let alone an iPad Pro.
I'm in the same boat. While I much prefer the more natural feel of the ReMarkable, I want to use apps like GoodNote that allow for a seamless transition between typing and handwriting, and let you move around images that you've drawn in your notes.
I'd be curious to hear what criteria you're using to make your decision.
I agree. Taking photos with an iPad looks so ridiculous anyhow; the photo in the press release where they're using the thing to do a photoshoot is really bizarre.
I would like an app that lets me map the dimensions and floor plans of an indoor space. Without really knowing a ton about lidar or the specific implementation of it in this device, I imagine that could be done?
The apps that use the camera are all pretty clunky. If I could just walk around the inside of my house for a while and let it map it out, that would be nifty.
(put on tin foil hat) Then the iPad can track my movement around my house and play ads based on which room I am in.
Example - walks into bathroom and I hear "Try new lemon toilet bowl cleaner."
"Later this year, Shapr 3D, a professional CAD system based on Siemens Parasolid technology, will use the LiDAR Scanner to automatically generate an accurate 2D floor plan and 3D model of a room which can then be used as the basis to design remodels or room additions like a bathroom or closet. New designs can then be previewed in real-world scale using AR right in the room you scanned."
I want to remodel my house. I want to take my device, scan everything, then put replace parts - new vanity in bathroom, try different paints in different rooms, new lighting etc.
After each change, I want to put on my VR device and walk around. Finally, I want to send the changes I choose to a contractor.
sorry for the non-context response, but in hopes you see the reply (and missed the one from the other day), blockbattle.net is currently down. would be great if it could be back up, not sure of any other way to contact the creators, will not nag about this again here. if you want someone to take over hosting, would be totally up for it :-) great game, Thanks.
Thank You :-) Would be great if anyone still involved could drop by /r/blockbattlenet ... would be happy to help with hosting (or if open sourcing at this point is an option, even better). Thanks again!
Why would someone want to map out an indoor space as a 3D model with color and precision? I would never have thought the usefulness of that would be in question. Any kind of building or construction, virtual spaces, robotics navigation, virtual tours etc. can and already are making use of these things.
There are already apps that do that. They are useful for home appraisers, interior designers, architects. Anyone who wants to quickly map out a building. They just use the camera though so improving the accuracy with Lidar would be valuable to those professionals who already use those apps.
I am thinking masonry/fireplace door installation. Each fireplace needs measured accurately before one can order a Fireplace door. Often times, customers opt to measure themselves. In a previous life, the company I worked for ran into so many issues and so many "rejected" doors that were used for floor/clearance models. Even if the customer did not do the measurement, installers would get it wrong. The measurements necessary for a Fireplace door include up to 12+ distinct measurement. The type of door (zero clearance, etc..) as well as door accessories are heavily dependent on the measurements. Imagine placing an order, waiting 4-8 weeks for it to be built and all to discover that it doesn't fit. Anyone interested in tackling this problem, get a hold of me.
3D scan any physical object and then send it to a 3D printer. So many possibilities!
- Cosplayer? 3D scan yourself, you now have a model you can make minis out of.
- Need to replace a simple valve to help treat covid19? This does most of the work for you.
- Game dev? You can scan a real world item, either importing it directly or using it as an outline for an in-game object.
For most high detail or functional things you probably will need to make some adjustments to the scanned model, but it could make the whole process waaay easier.
It really depends on a lot more than lidar. Kinect and Tango were lidar as well but getting a point cloud and computing perfect geometry are not the same thing!
Basically same as the current AR, but with actual measurements. So the scale is actually correct, distance measures are correct, and so on. Can create a 3D model up to the range of the LIDAR etc etc.
- How about self-body scanning for dating apps? You can add it on your profile as a "LiDAR 3d-model" bonus so interested parties know they're not getting catfished. Yeah, you can always scan your hot friend, but it just requires another level of deception.
- How about a "night-vision" app? Without needing a flashlight, you can stumble around a dark room (maybe outdoors at night?) without running into walls.
It is only new to the iPad - you can look at intel's realsense and microsoft's kinect to check out depth cameras in use for many years already. The integration is what will make it special. We will have to see what the noise is like coming off the camera though. I would guess there will be some SLAM demos of mapping spaces or digitizing objects.
A lot of these comments are expecting magical perfectly scanned geo but really its just another slightly less fuzzy point cloud you need to sort through. Kinect and Tango did it. Maybe Apple cracked it and it is magical. We'll have to see.
A 3D model of your home in a cartoon/"the sims" style that shows where your smart home devices are. The model could also be used to play various automation scenarios (e.g. morning routine, or someone walks past the front door). It's easy to keep track of a few devices, but if you have many similar devices, you likely think about them by location, not by name or other identifier.
I'm going to develop an alarm app that flashes the iPad screen red and blares an alarm when the user, walking with their head down, ignores the crosswalk signs and steps into the path of a car that has the right of way. At least the user will know that their death was their own fault ... something that wasn't possible until now.
There really is no reason at all to not support macOS apps when you've given the device a keyboard and a trackpad+cursor. In a lot of ways, this form factor is exactly what I would want my Macbook to be... ultra-portable, touch-screen with Pen support, more dynamic hinge, and no touch bar.
> There really is no reason at all to not support macOS apps when you've given the device a keyboard and a trackpad+cursor.
That would turn the keyboard and trackpad into a requirement rather than an option. If you want macOS you already have options. The iPad is great because it's tablet first with touch as primary input method.
While everybody is 'discussing' the technical and use-case merits in that manner for which HN is (in)famous i would like to point out that this device looks like somebody decided the iPads could do with some design flair so they took a photo of an iPhone SE and enlarged it and then basically said "Done!".
Specs, users, emotion aside at least as a physical device it actually has some style. At last. Thank you somebody inside Apple for not producing yet another round edge, nearly anonymous, soap-bar slab.
But it’s interesting when two things evolve towards each other, but starting from different places. Like comparing bats and birds, or penguins, otters, and fish.
In this case, evolving from a device designed for touch only into touch-first is going to be different from a device that evolved from—let’s be honest—keyboards, punch cards, and the command-line.
Judging from the (in my opinion) really clunky multi window feature in iPadOS it seems they are struggling to get even close to the usability of macOS. I don’t think so far iPadOS scales well to larger screen sizes and multitasking. A lot of things take more clicking compared to macOS.
It's ironic, but I've transitioned from using Ulysses and other apps for text editing to Blink + Mosh +
Tmux + Neovim (with Goyo plugin for focusing). This is on a 12.9" iPad Pro.
It's a smooth setup. I like iOS, but am tired of dragging apps from the dock.
(Note: I use Working Copy as a local git client & editor for times when I'm without internet or when I need to copy to another app. Great combo.)
The multi-tasking UX is atrocious. Daring Fireball has been posting critical essays and alternate designs for months. I hold out hope for a redesign: They redesigned WatchOS's UX, I don't think the multi-tasking in "untouchable" (heh).
Yes I wonder what's going to 'win', tablet or 'laptop which can act like tablet', or will they both stay?
At this rate we'll have to start comparing tablets like this to laptops like Surface Pro and it's clones (or vice-versa, maybe the Surface is the clone, don't remember exact sequence of events) because the only difference is the OS. And if more 'tablet modes' start emerging from main OS the gap will become very narrow.
I can't imagine a tablet is ever going to win for extremely typing-heavy tasks like writing and coding. This new keyboard also seems like it requires you to be sitting at a table to work well, which doesn't cover a lot of the cases where I type on a laptop.
To be honest, it's hard for me to think of cases where the tablet is better suited outside of things like digital drawing/painting, and some niche cases like at an expo.
From my colleague's and my experience: the iPad pro is a manager's dream. It's lightweight, you can take notes (either by writing or by typing), you can attend remote meetings with it, it works with all* websites... basically it's everything your average manager or C-level exec could ever want in one package.
You are right, however, in that long-form typing (say, over 1k words) and serious multitasking (>2 apps, or 2 apps that refuse to side-by-side) will be a real pain on a tablet. However, you can hook an iPad pro up to a standard USB-C dock and use it with a large monitor as well as a standard keyboard. It will never be a full laptop replacement (though if Apple made it possible to run base MacOS I might change my mind), but it's good enough.
* The only websites I've ever had issues with are those that explicitly break the experience.
Once I got my ipad pro I basically stopped using my laptop for anything but programming and video games. The former is basically just waiting on tooling and the latter is only a problem because the specific games I want to play aren't available.
I think the iPad will be the long term winner here. Legacy OS's are just way too reliant on keyboard / mouse. Having owned a Surface Book, I can easily say that the tablet mode is not workable with the software ecosystem that exists. You can mostly make it function in limited cases, but outside of a small handful of programs built specifically for it the experience is poor.
On the other hand, the addition of a keyboard just makes the iPad even easier to use. Using a mouse is slightly more awkward since you can't use gestures, but you can always fall back to the screen that's right in front of you. The extra precision is overkill, but it isn't painful.
Another layer to add in the tablets' favor: kids these days are growing up using phones and tablets. That's the way they interact with computing technology. It will be increasingly easier to convince these new generations to buy something that's familiar, but with some extra power and utility, as apposed to something that is foreign.
> Having owned a Surface Book, I can easily say that the tablet mode is not workable with the software ecosystem that exists.
Many Surface devices can run Linux+GNOME natively, and that software UX is at least as workable on a tablet as iPadOS, probably more so. Proprietary apps are lacking, of course (not always a bad thing) but some are available via Flatpak or (in a pinch) Snap.
Incorrect. It is not the standard desktop version of Photoshop, it is something quite inferior and there are many online articles discussing the differences.
Those kinds of laptops/tablets are great for one reason: no heating components under keyboard. I hate "heated keyboards".
I hope Apple will at some point allow to install macOS on iPads. Seems like it's possible, until that moment it'll be only consumption/sensors input device which is a shame. Unfortunately not a programmer machine.
I did development for Github on an iPad for a while while my Macbook Pro was getting serviced. If you look around the threads here you'll hear from others who have also done development on an iPad.
it's certainly lighter weight than developing on a mac pro (understatement!), but for web development, especially in a n environment where you have staging environments to host services... It gets the job done.
And while this is a matter of taste, when I was working remote, I preferred a lighter, smaller machine for going to cafés.
People in this thread are comparing the iPad Pro to a laptop. I would like to get one just to serve as a powerful consumption machine. Websites will load faster with the powerful CPU. It has a great screen and a pencil for occasional doodling. Yes, I know it's expensive, but iPads also last a long time so it's a good deal.
"Studio Quality Mics" are kinda useless if you can only monitor the sound through Bluetooth :) too much latency. You'll need a low latency ADC running through that single usb-c port. Or you know, just do what the rest of the world does and use an analog headphone jack for monitoring!
Even an analog jack is pretty slow (for example, with a macbook) since it's still going through the OS stack. IMO, you really want your monitor integrated with your microphone in an external setup (such as a Scarlet 2).
Then again, I'm exceptionally sensitive to monitor latency when talking, it might be fine for others.
But then they would be doing what the rest of the world does. Their artificial obstacles to straightforward functionality make them more money. And we pay to get solutions to problems we would never have, were we to use sane technology.
From the hardware, yeah, Microsoft got that pretty spot on though I have to say this keyboard cover has some major advantages in thickness. and the ability to remove the stand.
The part they didn't copy is the software, because the Surface is little more than windows on a tablet still. The tablet life sucks, the interaction is poor, the performance slow and buggy (esp in comparison), but Windows makes a great dev OS. It's funny how different they are.
What is the size of the app market for iPad software? Does this device matter to that market?
I still feel like my own iPad usage is mostly locked by a weak software ecosystem, and while the hardware is impressive, it still seems like complete overkill for the current ecosystem.
I want to use it more, but the software for things I would have expected on the iPad, like 3D design, music production, etc, are often limited, either by software or connectivity issues.
I've gotten more use out of my Linux notebook running a Windows VM. Which surprised me.
I just get the feeling that the only people really making serious money on iPad apps are games, which are probably just ports of phone apps.
For music production, I lost my best audio inputs, like the Apogee One, when "upgrading" to the iPad Pro. This was purely a move on Apple's part, and it appears that Apogee is not just going to do much about it: https://knowledgebase.apogeedigital.com/duet-ipad-mac/apogee...
Keep in mind this $300 device is a brick on the new iPads.
At this point, I'm loathe to purchase anything just to work with the iPad Pro, because these devices work fine and continue to work fine with my other devices.
This appears to work for _electronic_ music just fine, however, but for demos the iPad is a fantastic platform. But now you're left with... figuring it out, I guess.
It’s big on the creative side of things if you can make good software. Most artists love the iPad Pro, but absolutely despise Adobe. All my friends have spent good chunks of money on apps like Procreate, Clip Studio, and the Affinity apps, just to be free of Adobe
For 3D modeling, I've still not found a replacement for Fusion 360. It does appear that there are products like shapr3d that are interesting for some basic conceptualization, but, there aren't things like, say, a sheet of default variables you can use to restrict your design to. It seems like these tools are for some rough sketching, but, the intent is probably to move the concepts into a desktop CAD system.
This makes me wonder how big the iPad software market really is in comparison. It seems "tethered" to other platforms.
I wish they'd do something about battery discharge when off. I had an older model iPad, and it could be left alone for a week and it'd still have charge. Previous gen Pro is pretty much dead after a couple of days. I know it's not fully "off" when it's off, but come on, throw on some more lithium or something. At that price I shouldn't worry about charge when I'm about to get onto my stationary bike and would like to watch a movie.
I would love to use iOS devices but somehow I just can't accept I can't run Linux on them. I understand, it's all great and neat and etc. but I also believe IT professionals should use open source OS if possible at all. I don't have strong arguments for this so I understand people have different expectations and understanding.
"A full-size keyboard designed for iPad Pro brings individual hard keycaps and a scissor mechanism with 1 mm travel for a responsive, comfortable and quiet typing experience."
At least if this keyboard goes bad, it's a simple component swap instead of RMAing an entire computer. IT departments could keep them in stock like they do other spare parts.
It’s called the “magic keyboard”, which is the same branding that Apple used on the 16” MacBook Pro to signify that it’s not the butterfly. So I think this should be good
- do network troubleshooting with MAC address access
- use VOIP with proper background operation & notification
Sorry, Apple, but you created the greatest software/hardware ecosystem in history and then screwed the pooch so badly that you lost me as a customer and a developer.
Oh wow, that's a well managed list of expectations... Do you realise who the iPad is made for and why? Your network troubleshooting with MAC access requirements represents <0.01% of people who would use iPad for that.
Just get the right tools for your job (that exist for decades, and have been slimmed to down to portable, few mm devices knows as laptops) and don't expect Apple to suddenly make iPad do everything that your job requires you to do.
Apple lost you as a customer and a developer, but it gained few hundred million more, including my parents who now know how to use computers and phones. I don't get people that don't get it.
You don't get why people who have full control over their current Pro computers wouldn't want to move to a locked down, walled in garden of a "Pro" device?
The vast, vast majority of the hundreds of millions of customers they gained with the iPad aren't doing any work that is even remotely similar to what can be done on a general purpose OS. And furthermore, even if they can do some of the same work - they can't do it with nearly the same efficiency.
The vast majority of iPad users aren't even doing any work on their iPads. They're consuming.
Apple can keep trying to make the iPad appeal to users who need full control over their computer, but it ain't gonna happen until they actually give us full control.
I get why people wouldn't want to move to a locked down computer. I am a developer/engineer making a living off a MacBook, I'm not moving to iPad.
What I meant is, I don't get why people don't understand why Apple doesn't care to their needs of "do network troubleshooting with MAC address access", to extent that they're angry, and say "[Apple] screwed the pooch so badly that you lost me as a customer and a developer".
This is unbelievable thing to say, especially in this community.
Should I stop using Apple as a customer and developer because they're not bringing out native Kubernetes integration to manage my serverless Knative functions on iPad? ...
The walled-garden iPad is a direct descendent of the “Computer as Appliance” vision that Jef Raskin had for Macintosh, which Jobs took over and continued to dream about.
We can keep complaining about it in 2020, but we certainly shouldn’t suggest that Apple is pulling a U-Turn.
What do you guys do with an iPad? I cannot barely imagine working with it. I just see it useful for emails, web surfing and not much more... It's a very expensive device, I don't see any justified use. You can get a macbook air for less and have a full blown Photoshop, IDEs, Word...
Personally, I have no use for a laptop and use my desktop for "real" work (development, audio production). In a mobile setting I prefer my device to actually be lightweight and mobile and the iPad beats any laptop in that regard. It's also my most used device when it comes to casual usage like internet browsing, reading, research, writing, watching, sketching out audio ideas etc. - frankly, these days I can't imagine being bound to my desk to do these things. It's incredibly comfortable to have these abilities at hand whether you're on the couch, preparing meals in the kitchen or laying on the deck.
Like other commenters, I will never buy another iPad unless it comes preloaded with a desktop-like operating system (like macOS) versus iOS.
One would think Apple has explored doing this - putting OSX/macOS on an iPad - given that Microsoft put Windows on the Surface and gained market share as a result.
Why they haven't released any consumer/commercial iPads with a desktop-like operating system, an OS whose first versions were able to run on a 7.8 MHz processor (the Motorola 68000) and 128 KB of RAM, is beyond me. Of course the more recent the OS, the greater the hardware requirements, but I do not see it impossible to "fit" a version of OSX/macOS to a tablet.
Does it all come down to avoiding cannibalization of Macbook Air sales?
You can't just take a non-touch OS and release it on touchscreen devices. It makes more sense to try and add additional power/functionality/versatility to the already touch-based iOS, which Apple is doing, than it does to try and redesign macOS for touch.
Apple is working on a common core for iPadOS and OSX that's should be a way, but a memory limit is important for performance for your browser tabs. I'm waiting for iPad Pro with a minimum 16G RAM.
My mechanical engineer co-worker loves the depth sensor on the old iPad Pro. He uses it all the time to shapes into solidworks that he then designs parts to fit onto.
I'm sure he will be excited about this if the sensor is that much better.
Any software recommendations for this? I really like my iPad Pro for all sorts of other reasons, but until seeing your comment I didn’t realize that 3d scanning with the depth camera was a thing, and am now interested in trying it out.
The main thing Apple still hasn't addressed that it doesn't need new hardware for is multiple profiles. One of the most prevalent environments the device is used is at home, shared by the family.
It seems there is still no escape key. It’s super annoying to have to pick up your hand to touch the screen to escape out of random UI tasks. I haven’t found a hack or remapping ability like on macOS etc.
Have you tested recently? I’m familiar with a few of the key combinations that should work (by sending the replacement key for escape), but they haven’t been working.
The rear facing camera seems to have a nice upgrade. However, apart from AR applications, I found it weird to hold a 12 inch tablet in the air to take pictures while everyone could see my screen.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. They already nuked one generation of iThing connectors (two, if you count the FireWire iPods) and we survived. We will quickly get over the death of Lightning. The only people who will be seriously upset will be people owning the original Apple Pencil.
This iPad (with this new keyboard) is the first step for Apple to provide ARM powered Macbook, but now its called iPad Pro to not make unneeded noise ...
Wow, I was just about to buy a 3rd generation. I’m really glad they brought back 128gb storage — 64gb is too little and 256gb is overkill for my needs.
I’m a bit disappointed in the new iPad Pro, since it seems to be just as thin as the previous.
As someone who had nothing but trouble with the 2018 model because of this, it’s disappointing to see that Apple’s trend of reducing thinness for things such as better battery life (iPhone 11 (Pro)) or better thermals (MacBook Pro 16”) didn’t carry over to the iPad Pro, which arguably suffered the most from its thinness.
1. iPad doesn't have a serious IDE. And syncing your workspace with a local computer is not trivial.
2. Safari for iPad doesn't have a dev mode.
3. However, if you only use terminal and vi, iPad has a great terminal app: Blink. Honestly Blink is better than most of desktop terminal in the market.
https://blink.sh/
I use an iPad Air for light webdev work. Built my personal website with it, using a few handy apps.
Working Copy is an excellent Git client and pretty good text editor, Shellfish is great for FTP/SFTP.
Other good editors include Buffer and Textastic. Terminus is a great terminal client (though the pro edition is pricey).
Pythonista is a surprisingly powerful Python environment – with a bit of work I got Django working on it. Codea is the same for Lua. DraftCode is good for PHP, though more limited. Can run Wordpress and other PHP CMSs. There's other apps for JS/Node.
Inspect gives on-device browser developer tools. Not the best but still useful.
Plus, there's iSH, a Testflight-only app that provides a mostly complete Alpine Linux environment. Managed to get Git/Ruby/Jekyll running on it to develop a site locally, though it was slow.
Have you written about these workflows anywhere? If so, I’d be interested in the links. This sounds like by far the most sophisticated iPad development workflow I’ve ever heard of anyone using.
Having to re-sign one’s apps every seven days (or pay $99/yr) barely counts, IMO; but yes, jailbreaking is easier than ever on any iPhone s as recent as the X/8.
At a stretch you can, although probably not as a primary/sole machine for web development. I bought an iPad Pro about a year ago with the intention of doing just that (and using it for other stuff).
Essentially you need to be able to work from a remote server to do anything that could be considered serious web development.
So prepare to spin yourself up an EC2 instance or a Digital Ocean droplet that you will be working from.
for my editor. None of these are as good as something like SublimeText or a proper IDE but they are good, basic text editors with FTP/SFTP/etc. integration, code highlighting/folding/auto indentation etc. GoCoEdit I found to be probably the better of those three but they all offer something the others don't.
There's a SQL Client you can use (if you're not that comfortable on the CLI with your chosen SQL server) called SQLPro which I believe is available for MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server or you can get one that covers all but it's not especially cheap - £55 a year or £150 one time payment.
I've downloaded and used Dash, which is a documentation app that gives you offline access to API documentation for all your favourite languages and tools.
So there are plenty of tools available - some of them integrate with each other more tightly but I've found you're still really limited in how much development you can do. There's nothing like Docker or Vagrant available, you couldn't run your favourite language locally in a terminal although I recall seeing a PHP parser and a Javascript environemtn available for iOS that gives you some ability to code locally. Nothing you could use for any serious work.
Until Apple gives us the ability to get to the guts of iOS and install our own tools, realistically you're always going to be limited to working off a remote server for any serious work. I think the tools that are currently available are great but are limited. You may find a workflow that gets around the limitations and if you do, please share!
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use this for development. But then again, I don’t see how people develop without at least one, preferably two external monitors.
The new MacBook Air for $999 would be a lot more appropriate.
It doesn't seem to have any differences with the current model that are really important, so it should bring down the price of 2018 models significantly on the used market. Being a whole 2 years old instead of the latest version is a big difference, and iPad pros in general aren't holding their value like macs do.
For me, they've always been "kind of neat to have, but not for $2200".
Anyone here work in VFX and/or CG in the film industry? I suspect the lidar scanner is borrowing from film sets where they'll do a lidar scan to model the 3d environment. But I'm out of my depth. I'd like to know what the current pro workflow is and then speculate at how this might translate into consumers using the tool.
Mine would be when can we get a Pro keyboard too like the one on the MacBook Air? Escape and F keys are too useful to lose if this is a potential laptop replacement. Maybe Brydge will make a full function aftermarket keyboard.
Tangential, but I’ve observed that preferences of what caps lock should be is dependent on your domain.
I write and use a browser in my work. Caps lock as backspace makes the most sense. There will be others that will (unnecessarily) argue with me that caps should and always will be escape.
A possible (mainstream) solution is to change the caps to a custom key that’s configured in the initial setup of a device.
I've given up writing on the iPad pro, because you can't really hold it on your knees with a keyboard and because the screen is not well positioned (back pains).
This new keyboard thing is amazing. Really expensive but I think I might take the bullet on this one.
Funny how Apple went from a mindset that mice were only intended to be accessibility peripherals in iOS, to fully support for them so quickly. I think it was only a year or so ago that someone high up at Apple said something to reaffirm that mindset.
I thought solid state Lidar was still under development, at least as far as cheap mass production goes. Is that not the case? Or is that just true for lidar that’s powerful enough for self-driving cars? Or is this not solid-state lidar?
I love it. The new keyboard looks great. I have a first gen 12.9 iPad pro and it has completely replaced a laptop for everything but my development work. I can't wait for Apple to put A series processors into a Macbook pro.
Not sure about floating keyboard design. I have latest (well, before this one) ipad pro with keyboard and it sits really well on an actual lap. I have doubts about this. Looks like it would bounce on a lap when typing.
You can't even imagine how hard I wish I could run Linux on this thing. The hardware is just so good. But it's just not possible to work with the useless OS that's on there...
Got 3 ipad not pro. I am on reading paper and writing. The sync, ability to comment then back to mac to touch up is great. But 11 need rudder ... horse of course as one said.
The animation in the canvas elements is slick! I want to learn how to create something like that. Looks like highly optimized sprite animations to do the faux 3d rotations.
This is exactly how my friends at FB work every day (not necessarily from an iPad Pro), but the remote VM thing is very real in some parts of the world.
I hope that day never occurs. iPadOS is like a toy compared to macOS, although recent macOS has got more locked down (no directories in root, separate OS partition with incorrect total size reporting etc.).
A while still I think. The tablet laptop form factor is still not quite as good as just a laptop in a lot of situations. It only really works well when you have a large enough space to move the tablet around to make the limited angle options work for example.
Because we've had a family group iMessage chat going for nearly a decade now, and there's approximately zero percent chance of my Mum adopting a different platform. (It's also light-hearted teasing, not an alcoholism-style intervention.)
Now it runs most desktop web apps (like Google Docs) just fine, so they've obviously been making a lot of improvements. Everything that came with iOS 13 has been a huge improvement for web browsing on the iPad.
Between the 3D front-scanner for Face ID (which, incidentally, worked less well than TouchID did at the time of FaceID launch), the whole touchbar debacle, the UWB radio locator stuff in the latest iPhones, EKG support on the watch, and now LIDAR on the iPad, it seems like Apple is lately really into putting esoteric/novel hardware that nobody really wants or cares about into their newest high-end devices. There's even an argument that the now-debunked butterfly keyboard foray falls into this category (literally nothing was wrong with the scissor/mbair keyboard, as evidenced by the fact that they've returned to it essentially unmodified).
You can make the argument that Face ID/3D front scanner has enough "wow" or utility to be a selling point. I'm not so sure about any of the other stuff, especially the UWB and now LIDAR. This feels like throwing stuff against the wall until something or other sticks—pretty un-Apple, IMO.
I feel like Apple's hit a rough patch in terms of traditional Apple-level innovation; the AirPods and HomePod are mindbendingly great products, but outside of those, "going back to the old keyboard" is the biggest selling point they've shipped really since going all-in on Retina and then Display P3. Everything else user-facing has been incremental (e.g. TrueTone, routine CPU/GPU advances). To be clear, I don't mean to disparage the technical merit of these achievements in any way. It's a major achievement to do what they've done, and there's a lot more of it, across more product lines than ever before in their history, but my iPhone 11 pro maximum mclargehuge is not twice as good as my iPhone 7 was, CPU/GPU increases notwithstanding.
(I'm really, really glad about the T2 boot security that prevents Evil Maid, and the speakers in the new rMBP 16" are astoundingly good, and the 120Hz on iPad Pro is lovely, but this comment is about marquee/headline features.)
Maybe they're just more startuppy now, trying different things in different directions to see what cool technology ends up sticking around. I'm reminded of the time they shipped a bunch of speech recognition launcher/shortcut stuff and voiceprint login out of left field with os9. I still don't "get" where they think they're headed with AR (which is not to say they don't have a cool plan, just that it's not obvious from the outside what, if anything, it is).
I sure hope they've got something big up their sleeve other than the impending AnX CPU macOS laptops.
Apple user since 1985 here. Apple has made some marvellous things, but if we actually look at their entire history, innovation has happened in lurches, it’s not like every single thing they ship upends and redefines entire categories.
Tons of stuff the do is incremental, and yes, lots of dead-ends happen. Just look at the history of their mice. Or Newton. Or their tepid ventures into consoles, Macs that doubled as TVs, or CD-ROM drives that were also standalone CD players.
Yeah, you've got a great point. It's easy to forget a lot of their quirky weird sometimes-dead-end experiments over the years. It could just be a memory bias.
To this end, though: are there any Apple historians, inside or outside of the company?
Serious question. I like the idea and Android users are always running around with "we had that years ago". Well, I don't see that in this case, but would be happy to be told otherwise :)
Apple make beautiful high end consumer electronics. This is the kind of gadget that every IT manager wastes their time accomodating for flash execs. If Apple made professional equipment it would work properly with AD and Azure AD.
Apple's marketing on the new iPad pros is that they can replace your computer. I bought the most recent iPad Pro model and I can say that unless the only thing you do on your computer is browse the internet (without downloading anything) you're going to have a bad time. Here are some things that don't work:
* A full-featured file browser. The files app is sort of workable now, but the experience is really bad and certainly not suitable for any kind of professional or power-user usage.
* SMB or any other kind of file sharing. Once again, Apple theoretically supports this now, but in practice it's totally broken and non-functional.
* Video editing. The iPad only supports a few formats and refuses to show high-quality videos (the limit is 100mbps or 200mbps or something).
* High quality video conferencing/streaming/recording. The iPad pro has somewhat-working support for external audio devices (although apps have to support device selection, and most don't), but it has zero support whatsoever for external video devices. This means you're stuck with the shitty built-in cameras (which, no matter what Apple marketing says, are not "pro" or "studio" quality)
* No ability to do any kind of coding or scripting or anything except via SSH to a real general purpose computer
Some things that do work ok:
* Email
* Web browsing
* Photo editing (this is actually quite nice, as long as you don't need bulk processing)
* It's a decent SSH thin client, with an app like Prompt
* Note taking
I mostly use my iPad for taking notes and stuff at work, and occasionally for photo proofing/editing. For everything else, I still use my laptop.
What most people use a computer for these days are not what we use a computer for. Most people probably require little except a phone for most computing needs.
* Getting a convenient dock and better physical keyboard.
* Surfing on an iPad is probably a lot better and fast experience than a similarly priced computer.
* A lot of dedicated apps for most tasks people need. (Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, etc)
* People use email/dropbox/similar for sharing files.
* File browser definitely needs improvement. Specially for working with email attachments.
* As long as you can edit videos recorded with your phone/ipad.
* Most people use the built in camera and mic or perhaps a dedicated computer for conferencing.
* Getting Excel on it would be sufficient for business programming.
Apple released a pro product that’s not aimed at programmers. The physical form factor and keyboard are useful even if the computing could be done in a phone.
> What most people use a computer for these days are not what we use a computer for. Most people probably require little except a phone for most computing needs.
Most people also don't buy such costly computers, so I'm not sure why do you think a hugely expensive iPad "PRO" would be something meant for "most" people.
People buy really expensive iPhones as well.
My point wasn’t that the iPad Pro is for most people. Just that the features it and the future regular iPad supports are enough for most of the computing needs.
So who is this almost $1,000 iPad for? Typically the argument for Apple's wild pricing is that "it's for professionals" but if you can't do anything "professional" with it...it sounds like the surface or something would be better since you can at least do those things with it.
FYI you can do audio device selection from the little “airplay” icon in the top right of the audio widget in control center. It’s not really obvious but it’s separately clickable.
It's hard to get excited about a $1000 iPad when the US is projecting 20% unemployment. A large portion of he population is facing death from a global pandemic, is wondering how they're going to pay their mortgage, utilities or food but yayyyyy an iPad!!!
When I add up this new iPad in the minimum 128GB/Wifi/11" config this one is about $400 more than I paid for the Surface Pro + KB cover + MS Pen. (Which is i5/8GB/128GB/Wifi-only)
The Surface has been so much more useful due to it's "real" software ecosystem and ability to just plug devices & memory cards right into it. 4 years on it seems like this new iPad Pro is no better except for even slicker hardware + touchpad.
Not there for me till they fix the software and make it a lot easier to do real world tasks that require working with files on other pieces of hardware you have local.
Some of the use cases like traveling and doing photography or video on the road have just been so much easier with the Surface Pro. Even just doing things like downloading a spreadsheet from the bank. Maybe you can do that now but you couldn't when I had my iPad Pro. Safari wouldn't let you download a file and open it in the app of your choice. So even though Numbers (or Excel) would have been fine to do finances there was no way to get the files. If the bank had made it so the app could generate a spreadsheet and then let you share it with Numbers that would work, but those use cases never got enabled, and there were so many cases like that.