It is interesting that the most common criticism of the iPad Pro is that it is hard to fully leverage the hardware capabilities. Part of that is iPad OS has always been a bit of an afterthought compared to iOS, but part of it is probably just a limitation of the form factor. There are only so many things a tablet is good for before you need to connect a keyboard and pointer device. You can see this with the extremely expensive keyboard case that essentially turns the iPad into a laptop.
> Apple iPad Pro review 2018: the fastest iPad is still an iPad
> And the one thing Apple didn’t really change on the iPad Pro is iOS 12, which has all of the same capabilities and limitations iPad users have come to expect. Apple wants you to think that the iPad Pro is the future of computing, but if you’ve already used iOS 12 on an iPad Pro, you know exactly how you feel about that idea.
With a bit of work, Apple could make iPad OS a much better system for tablets. I don't like newer iterations of GNOME, but it is a really decent user experience on a Surface Go.
Given that an iPad Pro is a much better piece of hardware and linux-surface is made by some enthusiasts, there is no excuse for this.
iPads are great, some apps are great, but the overall experience is simply not there. It is way too constraining.
Not even just first party. My partner uses Instagram on an iPad, and the app looks like trash. Just a zoomed in version of the phone UI. Facebook has infinite money, uses Instagram to drive further revenue, and even they cannot be bothered to give the app any TLC.
At this point I can only guess that it's an explicit decision by Facebook not to support iPad — that is, they have some reason for wanting their user base to preference their interactions with the app using their phones
I think it gets a particularly bad rap among software developers because in a lot of areas you can do actual work on an iPad, but programming is an area where it’s still absolute shit with no signs of ever changing.
It’s possible to do SwiftUI development on device now, but god forbid you’re doing anything other than that (or even SwiftUI but it’s a real Xcode project already) then the iPad is practicaly useless.
I have that Magic Keyboard and would love to have the option to run real Linux via https://getutm.app/. The iPad is fully capable of this, but it is a pain because you have to jailbreak it. Ugh.
Yeah, they should really unlock the virtualization capabilities. That IMO would make a lot of power users happy. I would love for them to also offer some sort of dual boot option for running macOS on bare metal but that's likely not going to happen.
I'd be happy enough with virtualization, at least then I could make proper use of the hardware.
It's not like this overkill is a new phenomenon, the contrast between how powerful iPads are and how few applications they actually have for all that power has been there since they started putting M-series chips in them three years ago.
They’ve always been overkill for what most do with them. Lots of folks with iPad pros just want the really big screen and would otherwise be ok with midrange iPad power, but you can only get it with supercomputer internals.
I write that as an iPad Pro owner who really loves the device.
I just recently upgraded my 6 year old iPad Pro to the new M4 version. I use this as my 3rd device, mostly reading and browsing before bed, but also for some other things less regularly.
I agree its complete overkill, but I like it because of that, its is completely instant in everything it does, reading books, browsing etc. A noticeable improvement over the older one even though the older was completely usable.
its also lighter and thinner and the screen is amazing, and the battery is also completely overkill for my use case, I can leave it for days and I have already set it to 80% charge cap to extend its life.
I like overkill in this case, its makes it a transparent device that completely gets out of the way.
Thats all I need, I have my MacBook Pro for daily work with dual monitors and mouse keyboard etc.
I think the iPad fills a somewhat small gap very well, I would like to see it do more, but am happy with it as is as well. I also like its longevity, this is my 3rd iPad, the original, the 2nd gen pro and now the M4, 6-7 years between each with OS support for the whole time and the massive batteries last as well, and transparent backup restore with each carrying forward my settings. Almost as good as a Subaru.
I just bought this, and downsized to the 11" screen. It's ridiculously light and small, small enough I don't mind putting the keyboard on it.
I haven't pulled any LLMs onto it, and got the 8gb RAM version, so it's not going to be a great local inference device, but it is ultra, ultra fast and smooth for games, notes, reading, browsing, video - overkill, really. I really like it, enough that I might leave the remarkable 2 out of my bag for the next trip.
My personal experience with the iPad Air + keyboard is the same plus it weights more or similar than the MacBooc Air! The keyboard is really bulky. When I travel I use the device as a second monitor though...
All this power and you still can't run a terminal app in the background. iPad is a powerful computer crippled by a phone OS that doesn't let you do what most computers were capable of doing even 30 years ago.
I am told if you use Stage Manager and you have the terminal app in the same stage as, say, your browser app or editor, it is not "in the background" as a process, even when it's occluded.
Though it seems to me that as soon as a window is taken full screen, it's on a new stage. So you have to use them windowed?
Or in Split View, which grants the same "both in the foreground" privileges.
Which is as bizarre and arbirary as much of the rest of iPadOS. Which as you suggest, needs to stop feeling so much like a 1980s co-operative multitasking system.
(Edit to add: I suppose it is not _ridiculous_ that multitasking is in some ways tied to visual presence: apps don't need to be quit, and that which is not on the screen is not running full time. Even if it does make it very difficult to use one for work. It's quite an iOS-ish thing, to make the relationship between what you can see and what is happening more concrete. The camera works this way after all.)
I don't know. Termius doesn't do that does it? (Background App Refresh I mean)
The workaround Termius apparently uses is absurd (and rather amusing): it adds location tracking it doesn't really need. Because apps that have location tracking enabled don't lose their connections:
The "location tracking" thing is so absurd. Apps use the location tracking permission to stay active in the background. App Review says "why do you have this permission? you need to actually have a user-facing feature that justifies tracking the location to get it" so apps just add a pointless "my location history" feature that is not actually needed just to make App Review happy.
At that point, just allow background refresh! Everyone is just working around the rule anyway, why does it even exist?
Apple have full control over process scheduling so there is absolutely no reason that it should compromise the experience at all. They could notify the app it's about to go into the background so that resource-intensive tasks can be paused, then severely limit CPU shares to preserve battery life and then notify it again when it's about to hit the foreground. That would be enough just to keep application state in memory or socket connections alive.
No, you actually can't. iOS and iPad OS can run 'up to 30s in the background', and it is typical for an app to be terminated instantly once a user opens a home screen or another app.
(we develop apps for iOS that need bg functionality)
I dealt with this by switching to mosh which made sense anyways since, when I did use an iPad + terminal a lot, I was traveling a lot and consequently changing networks regularly. Conveniently, this also survives rebooting the device and OS upgrades (minor only? I think it survived the last major OS update as well).
I think it’d be nice if the user could go into settings and opt apps into running in the background indefinitely (on iPhones too), but given how common it is for random junk to be sitting in the background sucking up CPU doing a lot of nothing on desktop OSes I don’t think that it should be something that apps can do out of the box, or even request permission for since too many users would absentmindedly grant permission to a bunch of apps and then wonder why their iPad only lasts 1h30m before running out of juice.
Add a second tray/location showing the still-running background applications (as opposed to the paused/killed ones that you can still switch to). Then the user can quickly see what's taking up resources and pause or kill it themselves, optionally moving applications between the unkillable and killable locations.
No need to dive into per-app settings except maybe to determine the default behavior. You can do this dynamically based on which applications are running that you'd like to keep running (or not).
They could even justifiably restrict this capability to the M-series iPads given the substantial performance improvements (including efficiency cores) compared to the older A-series iPads if they wanted to create motivation to upgrade.
This article really got into some specific complaints of the software. No advanced background processes, poor windowing, no permission to use JIT in apps, a better file browser, better audio/video streams handling...
I'm really surprised the iPad Pro isn't the thing people want: a tablet-computer.
Honestly, this is the perfect tool for both many people in tech as well as the average person. I have a macbook air, why not a pro? Because I need a glorified ssh machine that can do word processing, I can carry around light weight, has long battery life, and I can do some basic coding on. Everything else is done upstream on a compute platform. For the average person, they're doing the same non-compute tasks as me: browsing the internet and some word processing or slide making.
So why don't I have a device that I can basically run MacOS on and have a detachable keyboard (yes, I know these are sold). Apple should be able to corner this market, but they continually seem to fall flat on their face. Why did it take so long for the fucking iPad to have a natively supported app to markup PDFs. And why is it still terrible? Isn't that one of the most common use cases? I swear, tablet makers don't seem to actually understand how people use tablets nor laptops and it is really hindering their ability to innovate.
The iPad's greatest weakness is that its developers are trying to stuff a phone into a computer while being neither.
> I'm really surprised the iPad Pro isn't the thing people want: a tablet-computer.
Because people also want a faster horse, not a car.
The iPad has been developing its own identity and language as a product category. Yes, it takes a while to iterate on the features. But Apple clearly sees the iPad as a chance to develop a language for how to interact with a tabula rasa. The easy thing would be to just slap a desktop OS on it. How do we get any better as a species if we do that? The iPad does need something, yes. It does not need a desktop OS.
> How do we get any better as a species if we do that?
By providing people what they want and incentivizing businesses to create something superior to it so that the demand for the prior solution goes away?
If the new solution isn't competitive with the old one then we arguably aren't improving as a species anyways.
At least the way Apple treats it, mobile operating systems are where user capabilities go to die.
You know all the professional software, on your desktop? Avid Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Adobe Premiere, Blender, that stuff? It doesn't run on iPad; not just because the developers are stingy and don't want to make a native version, but because the iPad is fundamentally limited in what it's software can provide relative to Mac. On top of that, you cannot distribute software yourself which relegates you exclusively to using Apple's provided runtime and storefront. It's an insular system that prevents new and exciting features or experiences from getting made without Apple's express approval and profit.
Or look at games. The iPad should be giving the Steam Deck a run for it's money; you've got a great GPU, strong single-core CPU performance and a big punchy display up front. Instead of playing Fallout: New Vegas (like any respectable person should be able to do in 2024), you're replaying Monument Valley and Angry Birds HD for the billionth time. Or maybe you just get frustrated trying to set up Delta or UTM and go watch House of Cards in resigned frustration.
The Mac is headed the same way, but at least there's a core audience of vocal whistleblowers pushing back against pointless software limitations. Apple is desperate to crush any methods of content creation or consumption that does not directly benefit them. To that end they have avoided adding professional features to their mobile devices to reinforce the content consumption loop and artificially inflate demand for the Mac.
I agree that a lot of this is true while disagreeing that it renders mobile a consumption platform. It’s outstanding for many productive tasks that “real” computers are either much worse at or no good for at all. Being in a tiny long-battery-life package with tons of sensors and radios opens up a lot of possibilities, many of which are in fact realized by the platform, even if it’s not a very good platform for writing custom programs on the same device. It’s especially great when you need the real world and computing to interact, “in the field” as it were.
I’d further agree that mobile’s used for far more consumption (or, presenting [multi-]media) than PCs! But I think that has more to do with PCs being a lot worse at those tasks than mobile devices (generally speaking), than mobile only being good for that.
I think there’s only a little overlap between the productive tasks real computers are helpful for, and what mobile’s good for, and that mobile also happens to be better for presenting media in most cases.
> The Mac is headed the same way
I’ve been reading this stated as fact since like 2012 (I became a Mac user—in addition to Linux and Windows, which I still use for some things, especially Linux, in 2010 or 2011). I’ve seen no sign of it.
> To that end they have avoided adding professional features to their mobile devices to reinforce the content consumption loop and artificially inflate demand for the Mac.
I do believe that’s some of it, but I also think a lot of the features certain types of professional want them to add are absent for the good reason that few people want them and they’d likely harm ux or security. Not all such features! But probably some.
> Instead of playing Fallout: New Vegas (like any respectable person should be able to do in 2024)
Well that’s just true, yes.
> Or maybe you just get frustrated trying to set up Delta
It’s one of the easiest emulators-with-game-library I’ve ever set up :-)
At least they do allow emulators now. Emulating a whole Nintendo DS is lighter on battery and faster to resume than nearly all the native iOS games in the App Store, which is just an absurd situation. Better overall game library, too.
Well we may have to agree to disagree. I abandoned Apple's ecosystem (Mac included) because the axe fell and my apps broke. First it was the OpenGL depreciations, which were annoying but manageable. Then 32-bit libraries quit loading and more than half of the Mac apps I paid for stopped working. Apple's advice to me was to pester the developers, and the developer's advice to me was to pound sand.
> It’s especially great when you need the real world and computing to interact, “in the field” as it were.
I agree in a certain respect. Parallel to this statement though, I also see another two things as true:
- Anything an iPad can do, a Mac can do better.
- Many things a Mac can do, an iPad can't at all.
Adding software functionality to the iPad would not detract from the few areas it excels in today. It is absolutely and entirely undeniable that the iPad's software capabilities pale in comparison to what the hardware can do. Apple has no reason not to give people what they want; except for the fact that it might stop people from buying Macs. Therefore they create an artificial (and entirely unnecessary) segmentation scheme that drives more people away than it attracts.
The apologism for Apple's blatantly anti-consumer practice is baffling. Do we just... pretend like Apple doesn't break things on a constant basis for the express purpose of pushing proprietary shitware? Should we smile and pretend like nobody misses OpenGL or wants Vulkan support? They're the largest company in the world by now, I should hope they've learned how to share their damn toys.
You know all the professional software, on your desktop?
My daughter has access to a computer with many of those programs if she wants to use them. I've showed them to her and what you can do with them, and offered to help her learn if she wants. She still does all her video, graphics and image editing on her phone or an iPad, because she genuinely prefers it. In her mind the only purpose of a desktop computer is gaming.
If they made a Mini Pro, I'd be lining up for one. I want a sleek, high end 8" or less tablet that is top tier. I guess the last one that matched that spec was the Nvidia Shield, and sadly nobody else made one as insanely brilliant as that tablet.
because the form factor of a laptop is better for typing. detachable key boards are awkward to carry and set up.
also lots of computer tasks require very precise clicks that mice do better with. touchscreens really need another interface and the keyboard only solves some of the issues. a solution here is to carry a stylus..
but if you’re walking around with a ipad, a key board, and a stylus, the laptop is simpler
> because the form factor of a laptop is better for typing. detachable key boards are awkward to carry and set up.
I think you miss the setup. The keyboard is for being on the go. If I'm at a desk, I'm using my mechanical keyboard, not my shitty laptop one. Yeah, macs are better than most, but a laptop keyboard is still a laptop keyboard.
They should just unlock the iPad's virtualization capabilities. That would let power users run a desktop OS without them really needing to support it.
Also I don't particularly care how any of the touch stuff works in a hypothetical desktop mode as long as I can hook it up to external display with KB+mouse.
It is not yet a glofiried ssh machine, so that is an 80% no when it comes to work hardware for me. But give me a docking station with my homemade keyboard, fancy monitor, mike, and headphones, and let me use the GNU toolchain locally to get a decent terminal and Emacs and I would be a happy camper. The macbooks managed to hit those points, but the iPad feels totally disconnected from this type of glorified terminal mentality… unfortunately.
I'm saying that my macbook air is a glorified ssh machine and word processing machine.
But clearly it would be better to walk around with a tablet (with detachable keyboard) as a glorified ssh and word processing/slide making machine than a macbook.
I want to be able to do some minimal work, walk around with my device and pull up slides (that I can fucking markup with my pencil -- not a glorified pointer), pull up docs, and etc because even though I'm mostly living in the cli I still have to show and communicate my work with others.
> "Why did it take so long for the fucking iPad to have a natively supported app to markup PDFs. And why is it still terrible? Isn't that one of the most common use cases? I swear, tablet makers don't seem to actually understand how people use tablets"
Because this is how Apple nudges/forces people to spend money on a 3th-party app for a $xx/month subscription (of which even Apple gets 30%), obviously...
Now that M4 has outshone tomorrow's Qualcomm SDXE (Nuvia/Oryon) Computex launch on performance, we must wait for WWDC/iOS18 to find out if Apple wants to compete with Microsoft/Lenovo/HP/Dell Arm devices on software flexibility, since SDXE devices will run both Windows and Linux (EL2).
> [SDXE] processors are cheaper and less energy-hungry than all of Intel's recent chips, including Meteor Lake. So much so, that in some cases, battery life in equivalent laptops is extended by as much as 98%. And all that's done with chips that are half the price ... While I'm ambivalent about 2024 being the year of the AI PC, I'm becoming increasingly sold on it being the year of the Arm PC. With MediaTek and Nvidia rumoured to be joining the party, it's clear that I'm not the only one.
If Apple lacks the imagination or creative leadership to square the circle of iPad pro-fessional use cases, starting with a Terminal (which could be an iOS CLI in an isolated VM), perhaps they can open up the iPad to boot Asahi Linux, to compete with SDXE devices that will run both Windows and Linux.
You don't have to wait for WWDS/iOS18 to find out if Apple wants to compete on software flexibility - the answer is NO, not now, not ever. If anything software flexibility for all other systems is being decreased to match Apple so why would Apple do anything about it except maybe make their software even more inflexible.
Qualcomm, which is not exactly known for being OSS friendly, has contracted Linaro to upstream Linux support for the upcoming Oryon-based "AI PC" devices from Dell, Microsoft, etc. If Apple rushed M4 into the May 2024 iPad Pro to take the wind out of Oryon sails at Computex on May 20th, then despite all talk to the contrary, they do care about ex-Apple competition from Arm-based hardware devices.
Dell XPS was one of the first mainstream x86 laptop vendors to support Linux developers and they will ship Oryon-based devices in a few months, https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157120/dell-windows-on-.... Was the 300-page roadmap leak a response to M4?
The current head of Apple hardware engineering is on the shortlist for next Apple CEO. Notably absent from the list of CEO candidates is anyone related to "Services". Despite their vertically integrated software and app stores, Apple went out of their way to allow Linux to work on Apple Silicon. Why? Sometimes escape valves can enable more control. If Apple software continues to decrease in flexibility, they can open up their hardware to Linux, for those who want best of breed hardware and nothing else.
iPad Pro is one of the most flexible hardware devices on the market, offering a range of options across touch, stylus, wired/wireless keyboards, cellular (from Qualcomm), lidar, docking, display, storage and hardware-based virtualization. If iPad Pro is not unshackled from arbitrary software restrictions left over from VR vision quests, it will inspire an arm-y of alternatives.
I get this is a common complaint about the platform, but after nearly 12 years owning and using iPads not once have I needed a calculator app on the device, nor wanted one.
This is just an absurd example, probably better to point out lousy file management, lousy window management, missing apps, and no multi user capability
I’ll agree file management and windows management is wonky, but both were afterthoughts to the platform and not what it was designed to be. Those things were basically supposed to be behind the scenes and not front and center to the user. Not sure what apps might be missing, because I can’t think of one I would want but can’t get on my iPad. As a personal device, like a phone or say a personal journal, I am not sure that a lack of multiuser is really a negative. Frankly, I don’t want to share my iPad.
Too many people especially here on HN seem to think it’s the same kind of device as a desktop or PC but it’s really not. It was designed from the get go to be a content consumer/PDA, but I think people see the power to portability ratio and desire their PCs to have that.
I am a fan because for what the iPad does…it does it better than any other tablet out there.
The only one of those you could make a reasonable case for from a general consumer perspective (not the general HN SWE consumer perspective) is maybe Journal. Which in of itself is simply too new an offering from apple to make it a must have app. Besides, if you really needed a journaling app, the app store is filthy with options.
They should turn the M4 into the ultimate terminal and use the high speed to seamlessly control any number of back end computers doing the heat-intensive processing.
iPadOS needs to be replaced by MacOS, and then this will be of some use: like a MacBook air 11, the best computer Apple has made (hands down). Simple, fast, relatively cheap but capable of everything.
I'm very on the fence with it. I have the new M4 13 and want to love it. The screen is incredible. hover effects with the pencil and the haptic squeeze all are very nice touches. It's very impressive that you can run logic pro on it.
But I'm simultaneously very disappointed. I started up logic pro, put in a chord progression on their new chord track and created 4 session AI players to make a little band going. I used their default instrument and fx plugins that came with each session players style, and the only tweak I made was to turn on side-chain compression off the AI drummer track i created. letting this loop on a 8 bar pattern for a little bit quickly maxes out the cpu and the ipad gets hot as hell until the logic alerts that it's doing too much and refuses to run unless i either freeze tracks manually or let it do so. 4 tracks thats ridiculously low.
So I tried running Github code-spaces in-browser for a bit to see how that experience is, and while it was nice at first, I could see a next.js app running in a preview and run shell commands etc. However many many times the layout got messed up by scroll position of the browser, which is pretty locked down in the GH CS layout to begin with, so its tricky to resolve it without randomly scrolling in different places/panes hoping it fixes itself. My muscle memory for cmd-w to close editor panes backfires because its (obivously) in a web browser. I was lucky because I made it a pinned-tab in safari so it didn't really close. But when you actually close the tab and try to re-open it GH CS can get in a weird state where it doesn't seem to boot or connect to the backing instance node.
All-in-all it still feels like just a toy. Even the prosumer use cases like Logic Pro, that Apple officially supports, seems like it doesn't really work the way I'd expect it to.
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