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To me, the shift to USB-C signifies a fundamental change in how Apple is approaching the iPad and computing going forward. Those stupid "what's a computer" ads

To me, the shift to USB-C signifies a fundamental change in how Apple is approaching the iPad and computing going forward. Those stupid "what's a computer" ads make a little more sense. With USB-C, developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals we all bought for our laptops/desktops will now begin to work with iOS too. This feature alone grows iOS into a much more powerful OS. By this logic, it's pretty clear Apple is killing macOS x86 dependency (and macOS itself) in two ways. 1. Shifting compute intensive workloads to A level chips. This started with the small stuff around "security" and ApplePay but today the video encode/decode functionality in the T2 is a huge leap. This will extend into graphics next year (thank god cause fuck Intel's integrated graphics) with APIs like Metal and going forward almost anything I/O, Display, and every function outside of the CPU. #2 strategy is the iPad - by offering a compelling device that has all the features and capability of laptops without 2 decades of baggage. We've all been so worried of the convergence of iOS and macOS, but after today I don't see a macOS future. Sure it will move to Apple's ARM chips, it will last another decade, but the shovel is out of the shed, it's called the T2. (Jailbreakers, we need you)

michaelmrose 8y ago
Jailbreaking will never be mainstream when people worry about the warranty on their 1k-2k+ devices. If you want people to own their own devices you will have to write it into law presumably in a more consumer friendly jurisdiction than the US which cares about business first last and only.
- selectodude 8y ago
  Jailbreaking has never violated the warranty. Apple just doesn’t support it so they won’t service your device until you update it to the latest software, which is completely reasonable.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I.e. violates half of your warranty, because any but the most obviously mechanical problem can be blamed on messing with software.
    - selectodude 8y ago
      And as far as I’ve seen when it comes to jailbreaks, anything but the most obviously mechanical problem is caused by the jailbreak.
    - jedieaston 8y ago
      But the first thing they'd do even if you didn't jailbreak would be to restore your device and pull a backup from iCloud. If you want to keep your jailbreak, then they can't help you, because who knows if the latest version of iOS included a patch for your problem, a tweak you installed borked the phone, or if Apple borked it?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    It's completely reasonable that upgrading your phone and maintaining administrator access shouldn't be a challenge.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Further, there’s no theorem that jailbreaking will always be possible. I get the impression it’s becoming harder over time.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  I'm aware the jailbreak community often felt Apple was targeting them specifically, and perhaps they were, but every jailbreak was also exposing a security flaw. Personally, I've never been worried about jailbreaking voiding my warranty -- I just never got sufficient value from it to make it worth the drawbacks. (Both value and drawbacks are subjective measures, obviously.) While I understand the "you must own your own device" line, that's more of a rallying cry than a useful description. (I have a similar pedantic complaint with "if you're not the customer, you're the product," for what it's worth.) It's interesting to think about a regulatory framework that mandates companies build software-driven devices with the ability for end users to do their own software loads, but figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't let companies wiggle out of it and doesn't essentially mandate insecure back doors in all "smart" consumer electronic devices seems to me to be a non-trivial problem.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Letting the user control the device inevitably means letting the user hurt themselves that is inevitable and impossible to fix. The least intrusive method is too allow users to add additional software sources and either opt out of sandboxing wholly or totally for select vetted apps. This isnt hard it would just hurt Apples ability to get a 30% cut as third party stores would spring up. User owned personal computing devices have been a thing for decades can we not pretend this is uncharted territory?
    - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
      The comment of yours that I replied to explicitly mentioned jailbreaking, which is not the same thing as "additional software sources." I'd like to see Apple allow users to install signed apps from places other than the App Store, and I suspect that protecting revenue is the main reason they don't. But I'm not particularly interested in jailbreaking, even though I'd like to see functionality that iOS doesn't currently allow.
      - lstroud 8y ago
        Well technically you can do that. Download code, build in Xcode, and install to your device. Probably not what you meant, but it does enable some side loading.
i_phish_cats 8y ago
....
- timcederman 8y ago
  The keyboards themselves didn't have the V, it was the extension cord, and it was because it was out of USB spec. If you push hard enough, any old USB port went in just fine.
- garblegarble 8y ago
  >Apparently you're not old enough to remember those apple "USB" keyboard plugs with the little v-shaped indentations so you couldn't plug in non-apple approved devices. Wasn't that because of the extender cable? As I recall extenders couldn't be USB compliant, so apple made a notch in the extender so that it wasn't technically a separate USB accessory from the keyboard?
- ken 8y ago
  Do you mean the extension cable that came with the original Apple USB keyboard? It was only for the extension cable -- which are prohibited by the USB spec, so it was technically a "captive" extension. (The USB specs define captive as having a non-standard-USB plug, even if it's not physically captive.) Blame the USB spec, not Apple. They're actually the only company I've ever seen make an extension cable that meets the letter of the spec.
basch 8y ago
A shift from lightning to usb c is apple losing because they didnt donate their port to the spec. They could have "invented" usb c. I understand why they didnt, but I still prefer lightning to usbc. They are doing this before the EU makes them do it. What apple did do was force the market to adapt to a plug that can go in both directions. And they thinned out the plug quite nicely, it never needed to be so thick.
- playpause 8y ago
  Why do you prefer Lightning to USB-C? Just curious.
  - spurcell93 8y ago
    I prefer it because it feels way better. The snap, and the way the plug feels secure in the socket.... I had a nexus 6p for a year and the plug was so damn unreliable and wiggly. Bought multiple different types but they were all bad. That said, I haven't used any Apple devices with USBC and I would not be surprised if they felt much better.
    - elcomet 8y ago
      For usb-c, this depends hugely. I've had phones were the plug felt very weak in the socket, and devices with a very satisfying snap and a very strong connection. This is to say that usb-c is not inherently bad, it depends a lot on the hardware (and I'm sure Apple will get it right)
      - akvadrako 8y ago
        They didn't on the MBP - some of my dongles and cables even with high end equipment lose connections easily.
    - ohitsdom 8y ago
      I have an iPhone and a MacBook with USB-C ports, and my experience has been the exact opposite. The lightning port on my iPhone is really weak, all cords can way too easily lose a connection so my music stops or it stops charging. The USB-C on my laptop snaps in really nicely, I'm never worried about the cable not being fully connected.
jrs95 8y ago
Seems like it'll be really difficult for them to ever make the iPad suitable for software development while also preventing users from installing software except through the app store. But if they ever figure that out I'll probably replace my laptop with an iPad.
- akulbe 8y ago
  I wish they'd make the iPad more development-friendly. I don't know exactly what that looks like… but if they did that, I'd use it as a daily driver in a heartbeat. So so so done with Apple laptops, though. It seems like the butterfly keyboards are here to stay, and they're just plain awful.
mihaela 8y ago
I would read your articles. Do you blog somewhere? Link, please.
kanishkdudeja 8y ago
I hope iOS 13 will have mouse support for the iPad Pro. Only being able to touch the screen while using the iPad Pro in laptop mode feels really limiting.
- pier25 8y ago
  It's not only the fact that a finger is so much less precise than a cursor, but also that UIs made for fat fingers take up a lot of space. Buttons are bigger, when dragging you need to know what's going on under your finger, etc. I also think that the lack of a desktop UI and a mouse is a huge limiting factor of the iPad Pro.
  - mcculley 8y ago
    Also, sometimes you are using a UI not designed for touch (e.g., remote desktop).
    - scarface74 8y ago
      At least AWS has solved that problem. The iPad Workspace client supports a Bluetooth mouse. I wish it were supported system wide. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/userguide/amazon-workspaces-ipad-client.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/userguide/amaz...
- gumby 8y ago
  You can do mouselike pointer selection via the on-screen keyboard: a force press on iOS devices that support it, else two fingers together: your keyboard is now a mouse pad. I"m not much of a mouse user so this is adequate for me.
  - gumby 8y ago
    I don't know why this factual comment would be voted down. It is functionality built into the OS to produce mouse cursor motion. Not like my life depends on a karma point; this is simply puzzling.
drb91 8y ago
The biggest pain for me of lack of access to the underlying OS has turned out not to be any of my thousands of tiny gripes with the way the software works that I can't change (e.g. setting dns on the cell connection), but the lack of transparency and ability to debug basic processes. What is the computer doing now? Why is it hanging? Why did that app crash? Why is my network failing? Who is that app talking to? My main fear is not, in the end, that I won't control or own my device (though I do feel this), but that it will turn computing from a transparent network of understandable processes—which I find beautiful, and which drew me deep into programming—into a Kafkaesque nightmare of inexplicably bad software and automated computer support, not just from apple, but from all the apps in the market they created. I am absolutely sure that they will port XCode to the iPad itself and allow visibility into my own apps. This is not the same as a workstation. EDIT: in retrospect, this is only tangentially related to parent post—my apologies. Also: wording, punctuation.
- SiVal 8y ago
  The reason Apple cares so much more about iOS than MacOS is vastly increased control. With iOS, they control the hardware from the chips up, the OS, which apps you can run, and via Safari-only access to the internet, even what you can and can't do using external services. It makes computing & communications an Apple theme park, where you can't bring anything forbidden into the park, have to buy everything you need from Apple concessionaires, and can't do anything that they haven't planned for you to do. The people in the "park" pay to enter and then become a new type of domesticated herd to be milked. You can't allow people to bring heavy equipment and power tools into a theme park, but you also can't build the park's controlled features without them, so how do you give power to authorized builders while keeping it away from users? In a physical theme park, they have controlled users during the day and empowered builders at night. But in Appleworld, I'm thinking they'll keep iOS locked down by limiting the building tools to MacOS. A unix-style workstation that gives maximum power to its users is so antithetical to everything Apple stands for that MacOS would never be created today, but since it already exists, they can take advantage of it to make iOS even more locked down than it would have been. (And refuse to let any other company use MacOS and not port Xcode anywhere else.) You want to see what your computer is doing (file sys, CPU procs, memory, network, etc.)? Do it with a Mac. iOS is not YOUR computer. It's Apple's. You only paid for admission to iOS, and you aren't allowed behind the locked doors. If you want control, you're in the wrong place. I'm afraid that if they ever figure out how to sandbox an iOS partition of some sort to allow builder tools to run on iOS itself in a totally controlled way, then the Mac is toast, but the Mac gives them time. I think that for the foreseeable future, they won't risk any accidental empowerment of iOS users and will limit the power tools to the Mac.
matt4077 8y ago
When you're starting from a change in plugs and end up predicting shifts in CPU architecture ten years down the road, there's a pretty high chance it's just fitting noise into your pre-existing narrative. FWIW: the death of the Mac has been predicted constantly since at least the original iPhone came out. If it takes another decade to happen, at least we can lay these accusations to rest that publicly traded companies are forced into short-termism.
pkulak 8y ago
Still, it's funny to see Google beat Apple to the punch here and make ChromeOS a valid dev machine for most people before Apple. USB-C doesn't let me run Docker, VSCode or IntelliJ. I'd love to bring an iPad pro for the weekend when I'm on call, but it's still not anywhere near.
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  "for most people" -> "for most javascript devs" ? totally ridiculous dev machine for scientific or financial computing, no?
  - coder543 8y ago
    Anything you can run on Linux, you can run on a Chromebook, without even having to do anything hacky these days, as I understand it. So, nothing to do with JavaScript specifically.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      I think it was a reference to the capability of the hardware.
      - dagw 8y ago
        I do a lot of scientific computing and data analysis development work and most of the time during my dev cycle I'm working on tiny test data sets developing and testing new approaches to certain problems. Most of that work could absolutely be done on something with the capability of the new iPad pro. In fact I do a fair bit of development on a mid-range surface pro 4 which has pretty similar specs as the new iPad pro.
  - askvictor 8y ago
    there's plenty of non-JS dev work that isn't scientific or financial. Since ChromeOS now runs Linux apps, any dev is feasible; arguments about machine specs are about the hardware, not the OS.
crazygringo 8y ago
I don't get what macOS vs iOS has to do with processor architectures or the T2. Why don't you see a macOS future? It can use the T2 just as well as iOS, no?
davmar 8y ago
i disagree in that i do see a future for macOS. steve jobs said it best - sometimes you drive a convertible, sometimes a pickup truck. macOS may be the pickup truck. but it isn't going to go away without a fight. not unless you can make software engineering work on an iPad the same way it does on macOS today.
bsimpson 8y ago
It's kind of amazing how much the lack of a real Chrome (not just a wrapper around WKWebView) prevents me from caring about this. I suspect the drawing experience on here is better than with a ChromeOS device, but I care more about my web browsing/creation experience than I do about sketching.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  What is it about Chrome's renderer that specifically appeals to you? I agree it's somewhat ridiculous that you can't get (real) third party web browsers, but Apple's is so damn good that I don't consider it a real problem.
mr_toad 8y ago
None of what I use a Mac for is available or practical on iOS. Atom, Git, bash, ssh, llvm, Python, R, PostreSQL, CouchDB, Docker, nginx, Node.js, homebrew, curl, wget, ffmpeg... I’m typing this on an iPad now. I mainly use it for web surfing, Netflix, email and casual gaming.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  All of that can be done in a remote VM. I use Coda + Shelly on an iPad pro and it's a pretty decent development experience. The real barrier is for (non-web) GUI development.
  - alexktz 8y ago
    Remote VM is an interesting idea, what about mouse support?
    - setr 8y ago
      out of that entire list, the only thing that called for a mouse was atom maybe we're returning to the age of terminal-only development ;) but with vector font rendering!
      - pmontra 8y ago
        Actually there were terminals with vector fonts in the '60s https://www.cca.org/vector/ https://www.cca.org/vector/
    - mensetmanusman 8y ago
      You can use swiftpoint on the jump desktop app (that is my setup), it’s highly portable. Don’t get the apple ipad keyboard though, no escape key...
  - avcdsuia 8y ago
    What's the point of having an A12X chip while running everything remotely?
Steltek 8y ago
> developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals... What are you talking about? Apple won't allow developers to do any such thing. They only recently allowed a narrow range of NFC uses even though the hardware itself has been there forever. You think they're going to let people develop your own kernel drivers? Maybe with a $10,000 "hardware developer" account.
clhodapp 8y ago
The simpler explanation is that Apple simply wants to move to USB C because they see benefit in being on the "standard" mobile device port now that it does not have marked drawbacks vs their proprietary solution and can used for their entire line of mobile devices, including laptops

michaelmrose 8y ago

Jailbreaking will never be mainstream when people worry about the warranty on their 1k-2k+ devices. If you want people to own their own devices you will have to write it into law presumably in a more consumer friendly jurisdiction than the US which cares about business first last and only.

selectodude 8y ago
Jailbreaking has never violated the warranty. Apple just doesn’t support it so they won’t service your device until you update it to the latest software, which is completely reasonable.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I.e. violates half of your warranty, because any but the most obviously mechanical problem can be blamed on messing with software.
  - selectodude 8y ago
    And as far as I’ve seen when it comes to jailbreaks, anything but the most obviously mechanical problem is caused by the jailbreak.
  - jedieaston 8y ago
    But the first thing they'd do even if you didn't jailbreak would be to restore your device and pull a backup from iCloud. If you want to keep your jailbreak, then they can't help you, because who knows if the latest version of iOS included a patch for your problem, a tweak you installed borked the phone, or if Apple borked it?
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  It's completely reasonable that upgrading your phone and maintaining administrator access shouldn't be a challenge.
abecedarius 8y ago
Further, there’s no theorem that jailbreaking will always be possible. I get the impression it’s becoming harder over time.
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
I'm aware the jailbreak community often felt Apple was targeting them specifically, and perhaps they were, but every jailbreak was also exposing a security flaw. Personally, I've never been worried about jailbreaking voiding my warranty -- I just never got sufficient value from it to make it worth the drawbacks. (Both value and drawbacks are subjective measures, obviously.) While I understand the "you must own your own device" line, that's more of a rallying cry than a useful description. (I have a similar pedantic complaint with "if you're not the customer, you're the product," for what it's worth.) It's interesting to think about a regulatory framework that mandates companies build software-driven devices with the ability for end users to do their own software loads, but figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't let companies wiggle out of it and doesn't essentially mandate insecure back doors in all "smart" consumer electronic devices seems to me to be a non-trivial problem.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Letting the user control the device inevitably means letting the user hurt themselves that is inevitable and impossible to fix. The least intrusive method is too allow users to add additional software sources and either opt out of sandboxing wholly or totally for select vetted apps. This isnt hard it would just hurt Apples ability to get a 30% cut as third party stores would spring up. User owned personal computing devices have been a thing for decades can we not pretend this is uncharted territory?
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    The comment of yours that I replied to explicitly mentioned jailbreaking, which is not the same thing as "additional software sources." I'd like to see Apple allow users to install signed apps from places other than the App Store, and I suspect that protecting revenue is the main reason they don't. But I'm not particularly interested in jailbreaking, even though I'd like to see functionality that iOS doesn't currently allow.
    - lstroud 8y ago
      Well technically you can do that. Download code, build in Xcode, and install to your device. Probably not what you meant, but it does enable some side loading.

i_phish_cats 8y ago

....

timcederman 8y ago
The keyboards themselves didn't have the V, it was the extension cord, and it was because it was out of USB spec. If you push hard enough, any old USB port went in just fine.
garblegarble 8y ago
>Apparently you're not old enough to remember those apple "USB" keyboard plugs with the little v-shaped indentations so you couldn't plug in non-apple approved devices. Wasn't that because of the extender cable? As I recall extenders couldn't be USB compliant, so apple made a notch in the extender so that it wasn't technically a separate USB accessory from the keyboard?
ken 8y ago
Do you mean the extension cable that came with the original Apple USB keyboard? It was only for the extension cable -- which are prohibited by the USB spec, so it was technically a "captive" extension. (The USB specs define captive as having a non-standard-USB plug, even if it's not physically captive.) Blame the USB spec, not Apple. They're actually the only company I've ever seen make an extension cable that meets the letter of the spec.

basch 8y ago

A shift from lightning to usb c is apple losing because they didnt donate their port to the spec. They could have "invented" usb c. I understand why they didnt, but I still prefer lightning to usbc. They are doing this before the EU makes them do it. What apple did do was force the market to adapt to a plug that can go in both directions. And they thinned out the plug quite nicely, it never needed to be so thick.

playpause 8y ago
Why do you prefer Lightning to USB-C? Just curious.
- spurcell93 8y ago
  I prefer it because it feels way better. The snap, and the way the plug feels secure in the socket.... I had a nexus 6p for a year and the plug was so damn unreliable and wiggly. Bought multiple different types but they were all bad. That said, I haven't used any Apple devices with USBC and I would not be surprised if they felt much better.
  - elcomet 8y ago
    For usb-c, this depends hugely. I've had phones were the plug felt very weak in the socket, and devices with a very satisfying snap and a very strong connection. This is to say that usb-c is not inherently bad, it depends a lot on the hardware (and I'm sure Apple will get it right)
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      They didn't on the MBP - some of my dongles and cables even with high end equipment lose connections easily.
  - ohitsdom 8y ago
    I have an iPhone and a MacBook with USB-C ports, and my experience has been the exact opposite. The lightning port on my iPhone is really weak, all cords can way too easily lose a connection so my music stops or it stops charging. The USB-C on my laptop snaps in really nicely, I'm never worried about the cable not being fully connected.

jrs95 8y ago

Seems like it'll be really difficult for them to ever make the iPad suitable for software development while also preventing users from installing software except through the app store. But if they ever figure that out I'll probably replace my laptop with an iPad.

akulbe 8y ago
I wish they'd make the iPad more development-friendly. I don't know exactly what that looks like… but if they did that, I'd use it as a daily driver in a heartbeat. So so so done with Apple laptops, though. It seems like the butterfly keyboards are here to stay, and they're just plain awful.

mihaela 8y ago

I would read your articles. Do you blog somewhere? Link, please.

kanishkdudeja 8y ago

I hope iOS 13 will have mouse support for the iPad Pro. Only being able to touch the screen while using the iPad Pro in laptop mode feels really limiting.

pier25 8y ago
It's not only the fact that a finger is so much less precise than a cursor, but also that UIs made for fat fingers take up a lot of space. Buttons are bigger, when dragging you need to know what's going on under your finger, etc. I also think that the lack of a desktop UI and a mouse is a huge limiting factor of the iPad Pro.
- mcculley 8y ago
  Also, sometimes you are using a UI not designed for touch (e.g., remote desktop).
  - scarface74 8y ago
    At least AWS has solved that problem. The iPad Workspace client supports a Bluetooth mouse. I wish it were supported system wide. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/userguide/amazon-workspaces-ipad-client.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/userguide/amaz...
gumby 8y ago
You can do mouselike pointer selection via the on-screen keyboard: a force press on iOS devices that support it, else two fingers together: your keyboard is now a mouse pad. I"m not much of a mouse user so this is adequate for me.
- gumby 8y ago
  I don't know why this factual comment would be voted down. It is functionality built into the OS to produce mouse cursor motion. Not like my life depends on a karma point; this is simply puzzling.

drb91 8y ago

The biggest pain for me of lack of access to the underlying OS has turned out not to be any of my thousands of tiny gripes with the way the software works that I can't change (e.g. setting dns on the cell connection), but the lack of transparency and ability to debug basic processes. What is the computer doing now? Why is it hanging? Why did that app crash? Why is my network failing? Who is that app talking to? My main fear is not, in the end, that I won't control or own my device (though I do feel this), but that it will turn computing from a transparent network of understandable processes—which I find beautiful, and which drew me deep into programming—into a Kafkaesque nightmare of inexplicably bad software and automated computer support, not just from apple, but from all the apps in the market they created. I am absolutely sure that they will port XCode to the iPad itself and allow visibility into my own apps. This is not the same as a workstation. EDIT: in retrospect, this is only tangentially related to parent post—my apologies. Also: wording, punctuation.

SiVal 8y ago
The reason Apple cares so much more about iOS than MacOS is vastly increased control. With iOS, they control the hardware from the chips up, the OS, which apps you can run, and via Safari-only access to the internet, even what you can and can't do using external services. It makes computing & communications an Apple theme park, where you can't bring anything forbidden into the park, have to buy everything you need from Apple concessionaires, and can't do anything that they haven't planned for you to do. The people in the "park" pay to enter and then become a new type of domesticated herd to be milked. You can't allow people to bring heavy equipment and power tools into a theme park, but you also can't build the park's controlled features without them, so how do you give power to authorized builders while keeping it away from users? In a physical theme park, they have controlled users during the day and empowered builders at night. But in Appleworld, I'm thinking they'll keep iOS locked down by limiting the building tools to MacOS. A unix-style workstation that gives maximum power to its users is so antithetical to everything Apple stands for that MacOS would never be created today, but since it already exists, they can take advantage of it to make iOS even more locked down than it would have been. (And refuse to let any other company use MacOS and not port Xcode anywhere else.) You want to see what your computer is doing (file sys, CPU procs, memory, network, etc.)? Do it with a Mac. iOS is not YOUR computer. It's Apple's. You only paid for admission to iOS, and you aren't allowed behind the locked doors. If you want control, you're in the wrong place. I'm afraid that if they ever figure out how to sandbox an iOS partition of some sort to allow builder tools to run on iOS itself in a totally controlled way, then the Mac is toast, but the Mac gives them time. I think that for the foreseeable future, they won't risk any accidental empowerment of iOS users and will limit the power tools to the Mac.

matt4077 8y ago

When you're starting from a change in plugs and end up predicting shifts in CPU architecture ten years down the road, there's a pretty high chance it's just fitting noise into your pre-existing narrative. FWIW: the death of the Mac has been predicted constantly since at least the original iPhone came out. If it takes another decade to happen, at least we can lay these accusations to rest that publicly traded companies are forced into short-termism.

pkulak 8y ago

Still, it's funny to see Google beat Apple to the punch here and make ChromeOS a valid dev machine for most people before Apple. USB-C doesn't let me run Docker, VSCode or IntelliJ. I'd love to bring an iPad pro for the weekend when I'm on call, but it's still not anywhere near.

jjtheblunt 8y ago
"for most people" -> "for most javascript devs" ? totally ridiculous dev machine for scientific or financial computing, no?
- coder543 8y ago
  Anything you can run on Linux, you can run on a Chromebook, without even having to do anything hacky these days, as I understand it. So, nothing to do with JavaScript specifically.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    I think it was a reference to the capability of the hardware.
    - dagw 8y ago
      I do a lot of scientific computing and data analysis development work and most of the time during my dev cycle I'm working on tiny test data sets developing and testing new approaches to certain problems. Most of that work could absolutely be done on something with the capability of the new iPad pro. In fact I do a fair bit of development on a mid-range surface pro 4 which has pretty similar specs as the new iPad pro.
- askvictor 8y ago
  there's plenty of non-JS dev work that isn't scientific or financial. Since ChromeOS now runs Linux apps, any dev is feasible; arguments about machine specs are about the hardware, not the OS.

crazygringo 8y ago

I don't get what macOS vs iOS has to do with processor architectures or the T2. Why don't you see a macOS future? It can use the T2 just as well as iOS, no?

davmar 8y ago

i disagree in that i do see a future for macOS. steve jobs said it best - sometimes you drive a convertible, sometimes a pickup truck. macOS may be the pickup truck. but it isn't going to go away without a fight. not unless you can make software engineering work on an iPad the same way it does on macOS today.

bsimpson 8y ago

It's kind of amazing how much the lack of a real Chrome (not just a wrapper around WKWebView) prevents me from caring about this. I suspect the drawing experience on here is better than with a ChromeOS device, but I care more about my web browsing/creation experience than I do about sketching.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
What is it about Chrome's renderer that specifically appeals to you? I agree it's somewhat ridiculous that you can't get (real) third party web browsers, but Apple's is so damn good that I don't consider it a real problem.

mr_toad 8y ago

None of what I use a Mac for is available or practical on iOS. Atom, Git, bash, ssh, llvm, Python, R, PostreSQL, CouchDB, Docker, nginx, Node.js, homebrew, curl, wget, ffmpeg... I’m typing this on an iPad now. I mainly use it for web surfing, Netflix, email and casual gaming.

ricardobeat 8y ago
All of that can be done in a remote VM. I use Coda + Shelly on an iPad pro and it's a pretty decent development experience. The real barrier is for (non-web) GUI development.
- alexktz 8y ago
  Remote VM is an interesting idea, what about mouse support?
  - setr 8y ago
    out of that entire list, the only thing that called for a mouse was atom maybe we're returning to the age of terminal-only development ;) but with vector font rendering!
    - pmontra 8y ago
      Actually there were terminals with vector fonts in the '60s https://www.cca.org/vector/ https://www.cca.org/vector/
  - mensetmanusman 8y ago
    You can use swiftpoint on the jump desktop app (that is my setup), it’s highly portable. Don’t get the apple ipad keyboard though, no escape key...
- avcdsuia 8y ago
  What's the point of having an A12X chip while running everything remotely?

Steltek 8y ago

> developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals... What are you talking about? Apple won't allow developers to do any such thing. They only recently allowed a narrow range of NFC uses even though the hardware itself has been there forever. You think they're going to let people develop your own kernel drivers? Maybe with a $10,000 "hardware developer" account.

clhodapp 8y ago

The simpler explanation is that Apple simply wants to move to USB C because they see benefit in being on the "standard" mobile device port now that it does not have marked drawbacks vs their proprietary solution and can used for their entire line of mobile devices, including laptops