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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”
by qubex 7y ago
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.
[EDIT: Spelling error corrected in ‘arrival’.]
- cptskippy 7y agoIt 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.
- djsumdog 7y agoWhich 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.
- xvector 7y ago> 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.
- cptskippy 7y ago> So it’s not completely locked down either. iOS and iPadOS pretty much are.
- filoleg 7y agoThe 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).
- cptskippy 7y agoFor most people, your argument is akin to saying "you too can go into space if you just start your own commercial space company".
- als0 7y agoIt costs you nothing to sideload an app (other than time), but it costs money to make a company. Not a fitting analogy.
- cptskippy 7y agoSideloading 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.
- filoleg 7y agoI 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.
- danShumway 7y ago> 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.
- IAmEveryone 7y agoI 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.
- cptskippy 7y ago> 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".
- enos_feedler 7y agoIt 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.
- jkaptur 7y ago> the risk of multitasking Do you worry about iOS's overaggressive autocorrect? (I'm just kidding, I know people are actually pretty close to as fast and accurate on mobile vs. desktop/laptop: https://userinterfaces.aalto.fi/typing37k/ https://userinterfaces.aalto.fi/typing37k/)
- vlunkr 7y agoYeah you're right, I'm coming from a developer perspective. I think I would make an exception if your work benefits from a good touchscreen.