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His (roundabout) answer is to point to the new iPad Pro and cursor support, i.e., Apple is moving everybody to the iPad so it doesn't matter what the Mac does.
by ken 7y ago
His (roundabout) answer is to point to the new iPad Pro and cursor support, i.e., Apple is moving everybody to the iPad so it doesn't matter what the Mac does.
Of course, as always, whether this is "an answer" or not depends on whether you happen to believe in this particular branch of Apple Kremlinology.
- chongli 7y agoApple Kremlinology [1] I love this term. What a fantastic way to look at this story and take a step back so that we recognize what we're doing here. Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all figured out? Maybe they're just trying stuff to see what sticks? I think, deep down, there are a bunch of people at Apple that know they'd have to pry the Terminal, vim/emacs, and command line tools out of macOS developers' cold, dead hands before they'd ever switch to iOS full-time. [1] https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-kremlinology.html https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-kremlinology.h...
- nicoburns 7y agoPresumably not least the Apple engineering department themselves!
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoThis is actually an interesting question for any company that makes operating systems. * I'm sure Microsoft's Windows developers all work on Windows. * I assume Apple uses Macs for all development right now. * If memory serves, Google uses a lot of Macs themselves, but did at least make an effort to make it possible to do development on Chromebooks. * Oracle... it's not clear to me that Oracle actually has anybody working on Solaris, but if they do then they have to use Solaris to work on Solaris unless they've managed to completely overhaul the build system. For everything else, OEL should at least theoretically be completely adequate. * I'd be interested to know what IBM uses internally; AIX was a workstation OS but I have no idea if they've maintained that capability, and they own RH now so that's an option if they wanted to stay "in-house" * I don't have any specific knowledge about it, but Red Hat absolutely could use Fedora and/or RHEL for most everything. * Canonical is almost certainly running Ubuntu everywhere.
- mattl 7y agoI don’t know about Canonical but certainly a few years ago I was seeing Windows created documents out of Red Hat.
- frandroid 7y ago> Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all figured out? I wish I had a super-like for this answer.
- tambourine_man 7y agoMaybe they don't need to. A terminal app with a busybox-like set of tools within the sandbox would make iOS/iPadOS a lot nicer to us nerds. We already have Files.app. A terminal can't be that far.
- kalleboo 7y agoiSH is reasonably popular and is ripe for Apple to either Sherlock them or bless them by allowing them on the app store https://ish.app https://ish.app edit: "but iSH is Linux, surely Apple would do Darwin!" you say. By looking at how poorly they're maintaining the command line experience on the Mac (deprecating their bundled Python, Ruby, not updating anything GNU GPLv3 etc), it's easy to imagine them happy to outsource that drudgery to the Linux community, like Microsoft is with WSL. Add to that all the web developers telling them they want a deploy-ready environment...
- tambourine_man 7y agoMy problem with iSH is that it's x86 emulated. On a battery contrained device. Hire the guy and do it natively in house.
- smcnally 7y agoTerminus is available now and works well enough. It’s not a shell into local iOS, but that’s fine for me. and standard external USB keyboards work fine with a $10 Lightning adapter. https://termius.com/ios https://termius.com/ios
- tambourine_man 7y agoYeah, but that's just an SSH access point. I want a full shell.
- chongli 7y agoA busybox-like set of tools would not be very useful without a package manager and the ability to install arbitrary software like compilers, editors, and the like. Just out of curiosity, I counted how many formulae I have installed with homebrew on my Mac: $ brew list | wc -w 244 That's probably not that many compared to some people out there.
- spacedcowboy 7y agocough There's a fair few of us - yes, even in R&D, that feel equally strongly supportive of Terminal.app, vi, and command-line tools. And as someone on the inside, who knows the answer to this story (nope, not telling) it's interesting to read the conjecture :)
- tasogare 7y agoThey sure can’t move ipadOS devs to iPad since XCode is not supported on it.
- freehunter 7y agoThat's the case right this minute, but thanks to Apple's famous secrecy, all that could change five minutes from now. Much in the way people say "I'm certain there are ARM-based Macs running inside Apple", I'd be pretty certain that there is at least one iPad running XCode inside of Apple.
- skohan 7y agoXCode or no, I can't imagine doing serious software development without a terminal and all the common *nix utilities.
- DagAgren 7y agoHis answer is not that Apple is moving "everybody" to the iPad. Just some. It won't split the Mac lineup into ARM and x86, it will split it into iPad and Mac.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoIt's that famous quip about "Macs are trucks, iOS devices are cars" Describe pre-pointer iPads as Model T fords, and now we're entering the 1950's…
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI am not convinced although I will admit this is the first iPad I am considering buying in a long time. Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C / C++ I cannot see it happening. I could see some programming on the new iPad though. Would be nice if Apple opened it up for trivial scripting though.
- saagarjha 7y ago> Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C / C++ I cannot see it happening. Have you used Swift Playgrounds?
- _ph_ 7y agoDoes Swift Playgrounds allow general App development? No one doubts that you could do software development on an iPad Pro, just that Apple so far has disallowed any real software development on that platform.
- ex3ndr 7y agoI bet i can do it faster.
- scarface74 7y agoIn the grand scheme of things, do you realize how niche software development is? Besides that, why do you think that the current ARM chips aren't already faster than most x86 chips that people use? Would be nice if Apple opened it up for trivial scripting though. You can already do that using Shortcuts and various third party apps.. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188