6 ms·

This is something I've been saying: Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon and compare the

by swiley 6y ago

This is something I've been saying: Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon and compare the same on a pinephone with a decade old budget SoC. One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations. You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone. EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.

throwawayboise 6y ago
> Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon OK but you are describing something that 99.8% of iThing owners will never do.
- swiley 6y ago
  sharing and building code is an important aspect of computing and making computers fundamental to people's lives while working to make them difficult to understand is very wrong. They don;t do it partly because it's so unpleasant.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    Watch a commercial for the iPad. It is not marketed as a computing device, to do CLI programming or spreadsheets on. It's selling points are stuff like Procreate and Lightroom...both 'work' apps but for the 'creative economy'. That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    I'm a computer nerd at heart, and I've _never_ wanted to pull a repository or compile a project with a phone. Ever. (Ok, there was this one time with a Nokia N900, but it was just a phase =) )
    - Siira 6y ago
      Do you write notes? Where do you keep them? In some cloud with no version control, under some proprietary binary format? Good luck with that.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    You're just not living in the real world. My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  They will likewise also not care about the increased computational power here.
jacobmischka 6y ago
Based on the way you phrased this I'm legitimately unsure which one gets painfully hot and which one does what you ask in your example.
camillomiller 6y ago
Peak Hacker News. Comparing an iPad Pro with a Pinephone to do something 99.9% of iPad Pro target audience wouldn’t even know the meaning of.
- swiley 6y ago
  If you're not going to do anything where performance matters why pay a premium for it?
  - foldr 6y ago
    Video and photo editing are common iPad Pro use cases where performance matters.
    - justaguy88 6y ago
      I always assumed that safari/youtube/netflix were the common use cases. Do numerically many people actually video/photo editing on these devices to make it "common"?
      - drewzero1 6y ago
        As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things. I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?
        chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        You are not alone. :)
      - camillomiller 6y ago
        Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.
efficax 6y ago
iSH is an x86 emulator. But yes I would love it if the iPad Pro could just run macOS and i could actually use it as a software development environment, but also run iOS apps. I'd buy that device yesterday
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Well, I might say it's not fair because iSH is not your only choice on the iPhone, at least if your goal is "checking out a git repo and editing files." Running git clone using an actual iOS native git client like Working Copy is pretty fast. And because Working Copy is an iOS file provider, you can edit files in a repo directly in a native iOS text editor like Textastic. If we're talking about doing web development, pair that with a cheap Linode or Digital Ocean VPS, the Blink terminal app and/or Secure ShellFish (an SSH client that also hooks in SFTP/SCP in as a file provider along with Shortcuts automation) and you're probably doing pretty darn well. Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :) (Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)
- Siira 6y ago
  As a heavy Working Copy user, with all the respect I have for its great developer, it is just a bad UX; Buggy, slow as hell, and you need to constantly wait for it as you can't minimize the app as the dumb iOS will kill it. SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I'm not a huge fan of Working Copy's UI, although to be fair to it, I find a lot of desktop GUI Git clients to be pretty arcane as well. My experience with Blink has been pretty good on the whole, though. In any case, I was focusing on iSH specifically -- I'm just not convinced that "when I run this terminal program which is a clever hack to allow console Linux apps to run in x86 emulation, it's a poor experience" is a great argument against the iPad's utility. :) But, I'll take gentle issue with > the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.
glglwty 6y ago
I own a pinkebook pro and it can't survive a kernel compilation (which is quite a normal thing to do for this device because it doesn't run on mainline kernel and requires patching) without dying from the battery drainage while plugged in.

by swiley 6y ago

throwawayboise 6y ago

> Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon OK but you are describing something that 99.8% of iThing owners will never do.

swiley 6y ago
sharing and building code is an important aspect of computing and making computers fundamental to people's lives while working to make them difficult to understand is very wrong. They don;t do it partly because it's so unpleasant.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Watch a commercial for the iPad. It is not marketed as a computing device, to do CLI programming or spreadsheets on. It's selling points are stuff like Procreate and Lightroom...both 'work' apps but for the 'creative economy'. That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  I'm a computer nerd at heart, and I've _never_ wanted to pull a repository or compile a project with a phone. Ever. (Ok, there was this one time with a Nokia N900, but it was just a phase =) )
  - Siira 6y ago
    Do you write notes? Where do you keep them? In some cloud with no version control, under some proprietary binary format? Good luck with that.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  You're just not living in the real world. My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.
whimsicalism 6y ago
They will likewise also not care about the increased computational power here.

jacobmischka 6y ago

Based on the way you phrased this I'm legitimately unsure which one gets painfully hot and which one does what you ask in your example.

camillomiller 6y ago

Peak Hacker News. Comparing an iPad Pro with a Pinephone to do something 99.9% of iPad Pro target audience wouldn’t even know the meaning of.

swiley 6y ago
If you're not going to do anything where performance matters why pay a premium for it?
- foldr 6y ago
  Video and photo editing are common iPad Pro use cases where performance matters.
  - justaguy88 6y ago
    I always assumed that safari/youtube/netflix were the common use cases. Do numerically many people actually video/photo editing on these devices to make it "common"?
    - drewzero1 6y ago
      As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things. I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?
      - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        You are not alone. :)
    - camillomiller 6y ago
      Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.

efficax 6y ago

iSH is an x86 emulator. But yes I would love it if the iPad Pro could just run macOS and i could actually use it as a software development environment, but also run iOS apps. I'd buy that device yesterday

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

Well, I might say it's not fair because iSH is not your only choice on the iPhone, at least if your goal is "checking out a git repo and editing files." Running git clone using an actual iOS native git client like Working Copy is pretty fast. And because Working Copy is an iOS file provider, you can edit files in a repo directly in a native iOS text editor like Textastic. If we're talking about doing web development, pair that with a cheap Linode or Digital Ocean VPS, the Blink terminal app and/or Secure ShellFish (an SSH client that also hooks in SFTP/SCP in as a file provider along with Shortcuts automation) and you're probably doing pretty darn well. Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :) (Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)

Siira 6y ago
As a heavy Working Copy user, with all the respect I have for its great developer, it is just a bad UX; Buggy, slow as hell, and you need to constantly wait for it as you can't minimize the app as the dumb iOS will kill it. SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of Working Copy's UI, although to be fair to it, I find a lot of desktop GUI Git clients to be pretty arcane as well. My experience with Blink has been pretty good on the whole, though. In any case, I was focusing on iSH specifically -- I'm just not convinced that "when I run this terminal program which is a clever hack to allow console Linux apps to run in x86 emulation, it's a poor experience" is a great argument against the iPad's utility. :) But, I'll take gentle issue with > the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.

glglwty 6y ago

I own a pinkebook pro and it can't survive a kernel compilation (which is quite a normal thing to do for this device because it doesn't run on mainline kernel and requires patching) without dying from the battery drainage while plugged in.