7 ms·

Emulation on the M1 iPad Air [video]

55 points by redbell 4y ago

rowanG077 4y ago
The iPad Pro is really my dream machine hardware wise. Thin and light, powerful, beautiful display. Unfortunately I don't think it will ever run Linux. So it a perpetually out of reach dream. Doubly infuriating because it would be technically feasable, especially with Asahi.
- p1necone 4y ago
  I wonder how much of the work on getting it to run on M1 macbooks is transferable to the iPad Pro (which also uses the M1 chip).
  - monocasa 4y ago
    You'd need an exploit as the bootloader isn't opened.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      I wonder if Apple might one day open this. They’ve solved the technical problem of doing this without compromising security on the M1 MacBooks, so there’s really no reason not to.
      - warning26 4y ago
        > They’ve solved the technical problem of doing this without compromising security on the M1 MacBooks, so there’s really no reason not to. You could say the same thing about sideloading apps and running web-browsers-that-aren't-Safari; both of those are "solved" on the Mac side, but I would bet that unless the EU forces them, Apple will never allow either of those things on iOS.
        joak 4y ago
        Exactly. Without good ad blockers (ie ublock origin) and other nice extensions (ie I dont mind about cookies) it is hard to browse/search the web efficiently. For this reason alone an ipad pro is limited in scope.
        nicoburns 4y ago
        I don't think you can. Both of those are security issues on the mac side. I don't think those issues justify locking down iOS devices, but they are security issues. On the other hand, different OS's on Apple Silicon devices are isolated from each other using full disk encryption and the SecureEnclave. Unless there's a hardware exploit, the only thing a linux OS could do to a partition containing an iOS/macOS volume is delete it.
      - barkingcat 4y ago
        Nope. It's not a technical issue. Apple will never open up the ipad because that's not what it's for. It's for media consumption and running paid apps via the app store. Apple has no use for an ipad that is open - the pure purpose for that device is to buy/download/install apps and media via itunes/music app, app store, and partner applications (locked down so all purchases must go through the apple app store) If you want an ipad that is open, buy a macbook air.
        p1necone 4y ago
        The twofaced advertising really bothers me - they promote the iPad pro as if it's a "pro" laptop/desktop replacement, but it's clearly just designed for the same use cases as any other iPad/Android tablet.
        nkingsy 4y ago
        But I play buttery smooth COD mobile on an M1 iPad while waiting for builds, so thats more or less professional.
        dagmx 4y ago
        “Pro” really depends on what market you’re speaking to which is where your comparison falls apart. Large, HDR and color accurate screen is very important to a lot of content creators for example, and coupled with the Apple Pencil+apps like procreate or shapr3d, there’s a significant number of professionals who make use of the hardware that the Pro offers that other tablets or devices in the iPad range cannot. Yes the Air has the pencil but not the screen, while the regular iPad has the older pencil which is significantly behind the current gen.
        musictubes 4y ago
        Music making on the iPad is amazing. Now you can use the same VST on the iPad and Mac (Apple Silicon). Moog just re-released their Minimoog app for both. The iPad Pro is certainly capable of professional music work, at least for performance.
        4y ago
      - oneplane 4y ago
        It's more a policy issue than a technical issue. But security-wise, malware on macOS is definitely not a solved problem. There are very real differences between the pervasiveness of iOS (and iPadOS) exploits and on macOS. As for reasoning: anything that costs money to do but doesn't get you any money in return is a reason not to do it. This can obviously be a direct effect or side effect: - If it is easy to run iPad apps on an iPad without paying for them, an entire sales channel is going to make a whole lot less (this isn't as much about the availability of free apps, but about the single pipeline for end-users) - If someone at Apple needs to work on supporting boot loader selection menus and recovery modes etc. that's someone who needs to get paid, and it's going to take a whole lot of iPad sales to cover that expense; when looking at other devices and markets, most of their life they run whatever software they came with and get trashed with that same software and replaced; no post-market OS involved - Perspective; some people might feel like their status symbolism is attacked if a device gets additional users, even if very few, that don't match their perceived user base - Legal might want to try and make the devices keep their appliance-like status, instead of turning them into general purpose computing devices; this is pretty similar to consoles and stuff like network equipment; most of them are general purpose computers with some job-specific add ons, you could run all sort of deviating tasks on them The only reason I might find reasonable is the end-user tunnel vision. As soon as a device gets some form of multiple personality disorder that makes a lot of things harder for everyone on the supporting side (including that family member that everyone always asks for help with their computer gets a BSOD, but also the helpdesk, in-store support, documentation etc.). It's also pretty easy to socially engineer someone into compromising their own devices, and that is a bad thing with bad results. We can't expect everyone to be capable and able to make informed decisions and know how their stuff works. A jailed experience on an appliance-like device yields far better results in that scenario. Ironically, this also puts a very big additional load on apple to get this 'as right as possible' when all the tools they sell must work consistently, all day, every day. For the end user, but also for business use. If some special function needs to be made available, and Apple is the only one who can enable that, they will feel that heat if it's something requested or standardised often enough. Take CAC support; if there is a sector that simply won't be able to use the product without it, Apple will have to make a choice; implement it and make money from significant sales, or don't, and miss all those sales.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Quite a bit I would have thought. The GPU at least will be identical.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Probably all of it. There are some special things like the touch screen but the architecture is mostly the same. The hard part is cracking the bootloader. Which afaik hasn't happened for any modern ipad.
- alden5 4y ago
  it's infuriating knowing that my ipad is faster than my mac as one of the gpu cores is binned on my mac and yet ill never be able to use the ipad's extra performance, with the locked bootloader it's essentially doomed to become ewaste when apple stops supporting it and the app store stops working as older ios versions are almost completely unsupported by almost all apps, meanwhile when my m1 air stops getting updates i can just switch to something like asahi :/
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > The iPad Pro is really my dream machine hardware wise. Thin and light, powerful, beautiful display. Unfortunately I don't think it will ever run Linux. You can sideload UTM and run Linux today. >UTM is an app for running other operating systems on your iPhone or iPad. It is not for running iOS on other systems. This allows you, among other things, to run Windows or Linux on your iOS device at a usable speed. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/ Sideloading involves having a developer account, either free or paid. >Sideloading allows you to load unofficial apps on your iOS device. If you have a free Apple account, you must re-sign the app every 7 days. If you have a paid ($99/year) Apple developer account, you must re-sign the app every year. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/ If you go with using a free developer account, you can use software called AltStore to automate the process of renewing the software every week. https://altstore.io/ https://altstore.io/ Using AltStore to keep gaming emulator apps signed is mentioned in the video, but if you go with a free developer account you are limited to three sideloaded apps being active on the device at a time, and AltStore would count as one them.
  - easton 4y ago
    UTM on iOS doesn’t have access to the virtualization extensions on the M1 chip (you need a private entitlement, ergo, a jailbreak). Without them, VMs will be painfully slow.
    - GeekyBear 4y ago
      >Because iOS devices lack hardware virtualization support, we cannot use the KVM accelerator and instead use the TCG accelerator which does dynamic code translation and JIT compilation. UTM also includes a SPICE client written for Metal. This connects with the SPICE server in qemu and allows for some para-virtualization as the QXL graphics driver running on the guest OS can send low-level draw commands directly to Metal APIs. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        This is no longer true, M1 and A14 introduce hardware virtualization support.
- bluedino 4y ago
  I just want to be able to dock it and run it like my MacBook Pro. I just want one device.
  - andy_ppp 4y ago
    It would be so great to be able to install full MacOS… I really wish it was an option for advanced users like many of us here.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Why buy one device when you can buy two? -- Apple
    - wil421 4y ago
      I can’t help myself and get caught being an Apple fanboy from time to time. Screw Apple for being this way, I just want a multi-user experience on an iPad so my kids and I have different apps on login. Nope, buy two iPads.
    - bluedino 4y ago
      I always owned a 13" and 15" MacBook, because I could never decide which I liked better.
wronglebowski 4y ago
This is so great in theory, too bad if you can only install these via the AltStore and if you’re away from your Mac for 7 days the AltStore and all those apps stop working.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  There's no way to accept a developer's certificate and not have to give them your device UUID to install non-app store apps other than AltStore, right?
  - wronglebowski 4y ago
    If it's open source you can compile and install from Xcode I believe but the 7 day limit still exists.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Personally, I don't feel like "your device has to connect to the same wifi network as your computer once a week" is going to be a problem for the vast majority of people. However, if you can't possibly live with that 7 day limitation, you can upgrade to a paid developer account, and only have to resign apps once a year.
  - wronglebowski 4y ago
    I just think it’s ridiculous to have to pay a 100$ a year subscription to run whatever code I want on the devices I own.
    - GeekyBear 4y ago
      Then live with the limitation of using a free developer account and having AltStore automate the seven day renewal process.
      - haswell 4y ago

55 points by redbell 4y ago

The iPad Pro is really my dream machine hardware wise. Thin and light, powerful, beautiful display. Unfortunately I don't think it will ever run Linux. So it a perpetually out of reach dream. Doubly infuriating because it would be technically feasable, especially with Asahi.

p1necone 4y ago
I wonder how much of the work on getting it to run on M1 macbooks is transferable to the iPad Pro (which also uses the M1 chip).
- monocasa 4y ago
  You'd need an exploit as the bootloader isn't opened.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I wonder if Apple might one day open this. They’ve solved the technical problem of doing this without compromising security on the M1 MacBooks, so there’s really no reason not to.
    - warning26 4y ago
      > They’ve solved the technical problem of doing this without compromising security on the M1 MacBooks, so there’s really no reason not to. You could say the same thing about sideloading apps and running web-browsers-that-aren't-Safari; both of those are "solved" on the Mac side, but I would bet that unless the EU forces them, Apple will never allow either of those things on iOS.
      - joak 4y ago
        Exactly. Without good ad blockers (ie ublock origin) and other nice extensions (ie I dont mind about cookies) it is hard to browse/search the web efficiently. For this reason alone an ipad pro is limited in scope.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        I don't think you can. Both of those are security issues on the mac side. I don't think those issues justify locking down iOS devices, but they are security issues. On the other hand, different OS's on Apple Silicon devices are isolated from each other using full disk encryption and the SecureEnclave. Unless there's a hardware exploit, the only thing a linux OS could do to a partition containing an iOS/macOS volume is delete it.
    - barkingcat 4y ago
      Nope. It's not a technical issue. Apple will never open up the ipad because that's not what it's for. It's for media consumption and running paid apps via the app store. Apple has no use for an ipad that is open - the pure purpose for that device is to buy/download/install apps and media via itunes/music app, app store, and partner applications (locked down so all purchases must go through the apple app store) If you want an ipad that is open, buy a macbook air.
      - p1necone 4y ago
        The twofaced advertising really bothers me - they promote the iPad pro as if it's a "pro" laptop/desktop replacement, but it's clearly just designed for the same use cases as any other iPad/Android tablet.
        nkingsy 4y ago
        But I play buttery smooth COD mobile on an M1 iPad while waiting for builds, so thats more or less professional.
        dagmx 4y ago
        “Pro” really depends on what market you’re speaking to which is where your comparison falls apart. Large, HDR and color accurate screen is very important to a lot of content creators for example, and coupled with the Apple Pencil+apps like procreate or shapr3d, there’s a significant number of professionals who make use of the hardware that the Pro offers that other tablets or devices in the iPad range cannot. Yes the Air has the pencil but not the screen, while the regular iPad has the older pencil which is significantly behind the current gen.
        musictubes 4y ago
        Music making on the iPad is amazing. Now you can use the same VST on the iPad and Mac (Apple Silicon). Moog just re-released their Minimoog app for both. The iPad Pro is certainly capable of professional music work, at least for performance.
        4y ago
    - oneplane 4y ago
      It's more a policy issue than a technical issue. But security-wise, malware on macOS is definitely not a solved problem. There are very real differences between the pervasiveness of iOS (and iPadOS) exploits and on macOS. As for reasoning: anything that costs money to do but doesn't get you any money in return is a reason not to do it. This can obviously be a direct effect or side effect: - If it is easy to run iPad apps on an iPad without paying for them, an entire sales channel is going to make a whole lot less (this isn't as much about the availability of free apps, but about the single pipeline for end-users) - If someone at Apple needs to work on supporting boot loader selection menus and recovery modes etc. that's someone who needs to get paid, and it's going to take a whole lot of iPad sales to cover that expense; when looking at other devices and markets, most of their life they run whatever software they came with and get trashed with that same software and replaced; no post-market OS involved - Perspective; some people might feel like their status symbolism is attacked if a device gets additional users, even if very few, that don't match their perceived user base - Legal might want to try and make the devices keep their appliance-like status, instead of turning them into general purpose computing devices; this is pretty similar to consoles and stuff like network equipment; most of them are general purpose computers with some job-specific add ons, you could run all sort of deviating tasks on them The only reason I might find reasonable is the end-user tunnel vision. As soon as a device gets some form of multiple personality disorder that makes a lot of things harder for everyone on the supporting side (including that family member that everyone always asks for help with their computer gets a BSOD, but also the helpdesk, in-store support, documentation etc.). It's also pretty easy to socially engineer someone into compromising their own devices, and that is a bad thing with bad results. We can't expect everyone to be capable and able to make informed decisions and know how their stuff works. A jailed experience on an appliance-like device yields far better results in that scenario. Ironically, this also puts a very big additional load on apple to get this 'as right as possible' when all the tools they sell must work consistently, all day, every day. For the end user, but also for business use. If some special function needs to be made available, and Apple is the only one who can enable that, they will feel that heat if it's something requested or standardised often enough. Take CAC support; if there is a sector that simply won't be able to use the product without it, Apple will have to make a choice; implement it and make money from significant sales, or don't, and miss all those sales.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Quite a bit I would have thought. The GPU at least will be identical.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Probably all of it. There are some special things like the touch screen but the architecture is mostly the same. The hard part is cracking the bootloader. Which afaik hasn't happened for any modern ipad.
alden5 4y ago
it's infuriating knowing that my ipad is faster than my mac as one of the gpu cores is binned on my mac and yet ill never be able to use the ipad's extra performance, with the locked bootloader it's essentially doomed to become ewaste when apple stops supporting it and the app store stops working as older ios versions are almost completely unsupported by almost all apps, meanwhile when my m1 air stops getting updates i can just switch to something like asahi :/
GeekyBear 4y ago
> The iPad Pro is really my dream machine hardware wise. Thin and light, powerful, beautiful display. Unfortunately I don't think it will ever run Linux. You can sideload UTM and run Linux today. >UTM is an app for running other operating systems on your iPhone or iPad. It is not for running iOS on other systems. This allows you, among other things, to run Windows or Linux on your iOS device at a usable speed. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/ Sideloading involves having a developer account, either free or paid. >Sideloading allows you to load unofficial apps on your iOS device. If you have a free Apple account, you must re-sign the app every 7 days. If you have a paid ($99/year) Apple developer account, you must re-sign the app every year. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/ If you go with using a free developer account, you can use software called AltStore to automate the process of renewing the software every week. https://altstore.io/ https://altstore.io/ Using AltStore to keep gaming emulator apps signed is mentioned in the video, but if you go with a free developer account you are limited to three sideloaded apps being active on the device at a time, and AltStore would count as one them.
- easton 4y ago
  UTM on iOS doesn’t have access to the virtualization extensions on the M1 chip (you need a private entitlement, ergo, a jailbreak). Without them, VMs will be painfully slow.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    >Because iOS devices lack hardware virtualization support, we cannot use the KVM accelerator and instead use the TCG accelerator which does dynamic code translation and JIT compilation. UTM also includes a SPICE client written for Metal. This connects with the SPICE server in qemu and allows for some para-virtualization as the QXL graphics driver running on the guest OS can send low-level draw commands directly to Metal APIs. https://getutm.app/faq/ https://getutm.app/faq/
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      This is no longer true, M1 and A14 introduce hardware virtualization support.
bluedino 4y ago
I just want to be able to dock it and run it like my MacBook Pro. I just want one device.
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  It would be so great to be able to install full MacOS… I really wish it was an option for advanced users like many of us here.
- chongli 4y ago
  Why buy one device when you can buy two? -- Apple
  - wil421 4y ago
    I can’t help myself and get caught being an Apple fanboy from time to time. Screw Apple for being this way, I just want a multi-user experience on an iPad so my kids and I have different apps on login. Nope, buy two iPads.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    I always owned a 13" and 15" MacBook, because I could never decide which I liked better.

wronglebowski 4y ago

This is so great in theory, too bad if you can only install these via the AltStore and if you’re away from your Mac for 7 days the AltStore and all those apps stop working.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
There's no way to accept a developer's certificate and not have to give them your device UUID to install non-app store apps other than AltStore, right?
- wronglebowski 4y ago
  If it's open source you can compile and install from Xcode I believe but the 7 day limit still exists.
GeekyBear 4y ago
Personally, I don't feel like "your device has to connect to the same wifi network as your computer once a week" is going to be a problem for the vast majority of people. However, if you can't possibly live with that 7 day limitation, you can upgrade to a paid developer account, and only have to resign apps once a year.
- wronglebowski 4y ago
  I just think it’s ridiculous to have to pay a 100$ a year subscription to run whatever code I want on the devices I own.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    Then live with the limitation of using a free developer account and having AltStore automate the seven day renewal process.
    - haswell 4y ago