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They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I f
by atty 4y ago
They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. Any time I want to do anything complex or computationally intensive I find a laptop to be much more efficient, both in terms of the OS flexibility and better input devices.
- bparsons 4y agoFor 99.99% of users, they are 1500 dollar Facebook machines.
- m3kw9 4y agoYou are projecting a bit there
- NoraCodes 4y agoI doubt that. Many very serious artists use Procreate on an iPad as their primary medium, and I honestly can't think of a better tool without jumping about a thousand dollars in price, loath as I am to say it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nickthegreek 4y agoagreed. I dont know any tattoo artist without one.
- davidgay 4y agoAdobe Lightroom works quite nicely, I use it to edit photos I take on vacation while on vacation.
- lbotos 4y agoI don't particularly, but I like to watch videos at 3 and 4x and bigger procs have helped. Older iPads stumbled past 2x. But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.
- yamtaddle 4y agoGive me XCode and Preview (I use the pdf page-re-arranging/deleting/etc a lot) and finally put a fucking calculator on iPad OS and I can stop using macbooks at all. I mean for personal devices, at least, I'd still use one for work since they give me one anyway.
- null_object 4y ago> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals. I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Auracle 4y agoI mean, I don’t understand how I could really use an iPad in my workflow as a photographer. Everything is slower without a keyboard, and for raw editing I use a whole bunch of knobs. I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow… Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
- smoldesu 4y agoSame goes for music production. I've tried using a few iPad DAWs over the years, but it's so much slower than using a keyboard and mouse, or just popping open your Macbook with Live. Apple already has a product segment that does fairly well with this market, trying to force the iPad into being something it's not just looks silly.
- psychomugs 4y agoProducing may be faster on desktop for now because they've had a large head start on optimizing the interfaces for mouse and keyboard, but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen. Touch screens won't replace dedicated controllers with physical knobs, but digital knobs are surprisingly usable.
- jwr 4y agoHeck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get. The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better. I still find it sad that: a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?" b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
- educaysean 4y agoThis made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?
- kaba0 4y agoI don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.
- smoldesu 4y agoYep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.
- jwr 4y agoYep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe. This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
- blorgensnarf 4y agoCiv VI is pretty CPU intensive.
- pradn 4y agoWeb browsing is a task you can throw great single-core performance at.
- monitron 4y agoRight now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!) Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
- boppo1 4y agoDigital sculpting.
- singhrac 4y agoI would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.
- rodgerd 4y ago> Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)
- dirtyid 4y agoMy compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.