4 ms·

> They gain nothing by blocking this specific app. I dunno, I think there's an obvious thing Apple would be worried about by allowing PC emulators on iOS (iPad

by derefr 2y ago

> They gain nothing by blocking this specific app. I dunno, I think there's an obvious thing Apple would be worried about by allowing PC emulators on iOS (iPadOS specifically): the only thing that stops an iPad Pro from being the only computer of, say, a software engineer these days, is that iPadOS doesn't function as an non-inter-app-sandboxed parallel-multitasking development platform in the way that a desktop OS does. But a (performant) PC emulator on iPadOS would fix that. You could buy an iPad Pro with a keyboard case, boot up a Windows or Linux (or maybe even macOS) VM, and work inside that — running shells, editors/IDEs, compilers, Docker containers, etc. And then swipe back over to (less-heavyweight) iPad apps when you're just taking notes / watching videos. Honestly, it's something I've personally wanted for a long time. Despite loving my laptop, I'd love to be able to pack only an iPad when travelling to e.g. conferences. Right now I can't, because what if prod goes down and I need to investigate + develop a critical bugfix + deploy it? If I could run a PC VM on my iPad, I could do all that and more.

lawlessone 2y ago
Would be very funny to see someone emulating a PC on an iPad to Linux so they can use Wine to run windows apps.
- dmonitor 2y ago
  Use Wine to run Dolphin, running an SNES emulator, running the Gameboy player, playing Tetris
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Or more specifically, Doom implemented in Tetris.
    - lawlessone 2y ago
      When Nintendo sues, do they start at the top or the bottom of the stack?
      - anthk 2y ago
        There are public domain Tetris versions for the GB.
      - NikkiA 2y ago
        Nintendo legal is massively concurrent, and sues all simultaneously.
Aardwolf 2y ago
I don't understand this: Would they rather someone buy a Thinkpad and run Linux on it, than someone buy an iPad and run Linux on it? What's there to be scared of someone buying their own hardware?
- derefr 2y ago
  Apple would rather people buy an iPad and a cheaper Mac, e.g. a Macbook Air. And many of their customers do — despite only needing the Mac for one or two things. These customers, in my personal experience, mostly end up gravitating toward using the Mac more and the iPad less — despite often saying they enjoy using the iPad more. They try to use the iPad for more things, but when there's something they need to do on their laptop, they switch over to using it — and then forget to switch back. Eventually, they give up on the "iPad experiment", and the iPad sits there gathering dust. But they still did buy it. And likely have had it for long enough that they can't just return it. And they might even (probably mistakenly) think they'll pick it up again someday, maybe when a new iPadOS update makes it more functional and solves their pain-points. And that line of thinking makes Apple very, very happy. "Buying an iPad you don't end up using because you also bought a Mac" is a situation Apple emphatically does not want to help anyone avoid. In fact, they do everything they can in their advertising to subtly guide customers into bad expectations about iPadOS capabilities, so that they'll end up in that situation.
  - colinng 2y ago
    Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    IPad is great for direct manipulation, such as drawing / painting / rearranging things visually. In this regard, it far outstrips any macbooks.
    - 2y ago
rrgok 2y ago
You can already achieve the same workflow with Shadow PC, even though you need a permanent low latency network connection.
- derefr 2y ago
  Sure, you can... but you never would. The whole point of an adult owning an iPad as a separate second device (besides using it as a drawing tablet or as a touch-control surface for professional production apps) is that it's a lightweight and more "rugged" portable computer than a laptop is, focused on enabling consumption and light computing tasks in situations where you either would worry about bringing a laptop, or just wouldn't care to deal with bringing a laptop. The comparative advantage of an iPad over a laptop is found by just throwing it in your bag when you're going "out" and not planning to do work, and then pulling it out: in a coffee shop; at a park; on a beach; on a bus/train/plane; etc. Into, in other words, exactly the sorts of situations where you don't have a "permanent low latency network connection." Any environment where relying on a remote desktop would make sense, is also an environment where the iPad has no comparative advantage. If you're in such an environment constantly, you'd just buy a laptop and never even consider an iPad!
kmeisthax 2y ago
iSH is already on the App Store and lets you run x86 Linux apps. My guess is that the thing Apple is actually objecting to is graphical user output, specifically mouse software being utilized on a touchscreen. UTM (and iDOS) does that, iSH only gives you a terminal. Terminal software is touch-friendly, so it's allowed, even though iSH has to do the same threaded code dance UTM SE does. (And of course there's also a-Shell which runs WASM/WASI binaries in Safari...)
- derefr 2y ago
  My understanding was that iSH is the same kind of thing that e.g. Swift Playground for iPadOS is: both ship with an internal userland of binaries, including a compiler toolchain, embedded into the app (that Apple can audit); and both allow code to be compiled and executed locally. But in neither case can you download and install arbitrary non-Apple-audited third-party packages into the sandbox. This is why iSH calls itself a "Linux-like environment." There's no package manager! If Apple allowed it, iSH would almost certainly just be a wrapped-up Debian VM. But it's not. (And this is why iSH has always been considered a toy by people wanting to do real software development, rather than being something anyone would recommend you use as part of your workflow.)
  - timenova 2y ago
    iSH does allow you to download packages from the Alpine package repo, but they maintain their own mirror. The only issue is that they haven't updated it in a while, so its stuck at Alpine 3.14, and there's no (at least straightforward) option to upgrade to the later versions or to Alpine edge. I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though.
    - derefr 2y ago
      This isn't real "arbitrary package downloading", though — Apple still audits all the code that goes into these repos (which is why they can't just keep them up-to-date.) It's essentially just offloading of some of the app's packaged code into separate "DLC" modules, to make the base app download more lightweight. > I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though. I would highly suspect that this wouldn't work. Maybe it would have in some prior version, back when there was the technical barrier of it being very hard to cross-compile Linux binaries for arm64. But I would guess, upon the popularization of things like the Raspberry Pi, that Apple required the developer of iSH to modify the version of apk(1) that ships with the tool to only work with APKs that have been signed by Apple.

by derefr 2y ago

lawlessone 2y ago

Would be very funny to see someone emulating a PC on an iPad to Linux so they can use Wine to run windows apps.

dmonitor 2y ago
Use Wine to run Dolphin, running an SNES emulator, running the Gameboy player, playing Tetris
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Or more specifically, Doom implemented in Tetris.
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    When Nintendo sues, do they start at the top or the bottom of the stack?
    - anthk 2y ago
      There are public domain Tetris versions for the GB.
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      Nintendo legal is massively concurrent, and sues all simultaneously.

Aardwolf 2y ago

I don't understand this: Would they rather someone buy a Thinkpad and run Linux on it, than someone buy an iPad and run Linux on it? What's there to be scared of someone buying their own hardware?

derefr 2y ago
Apple would rather people buy an iPad and a cheaper Mac, e.g. a Macbook Air. And many of their customers do — despite only needing the Mac for one or two things. These customers, in my personal experience, mostly end up gravitating toward using the Mac more and the iPad less — despite often saying they enjoy using the iPad more. They try to use the iPad for more things, but when there's something they need to do on their laptop, they switch over to using it — and then forget to switch back. Eventually, they give up on the "iPad experiment", and the iPad sits there gathering dust. But they still did buy it. And likely have had it for long enough that they can't just return it. And they might even (probably mistakenly) think they'll pick it up again someday, maybe when a new iPadOS update makes it more functional and solves their pain-points. And that line of thinking makes Apple very, very happy. "Buying an iPad you don't end up using because you also bought a Mac" is a situation Apple emphatically does not want to help anyone avoid. In fact, they do everything they can in their advertising to subtly guide customers into bad expectations about iPadOS capabilities, so that they'll end up in that situation.
- colinng 2y ago
  Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.
- nine_k 2y ago
  IPad is great for direct manipulation, such as drawing / painting / rearranging things visually. In this regard, it far outstrips any macbooks.
  - 2y ago

rrgok 2y ago

You can already achieve the same workflow with Shadow PC, even though you need a permanent low latency network connection.

derefr 2y ago
Sure, you can... but you never would. The whole point of an adult owning an iPad as a separate second device (besides using it as a drawing tablet or as a touch-control surface for professional production apps) is that it's a lightweight and more "rugged" portable computer than a laptop is, focused on enabling consumption and light computing tasks in situations where you either would worry about bringing a laptop, or just wouldn't care to deal with bringing a laptop. The comparative advantage of an iPad over a laptop is found by just throwing it in your bag when you're going "out" and not planning to do work, and then pulling it out: in a coffee shop; at a park; on a beach; on a bus/train/plane; etc. Into, in other words, exactly the sorts of situations where you don't have a "permanent low latency network connection." Any environment where relying on a remote desktop would make sense, is also an environment where the iPad has no comparative advantage. If you're in such an environment constantly, you'd just buy a laptop and never even consider an iPad!

kmeisthax 2y ago

iSH is already on the App Store and lets you run x86 Linux apps. My guess is that the thing Apple is actually objecting to is graphical user output, specifically mouse software being utilized on a touchscreen. UTM (and iDOS) does that, iSH only gives you a terminal. Terminal software is touch-friendly, so it's allowed, even though iSH has to do the same threaded code dance UTM SE does. (And of course there's also a-Shell which runs WASM/WASI binaries in Safari...)

derefr 2y ago
My understanding was that iSH is the same kind of thing that e.g. Swift Playground for iPadOS is: both ship with an internal userland of binaries, including a compiler toolchain, embedded into the app (that Apple can audit); and both allow code to be compiled and executed locally. But in neither case can you download and install arbitrary non-Apple-audited third-party packages into the sandbox. This is why iSH calls itself a "Linux-like environment." There's no package manager! If Apple allowed it, iSH would almost certainly just be a wrapped-up Debian VM. But it's not. (And this is why iSH has always been considered a toy by people wanting to do real software development, rather than being something anyone would recommend you use as part of your workflow.)
- timenova 2y ago
  iSH does allow you to download packages from the Alpine package repo, but they maintain their own mirror. The only issue is that they haven't updated it in a while, so its stuck at Alpine 3.14, and there's no (at least straightforward) option to upgrade to the later versions or to Alpine edge. I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though.
  - derefr 2y ago
    This isn't real "arbitrary package downloading", though — Apple still audits all the code that goes into these repos (which is why they can't just keep them up-to-date.) It's essentially just offloading of some of the app's packaged code into separate "DLC" modules, to make the base app download more lightweight. > I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though. I would highly suspect that this wouldn't work. Maybe it would have in some prior version, back when there was the technical barrier of it being very hard to cross-compile Linux binaries for arm64. But I would guess, upon the popularization of things like the Raspberry Pi, that Apple required the developer of iSH to modify the version of apk(1) that ships with the tool to only work with APKs that have been signed by Apple.