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Hardly. The device by its very design and form factor was designed for information consumption as its main purpose. Everything that allows the device to be us

Hardly. The device by its very design and form factor was designed for information consumption as its main purpose. Everything that allows the device to be used for information creation today is an afterthought to the initial design and purpose and therefore the experience you are seeking will be handicapped by the initial design and purpose of the device. If a hammer didn’t have the “artificial constraint” placed on it of missing a standard slot head or Phillips head driver (and hammer manufacturers can clearly install them if they chose to) it could be a more multi-use tool than just a hammer. Likewise, screwdriver manufacturers would only need to add a hard striking surface to their tools for them to be also used to drive nails too. I had a multitool hammer/screwdriver combo once. It sucked as both a hammer and a screwdriver and I found myself always reaching for my actual hammer for driving nails, or screwdrivers for driving screws.

Gud 2y ago
Yes, those are inherent constraints which makes your analogy flawed. There is no reason(except greed) for why an iPad has to be locked down.
- kcplate 2y ago
  But is the iPad actually locked down? There are developer tools available. If they don’t meet standard is there anything actually stopping developers from writing a better one? Seems to me the big complaint is not that you can’t write code on it, but that it doesn’t run MacOS. But that brings me back to the original intent of the product—It’s form factor is designed for information consumption and only recently with the introduction of the M-chips on the device, it would have made a pretty shitty MacOS device in prior versions. So recent tech has improved the screwdriver so that it could be used effectively as a hammer too, but I don’t think you can realistically say it was greed that caused Stanley tools to create both hammers and screwdrivers before the tech changed to combine them. They were two separate tools because they needed to be.
  - wpm 2y ago
    > If they don’t meet standard is there anything actually stopping developers from writing a better one? Uh, the App Store guidelines? >it doesn’t run MacOS No, it doesn't, but they both run XNU and share a huge amount of their userspace. If someone was clamoring for AppKit on iPad, yeah, you'd be correct in saying that's a silly request, but macOS and iOS are for most intents and purposes the same, aside from the artificial limitations placed on the latter to protect App Store profits. 1-hour of battery life / Wh of battery capacity between the last iPad Pro with an M2 and the M2 Macbook Air are pretty close too, its not like the limitations are there solely to save battery life since macOS with is yucky icky energy hog background tasks and spoooOoOOOky applications that haven't had their code inspected by Apple and might be able to do maniacal things like read the filesystem don't tank the battery life that much after all. (52.6Wh in the MBA for 12 hours of browsing, vs 40.88Wh in the old M2 iPad Pro 13" for 10 hours). Of course these are very different kinds of devices with very different feature sets, but minus a touchscreen and OLED, plus a hardware attached keyboard and trackpad, what are the actual material differences, not vague market segmentation, between a Mac and an iPad? If the iPad is only for content consumption, why does Apple sell one that stock is better than most of the Macs they sell? Why does Apple market and position the iPad Pro as a content creation device, why do they bother adding content creation features and multitasking improvements and so on to iPadOS, if it is not meant to be a content creation? If it is meant for content creation, why is it only the content that can be created in ways Apple deems allowed for the device you bought from them?
    - kcplate 2y ago
      You are only arguing from the “now state” and comparing device capabilities that have only existed for about 18 months since the M series chips came out. iPads of 14 years ago, even pro models pre-M chip would not be reasonable devices for development or MacOS. Original intent was information consumption. The design and form factor speaks to this as the primary function of the device. Sure as tech has lead to more powerful hardware, even where it has added content creation capabilities, they are still focused on content creation where the form factor is appropriate and doesn’t get in the way. The expectation that Apple should now consider the device and tune its software and OS to SWE is a pretty bold expectation. Frankly, most devs I know wouldn’t use the device for hardcore dev even if it ran MacOS. It would be useable for those few moments when you would not be behind a desk and need to code, emergency fixes and the like. Pretty sure Apple’s product team knows this and are not all that worried about that use case.

Gud 2y ago

Yes, those are inherent constraints which makes your analogy flawed. There is no reason(except greed) for why an iPad has to be locked down.

kcplate 2y ago
But is the iPad actually locked down? There are developer tools available. If they don’t meet standard is there anything actually stopping developers from writing a better one? Seems to me the big complaint is not that you can’t write code on it, but that it doesn’t run MacOS. But that brings me back to the original intent of the product—It’s form factor is designed for information consumption and only recently with the introduction of the M-chips on the device, it would have made a pretty shitty MacOS device in prior versions. So recent tech has improved the screwdriver so that it could be used effectively as a hammer too, but I don’t think you can realistically say it was greed that caused Stanley tools to create both hammers and screwdrivers before the tech changed to combine them. They were two separate tools because they needed to be.
- wpm 2y ago
  > If they don’t meet standard is there anything actually stopping developers from writing a better one? Uh, the App Store guidelines? >it doesn’t run MacOS No, it doesn't, but they both run XNU and share a huge amount of their userspace. If someone was clamoring for AppKit on iPad, yeah, you'd be correct in saying that's a silly request, but macOS and iOS are for most intents and purposes the same, aside from the artificial limitations placed on the latter to protect App Store profits. 1-hour of battery life / Wh of battery capacity between the last iPad Pro with an M2 and the M2 Macbook Air are pretty close too, its not like the limitations are there solely to save battery life since macOS with is yucky icky energy hog background tasks and spoooOoOOOky applications that haven't had their code inspected by Apple and might be able to do maniacal things like read the filesystem don't tank the battery life that much after all. (52.6Wh in the MBA for 12 hours of browsing, vs 40.88Wh in the old M2 iPad Pro 13" for 10 hours). Of course these are very different kinds of devices with very different feature sets, but minus a touchscreen and OLED, plus a hardware attached keyboard and trackpad, what are the actual material differences, not vague market segmentation, between a Mac and an iPad? If the iPad is only for content consumption, why does Apple sell one that stock is better than most of the Macs they sell? Why does Apple market and position the iPad Pro as a content creation device, why do they bother adding content creation features and multitasking improvements and so on to iPadOS, if it is not meant to be a content creation? If it is meant for content creation, why is it only the content that can be created in ways Apple deems allowed for the device you bought from them?
  - kcplate 2y ago
    You are only arguing from the “now state” and comparing device capabilities that have only existed for about 18 months since the M series chips came out. iPads of 14 years ago, even pro models pre-M chip would not be reasonable devices for development or MacOS. Original intent was information consumption. The design and form factor speaks to this as the primary function of the device. Sure as tech has lead to more powerful hardware, even where it has added content creation capabilities, they are still focused on content creation where the form factor is appropriate and doesn’t get in the way. The expectation that Apple should now consider the device and tune its software and OS to SWE is a pretty bold expectation. Frankly, most devs I know wouldn’t use the device for hardcore dev even if it ran MacOS. It would be useable for those few moments when you would not be behind a desk and need to code, emergency fixes and the like. Pretty sure Apple’s product team knows this and are not all that worried about that use case.