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Interesting from a cost perspective but I hope it doesn’t introduce any oddities in software compatibility. There’s already things the M chip series iPads can
by steveBK123 1y ago
Interesting from a cost perspective but I hope it doesn’t introduce any oddities in software compatibility.
There’s already things the M chip series iPads can do that the A chip series can’t.
- xattt 1y agoThe new multitasking features (movable windows, pseudo-desktop environment) of iPadOS might be telegraphing an “iBook” line-up. Meanwhile, the MacBook stays with the M chips.
- msgodel 1y agoOSX could run just fine on the iPad today. There's no technical limitation, there's nothing to develop (nothing non-trivial anyway.) OSX does not run on the iPad because it would give iPad users an escape from profitable "value add."
- ch_sm 1y agoAlso, it doesn‘t run on iPads because it would be very difficult to use all these mouse and keyboard centric UIs with only your finger.
- msgodel 1y agoNah. I used a phone for two years running Linux with FVWM and mostly VTE apps. If anything keyboard driven UIs are nicer on touch screens since the controls don't slide over each other all the time. Most people think they would be bad because they haven't tried them.
- burnerthrow008 1y agoBut macOS is not primarily a keyboard driven UI?
- xeonmc 1y agoImagine if iPad gains a Windows Continuum-like morphing desktop functionality when docked with peripherals and a monitor. They could name the feature . . . Continuation?
- RandomThoughts3 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dagmx 1y agoWhat differences in capabilities would there be? The cores are identical, it’s largely the topology that’s different.
- geoffpado 1y agoI/O seems to be the big one. The M1 has Thunderbolt support, the A18 Pro does not. This would majorly limit the resolution of external displays this MacBook could drive, for example. And the base-model M1 was already pretty limited in that capacity already.
- abracadaniel 1y agoApple has a history of gating external displays behind higher price points. Seems reasonable they’d do it again.
- zaptrem 1y agoDon’t quote me on this but I think the A series also lacks support for virtualization.
- dagmx 1y agoSure but that doesn’t affect software compatibility which was what the person I responded to was talking about. There’ll be hardware compromises of course, but software should run fairly uniformly.
- steveBK123 1y agoThere’s definitely some underlying differences seemingly I/O focused that impacts what apps can do beyond simple lack of thunderbolt. For example Elektron a company that makes synths has some software that runs on Macs and are porting it to iPad. They have it running in beta at conferences. It does audio/data/midi of sorts of USB. They have explicitly stated it will only work on M chips for some reason related to underlying OS limitations. It’s also my understanding that apps in the App Store need to be explicitly enabled by developers for A & M series compatibility. So there’s something different enough to allow devs to disable / enable.