| ▲ | LeoPanthera 11 hours ago |
| I have an 11" iPad and the screen still feels too small to use windowed apps. It gets very cramped very quickly. I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not. |
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| ▲ | rock_artist 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable. |
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| ▲ | 650REDHAIR 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem. | | |
| ▲ | runjake 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | File a Feedback request to make the “external monitor support” available on iPhone and iOS. This is essentially the equivalent of Dex for iOS. The more people that file, the more likely it is to happen. | |
| ▲ | wjnc 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did). Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy. Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products. | | |
| ▲ | Topfi 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Historically, cannibalizing has always been the right choice when it comes to such things. That was a major point of the first iPhone, that it was a full replacement for your iPod, which was instrumental in its success. All this thinking does is cloud ones judgement and let competitors succeed. Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted. | | |
| ▲ | wjnc 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We agree. Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift? The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple. | |
| ▲ | nerdsniper 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That said, the iPhone was more expensive than the iPod, and replaced 1 Apple device (plus a device made by someone else like Nokia) with 1 alternative Apple device. This had an expected increase in revenue per customer. Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook. | | |
| ▲ | close04 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals. They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs. The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell. | | |
| ▲ | Topfi 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs. The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard. | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode. Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades. Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most of its size, I think, comes from the device emulator images. | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure of that. It stores that stuff in a different container. [UPDATE:] I just looked at the contents. The single biggest component is the toolchains (Swift, SourceKit, etc). The next biggest components, are the platforms (which may be used to construct simulator images). These are all wrapped into the app, itself. |
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| ▲ | close04 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen. Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation. |
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| ▲ | imiric 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS. Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would they spend a bunch of money to trade sales of one of their products for another? |
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| ▲ | jen729w 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Naked robotic core. |
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| ▲ | Someone 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not. Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad. marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.” The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method? |
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| ▲ | eptcyka 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They call it a different name. They want you to think those are two distinct things. They barely are. It's all to ensure that the EU doesn't get it's grabby fingers onto iPads too, as they don't have a big enough market to be forced to open up the app store. Please don't labor for free to improve the PR of a billion dollar company :) | |
| ▲ | ChocolateGod 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yet somehow some "tech journalists" are branding this as "how to flash iPadOS onto an iPhone". As you said, it's obvious that both iOS and iPadOS are compiled from the same source tree with different features levels enabled. The difference is purely marketing. |
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| ▲ | tombert 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I did an awful lot with my GPD Win 2, which was running vanilla desktop Ubuntu. The tiny display did require a bit of getting used to, but it was a lot of fun to have a tiny little thing that could fit in my pocket that I could write code while on the train. Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble. |
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| ▲ | rado 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, on 13" it's just about right |
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| ▲ | alentred 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ha, curious how preferences vary from a person to person. Even on my MacBook Air I am using apps in full-screen almost all the time. About the only time I drag windows around is when I need Finder (preview, drop a file, etc.), or when I plug an external 24" display :D | | |
| ▲ | stavros 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same, no matter the display, I just use maximised windows. This also means that I can't really use a second screen. |
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| ▲ | Razengan 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way. People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option. |
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| ▲ | tecoholic 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. I remember a post shared here a while ago, someone with just an Android phone developed some really cool Neovim plugin that became popular enough that people were pitching in to buy him a laptop. |
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