At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.

I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying. Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:

> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.

That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.

Hard agree.

Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.

I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.

And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.

Very much agree with you, but I’m pretty surprised that you even bought the M4 given that all these limitations blocking the iPad from its potential have been there since the first iPad Pro first made the claim that it could be on par with a general purpose machine.

And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).

Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D

I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.

Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.

"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO

This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.

if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.

Yeah, I’ve had a similar experience. Even the features of iPadOS that work are buggy. iPadOS is a nerfed buggy mess compared to macOS

You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.

I don’t understand why users even went to iOS-based devices as a daily driver for more serious computing. They need to be seen as appliances.

You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.