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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS, like Windows, has fundamental latency and battery use issues that can't be easily fixed without sacrificing backwards compatibility.

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What latency are you talking about? Decent PC or Mac with SSD is much faster than iPad and can hold battery trough ~9 hours (depends on a workflow).

You should look at benchmarks of latest iPad Pro vs. Mac laptops. iPad Pro is faster than lower end Mac laptops and only a little bit slower than MacBook Pros.

Why does graphics performance matter for programming? (Game design excluded of course)

Only in benchmarks. Look at the workflow presented in article. There is no builds required nor CPU heavy processing. But there is a lot of switching between applications, multi windows etc. iOS UI is not prepared for this kind of workflow. Even the newest improvements on iPad Pro are far away from being as useful and as fast as on normal laptop.

Sorry, I misunderstood you. The way you phrased your earlier comment ("Mac with SSD") made me think you were talking about hardware performance.

On macs with without SSD UX is lagy

Interactive latency. Being able to type and have it appear on the screen instantly, reliably.

> Decent PC or Mac with SSD is much faster than iPad

Yes, but speed isn't latency and hardware speed is irrelevant.

My DOS-based 286-12 had better latency than my Surface Book and MacBook Air do, mainly because DOS has no (or very little) multitasking. My iPhone also has excellent latency as it limits the APIs available to background tasks, stopping the typical 'Windows Search Service' (or any other random background executable) killing foreground performance.

I'm sorry I haven't use Windows for a while but there latency, as you call it, is much better on Linux/MacOS based machines than on iOS. Switching between windows without waiting, multitasking all those, and more, things are much better on computer.

If you use a mid range windows or mac like the article author uses an ipad pro, meaning nothing running in the background and no high cpu build steps on the machine itself, then latency and battery life would be excellent.

The ipad is not magical. Were you to run actual dev workloads on the machine itself it would be sluggish with terrible battery life.

what do you mean by "latency"?

It's the action-response time. I this case the delay time for interactive activities, such as the delay between pressing a key and seeing the letter appear on the screen. Even 'fast' desktops can be intermittently rubbish at this due to background tasks saturating the CPU or I/O channels.

OP here, this is exactly what I meant.

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