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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

I wish the iPad had a useful OS rather than just a magnified iPhone. It should be the apple equivalent of the surface.

Apple will keep iterating it until it's almost as good as a real OS but they get to control the walled garden and collect the 30% tax from the entire ecosystem inside it. They'll get there eventually, it's a very profitable long term strategy. They have absolutely no interest in encouraging adoption of a free and open internet where they don't get to collect their rent.

Right. The fact that iOS is so crippled compared to OSX is putting me off buying one.

CPU architecture I assume is the reason these things cannot run OSX.

>The fact that iOS is so crippled compared to OSX is putting me off buying one.

That's its main allure.

If one just wants a computer to run arbitrary OS with desktop-like experience there are tons of them, it doesn't even have to be a tablet.

I too see this as an advantage; sometimes I want to develop and tinker, sometimes I need to to get work done that does not require that freedom but does require: stability, focus, long battery life etc and for that the iPad pro with keyboard is perfect (in my opinion). I had a Surface Pro and for that ‘just work’ kind of experience it sucks in my experience; updates, crashes, battery life etc. It turns out 80% of my work can be done really well on the iPad Pro and I indeed find myself using it far more than my laptop these days. I think a combination has to screw up that experience as it has for all other more free devices besides maybe Android but there is no iPad quality hardware for Android.

Nothing in the CPU architecture would prevent porting MacOS if they wanted to. However I suspect that Apple has a long-term plan to phase out MacOS and the Macintosh hardware line. They'll enhance iOS and iPad to make that platform meet the needs of content creators, not just content consumers. That would allow them to simplify their product catalog rather than maintaining two totally separate lines.

CPU arch. would be the least of the problems. They can do roughly the same trick they did with the PowerPC -> Intel switch years back.

The problem is that you cannot just put a keyboard/mouse centric on a touch device. The entire UX will crumble down. Same story the other way around.

Small things like buttons and textfields need to be bigger and more spaced out. Entire panels need to be redesigned as the control density is lower. To get the same quality of UX you need to design for both interface methods.

iOS suffers the same when attaching a keyboard to an iPad. A lot of small things like workflow shortcuts and navigating the control space with just a keyboard just don't work (yet). Forcing you in either a touch-only mode or having to switch between keyboard and touch constantly.

> CPU architecture I assume is the reason these things cannot run OSX.

Not, the fact that it's taboo to control every single app binary and extract 30% tax on everything on macOS is what's making Apple not port OS X.

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