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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I am always amazed how the user experience of an iPad mini (~USD 400) is much better than a top end 13" Windows based notebook (~USD 2700). I know I am comparing apples with oranges in term of running processes and multitasking but the foreground app experience is much better.

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My uninformed hunch: There's likely a lot to be said for 1) requiring all apps to use a single modern GUI toolkit, and 2) optimizing that toolkit for the use case of touch. Rather than having a single codebase that's supposed to solve all use cases in addition to 30 years of baggage.

Most of it is running a single app at a time, with far less complexity than a desktop system.

Note that at any given moment there's usually a couple dozen daemons running in the background on iOS. And while iPhone will only show one app at once, iPad can do a handful.

iOS optimizes here too, by limiting how much CPU/IO background apps can use. It's frustrating to use Chromecast (for example) on iOS since it's always disconnecting from the receiver.

I'm talking about background daemons from the system, which have different resource limits.

the background daemons are mostly memory-limited, not processor-limited.

Fair. And to be honest, many of them are present on macOS too, without Jetsam around to kill them ;)

Apple fires a lot of customers as well, to stay focused on a narrower set of problems.

And we spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about that (nobody likes rejection).

> optimizing that toolkit for the use case of touch.

iPadOS seems to be good enough with mouse pointer and keyboard input too now.

Comparing apples to windows?

ios to windows; apple to microsoft;

I understand the relationships— it was merely a play on words.

Correction was not my intent. Apologies. I didn't really think through communicating my intent when I wrote the comment. I was actually hoping to elicit someone else chiming in with a clever comparison. Alas...

Dust to dust?

Unless you have to manage files, use a mouse, or install software that isn't on the app store.

I don't know what too end laptops you were looking at but I suspect there are more options there than the one you chose.

Mouse support is quite good as of April.

iOS 13 supports local USB hard drives and network shares well enough.

Supports mouse and fileanagement poorly. File management on iOS is a disaster. I love my iPad pro I detest iOS.

The file browser is a new feature right? Perhaps it will get better soon. The new pro ipads seem like a push to replace some laptop usage which would require a file browser.

The file browser to support iCloud and third party apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and on device storage has been around for awhile. UsB Drive and file shares came out last year.

Let's say you want to work in a Google drive folder when making a file so that it's always backed up, like you would on a PC.

You open procreate and have to share/import/export with Google each time. The automatic backup thing I use drive for doesn't seem to work. The files aren't really backed up until they're reshared with Google drive, circumventing the whole point of automatic backups as I'm working.

The file browser is a workaround that lets you drag files but the basic functionality is ruined.

Procreate should support the UIDocumentBrowserViewController

When you open a file within Procreate, it should give you an option within the app to choose Google Drive or whatever other storage provider you have install and load and save files to Google Drive from within the app.

It works for Office.

can confirm does not work in procreate.

The API was introduced in June 2017 at WWDC. There is really no reason for Procreate not to support the functionality.

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