Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

The allure of the iPad is that it's not macOS. It opens instantly, apps can't screw the system up ever (at worst you delete the app and re-install it), everything is neatly sandboxed, the UI is optimized for touch, etc.

And iPad with macOS would be unusable as a tablet with regular mac apps (macOS requires more precision control and has smaller targets), and at best would be a way to get a Mac to hook to a monitor and use with a mouse and keyboard. But you can already get a Mini for half the price, or an Air that also comes with a keyboard. So what exactly do you gain? Especially if they also come up with a M1 Macbook (no Air/Pro, the small version).

What Apple could do however, is further improve iPad OS multitasking and windowing use to make it better for multi-app workflows.

Already basic multitasking, window-tiling, drag and drop, and file Finder support, and USB-C have improved it dramatically for such purposes.

That said, Final Cut Pro, Logic, XCode and a Terminal would be nice additions...

The solution is to combine macOS and ipadOS on the iPad. So you can run iOS apps and macOS apps when one or the other is appropriate.

It maybe sounds weird but I have an Samsung tablet with Dex so I have experienced a little bit what this could be like. Without the keyboard attached, I run in regular Android mode but when I really want to get work done I connect a keyboard/mouse and switch to Dex to get a desktop experience. The downside to Dex is that the apps are still Android apps. But with macOS, you could have full Mac desktop apps running in a similar mode.

Besides the obvious reasons you mention above for why Apple doesn't put MacOS on the iPad, I think the other reason is slightly alluded to in the article: The device is not designed for that kind of computing in terms of battery size and thermal design. They've carefully constructed it to work with iOS.

> The device is not designed for that kind of computing in terms of battery size and thermal design

Thermal design, maybe, but the iPad Pro battery has higher capacity than the on in MacBook Air, and they share the same SoC.

2021 12.9” iPad pro is 40.88wh

2020 Macbook Air is 49.9wh

https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

I stand corrected. Pretty close though.

>So what exactly do you gain? Especially if they also come up with a M1 Macbook (no Air/Pro, the small version)

Fluidity of not having to carry or manage two devices would be the main attraction for me. M1 Mac's can already run iOS and iPad OS apps so there is no need for a dual boot mode. When I want the pure tablet experience I just stick to native iPad OS apps. When I need more power and flexibility, hook up a keyboard and track pad and now I can use MacOS apps effectively.

Heck if they actually paid a smidgen of attention to Mission Control it could easily provide the functionality to manage the different "modes" - at the minimum a macOS workspace vs. an iPad OS workspace.

The bits are there; are they motivated to do it? Probably not but it's still nice to dream about what it could be :p

I'm not sure if you remember but this was exactly the route that Windows 8 took and it was a giant failure. There was a "tablet" mode and a "Windows" mode with a start button. App developers couldn't figure out which one they wanted to optimize for and ended up making half-assed versions of their apps for both sides of the OS and end users were confused about which mode they needed to be in for which apps and how they could multitask to switch between them.

Power users didn't really have many issues as the paradigm isn't all that complex but, in daily usage, it was a big mess and it never made any headway. It was the first thing they got rid of in the first Windows 8 Service Pack. Apple knew that and saw it and I prefer their cautious approach and would be fully against what you're suggesting unless there are some major UI changes.

They could make it possible but a pain in the ass to run macos on the ipad. So normal users get a normal ipad that works great, and pros convert it in to a touch screen macbook.

If you jailbreak your iPad, there are tweaks that add real multitasking support and you can use a terminal. If that's not something you want to do, there's always the (very slow but really cool) https://ish.app/ that's an x86 emulator coupled with a syscall translation layer (like wine) so you can run lotsa Linux stuff on iOS.

A less flexible, but _much_ more performant option, is <a href="https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/">ashell.app</a>

Maybe an ipad subsystem for macOS/Linux for advanced users? Or opening Virtual Machine support?

RE your subsystem idea - you can run iOS/iPad OS apps on the new Apple Silicon Mac's today (as long as developers allow it).

I would disagree. To me its allure is what it could be. At this point it is a device for consumption (alabit a great device for that) and for the 0.001% who are artists.

A touch-screen Mac osX with an optional keyboard would a genually new thing from Apple.

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