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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?

The post makes it clear they’re making heavy use of multitasking and you’re isolating just one task then saying the CPU is overkill. I don’t think simultaneous note taking, Airplay display and remote control of a Mac was a solved problem in 2014.

And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.

He could have achieved all that even with an iPad Air. So again, my question is what is the relevance of the "pro" moniker?

The broader question is "is a desktop grade processor sold with a "pro" moniker being able to perform some basic PowerPoint and screensharing worth the $1000 asking price?"

And the answer is clearly yes for millions of people.

Wow, your comment history is just full on defence mode for Apple, hope the big corporation that doesn't care about you gets to see that.

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.

Why doesn’t Apple allow you to use native screen sharing to control other Macs on the iPad??? it is enraging

Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.

Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.

Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.

Microsoft tried to have one OS for two diff device types with very different UXs and how did that work out for them?

Sure, they don't like programmers, why not. Then who are the other users which could make use of iPads as powerful machine?

Gaming? It's complicated for them as well and I have the impression they also hate gamers.

Video editing? Maybe, but what does the latest CPU brings on the table for that compared to the other ones?

Office tools? The situation looks as miserable as programmers.

3D modeling? Maya3d/Blender/... aren't available and even if it would be, Apple would likely ban plugins, making it useless.

AI tools? Too locked down to work.

Do you suppose that Google or Samsung are self-consciously catering to my specific use case either? I don't. But an Android tablet is open enough that I can do what I want to do with it, and an iPad is not.

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.

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

You're right. The pro indeed is more expensive now. I bought mine with a trade in, so you're right.

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

> iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK

It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)

Ah, yeah, I guess I meant processes, indeed

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

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.

The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.

What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.

For simple tasks (someone pointed out a rental car agent doing the walk around photo taking and signature capturing) an iPad is great - its light weight is the main advantage. But if I was doing a walking-around task that was more complex, a convertible laptop that folds around (HP x360 for example) and runs a real OS is just more powerful. There’s nothing an iPad can do (besides being light) that wouldn’t be done better by such a device. (Assume here that Apple made an x360-shaped Mac, this argument isn’t about Windows vs Mac).

“Serious” computing would be using several applications that chain together to create an end product.

Case in point: authoring academic papers. If you have a local or self-hosted Zotero collection, you will want to cite them. Any desktop platform allows you to use [word processor of choice] and Zotero together fairly seamlessly.

This is a big kludge on iPadOS where you keep switching back and forth between Pages/Word and Zotero to paste in a citation key, which then makes it untenable long-term because the attention break is too great.

Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.

I mean, yes, they did position it for this. But it’s surprising that anyone has taken them seriously, and to me it’s surprising that anyone has signed up for all the homework it takes to find and perform the workarounds to every one of its dozens of self-imposed limitations in order to force it to work.

Like, even as simple as positioning windows on the screen. On a Mac, you don’t need to ask how, you just drag and size them where you want. On an iPad, even with Magic Keyboard and trackpad, same basic input devices, it requires a bunch of learning to vaguely approximate what every Mac user has been doing for 42 years. And until like 1 year ago, there weren’t even window-like things, only weird alternative paradigms to learn and accept.

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