This is something I've been saying:
Try cloning and building even a moderate project from github on iSH on the latest iThing with Apple silicon and compare the same on a pinephone with a decade old budget SoC.
One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations.
You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone.
EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.
I hear this argument a lot, but I don't buy it. Let's flip it around, 99% of people will want to do something with their computer that will turn out to be a giant pain in the ass with an ipad compared to a mac or windows laptop.
If you had a friend/relative that didn't have much money, and was asking you for advice about which "computer" to get and they can only have one. Would you recommend an ipad? There is no chance I would recommend an ipad in this context.
Jobs liked to describe computers as bicycles for the mind. The ipad is a unicycle for the mind.
No, and you know what, neither would Apple, otherwise they wouldn't offer M1 Macs.
The mistake is that everyone thinks Apple wants its product to be everything, just because their marketing tends to encompass and emphasize bold claims of universality.
The reality is that Apple knows pretty well its segmentation.
The Pro in the iPad Pro is the same Pro of the iPhone, it simply doesn't mean what the average hackernews reader thinks it means.
The Pro is a videographer, a photographer, an influencer, a consultant and so on. In general, a subset of the creative professions or someone that needs a slick device to show its presentations on.
I'm lucky enough to review tech products for a living and I've been through the last seven generations of iPads. iPad Pro is a product of its own league. It's perfect for low-distraction pro tasks like writing, for example, with light research on the side, but it's absolutely the best device I've ever used for professional photography workflows.
I have, indeed, suggested to many photographers to absolutely buy the iPad Pro, as it's simply a game changer. The quality of the screen paired with the speed of the the AXX chips is unrivaled on Macs, unless you spend quite some money to buy a Eizo monitor or some other professional device.
So here's a simple "Pro" definition that in my book is way more effective at explaining why the iPad Pro does not need to be what so many users here think it should be.
I agree that the target market might be different. However, even though multimedia workflows work pretty well on the iPad, some of the same restrictions that apply to development apply there.
For example, there's no notion of rendering a video in the background, organizing project files independent of the application, a plugin ecosystem for creative software, and proper IPC between these apps. So even though the market is different, there's still a lot to be done to come close to desktop editing workflows.
I've always desired an iPad Pro for displaying PDFs of piano sheet music while practicing, because it's light enough to not damage the piano stand, and has a high resolution display. But then I realize the iPad Pro is kind of overkill if I don't intend to use it for anything else. Can you recommend a cheaper alternative? Maybe one of those e-paper things, or some other light tablet?
iPad Air? But any non-Pro iPad is ok if you don’t mind much about the bezels and the less spectacular display.
In general, if you have just one intended use for a tablet as a “smart lightweight device with a display”, and that use isn’t tied to an App Store app, then Android tablets are worth checking. The high-quality display might be a bit more of a problem, though, unless you go for a product with a similar price range. If you have other Apple products, the ecosystem advantage is huge.
Ah I didn't mention, for music purposes a big screen is ideal for reading letter/A4-sized sheets of fine-print music for long periods of time. It's a pretty niche use case, I guess.
I've tried that, unfortunately regular iPads are just too small for full-page display of musical notation. Actually right now I just prop up my MacBook Air, but then the keyboard sticks out, and similarly it only displays 1/2 page at a time, and so forth.
gotcha, that makes sense. You might be able to get a cheap chromebook with a big enough screen that folds into a tablet form. One thing to be careful with on these is the brightness of the screens if you want to use it outside.
Haven't you heard? Programming is the only "pro" or performance-intensive thing that exists.
I don't even understand why programmers are always so up in arms about devices like the iPad. Why on earth does one want to program on a handheld touchscreen device anyway? I have zero expectations for that, much like I have zero expectations for the laptop I do program on to be a good drawing device.
I don't get the huge blind spot there, either, and it's pervasive on here every time the iPad comes up.
"I can't boot an OpenBSD VM on it so it must only be for watching YouTube, for sheeple consumers, not godlike 'creators' like me".
Meanwhile it's plainly great for all kinds of creation-oriented activities, especially where the real-world meets the digital. The sensors are great. Pencil is great. It's a really good companion-tool for all kinds of real-world work, better than a laptop (though actually iPhones often beat both iPads and "real" computers, in that regard, just because of the form factor) Plus it's got some damn good, often-interactive educational apps, some of which work better on a tablet than they would anywhere else. Much the hell better for several of those things than any laptop running a "real OS for Serious Work".
But no, it's just a Netflix console for drooling morons, because you can't easily HAX0R it to replace the lock screen with a port of DOOM, since if you can't do that then it must not be any use for creating things. Give me a break.
The whole "this device isn't meant for programmers" argument is a red herring. I don't like how the discussion ultimately boils down to complete control over the OS. That's not going happen, and likely requires a different mental model around OS abstractions, so we should put that aside.
My original point was that productivity apps, whether its photo/video/audio editing, word processing, or 3D modeling, all categorically benefit from features like better file management, IPC, background processing, working with external displays, easier keyboard/trackpad navigation, etc...
I saw some things in the presentation around external storage and thunderbolt devices which look like steps in the right direction, but the OS is really not doing it any favors. I would guess that the iPad is successful among this demographic despite iPadOS, not because of it.
I always assumed that safari/youtube/netflix were the common use cases. Do numerically many people actually video/photo editing on these devices to make it "common"?
I make a (good) living working as an iOS developer on the video editing app (LumaFusion) shown several times in today's event. We have a very solid userbase, including plenty of people using it for professional work. Apple chose to use the app as a featured example in marketing the new iPad. To me, that's all evidence that video/photo editing is indeed a "common" use case for these devices.
Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.
Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.
Well, now, that's interesting. I legitimately did not know that, even though I own three Blackmagic PCC4k video cameras and take quite an interest in 'playback technology', whether audio or imagery. I do know that my horrifyingly over-expensive iMac Pro has a good screen, but not Pro Display XDR good. I'd assumed the iPads were basically consumer grade.
So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.
People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.
I do all my audio editing on the iPad. And I generate artwork (generally by mangling stock photos) on there. I also do a little bit of video editing but not enough to count it as a common use case.
It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).
For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.
It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.
As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things.
I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?
Well, I might say it's not fair because iSH is not your only choice on the iPhone, at least if your goal is "checking out a git repo and editing files." Running git clone using an actual iOS native git client like Working Copy is pretty fast. And because Working Copy is an iOS file provider, you can edit files in a repo directly in a native iOS text editor like Textastic. If we're talking about doing web development, pair that with a cheap Linode or Digital Ocean VPS, the Blink terminal app and/or Secure ShellFish (an SSH client that also hooks in SFTP/SCP in as a file provider along with Shortcuts automation) and you're probably doing pretty darn well.
Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :)
(Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)
As a heavy Working Copy user, with all the respect I have for its great developer, it is just a bad UX; Buggy, slow as hell, and you need to constantly wait for it as you can't minimize the app as the dumb iOS will kill it.
SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)
I'm not a huge fan of Working Copy's UI, although to be fair to it, I find a lot of desktop GUI Git clients to be pretty arcane as well. My experience with Blink has been pretty good on the whole, though. In any case, I was focusing on iSH specifically -- I'm just not convinced that "when I run this terminal program which is a clever hack to allow console Linux apps to run in x86 emulation, it's a poor experience" is a great argument against the iPad's utility. :)
But, I'll take gentle issue with
> the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro
I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.
sharing and building code is an important aspect of computing and making computers fundamental to people's lives while working to make them difficult to understand is very wrong. They don;t do it partly because it's so unpleasant.
Watch a commercial for the iPad. It is not marketed as a computing device, to do CLI programming or spreadsheets on. It's selling points are stuff like Procreate and Lightroom...both 'work' apps but for the 'creative economy'.
That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.
My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.
I own a pinkebook pro and it can't survive a kernel compilation (which is quite a normal thing to do for this device because it doesn't run on mainline kernel and requires patching) without dying from the battery drainage while plugged in.
But yes I would love it if the iPad Pro could just run macOS and i could actually use it as a software development environment, but also run iOS apps. I'd buy that device yesterday
One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations.
You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone.
EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.