> But they advertise the iPad as a computer, and yet their software restrictions make it a portable TV.
That's not at all true. It's not useful for some subset of what certain geeks want to use it for. It's very useful for all the other things a highly portable computer hooked up to a bunch of really cool sensors and a very capable peripherals ecosystem is.
Ordinarily I'm all for arguments that we, as an industry (software developers, that is) are laughable failures, but I don't think we've failed so badly that computers are useless if you can't—for any reason, including personal inability or lack of interest—run (e.g.) Python on them.
I was speaking more generally than this specific issue, but things like not being able to mount file shares in a stable way (where the connection isn't dropped a bunch, although maybe that's a me issue and not a Files.app issue) are blockers to video editing with something like Premiere taking off on the iPad. No allowance of alternative browser engines means software like VSCode or Figma that rely on Electron would have to port bespoke versions to either entirely native apps or to Safari (which Microsoft has been doing with VSCode, but that's a lot of work for teams that chose to make their app an Electron app because it would save porting time). I'm more willing to excuse the second one because it has made it possible for a second browser engine that isn't built by Google, but it's still a factor.
It's more of a death by a thousand cuts scenario at this point rather than major things being completely missing from iPadOS, which is why it's painful to watch as they sell extremely powerful hardware that could be used for something cool if not for the darned restrictions.
Besides, I don't get the whole "can't do geek things on an iPad". I have an iPad Pro 2017 and I've:
- Run full linux on it (both emulated X86 and via WASM magic, via A-Shell and iSH, both on the App Store)
- Coded Python, C#, Javascript and Lua on it (via
Pythonista, Continuous, Scriptable and Codea) _and_ ran the code on the iPad itself
- Wrote blog posts for my old static site and pushed them to a git repo to publish them (via iA Writer for writing and Working Copy for Git)
- Connected via SSH and RDP to "real computers" (via the Remote Desktop app and Blink!, though there's many SSH clients on the AS)
- Used SFTP to transfer files to/from said computers/servers (via Secure Shellfish)
There's also an entire class of apps built upon the Shortcuts model, that allows you to extend and improve upon the Shortcuts (née Workflow, third party now first party) "coding model", which is very powerful and heavily integrated with the device and Apple services - though very different from "traditional" coding.
Is it a limited platform? Yes, absolutely.
Is it a general purpose computer? Yes, most definitely.
Can you do "geeky things" on it? Well, I've been doing them for years.
Can you run a full UNIX-like dev environment on it? Well, yes, with tricks. But why would you want to, when there's plenty of options that do it 1) natively 2) better? Use an iPad for what its purpose is, not for what a Mac's purpose is.
That's not at all true. It's not useful for some subset of what certain geeks want to use it for. It's very useful for all the other things a highly portable computer hooked up to a bunch of really cool sensors and a very capable peripherals ecosystem is.
Ordinarily I'm all for arguments that we, as an industry (software developers, that is) are laughable failures, but I don't think we've failed so badly that computers are useless if you can't—for any reason, including personal inability or lack of interest—run (e.g.) Python on them.