can't on latest ipad os, at least not without a jailbreak first? at least as far as I can tell, from UTM's own documentation. wish it was a developer option at least.
>If you are running iOS 14.0, 14.1, 14.4, or higher: UTM works if you are jailbroken or semi-tethered with Jitterbug, AltJIT, or Jitstreamer. “Semi-tethered” means either tethered to a Mac/PC, to another iOS device with Wifi sharing, or to itself (one iOS device running both Jitterbug/AltJIT and UTM) through a on-device VPN profile.
Seems like with iOS 14+, and as of writing it seems like we're on iOS 17, it needs to be jailbroken? Do Jitterbug, Jitstreamer, AltJIT, work for developer accounts?
Photoshop for iPad shipped in 2019 and still to this day is half-baked garbage that you can’t do anything productive with. Photopea is more useful on the iPad and it’s a web app.
Sure, there's a lot of great choices for professional photo editing — Affinity Photo, Adobe Lightroom, Darkroom, Pixelmator Photo, etc. I just wanted to make @falcolas's specific dream come true.
Any device you cannot program yourself is a toy. Apple understands this, hence the pivot to entertainment rental services like Apple TV, Apple News, Apple Music etc.
Despite the name, Swift Playgrounds is surprisingly capable. It is much more than just a child's play thing and learning tool. I use it all the time to prototype ideas or whip up quick programs to solve an immediate problem when I'm away from my Mac. It even supports submitting SwiftUI apps to the App Store (with some limitations of course).
> Any device you cannot program yourself is a toy.
That has to be one of the dumbest of dumb takes.
A car is a toy. A fridge is a toy. A spaceship is a toy.
(Hint: Those are all controlled by predefined knobs and bits and not ""programmable"" by the user. If your argument is that you can rip open a car and do whatever you want with it, well, nothing's really stopping you from doing the same to an iPad or iPadOS, if you can figure out how to do it.)
It's a common POV on this site and I don't get it at all. All I can figure is there are a bunch of folks who think the only useful thing you can do with computers is make software for computers, so if a computer's anything less than excellent for that specific purpose, it's just a toy.
Meanwhile everything important in my actual life that involves a computer takes place on my phone (an iPhone, the greatest bogey-man for that crowd, as far as I can tell) or on some purpose-specific device of one sort or another. Zero percent of it happens on a "real" computer—their role in my personal life is entirely toy-like.
TL;DR: Removed monitor from a MacBook, made a mount for a removable iPad in sidecar mode to act as its monitor instead.
It's not really what I was expecting. The appeal seems to be if you hate having an attached monitor for some reason. You can do the same thing without removing the monitor, and then you have two monitors.
"I’d accidentally create the hybrid Apple computer of my dreams."
And of other people's nightmares. A macbook and an ipad frankensteined together into an actual laptop?
Sorry, it's a good hack and all, but definitely not for me.
An ipad that's actually internally a macbook, running the full unix-like system, to which you can attach a keyboard of your choice, is more likely what people have in mind as the solution here. use it like an ipad when you just want to read, then stick it on the keyboard dock to do work. Actually let's make it an ipad that's actually a thinkpad or framework; something less coercive than apple or microsoft.
Honestly I'd just want an iPad as it is today + a built in, sandboxed VM running macOS. So I can run macOS apps when needed (Basically Xcode/terminal/slack for me) and for everything else, I'd use iPadOS. Plug it into a monitor/keyboard and it just runs the macOS VM.
I just want a Windows Surface-like device that runs iPadOS when detached from its keyboard (as the current iPad is now with its keyboard case) and when attached, it runs macOS. Is that so difficult? But of course, why sell you only one device when Apple can sell two?
You could get an iPad Pro (or even a regular iPad) and remote into a cloud Mac.
If people wanted what you described, then Surfaces would be skyrocketing. However it looks like according to MSFT that Surface sales are sinking, which might explain why the previous head has left Microsoft:
Exactly. I also used to have a Surface (both the regular one and a Book 3) but the smaller screen of the former and the higher cost and weight, and lower performance, of the latter made me buy a MacBook. The form factor appeal is there for the Surface, it's just death by a thousand cuts in terms of their other problems. I never had an issue with Windows development however, as I generally used WSL 2.
Yes, that's basically it. Microsoft had the right idea they were just too early on it and cannot put as much money into it as Apple does. And they don't have a competitive enough chip to choose from their partners.
If either Intel or AMD gets there, Apple will get some much-needed competition.
> If people wanted what you described, then Surfaces would be skyrocketing.
But isn't Apple in somewhat of a unique position given that they're the only company that develops a popular tablet OS and a popular desktop OS? Microsoft has Windows Subsystem for Android, but it looks like it only runs apps from the Amazon Appstore [1].
If there was an Apple device similar to the discontinued Surface Book that ran iPadOS and MacOS, I would be intrigued. Using an iPad as a display for a Mac is cool, but it would be nice to run MacOS locally.
Unlike Windows Subsystem for Linux which is thriving, Google's stranglehold on Android via its Play Store renders any attempt to integrate Windows and Android non-viable.
Apple's shown some willingness in the past to cannibalize their own sales (the iPod is a prime example), so my take is less pessimistic than yours. Though I also really want such a device (at least in theory), I think it's likely there are a lot of technical hurdles and trade-offs Apple finds unacceptable.
You'll know they're maybe thinking about it when iPadOS gets multiple accounts.
Until then, it's hard to define the right thing for such a device to do when it's logged in to a second account on macOS and you un-dock it.
You'd also take a pretty big hit in disk use for such a dual-OS device, until they do a ton more work to unify a lot of their software (I'm thinking not just of the OS, but their office suite and other programs).
iOS/iPadOS is the future. Ever iteration macOS becomes more iOS like.
The compute model is changing. I am now old and enjoy doing computers the "old way." I watch younger people wizzing through apps on an iPad and they are able to do 85% of what I can do on a desktop—and if I'm being honest they can often arrive at the same output faster.
There are tons of exceptions, of course. No terminal, limited filesystem access, no Xcode, applications like Photoshop and Final Cut run with a limited feature set, etc.. The list is actually quite long. But every year the list gets shorter.
Somewhere in a room at the Apple spaceship is a chart that has all three OSes converging under a single OS, probably aptly called OS. I'm sure they keep pushing the date off into the future, but it will happen. The numbers are really getting up there too—macOS 14, iOS 17, etc.. If I had to guess, there will be no iOS 20. We will get AppleOS v1.0 instead.
They don't need to create it - they have the iPad with a detachable keyboard. What you've created is an unnecessary duplication of effort and an incredible expense for any user who would try to buy it, if it existed.
The real take away is that apple should sell a keyboard and trackpad combo that is laid out like a macbook body, not that they should make a hybrid device
Many of those buttons look like they'd be horrible to actually use. They give you same sized arrow keys, but tiny tilde/right brace/slash? I can see I wouldn't be doing much development on it.
It is interesting the choices they made, I just grabbed my partners Magic Keyboard to compare to my 16" MacBook Pro.
Most of the space difference seems to come to the smaller space bar. Tab, caps, and shift on left and delete, return, and shift on right. And the brackets, plus, and minus.
Other than that, the actual letters seem identical.
One thing i imagine is missing is the weight aspect. The weightiness of a macbook pro makes a solid typing experience that is missing from a lot of laptops and keyboards
For the keyboard + trackpad maybe, although you would be likely damaging the screen in the long run. I also have a lenovo yoga and it spends very little time flipped. It is just too heavy to be used as a tablet regardless of the UI (gnome3 works quite well for that.
I used a Comodore 64 plugged into a black and white TV as a kid. This would be the same kind of thing. Sure, an iPad could be the monitor, but so could your TV, or an actual monitor. A computer with storage and input device as a single unit, but without a monitor.
That is quite different from an iPad with detachable keyboard, or even a Microsoft Surface Book (which had auxiliary computing in the keyboard / base, but the CPU and storage was with the display.
I have long been torn on the idea of touch screen on a Mac. I feel like by now Windows should have shown us that the different ways in controlling the OS leads to problems and just doesn't mesh well.
You end up with buttons that are way to large to allow for finger taps that make no sense with a mouse, so a lot of wasted space.
Forcing stupid gestures and UI animations that make zero sense with a keyboard and mouse.
And of course, the fact that you have legacy applications that will never be updated to fully support it (and likely even new ones) and the experience will never be great.
A single device that is meant to be fully usable with a k/m and touch screen is always going to be a compromise for one (or both) setups. At least iPad OS while you can attach a k/m (with decent results if really not how it was designed to be used) the OS is clearly touch first.
I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both with the respect that each input method deserves. The only way I really see that possible is if the OS forces every application to use built in libraries for navigation, buttons, etc (and I mean force!, like it would not run if you don't use it) and the OS then shifts between the 2. But even then you could not naturally switch between, oh I am typing but let me just press this button on the screen because the OS would be on a specific mode.
Its easy to say that Apple just wants to sell us another device, but let's not forget that Microsoft tried and failed... horribly... And we still see the problems with this idea in Windows 11.
I’m not sold on the idea of touch on laptops either, particularly since it often comes with compromises that make the display worse at its traditional job — large touch-sensitive screens are typically glossy and have some of the worst antiglare coating I’ve ever encountered, to which the iPad is not exempt (treating glass to be both oleophobic and antiglare must be cost prohibitive beyond smartphone sizes or something), as well as visible touch sensitive wire matrices which is commonly seen on touchscreen PC laptops.
I think the idea would be better implemented by a second screen on a swiveling laptop lid. This allows the user to signal to the OS to toggle touch specializations by way of closing or swiveling the lid and lets the main display remain a great no-compromises traditional laptop display.
I've been using a laptop/tablet with Windows 11 and touchscreen for a while now. It has many problems and is so janky and is really annoying sometimes and it's also so much better than being without it.
I really think this is the big issue. No disrespect to people who feel differently, but I do not use the touchscreens on laptops for anything substantial. I had one, for years, and I used it probably a handful of times for actual tasks, and the vast majority of the time, it was to like... dismiss a dialog box when I wasn't actually using the machine and was standing over it to where the mouse was out of reach.
A mouse is fast, precise, and most importantly, does not block the screen with itself while in use. Your hand is none of those things, and unless you use the screen in the exact same orientation in the exact same place day after day, you'll find it markedly harder to develop muscle memory with regard to it. And, if your software updates, all that could go out the window anyway. A mouse feels like a mouse, barring some hardware change. Once you have your settings dialed in, you know on an instinctual, unconscious level how far it takes to get from here to there.
Add to it, even the most basic mouse has two discreet actions- left and right click- out of the box. The shittiest mouse you can find has those two buttons, and these days, probably a third too with the mouse wheel click. A touch is a touch, unless it's a long-press (but don't move your hand by mistake, or it's now a drag) or if you touch with two or more fingers (but that might also mean you want to touch two things? And if you add any lateral movement at all the software will struggle even more.)
And all of that happens with zero feedback to the user. Touch screens have a much harder time implementing haptics, and you could use sound but not everyone is going to be comfortable with that.
Don't get me wrong, I love my phones and my tablets. But I have no desire at all for touch features on any of my computers, Mac or Windows or Linux. It's just not a good interface for when I need to Get Shit Done.
I use a convertible laptop for taking handwritten notes, annotating PDFs, "prototyping" plots, and occasional drawing. I tried navigating the OS using touch, but it is pretty inconvenient and, in my case, not very ergonomic.
Oh yeah, I have a Kindle Scribe my wife got me for my birthday and it's bloody amazing for taking quick notes and making doodles, diagrams, that sort of thing. But I have no desire to use that interface on my entire machine. It's a specific tool good for specific things.
> And all of that happens with zero feedback to the user. Touch screens have a much harder time implementing haptics
AOSP has a feature which shows every tap the system registers as a fading circle. It's part of the dev-mode options but it really should be included in the display- or accessibility- features, it makes the system a whole lot more usable than the default of showing no feedback whatsoever. Knowing instantly where the tap has registered makes for a huge increase in accuracy and overall confidence with the UI.
Besides, the best implementation of advanced "discreet actions" on touchscreens probably involves gestures (like the secret unlock pattern on AOSP) or radial/pie menus.
My understanding is that what most people want out of a MacPad is not necessarily the Mac UI on iPad form factor, but Mac capabilities. iPad has a Pro model but iOS doesn't have a Pro edition that lets one use their iPad as a fully capable computing device like any other PC.
Basically an iPad that is not just a big iPhone but a capable computer in iPad form factor, not necessarily one that uses MacOS even.
> Why shouldn't I be able to run software that works on my M2 MBP?
Well, there's the technical reason which is that the userland of MacOS and iPadOS aren't the same.
But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized.
>But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized.
The iPad Pro is heavily marketed as a device to create things.
It does, just not the same workflow you use on the mac. I use my iPad Air, for drawing, writing and it's great. But can't imagine having something like Swinsian, Audacity, or Calibre on it without heavily modifying their UIs.
Well you just a sweeter your own question. They may not want the UI, but to function the same you need the UI. Do this only strengthens the argument you replied to
I had a touchscreen laptop in one work environment, and like others, very rarely used the touch interface. It's actually surprisingly tiring to use for more than touching a button or scrolling, and I only use it for that over a mouse if I wasn't at the keyboard (if I was off to the side writing in a notebook or something). I have certainly never missed having the feature.
I think this project is cool but it looks like a lot of annoyances compared to just having a macbook plus ipad, and doesn't really seem more portable than a normal macbook plus ipad.
It's surprising how often people advocate for interfaces that require more muscle movement to do the same thing. I regularly use a pen display for drawing, and even with a tool that is more precise than finger touch input and optimized ergonomically for long art sessions I still regularly switch back to a mouse or even laptop touchpad when interacting with anything outside of a purpose-built art program.
I no longer have it but for quite a while I used a touch screen Windows laptop. I found touch useful and natural for some actions. I never expected to use it for everything. No worries about gorilla-arm.
For me it was about having a mix of interaction methods. Sometimes would use touch, sometimes mouse or trackpad, and sometimes keyboard. It was all very situational. Actions like scrolling, dragging, and tapping buttons lend themselves to touch. Fiddling with forms or small UI elements may need a pointing device. Editing text works best with a keyboard. It's about options.
In addition, I felt that being able to switch methods meant less RSI as I wan't using the same movements as much. I was never bothered that some UI elements were too small for touch because I was always ready to switch to a pointer when it was called for.
I do the same now on an iPad Pro that almost all the time sits in a keyboard case next to a mouse. I am constantly switching between those and sometimes picking up the pencil, too.
it might not be for everyone but I would like the option to do that on Mac OS as well.
A friend of mine has owned Windows laptops for years. She's constantly trying to do pinch-to-zoom on the screen of my MBP when I'm showing her something. She gets super frustrated at how backwards my computer is. I can see how that feature would be nice to have.
But yeah, an entirely touch-first laptop experience would be terrible. At the same time a no-touch laptop experience seems to be suboptimal these days. Philosophical design extremes usually aren't the best.
I have a Dell with that, wasting power and forcing glossy on me—there was no other option. Hands on keyboard more efficient, so have used it twice in five years maybe. A waste imho.
Dell Inspiron with 4k Screen? I had a work provided one and I kept forgetting it was a touch screen. The screen was nice, but I never found a use for the touch part. A pen (Microsoft Surface laptops) is a better idea. as you can keep the same UI.
And yet, with a touch screen laptop I did use it extensively without needing to change the UI as I never used it exclusively. People use different features differently. Not particularly profound but still pertinent.
I think being forced to buy a thing that degrades the experience in some way (battery/reflection) is worse than not allowing it for folks that might use it.
Would be great if we all had options, but perhaps not economical.
I found touch really useful for taking notes (OneNote) and for drawing (Clip Studio Pro) - and that's it. I could try to build some Star Trek-like giant touch UI, but never found it useful to use touch for apps that work better with keyboard/mouse.
So yeah, I agree that I wouldn't want a Windows or macOS device that uses touch for the primary UI, I just want touch-enabled apps that make good use of a pen, on a device that has a proper keyboard/trackpad for everything else.
Arguably, the Wacom Cintiq already solved that issue completely. I did think that the Surface Studio were the most interesting Surface products, though the price wasn't attractive.
The GNOME built-in apps seem to work just fine in touchscreen mode. Yes the buttons and window titlebar are larger, but not too much. (And there are ongoing 'tweaks' that allow for a better use of the resulting space; e.g. the large, touch-usable titlebar now has a room for a subtitle and a few app-specific buttons.) The clearest issue with GNOME on touchscreens right now is that it ships with a crappy on-screen keyboard, missing many of the PC keys (which leads to usability issues with many apps) and a lot less usable than what you can get on AOSP.
I have a touch enabled Chromebooks and when you change to a tablet mode the interface changes in front of your eyes to be more tablety. It is actually quite nice.
I don't think people want to fudge the different interaction styles together. I think they just want to have both experiences out of the same hardware.
I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware.
It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience.
It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!).
macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason.
There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)
Historically, that was basically coping with the fact that mobile devices would ship with low amounts of RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage, so they couldn't really have swap space. One would think that the latter factor is a lot less important nowadays, since storage size and quality has improved with things like UFS.
I thought Apple had the perfect groundwork, at least from UI elements, to make the single device work.
My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode.
It seemed like Apple was laying a lot of ground work, and it made so much sense to me that they’d do this. This was many, many years ago. I’ve since given up thinking they’ll do this.
I thought the same thing about the iPhone, even before the iPad. Once it got fast enough, allow it to plugin to a dock and use a normal desktop with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Some Android devices have since come out that do this, but I think Apple is in a much better position to make something happen.
> My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode.
AKA Windows 8.
That's how you got the worst of both worlds. First thermal issues. Then a whole slew of conditional statements. And one of the things I like about desktop apps is having multiple windows because you don't have to make everything big for touch interaction.
Windows 8 seemed to force it more with the full screen start menu and all the other stuff, even when the user didn't have a touch screen.
I rarely, if ever, use full screen apps in macOS, so in the model I described, I wouldn't notice any changes (in theory). Similarly, someone who only used a touch device shouldn't see any major differences vs normal iPadOS. Though I'm sure when fulling vetting this out and looking into all the edge cases, there would likely be a lot of little issues that would need to be solved or lead to compromises.
Windows 8 went overboard and tried to force the touch idea, even when it didn't make sense... like removing the start button from Windows Server and relying on hot corners, which was hell with RDP.
That was probably thought about at some point but the thing is that Apple makes way too much money as it is to try anything, because they don't have to, at least for now.
I'm pretty sure Apple's leadership knows about this possibility and there are even some prototypes most likely but they conveniently rejected the idea because it would mean selling less devices.
Even if they price the combo higher than their laptops current it would still make less money overall (especially since they already got the prices so high there is very little room to push for more, as falling mac sales attest).
This is basically the same reason the iPad never got a multi-user mode even though it should be relatively easy to implement since they have all the basics in macOS already.
I think Apple is blinded with money and is being way too complacent, ignoring that they are in fact losing customers to more modern 2/3-in-1 devices, especially in the young/students demographics, just like they lost customers because of their lack of interest in PC gaming. And since they make it extremely hard to integrate their stuff with other products, people won't renew their Apple hardware overtime, since it's an easy decision considering for how much they sell their stuff.
And I think they are way too proud to admit that Microsoft was actually right with their Surface, for most people it is actually a much better device since a tablet isn't that useful in the end. If all you want is entertainment, a cheap Android tablet with a decent screen is all you need. The iPad Pros as they exist, are way too overpriced for their real capabilities and at this point are terrible value.
If Intel or AMD successfully make a competent power efficient chip in the near future, they will be only Apps left as an "advantage". Considering many of the powerful iPad apps are stripped down versions of the fully featured versions available on "legacy" computing platforms, that's not saying much.
Touchscreen is great, touchscreen first UIs are not. I use a touchscreen laptop and the number of times I subconsciously try and tap/scroll/pinch the screen when I use macbooks is frustrating. It is such an improvement over trackpad and a nice compliment to keyboard+mouse
I've got the admit, this looks a bir ridiculous. However, if Apple had a MAcBook shell (keyboard+screen+battery) that, in place of the trackpad you can snap in your iPhone, it would be awesome. For the life of me I don't understand why somebody does not create such a phone-turns-into-laptop thing (it was tried by Motorola some years ago but never caught on).
Samsung phones have a feature like this (DeX I think it’s called?) but it’s a bit kneecapped by the selection of apps available for Android. It’d be more useful if when plugged into dock, a Linux desktop with GNOME or KDE or something is what appears.
Steam Deck does this. It's a touch screen + joystick (btw I love the double-trackpad onscreen keyboard, better even than using the touch screen), that becomes a KDE desktop when docked.
Well, sort of. Under normal operation it requires a (fast) system reset to switch between desktop and "handheld" modes. However, you can open Big Picture (the handheld mode) from desktop mode, it's just not as gaming-focused when you do it this way.
Anyway, I would install SteamOS on a tablet form-factor in a heartbeat if I was looking for this experience.
Yep, I have a Deck and think it’s a cool feature, though not one that I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of yet. It’s mainly been nice for getting a keyboard and mouse to do more involved emulator setup with.
A Linux tablet with hardware that doesn’t suck would be pretty interesting, especially if the manufacturer integrated Waydroid as well as WINE/Proton is on SteamOS.
The Steam Deck is real janky in desktop mode. Way more so than I was expecting. Any time I have to switch over to it, I sigh and grit my teeth as I prepare for a bad time. Killed my highest hopes for the device dead ("hm, maybe this could double as a light-duty Linux workstation?")
One of my college classmates toted one of the lower end versions made from a white polycarbonate Macbook around. Worked surprisingly well for what it was but its stylus was a must, it would’ve been disastrous if it had tried to take a finger-based approach.
is this supposed to be taken seriously? they are using a laptop with apple vision and thought the screen is wasting space so they took it out. but wait, sometimes they do want a screen, so lets pop in an ipad? what in the hell? bet this kid has an iphone for each pocket. if only we all had this kind of spare time and nothing better to waste money on
This setup has been done before with the Mac Mini, which makes more sense to me... Or you know, just ssh into some server.
In any case, these "iPad as Screen hacks" still do not address the main issue at hand: Hardware-wise, you simply don't need the (Macbook Air) laptop, at all.
The laptop form is technically obsolete for most users, since Apple Silicone chips are very similar in Air and iPad. The iPad offers more than enough processing power, while having additional capabilities. Breaking this stupid redundancy and better ergonomics are the things Apple won't make for the sake of completely artificial market segmentation. Probably to keep up supply to the golden iOS Appstore prison and consequent double spending on not just hardware, but software, too.
Honestly, every time Apple tries to green-wash their business, you shall remember how they keep the demand for a whole device line up artificially - and its unnecessary production impact on the planet. Dear Apple, who cares about your headquarter's solar panels, or aluminium recycling rate, when you could simply give people a unix shell on the iPad, with a much, much better environmental impact? Yeah...
Side note: Fool me once... the iPad-paperweight experience is the sole reason I would never, never ever even consider getting into their AR/VR ecosystem. Specs my ass, shell or GTFO. Stallman really do be right.
One could argue that the iPad is the reinvention we don't need.
Here's my loadout: iPad Air 5 (big box sale), Pencil 2 (post xmas open-box sale, you bet), Zagg Rugged Book (eBay). M2 MBP (refurbished), 2020 MacBook Air Intel (big box open box with dents in it, runs Windows 10 on the metal). I also have an iPhone.
The iPad is for daily driving human citizen stuff: bank stuff, buying stuff, selling stuff, talking to people, paying bills, reading the news. I'm typing on it now. It is so easy taking screen shots of bills, using the pencil to mark them up, and then showing these insights to people via email. If you hacked into it, you could take over my life! iPadOS is generally considered secure, so I generally consider this device a luxury.
The MBP is for development and if you hacked into it, you could just see what I'm working on. I guess you could make a mess of my GitHub, oh no. Nothing personal on there though. You could probably guess the root password, but it's still iCloud locked. This thing is the money maker and is not a luxury.
What about my third windows laptop I lug around? You are correct, they make you need to have various hardwares to run all their different softwares. Again it's a luxury: I have it for the "need" to use "real" office.
I also have a fourth: a Chromebook with several paid Android apps on it, other Google Play movies I bought, and I do not own any other Android devices. This thing sits on the shelf most of the time, but I felt the need to have it so I could use the Google software. Maybe if I felt the need to install Linux on bare metal, it would go on this thing, it has an i5. Luxury.
There's probably a way to compress all my software activities down into the singleton MBP, without losing much security. But, I've already been burned by having all aspects of my daily life in one place. This is how I could live without luxury.
If we want to bark up the "they're screwing us over" tree, then, it's nonsense that we need to buy all these different hardwares to run all these different softwares: because that is the REAL LUXURY. If we care about minimizing the number of devices I'll buy per (5) year(s), then we need to "make them" allow us to run any software on any hardware.
TL;DR: I like my iPad, but if we lived in the EU, then they'd sue Apple to let me run Windows on it. Otherwise I'm forced to live a luxurious lifestyle of many devices.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadThey got the M* chip but all we can do is just checking emails & watching youtube
You can side load it using a developer account without jailbreaking.
Seems like with iOS 14+, and as of writing it seems like we're on iOS 17, it needs to be jailbroken? Do Jitterbug, Jitstreamer, AltJIT, work for developer accounts?
Adobe shipped Photoshop for iPad in 2019: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ipad.html
GIMP for iPad: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/xgimp-image-editor-paint-tool/...
That has to be one of the dumbest of dumb takes.
A car is a toy. A fridge is a toy. A spaceship is a toy.
(Hint: Those are all controlled by predefined knobs and bits and not ""programmable"" by the user. If your argument is that you can rip open a car and do whatever you want with it, well, nothing's really stopping you from doing the same to an iPad or iPadOS, if you can figure out how to do it.)
Meanwhile everything important in my actual life that involves a computer takes place on my phone (an iPhone, the greatest bogey-man for that crowd, as far as I can tell) or on some purpose-specific device of one sort or another. Zero percent of it happens on a "real" computer—their role in my personal life is entirely toy-like.
It's not really what I was expecting. The appeal seems to be if you hate having an attached monitor for some reason. You can do the same thing without removing the monitor, and then you have two monitors.
I think it is crazy to decapitate a 2-3k+ laptop to make it an accessory for a 3.5k VR headset.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-conversions/
And of other people's nightmares. A macbook and an ipad frankensteined together into an actual laptop?
Sorry, it's a good hack and all, but definitely not for me.
An ipad that's actually internally a macbook, running the full unix-like system, to which you can attach a keyboard of your choice, is more likely what people have in mind as the solution here. use it like an ipad when you just want to read, then stick it on the keyboard dock to do work. Actually let's make it an ipad that's actually a thinkpad or framework; something less coercive than apple or microsoft.
It was a different time back when the 12” MacBook was tested against the iPad+keyboard.
Apple like other manufacturers wants you to own more devices, not less of theirs, which is why they probably won’t do this.
If people wanted what you described, then Surfaces would be skyrocketing. However it looks like according to MSFT that Surface sales are sinking, which might explain why the previous head has left Microsoft:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-microsoft-recover-from-the...
I preferred the Surface Book from a device ergonomics perspective -- but I finally got sick of trying to do dev work on Windows.
So I paid 2x as much for the same functionality instead. And that's why Apple won't make that form factor.
But isn't Apple in somewhat of a unique position given that they're the only company that develops a popular tablet OS and a popular desktop OS? Microsoft has Windows Subsystem for Android, but it looks like it only runs apps from the Amazon Appstore [1].
If there was an Apple device similar to the discontinued Surface Book that ran iPadOS and MacOS, I would be intrigued. Using an iPad as a display for a Mac is cool, but it would be nice to run MacOS locally.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
Unlike Windows Subsystem for Linux which is thriving, Google's stranglehold on Android via its Play Store renders any attempt to integrate Windows and Android non-viable.
Until then, it's hard to define the right thing for such a device to do when it's logged in to a second account on macOS and you un-dock it.
You'd also take a pretty big hit in disk use for such a dual-OS device, until they do a ton more work to unify a lot of their software (I'm thinking not just of the OS, but their office suite and other programs).
iOS/iPadOS is the future. Ever iteration macOS becomes more iOS like.
The compute model is changing. I am now old and enjoy doing computers the "old way." I watch younger people wizzing through apps on an iPad and they are able to do 85% of what I can do on a desktop—and if I'm being honest they can often arrive at the same output faster.
There are tons of exceptions, of course. No terminal, limited filesystem access, no Xcode, applications like Photoshop and Final Cut run with a limited feature set, etc.. The list is actually quite long. But every year the list gets shorter.
Somewhere in a room at the Apple spaceship is a chart that has all three OSes converging under a single OS, probably aptly called OS. I'm sure they keep pushing the date off into the future, but it will happen. The numbers are really getting up there too—macOS 14, iOS 17, etc.. If I had to guess, there will be no iOS 20. We will get AppleOS v1.0 instead.
Works good enough...
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJQJ3LL/A/magic-keyboard-...
Most of the space difference seems to come to the smaller space bar. Tab, caps, and shift on left and delete, return, and shift on right. And the brackets, plus, and minus.
Other than that, the actual letters seem identical.
I used a Comodore 64 plugged into a black and white TV as a kid. This would be the same kind of thing. Sure, an iPad could be the monitor, but so could your TV, or an actual monitor. A computer with storage and input device as a single unit, but without a monitor.
That is quite different from an iPad with detachable keyboard, or even a Microsoft Surface Book (which had auxiliary computing in the keyboard / base, but the CPU and storage was with the display.
I like it. Seems like a great idea to me.
You end up with buttons that are way to large to allow for finger taps that make no sense with a mouse, so a lot of wasted space.
Forcing stupid gestures and UI animations that make zero sense with a keyboard and mouse.
And of course, the fact that you have legacy applications that will never be updated to fully support it (and likely even new ones) and the experience will never be great.
A single device that is meant to be fully usable with a k/m and touch screen is always going to be a compromise for one (or both) setups. At least iPad OS while you can attach a k/m (with decent results if really not how it was designed to be used) the OS is clearly touch first.
I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both with the respect that each input method deserves. The only way I really see that possible is if the OS forces every application to use built in libraries for navigation, buttons, etc (and I mean force!, like it would not run if you don't use it) and the OS then shifts between the 2. But even then you could not naturally switch between, oh I am typing but let me just press this button on the screen because the OS would be on a specific mode.
Its easy to say that Apple just wants to sell us another device, but let's not forget that Microsoft tried and failed... horribly... And we still see the problems with this idea in Windows 11.
I think the idea would be better implemented by a second screen on a swiveling laptop lid. This allows the user to signal to the OS to toggle touch specializations by way of closing or swiveling the lid and lets the main display remain a great no-compromises traditional laptop display.
A mouse is fast, precise, and most importantly, does not block the screen with itself while in use. Your hand is none of those things, and unless you use the screen in the exact same orientation in the exact same place day after day, you'll find it markedly harder to develop muscle memory with regard to it. And, if your software updates, all that could go out the window anyway. A mouse feels like a mouse, barring some hardware change. Once you have your settings dialed in, you know on an instinctual, unconscious level how far it takes to get from here to there.
Add to it, even the most basic mouse has two discreet actions- left and right click- out of the box. The shittiest mouse you can find has those two buttons, and these days, probably a third too with the mouse wheel click. A touch is a touch, unless it's a long-press (but don't move your hand by mistake, or it's now a drag) or if you touch with two or more fingers (but that might also mean you want to touch two things? And if you add any lateral movement at all the software will struggle even more.)
And all of that happens with zero feedback to the user. Touch screens have a much harder time implementing haptics, and you could use sound but not everyone is going to be comfortable with that.
Don't get me wrong, I love my phones and my tablets. But I have no desire at all for touch features on any of my computers, Mac or Windows or Linux. It's just not a good interface for when I need to Get Shit Done.
AOSP has a feature which shows every tap the system registers as a fading circle. It's part of the dev-mode options but it really should be included in the display- or accessibility- features, it makes the system a whole lot more usable than the default of showing no feedback whatsoever. Knowing instantly where the tap has registered makes for a huge increase in accuracy and overall confidence with the UI.
Besides, the best implementation of advanced "discreet actions" on touchscreens probably involves gestures (like the secret unlock pattern on AOSP) or radial/pie menus.
Basically an iPad that is not just a big iPhone but a capable computer in iPad form factor, not necessarily one that uses MacOS even.
I would even accept having to hook up KB/mouse for input. But carrying around a MacBook AND an iPad is a lot of weight.
Well, there's the technical reason which is that the userland of MacOS and iPadOS aren't the same.
But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized.
The iPad Pro is heavily marketed as a device to create things.
Oh wow, I wrote that before even reading the article.
I think this project is cool but it looks like a lot of annoyances compared to just having a macbook plus ipad, and doesn't really seem more portable than a normal macbook plus ipad.
For me it was about having a mix of interaction methods. Sometimes would use touch, sometimes mouse or trackpad, and sometimes keyboard. It was all very situational. Actions like scrolling, dragging, and tapping buttons lend themselves to touch. Fiddling with forms or small UI elements may need a pointing device. Editing text works best with a keyboard. It's about options.
In addition, I felt that being able to switch methods meant less RSI as I wan't using the same movements as much. I was never bothered that some UI elements were too small for touch because I was always ready to switch to a pointer when it was called for.
I do the same now on an iPad Pro that almost all the time sits in a keyboard case next to a mouse. I am constantly switching between those and sometimes picking up the pencil, too.
it might not be for everyone but I would like the option to do that on Mac OS as well.
But yeah, an entirely touch-first laptop experience would be terrible. At the same time a no-touch laptop experience seems to be suboptimal these days. Philosophical design extremes usually aren't the best.
Would be great if we all had options, but perhaps not economical.
So yeah, I agree that I wouldn't want a Windows or macOS device that uses touch for the primary UI, I just want touch-enabled apps that make good use of a pen, on a device that has a proper keyboard/trackpad for everything else.
Arguably, the Wacom Cintiq already solved that issue completely. I did think that the Surface Studio were the most interesting Surface products, though the price wasn't attractive.
I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware.
It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience.
It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!).
macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason.
There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)
Historically, that was basically coping with the fact that mobile devices would ship with low amounts of RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage, so they couldn't really have swap space. One would think that the latter factor is a lot less important nowadays, since storage size and quality has improved with things like UFS.
My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode.
It seemed like Apple was laying a lot of ground work, and it made so much sense to me that they’d do this. This was many, many years ago. I’ve since given up thinking they’ll do this.
I thought the same thing about the iPhone, even before the iPad. Once it got fast enough, allow it to plugin to a dock and use a normal desktop with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Some Android devices have since come out that do this, but I think Apple is in a much better position to make something happen.
AKA Windows 8.
That's how you got the worst of both worlds. First thermal issues. Then a whole slew of conditional statements. And one of the things I like about desktop apps is having multiple windows because you don't have to make everything big for touch interaction.
I rarely, if ever, use full screen apps in macOS, so in the model I described, I wouldn't notice any changes (in theory). Similarly, someone who only used a touch device shouldn't see any major differences vs normal iPadOS. Though I'm sure when fulling vetting this out and looking into all the edge cases, there would likely be a lot of little issues that would need to be solved or lead to compromises.
Windows 8 went overboard and tried to force the touch idea, even when it didn't make sense... like removing the start button from Windows Server and relying on hot corners, which was hell with RDP.
I think Apple is blinded with money and is being way too complacent, ignoring that they are in fact losing customers to more modern 2/3-in-1 devices, especially in the young/students demographics, just like they lost customers because of their lack of interest in PC gaming. And since they make it extremely hard to integrate their stuff with other products, people won't renew their Apple hardware overtime, since it's an easy decision considering for how much they sell their stuff.
And I think they are way too proud to admit that Microsoft was actually right with their Surface, for most people it is actually a much better device since a tablet isn't that useful in the end. If all you want is entertainment, a cheap Android tablet with a decent screen is all you need. The iPad Pros as they exist, are way too overpriced for their real capabilities and at this point are terrible value.
If Intel or AMD successfully make a competent power efficient chip in the near future, they will be only Apps left as an "advantage". Considering many of the powerful iPad apps are stripped down versions of the fully featured versions available on "legacy" computing platforms, that's not saying much.
Many users would be okay with dual booting if they can safe on money and weight
Well, sort of. Under normal operation it requires a (fast) system reset to switch between desktop and "handheld" modes. However, you can open Big Picture (the handheld mode) from desktop mode, it's just not as gaming-focused when you do it this way.
Anyway, I would install SteamOS on a tablet form-factor in a heartbeat if I was looking for this experience.
A Linux tablet with hardware that doesn’t suck would be pretty interesting, especially if the manufacturer integrated Waydroid as well as WINE/Proton is on SteamOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modbook
In any case, these "iPad as Screen hacks" still do not address the main issue at hand: Hardware-wise, you simply don't need the (Macbook Air) laptop, at all.
The laptop form is technically obsolete for most users, since Apple Silicone chips are very similar in Air and iPad. The iPad offers more than enough processing power, while having additional capabilities. Breaking this stupid redundancy and better ergonomics are the things Apple won't make for the sake of completely artificial market segmentation. Probably to keep up supply to the golden iOS Appstore prison and consequent double spending on not just hardware, but software, too.
Honestly, every time Apple tries to green-wash their business, you shall remember how they keep the demand for a whole device line up artificially - and its unnecessary production impact on the planet. Dear Apple, who cares about your headquarter's solar panels, or aluminium recycling rate, when you could simply give people a unix shell on the iPad, with a much, much better environmental impact? Yeah...
Side note: Fool me once... the iPad-paperweight experience is the sole reason I would never, never ever even consider getting into their AR/VR ecosystem. Specs my ass, shell or GTFO. Stallman really do be right.
Here's my loadout: iPad Air 5 (big box sale), Pencil 2 (post xmas open-box sale, you bet), Zagg Rugged Book (eBay). M2 MBP (refurbished), 2020 MacBook Air Intel (big box open box with dents in it, runs Windows 10 on the metal). I also have an iPhone.
The iPad is for daily driving human citizen stuff: bank stuff, buying stuff, selling stuff, talking to people, paying bills, reading the news. I'm typing on it now. It is so easy taking screen shots of bills, using the pencil to mark them up, and then showing these insights to people via email. If you hacked into it, you could take over my life! iPadOS is generally considered secure, so I generally consider this device a luxury.
The MBP is for development and if you hacked into it, you could just see what I'm working on. I guess you could make a mess of my GitHub, oh no. Nothing personal on there though. You could probably guess the root password, but it's still iCloud locked. This thing is the money maker and is not a luxury.
What about my third windows laptop I lug around? You are correct, they make you need to have various hardwares to run all their different softwares. Again it's a luxury: I have it for the "need" to use "real" office.
I also have a fourth: a Chromebook with several paid Android apps on it, other Google Play movies I bought, and I do not own any other Android devices. This thing sits on the shelf most of the time, but I felt the need to have it so I could use the Google software. Maybe if I felt the need to install Linux on bare metal, it would go on this thing, it has an i5. Luxury.
There's probably a way to compress all my software activities down into the singleton MBP, without losing much security. But, I've already been burned by having all aspects of my daily life in one place. This is how I could live without luxury.
If we want to bark up the "they're screwing us over" tree, then, it's nonsense that we need to buy all these different hardwares to run all these different softwares: because that is the REAL LUXURY. If we care about minimizing the number of devices I'll buy per (5) year(s), then we need to "make them" allow us to run any software on any hardware.
TL;DR: I like my iPad, but if we lived in the EU, then they'd sue Apple to let me run Windows on it. Otherwise I'm forced to live a luxurious lifestyle of many devices.
Isn't this effectively what the 11" MBA or 12" MB was?
Whereas today, there is no macOS device with a built-in screen smaller than 13".