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New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

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Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens. MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop. Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding p…

May I ask how you manage to get into tablet mode unintentionally? I've never experienced this issue and it was my understanding that this is only possible to switch over by opening the action center and turning it on...both very deliberate actions that seem hard to do by accident. I'm not being sarcastic either, though. I work in a repair shop and one of the most common things people bring their devices in for is the…

It may be the auto rotate. I think if the tilt of axis is over the angle to enable tablet mode it will enter it automatically and ask you if that's what you want. You have to choose a default and it won't ask again.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you can run MacOS on it, it will always pale in comparison to a Surface pro. You can do some things well on a iPad pro. But you can do anything on a Surface pro except run MacOS. Well I looked and it looks like some have installed MacOS or used vmware images.

This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens. MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop. Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding p…

There was no tablet mode in Windows 8.

Windows 10 has a tablet mode, but it still sucks compared to Windows 8's "default mode". It is actually better to use tablets in regular, "windowing OS" mode than in Windows 10's tablet mode.

For me Windows 8 is an example showing one can make a decent mouse and tablet UI. Obviously it will be worse than the two, but at some point there is an advantage of having a common UI rather than specialized.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely off-topic, but for everybody that maps Caps Lock to esc, how do you ctrl-tab? That's what my Caps Lock is mapped to, and I cannot understand how ctrl-tab can be any sort of comfortable to reach on a standard layout?

The best solution I've found is mapping caps lock to control on hold, and escape on press. You can do this with Karabiner on OS X, ililim/dual-key-remap on Windows, and alols/xcape on Linux.

> The best solution I've found is mapping caps lock to control on hold, and escape on press.

wow. just wow.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#474
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want to any real work Here we go again with this 'real work' nonsense. What counts as 'real work' to you? A friend of a mine is a barrister and uses an iPad pro to take and use notes. He's definitely doing 'real work' just fine on his iPad.

It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.

I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.

Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.

Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).

Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason it has to be one or the other? MacOS is the best operating system for power users or content creators. iPadOS is the best operating system for personal computer users. That seems like the vision to me.

Agreed. But the dilemma is Apple is not encouraging content creation on macOS. E.g., no important content creation apps are Sandboxed[0], so they can't be in the Mac App Store. And their latest development push, Catalyst and SwiftUI, is about cross-platform parity of low-powered apps, it does nothing for high-powered content-creation apps. With few exceptions, content creation has not been successful on iPadOS. And f…

> no important content creation apps are Sandboxed[0], so they can't be in the Mac App Store

Logic Pro, Final Cut Studio, Motion

Considering the Best Picture Oscar winner was cut with Final Cut, I’d say that’s an “important” content creation app.

I agree that all content creation apps aren’t on the store, but you said “no important” ones, which isn’t factual.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#476

Apple, please make the ipadOS eco system developer friendly. I'd buy it instantly. If Visual Studio Code was available there, that'd be amazing. There is some projects[1] going on but using some non-viable workaround [1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/70764

This. It's sexy but it's still basically a glorified iPhone. At this price it should be running full macOS.

Why? It's not really more expensive than an iPhone 11. Ipad 11 pro 128gb = e899, iphone 11 128gb = e859, just 40 euro difference. Why should it run a full os when price is almost equal?

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens. MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop. Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding p…

I wasn't fond of the windows start menu when they decided to replace the list style with the tiles. But that is long gone. Long live the windows start menu. But seriously If ipadOS doesn't at least allow for backwards compatibility with the software from MacOS. The iPad will never be a replacement for your Mac computer. It will only be an expensive surrogate. The windowing OS vs Touch OS is definitely a good point. B…

In my view, Apple doesn’t want to make an iPadOS-running iPad into a laptop replacement, they want to make it into an orthogonal alternative.

In some sense, for many categories of use, the App Store hosts superior offerings to what the Mac App Store does. Panic and Omni offer extremely sophisticated applications that I use on a daily basis. Office is likewise almost on par with the desktop equivalents (for most users, I’m well aware of the limitations in macros and plugins and so forth).

Many developers seem to be taking a “Mobile First” approach these days, and that is driving wind into the iPad’s sails.

I really would be more prudent before dismissing it.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#478
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would debugging sacrifice the security model?

Debugging allows arbitrary code execution. Essentially you allow developers to debug running applications on their iPad, you allow them to run any code they want on it (maybe with extra steps, but that is the unavoidable inevitable result). I'm not against it, but I am saying that's quite different from the iPad's current security model. You're giving developers root, maybe with extra steps, but root none the less.

> You're giving developers root, maybe with extra steps, but root none the less.

No you aren't. It's arbitrary code execution in the target app's sandbox which is already doing arbitrary code execution in the first place. You know, the thing that you compiled & ran before you ever attached a debugger? Every iOS app is already doing arbitrary code execution. That's the whole point of apps. And the security model holds up just fine.

iOS's restrictions on JIT'ing is about App Store control, not security.

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#479
post #422

I already had an iPad Pro + smart keyboard + pencil once... and got rid of it and switched to a Surface Pro. We still have an old 10" iPad 2 + an older iPad Mini in the house and they get use for typical iPad consumer stuff. When I add up this new iPad in the minimum 128GB/Wifi/11" config this one is about $400 more than I paid for the Surface Pro + KB cover + MS Pen. (Which is i5/8GB/128GB/Wifi-only) The Surface has…

This is why I don't understand how there's even a market for the iPad Pro (outside the Apple superfans). I like iOS, but it seems like if you want to any real work it's an uphill battle, and for the money there are plenty of alternatives.

I bought one last Christmas. It broke my heart (and my wallet), but its only purpose is to serve as the CPU and screen for my wife's new ultrasound probe [1] that only has good support of iOS.

Even when you bundle the cost of both the probe and the iPad pro, it ended up being cheaper than the (much less portable) alternatives in the market.

[1] https://store.butterflynetwork.com/us/en/iq/bundle/

Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

#480
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d wager that much of your incredulity regarding the suitability of iPads to doing “real work” hinges very sensitively upon what your conception of “real work” is, and that your judgement of utility follows suit. I’ve been using a succession of iPads as my main computing platforms since the first iteration was released ten years ago . Initial releases were a bit of a compromise, but the arrival of multitasking, mult…

It seems like they're slowly implementing paradigm safe versions of features from Desktop OSes into iPadOS in order to gradually bleed off the MacOS userbase since locking MacOS down to the App Store paradigm didn't pan out.

Which is why I hope this doesn't pan out either. I like desktop OSes and I like having major OSes that are not locked down by ridiculous app stores. Stop doing app stores.

They work in Linux because they're open package repos, we can add our own tress/signatures in and can have a lot of control over them. App stores are bastardizations of this concept. They offer some additional security for the non-tech user (maybe? It's questionable) but it also makes your devices not your own.

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