New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support

You are missing the forest for the trees.

When people talk about app store moderation, they're talking about a moderation team deciding which apps are abusive and which ones aren't. They're not talking about the underlying mechanism of, "there's a system that verifies an app doesn't violate its manifest."

The relevant part of the app store that people in this thread are talking about are the decisions about, "should a specific app that asks for location permissions be allowed on the store?" Code signing doesn't have anything to do with that decision. It's an implementation detail. The important part is not "Facebook is signed to a specific manifest", it's "Facebook's app will be rejected if it's submitted with a manifest that asks for privileges that aren't consumer-friendly."

The decision about which apps are allowed on the store is the part of the App Store that's relevant. When people question whether or not app stores improve security, what they're asking is, "does a centralized malware filter improve security?"

You could have a Gatekeeper model that worked the exact same way as Android, where the Manifest was required and the user confirmed the Manifest. Even in that world, Apple's sandboxing would still be better than Android's, because the capabilities Apple offers in the manifest are more intelligently split up, and can be granted in more limited degrees.

The question is whether Apple's security stats are due to moderation, or largely due to having a better set of permissions. I strongly maintain that there is not enough clear data for anyone to claim that the moderation is objectively the main contributor to those stats.

And that's really the only claim that djsumdog was ever making -- that it's questionable whether every company adding an app store to every platform is actually going to make most people safer.

If you don’t like dongles, just buy the right cable.

The iPad is useful for certain things. If you're trying to share a document with another person and discuss it, it works much better on an iPad. Both people can hold it, scroll it, etc and it feels much less awkward than discussing things on a laptop.

It's also a bit better than a laptop for digging in and highlighting reading material.

I would not use it as my main PC, though, that's for sure. The apps just aren't there yet.

The surface pro can do everything, but for most things the tablet mode experience is somewhere between dismal and unusable. The ipad pro can't do a handful of tasks, but for everything else the experience is excellent in both tablet and laptop mode.

Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche (now that working with files is well supported), and are solvable limitations. The software problem on the surface pro is pervasive and unsolvable. They've done their best, but you can't make every piece of software written for Windows suddenly not require the precision of a mouse or suddenly support navigational gestures.

I had a surface book 2, but got rid of it in favor of an ipad pro after using one for a while. I have a desktop that I use for gaming, but I would have that either way for the sheer power of it.

The only thing that the ipad can't do well that I'd use it for is programming. This is not a dealbreaker for me, as I don't like programming on the go anyway, and if I really needed to then I can remote into a desktop to do it.

I will definitely get this new iPad Pro (have been waiting for this configuration) but this doesn't contradict your point as, for example, I don't intend to plug much of anything into it. Perhaps an HDMI adaptor or ethernet dongle, both of which I already have for my MB.

By the sounds of the usual complaints my use case is quite uncommon (really I need a fast, multithreaded easy-for-demos device for a specific code base the engine of which runs on Linux/MacOS/iOS). It seems Apple is selling a boatload of iPads so they seem to think that few people want to plug things in. That seems absurd when I talk to my friends, but, well, I'm sure the usage data they get from people (like me) who enable that is telling them otherwise.

As for the Surface: I've seen a couple and the hardware looks quite nice but in terms of weight and usability the MBA has been just fine. I often find myself using my current iPad to do something and then put it down and switch to the laptop. The use cases seem disjoint, partially due to the inherent limitations of each platform vs the other in certain regards, so over the years I've given up on thinking that a unified device would be worth it.

I notice people have commented that some of your objections to the iPad have subsequently been rectified, but the core issues IMHO still remain. Another way to put it is that you now can do many laptop-like things on the iPad but it would hardly be your first choice, especially when it's so easy to switch to another device more adapted to things like filesystem manipulation. But if it's the only device you happen to have on your person you aren't stuck. Maybe Surface can find a way over that hump.