131–140 of 210 posts
> Instead, go into a three year period of major OS refactoring. Speed above all.
I cannot understand why a slow mac is acceptable at any level at all. The icons need a second to load in the applications drawer! Jobs would have thrown this thing across the room at the first MVP demo
My dream is having an “app” on ipadOS that switches out userland from ipadOS to macOS when launched. Let them be two silos, containers, VMs, whatever. Only allow “Mac mode” if you have a keyboard and monitor attached. Hell, automatically “sleep” it if you undock. Make it unapologetically keyboard-and-mouse first. One UI for keyboard/mouse. A second UI for touch. One device that can do it all. That’s the dream. I feel…
Touch and mouse are two very distinct forms of input that need to be kept separate. Every convertible Windows laptop I have ever used has convinced me of that. Mouse interfaces can be incredibly information dense because mice are both incredibly economic from a space and motion standpoint, and also somehow incredibly precise. You can flick your wrist to select any target the size of a grain of rice on a 32" screen. T…
It's been a long-term goal of Apple for the iPad to eclipse and replace the Mac, in the same way the Mac eclipsed and replaced the Apple ][. Or the Lisa[0]. In fact, I would not be surprised if it turned out a driving goal of the Apple Silicon transition was just to make the Mac more like an iPad so that they'd consume less engineering resources to release.
That, of course, backfired, because Apple suddenly started releasing actually compelling laptops again. Oops! But the original design intent is clear: the Mac is a legacy platform. I mean, app developers don't even pay 30% on it. Apple doesn't design platforms like macOS anymore, due to a combination of toxic max-security[1] and not wanting to be embarrassed by third-parties out-innovating them on their own turf.
This is where I start to disagree with the author, though. The clear separation between mouse software and finger software was a mandate from Steve Jobs intended primarily to force developers to make apps that are finger-friendly. But nothing prohibits you from writing software that respects both modes of input. Furthermore, the only clear path for the iPad is for it to become more like a Mac.
The problem is that Apple also wants to obfuscate the issue by pretending like the capability gap has been met with better windowing. The real problem are all the things Apple considers non-negotiable: i.e. there are going to be apps that will never fit into Apple's sandboxing restrictions, and apps whose economies of production do not afford handing off 30% of revenues in commission to Apple. Whether or not those apps happen to let you plug in a keyboard and mouse into a tablet is a different question.
But at the same time, of course the tablet should support a mouse if you plug it in, and of course if I plug in a touchscreen into a laptop that should work too.
[0] TBH, you develop apps for the iPad in the same way early Mac apps were developed on a Lisa.
[1] I am stealing this term from tom7.
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Plenty of tablets and touchscreens support stylus input though, including Apple Pencil.
That wasn't my point. Graffiti is not possible without a stylus, or at the very least is vastly less effective. Android and iOS are both "finger first" interfaces. You can use a stylus, but you don't have to. And everything is designed around finger-fatness. Icons, gestures, on-screen keyboard.
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It’s got a bunch of decent ssh clients; I use mine quite often for this. With a hdmi capture thingy it’s also the display for a bunch of my rpis when they don’t boot etc.. Totally doable for travel debugging.
Yes, but what I meant was to have an IDE, where I could run and debug the stack, and deploy when happy. Technically totally doable, just give me a VS Code + local Linux container (Apple Silicon is great at virtualization) to which it can tunnel. In practice, impossible with Apple's limitations.
I daily drive VS Code remote SSH and had a (honestly inexplicable) thing for Chromebooks for a while. Before the included Linux environment let me install "real" VS Code, these options worked well for me.
My dream is having an “app” on ipadOS that switches out userland from ipadOS to macOS when launched. Let them be two silos, containers, VMs, whatever. Only allow “Mac mode” if you have a keyboard and monitor attached. Hell, automatically “sleep” it if you undock. Make it unapologetically keyboard-and-mouse first. One UI for keyboard/mouse. A second UI for touch. One device that can do it all. That’s the dream. I feel…
We trained billions of humans to touch the screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong disagree. I gave up my Macbook for an iPad + (Mini + Jump). I do a fair amount of penciling and consumption, but most of my time is booping around in the window environment with the Magic Keyboard case. Emails, YouTube, WhatsApp, Obsidian, Remoting into more capable machines, sometimes I touch the screen, most times I'm using the trackpad or a mouse.
You're one of the (relatively) few who found the iPad useful for getting actual work done. There are others like you, just not that many. (I tried and failed to make the iPad + Magic Keyboard my only machine.)