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New iPad Air, powered by M4

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Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#461

Post by gyomu »

thewebguyd wrote: post #187
pjmlp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it Some places even do a bundle "discount".

I don't think even Apple knows what they want to do with the iPad. I could buy the "companion device" niche for a while until iPad OS 26 came along, which took away most of the "touch first" multi tasking and replaced it with a model that heavily favors mouse and keyboard use. I actually use my iPad less now since the update, because I still primarily used it as a tablet, I don't even own the magic keyboard/trackpad…

I think they’re very happy to have the 2 parallel product lines; they might overlap a bit but who cares, business is about the numbers, not ideological purity of product lines.

The line they’ll probably never cross is that the Mac can run software in a (mostly) non sandboxed mode, with unrestricted background processes, which means it’ll always be the platform of choice for developers. Those extra restrictions on the iPad makes them more free to push it/experiment with it in the direction they wish (for better or worse, as we’ve seen with all the wonky windowing implementations, although the current one is mostly fine)

I love my iPad for drawing/photography, reading comics, and its extreme portability; I love my MacBook as a developer and as my main productivity machine.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#462

Post by [deleted] »

moolcool wrote: post #214

The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff. Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.

[deleted]

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#463

Post by projektfu »

moolcool wrote: post #214

The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff. Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.

I was recently given an iPad Mini and I thought, great, I'll just set up a few profiles for the users around the office.

What?

Sometimes the culture shock from Android is just too much. You expect things to be there that simply are not.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#464

Post by phatskat »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #312
tomaskafka wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Cook's fear of people not buying a full set of Apple devices for each person is the driving force behind not just the lack of multiuser support, but also the overall nerfing of iPadOS. For the past 5+ years it's been, "This will be the year of real work on the iPad," but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.

> they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook. Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done. Apple has nothing to fear here.

Cue my old manager SSH’ing into work machines while on his boat from his iPad - it does happen. Not saying that working on it is the norm by any means, but it’s about on par with “my android phone is logged in to my tmux session on the dev server and I’m cowboy coding from the bar”

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#465

Post by [deleted] »

eldaisfish wrote: post #430
coldtea wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.* Nonsens. The iPad is basically a 11 to 13 (Pro) monitor+computer with an amazing touch screen. Adding the official keyboard folio, or any bluetooth keyboard/mourse is trivial, and it makes for an excellent on-the-go machine.…

the form factor is a problem. Have you ACTUALLY tried using an ipad as a laptop for more than a few minutes? It is top-heavy and falls over all the time. Even if you solve that problem, you now have multiple devices that you must keep charged and with you at all time. At that point, an actual laptop is simpler.

[deleted]

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#466

Post by recursive »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #435
wffurr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 car for our family of four seems to work fine for us in the city. Hard to imagine people with different living situations. I held off a while on giving my youngest child his own iPad because he and his brother were playing nicely together on one more often than not. It turned iPad time into social play-together time.

Wait until your kids are older.

What's the point here? Then you'll need another car?

Remember, we're comparing to iPads. Apple intentionally hobbles them to induce demand for multiple iPads. This isn't a question of being allowed to own multiple iPads/cars. It's a question of being artificially prevented from owning a single one.

The point isn't that you have to commit to being a single-car household for life. It's that at some points in time, you can be.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#468

Post by fragmede »

tomaskafka wrote: post #383
jclardy wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been experimenting with a 13” iPad Pro and Mac mini, setup with Tailscale. I love it, minus the general issues you run into with Remote Desktop. That plus not being able to deploy apps unless I’m on the same wifi (as an iOS developer.) A dual boot iPad would be killer. I would go out and by the maxed out M5 if it was possible. MacOS for workdays, and iPadOS for everything else. That or just finish the last mile…

Remote Desktop is another nerfed thing. Windows is sending around window positions and UI primitives, while Mac still streams terribly compressed and lagging video of desktop, unable to even adapt resolution to client.

Fwiw, Modern Windows is mostly DWM, and doesn't get the benefit of using GDI primatives for any serious work, so it's also "just" sending compressed video streams. These days it's basically all H.264/5 thanks to GPUs taking over.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#470

Post by apparent »

zadikian wrote: post #391
apparent wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook. TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA. This is one of the reasons I simply cannot justify getting a new iPad these days. The other is that my 8 year old iPad Pro still works just fine, in case I ever need to do iPad-ish things like draw with the pencil.

$270-$300 (used to be $350?) for the iPad keyboard. I feel like Apple did a good job targeting a user segment that is just happy to spend extra money on gadgets, aside from whoever really needs this laptop-tablet in-between.

Yeah I feel lucky to have picked one up for $199 back in the day. Still use it, though TBH it's mostly as a second monitor for my MBA, when I'm traveling. I don't work on the iPad itself that much, even though the keyboard is delightful.
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