On a normal desktop OS, it is routine to use multiple applications in concert to do work, using files and the clipboard as means of composition.

On an iPad (or mobile devices in general), it is indeed possible to build delightful and useful end-to-end integrated suites for doing so-called "Real work".

The problem is that if you want to perform a task that requires features from two or more applications, you may well be out of luck! Applications can rarely share data, often resorting to cloud services (and thus a mandatory network connection) as a clumsy workaround, and even copying and pasting data between applications can be challenging and error-prone.

On a desktop, any user can invent new workflows. On an ipad, a user can only buy them wholesale. Users are at the mercy of the degree of forethought the app developers put into their designs.

The OSes were removing friction and making it easier and easier to craft our own solutions from tools in an expanding and interoperating toolbox.

And then we got iOS and iPad and each app has its private data, no more command line, no more generic project folders, no file system access, not even copy and paste, and years of "well, I guess you could email it to yourself" or "just pay us every month for iCloud instead of plugging in a thumb drive" nonsense. Those restrictions are being partly and awkwardly eased somewhat, but we're being assured that having self-contained, pre-designed apps for everything is the new way. Apple (which seldom makes claims about the future) is telling us explicitly that the iPad is what the future of computing is going to be. That is not appealing to me, nor is it intended to be.

While it is true of course that you can do "real work" if "there is an app for that", you can't even write your own app for that without paying Apple a yearly fee and getting their approval to put it in the app store. I hope this won't be the only future of computing.

The iPhone and iPad are fine platforms; I use them regularly for my work. However, they are a far cry from Alan Kay's Dynabook idea. A better base for developing on the Dynabook idea would be the Microsoft Surface line of tablets, which can run the full versions of Windows 10 Home or Pro and thus can run modern Smalltalk implementations such as Squeak or Pharo.

I wish there were more work done in the area of composable GUIs, where the core logic of applications is scriptable and where these elements can be combined in ways that could be even more expressive than Unix pipes are. Every now and then I have thoughts about taking a modern Smalltalk implementation and writing a suite of composable GUI apps as a demonstration of this idea.

This topic always takes me back to a Hacker News comment I read many years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373) about composable software versus monolithic applications and how commercial software companies are predisposed to support the latter while the free software movement should have focused on the former. I still don't think it's too late, however, as long as there are some vendors selling hardware that users can install their own software on without needing to use a certified app store.

There is a related issue at play here when it comes to how systems are developed. It takes an enormous amount of sustained effort and time to create whole computing systems (hardware, OS, design, etc). The FOSS movement is not really capable by definition of doing this, since it is dispersed and not funded at the level that today's major platforms have been funded. This is precisely why FOSS is so Unix-centric: that is the predominant and free OS that was available at the time the whole movement really came about.

It would take a years-long, well funded research effort to build a truly new computing environment. On the technical side, the desire and some of the knowledge is there. We simply lack funders that are willing to pony up a good amount to the right people and leave them alone. That is was ARPA, PARC, and Bell Labs were able to do in their time, and the disappearance of this kind of funding environment is exactly why we are still reiterating on the accomplishments of those institutions today.

Where the browser is the platform, you might consider using custom elements to fill this role: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#...

Ok... but if you don’t need that you’re not doing ‘real work’?

Apple has pushed the narrative of "What's a Computer", so they're just reaping what they sow.

For tens of millions of people it can be.

Evidence: Hundreds of million of iPhone users who do not have computers. It's why Apple started iCloud backup and restore for the iPhones — So people without computers can upgrade without losing all of their data and settings.

If Apple sold a device which was physically identical to an iPad but ran OSX (with some minor affordances to close the gaps between touch, pen, and mouse input- much as Microsoft has pursued in recent Windows iterations) I'd be ecstatic with it. I've considered trying a Modbook, but the price is a bit eye-watering.

Having access to a desktop-style OS would only add to the range of things you could do with smaller devices. Would it be harder to use than an iPad? Maybe.

Then your work is not a typical example of real work, the same thing being a rock star is not -- even if people exist that are rock stars and get paid for it, so it's still "real work" in that sense.

"Real work" is only real if it agrees with your narrow world view.

It's you who want to enforce much narrower areas of work as characteristic of real work.

"Real work" in the casual sense (what most people consider work, or work most people's work is like) is what agrees with the statistically wider kinds of work people do.

This also has nothing to do with gatekeeping. People still get to be stunt drivers and rock stars and vloggers paid to eat their lunch live on YouTube, whether we consider what they do representative of "real work" or not.

But "Real work" for the purposes of this thread is work that is representative of what most people do / realistic for people to have -- and statistically speaking, being a rock star is neither common, not representative of the kind of job most people do.

To recap the argument made:

A: People can't do real work on the iPad because it lacks X. B: Really? And what about the people that are Y, they don't need X feature. A: Well, Y is not real work.

What the person A says is not that (a) Y doesn't exist, (b) nobody has Y as their role, (c) nobody makes money by doing Y (and it is thus, their work).

The charitable interpretation, which is obvious since we're talking about e.g. "fighting aliens" (which indeed, is not a "real work" in any sense of the term), is that A means Y is not really representative of the work most people do, and that the percentage of people doing Y is small to not count for the purposes of how useful an iPad is for real work.

It makes sense then to define "real work" by what the majority of "real work" is, not the exceptions, even if the exceptions are still real work.

Like the phrase "Nobody uses X" means "very few use X, so few that it doesn't matter", "Y is not good for real work" means "Y is not good for 90% of real work" (the most common types) not "Y is not good for any kind of real word at all ever period".

You do realise this is HN where quite a lot of us are building startups and not getting paid for it.

Also what about people doing CAD, Data Science etc. they also almost always stay within one app.

Are you? Apart from IDE, I also run a version control system, a build system, a CI/CD system, a language runtime..

These are all from different vendors.

I kind of appreciate Apple's approach to simplicity. I use an iPad because I don't want to maintain another computer; syncing configuration, updating packages, etc. But it basically means that I use it as a "dumb terminal" when I hear it has a surprisingly fast processor. Seems like a waste.

I admittedly don't do much of anything with it, but it's neat to have.

I wonder why they emulate x86 instead of targeting ARM though.

More in depth discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425106

It's actually why they call it IDE because it's an integrated development environment.

I work on open standards for CAD to allow portability of that and am starting to apply this to data science too.

Add Git credentials, importing a project takes care of the setup and build and you can create new Run tasks in most IDEs for calling a different part of your build file e.g. deploy or test.

And I occasionally copy/paste from a browser. But you can do that just fine on an iPad or iPhone.

That said... it’s still less productive to move data between applications than on a PC or Mac. The gap hasn’t been closed yet.

Meanwhile, on desktop I can't paste between Emacs and Confluence because Atlassian went out of their way to break it.

I know what people are trying to get at here, but I think there's also a lot of tunnel vision and selective memory.

Realistically, it's only easier to share data on the PC if the application developers made it easy to share data. There's no shortage of proprietary and undocumented file formats. Heck, there's a small industry built up just for converting CAD files between different formats.

It's really not much different on the iPad.

You said it yourself:

> on desktop I can't paste between Emacs and Confluence because Atlassian went out of their way to break it.

Which presupposes that by default (i.e without Atlassian's messing things up), it would have worked. On desktop applications, File-level and copy-paste interoperability are there by default.

This is the difference: what is the amount of interoperability you get by default, i.e without specific actions from the app developers?

The fact that you can break interoperability is irrelevant.

Applications share data on the iPad just like on the desktop - copy and paste and opening a document in multiple apps.

often resorting to cloud services (and thus a mandatory network connection) as a clumsy workaround, and even copying and pasting data between applications can be challenging and error-prone.

You can store documents on your device that can be shared just like you can on iCloud and Dropbox.

On a desktop, any user can invent new workflows. On an ipad, a user can only buy them wholesale. Users are at the mercy of the degree of forethought the app developers

Apple actually bought the company that made the Workflow app and integrated more tightly into iOS to allow cross app automation

Not quite. There’s Shortcuts (https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios).

Limited? Yes, but not nothing, either. This _may_ evolve into something that’s more powerful.

I can tell not everyone feels that way when I tell others that my computer died and they offer sympathy like I just lost a relative. It shouldn’t take more than three hours to set up a machine with your work stuff, or somebody isn’t doing their job.

Most of the time when we say "Cloud Services", though, it means exactly one specific vendor. If an app is designed to integrate with Dropbox and GitHub, I can't necessarily substitute an alternative, or run my own replacement instance. If a cloud-based solution becomes unavailable because the company is bought out, shut down, drops old API support, or simply because I've stepped onto an airplane, I'm stuck. The cloud is both a convenience and an accident waiting to happen.

My NAS at home has never sent me an email thanking me for participating in an Incredible Journey and disappeared.

If this data is useful, why am I bogarting it? I should be sharing it, as soon as possible. If some ears are too sensitive to see rough drafts, we can use obscurity or permissions to control premature messaging.

It's the same argument as Bus Numbers, or for DVCS, or feature branches. I don't want days or weeks worth of work hanging out on some engineer's system, which can get wet or take a tumble down the stairs on the way to a meeting or stay home for a week while down with the flu.

Backups are for people with a bus number of 1 (ie, mismanaged teams or personal projects).

So you should have a second repository of any data you have in any account, in a different location, provider, hard drive, or whatever. Because it's only a matter of time until you need it.

Firewalls, people.

And yes this has happened to me, coincidentally after a period of travelling.

Some backed up hard drives in my house and a family member's are probably more reliable.

The iPad lacks flexibility and as a result it is less generally useful than a "PC". Can we agree on that? I own a 12.9" iPad Pro, I love it, and I'm fully bought in with the pencil and the keyboard folio and all that shit. If I want to write or draw or browse the web or watch a video, I reach for my iPad first because it does all those things just as well as or far better than my laptop, and nothing would delight me more than to be able to toss my laptop in the trash (or whatever). But I can't!

Neither can my partner, who does most of her computing (largely consumption) on her iPad, but often has to interact with institutional websites that have poor compatibility. Neither can my mom, for whom I bought an iPad in 2012, which she still uses and loves, but not even the latest and greatest iPad can support her hobby genealogy research workflow, so I had to buy her an iMac, too.

The author's tone may strike some people as inflammatory or self-centered or whatever, I guess, but his essential point is right: the iPad's apps-first design and locked-down nature keep it from being a first-class general-purpose computing machine, especially for creative work. That it works for some people is great--we don't have to fight about that, nor should we. Obviously it is a crazy good form factor and fully capable for many real professional tasks and workflows. But it should not be recommended as a PC replacement for somebody who hasn't looked at all the angles, because it simply isn't a fully capable replacement, and that's what the author is talking about. If anything, I think the author's point is made more narrowly than it could be.

You don't need to sacrifice composability just because of the tablet form factor. You need to be careful with the input methods, sure, but composability on a tablet could actually be better than on a PC if designed well, but we'll never know until someone bothers to try.

For similar reasons I thought Microsoft made a big mistake dumping the Windows 7 UI for Metro (or whatever it's actually called).

If I want to do PC-type stuff, I'll do it on my PC. Tablet stuff I'll do on a tablet.

I think you’re conflating multitasking and stability.

Nothing is stopping you from using an iPad to VNC into a Windows PC on AWS to access that website. It’s inconvenient and complex, just like using your PC on a treadmill, but it’s certainly possible.

Is that interesting in the context of a frank discussion of the iPad's capabilities as a general-purpose computing device? No, it isn't.

The point is that PCs have got use cases, iPads have use cases, and they both help people do "real work". In both cases there are situations where the form factor or operating system is an impediment to getting "real work" done.

The fact that one aspect of iPad - multitasking - is rough around the edges, doesn't deduct from the overall proposition of iPad or the ability for it to be used in "real work". The form factor itself is a huge benefit to certain types of job, the OS is built to work with that form factor, and this is something that iPad does better than anything else (at least if sales are an indication).

The PC is not remotely the best tool for every computing job, and just because you're, say, a pilot, doesn't mean you're not doing real work.

I feel like perching it on the control panel would work pretty well, or perhaps a tall side table if you did it a lot. Not sure what's so hard about any of that, but it's not really all that relevant IMO.

> And while I haven't done it, I'm pretty sure I can just spin up a desktop PC in the cloud and remote into it; it's not that hard, but it is inconvenient.

Can my mom do that? I mean, she's intellectually capable of learning how, presumably, but I wouldn't even bother with that rigamarole. I'd just buy a PC, and so would she. Both of us own PCs and iPads, but it's pretty clear which one we'd choose if we could only afford one or the other, and that's the point of all this: if you are a person who sits down at your computer and makes things, if you can only afford one or the other, without any other information (and most people will really have to dig into it to be sure, and still risk getting burned in the future), it's obvious which one you should buy.

> The point is that PCs have got use cases, iPads have use cases, and they both help people do "real work". In both cases there are situations where the form factor or operating system is an impediment to getting "real work" done.

I never said you can't do "real work" on an iPad. I do "real work" on mine all the time, and the whole point of my original post in this thread was that people are—as you are now, to me—talking past each other, using this "real work" phrase as an excuse to do so.

I'm typing this comment on an iPad. I love my iPad and I have a very good idea of what it can and can't do. All the things it can't do (for me, at least) are 100% imposed by the operating system and apps-over-files model.

> The fact that one aspect of iPad - multitasking - is rough around the edges, doesn't deduct from the overall proposition of iPad or the ability for it to be used in "real work". The form factor itself is a huge benefit to certain types of job, the OS is built to work with that form factor, and this is something that iPad does better than anything else (at least if sales are an indication).

Multitasking isn't the thing that stops me from totally replacing my PC with my iPad, and it's not the only thing the author of the OP article brought up (if he even brought it up at all).

See above re: "real work".

> The PC is not remotely the best tool for every computing job, and just because you're, say, a pilot, doesn't mean you're not doing real work.

See above re: real work. At no point in this thread have I suggested that you can't do "real work" on an iPad, and, again, I am personally a counterexample to that claim.

On the other hand, maybe there's a good reason that Plan 9 never caught on.

Probably the use case that is best suited to an iPad.

Of course that’s a silly analogy—there’s no technical reason why Visual Studio couldn’t be ported to run on iPad.

Most impressive thing I saw was two bundles of 12 foot rebar. I was reminded of jousting.

You better inform Apple then, that the Python IDEs that are available in the App Store need to be banned!

https://github.com/ywangd/stash

I think we will need some examples to support that claim.

Retail is one. Any retail company that doesn't have a legacy system to integrate with uses iPhones and iPads for their POS systems.

Logistics is another. According to an ex-girlfriend who works in LTL, the logistics industry is 90% people with iPads and iPhones. The only people who aren't using mobile devices for their "real work" are people like her who are chained to a desk doing back office stuff.

Tradesmen is another. When my water heater burst, the water heater guys, the plumber, the guys who replaced the floor, the guy from the gas company, and the guys who replaced the walls all took pictures of the situation before, during, and after to document what they did. Copies went to me, to the landlord, and to their office.

It's like carrying around a whole office's worth of office equipment in your pocket. It's a document scanner, you can use it to measure stuff, to get paperwork signed, to take pictures and look at them later, it's a level or flashlight in a pinch, you can load reference materials on it, and on and on, and that's without getting into really specialized software or peripherals that let you do all kinds of cools stuff.

I have a project where I try and create at least 2 pieces of abstract art every day on my iPhone. It’s great for getting ideas out quickly. Over 1500 pieces later I’m still going.

Also, on the iPad, Procreate and the Affinity apps plus the Pencil are amazing.

Hauling a laptop through all those environments was a pain. They would typically need to set their laptop down to type anything, even a brief five word note. Using a laptop could be done, but an iPad with a strap on the back enabled them to hold the device with one hand and input inspection results with the other. This along with other app improvements made the entire inspection process easier and faster for everyone involved.

Think about how many people use clipboards and printed forms in their work. Ask why they need the mobility of a clipboard. If those reasons are sound, then they would probably be a good candidate for an iPad / tablet application for their workflow.

Edit-I wish they’d release an oddly large iPad Pro. I think some interesting use cases might exist in the 24”,30”,higher screen sizes. Not unlike LFD displays.

I generally have found it maddening that apple has set it up so that everyone has to "ask permission" before something is allowed on ipad/iphone/ipod. And they never let this happen before except to import from a camera (and the same camera adapter that worked on an ipad was not allowed on an iphone)

I agree 100% that calling it "real work" is terrible, but I still think the authors points about resilience of files in the process of making digital products are important.

Lawyers, accountants, nurses, doctors, paramedics, tree surgeons, baristas, plumbers, electricians, shop assistants, mechanics, jewellers, cleaners... most of these people - if they want to use computers at all - want them to be less complicated, they don’t generally care about interoperability between applications, and iPad in some cases fits the bill. Its simplicity for some of these use cases is an enabler.

To my mind there seems to be two independent narratives at play here:

- “is the iPad better than a general purpose computer?” for many use cases, yes it is.

- “Is it perfect?” Perhaps not yet. But it’s more perfect for those use cases than what came before.

Your claim that only a minority of people use more than two applications needs a source, because I don't know a single person who gets by with just two applications for work. Pretty much everybody uses at least an email client/office messaging app, a browser, and Word, and those are just the generic tools; there are very few people who don't also use work-related, specialized tools.

When Joel Spolsky was starting out I agreed with at least four out of five things he said and the fifth was more of a “huh?” As time went on quite a few “no, Joel” and a few “yikes” reactions began. He petered out when I still thought half of his stuff was good. I’m sure others have kept going.

Otherwise, yeah, it makes little sense, because, yeah, just about every other kind of work, short perhaps of literal bricklaying, has been radically changed by tablets. The last time I had to visit a hospital, I got the impression that they might have had more money invested in iPads than in CT scanners.

I don't see this as a failure. Expecting the iPad to be positioned as a device that would outright displace an existing line of Apple products that's typically sold at 2-3x the price point strikes me as an impressive failure to intuit Apple's priorities. The iPad was intended to break into - and even create - new markets, not to cannibalize its cousins. And if you look at it that way, it's been an amazing success.

[EDIT] "but why's a camera important to construction work?" want to get a usable estimate of how much tile you need for a room in about 5 seconds flat, recorded for later use? Snap a photo of the floor with the 4' by 8' plywood exposed. Done, you can walk away now. Ditto drywall if the studs are exposed and follow standard spacing, and so on.

This is about productivity. Real-work is usually about being about to do many different things with a single machine. This typically requires interoperability between applications, a file system (to access data thru a unified interface even outside of apps), and standard ways of storing data. The iPad can be very good for doing very specific tasks in one application, but everything else is lacking.

Of course, if your "work" depends only on a single application, then you will be happy with pretty much anything. If you need to work with a wealth of different applications, at the same time, on the same machine, then "real work" won't be possible on an iPad easily: probably do-able, but akin to painting with spaghetti instead of brushes.

But why are we saying that this isn’t ‘real’ work? Why are you putting ‘work’ in scare quotes?

Because by 'real work' we mean creating stuff, not consuming stuff.

Using a tablet as a fancy embedded device with pre-loaded industrial apps isn't creating stuff.

Why is creative work the only 'real work'?

Do you honestly think someone who does an exhausting 12 hour shift repairing trains, covered in grease, is not doing 'real work' because they aren't creating anything?

I didn't say that. I'm just explaining what the original article writer's phrase ('real work') means here in this context - the context of personal computer users. Think of it like this: by 'real work' he wants to say 'really using the personal computer to its complete potential as a force multiplier'.

https://genius.com/a/madlib-says-he-made-all-the-beats-for-b...

It takes talent to insult them all.

Maybe, but that's accidental, because every tool sucks and you might as well use a sucky tool if it's trendier.

I do cut/paste and drag/drop between multiple apps every day. Can also use USB drives and inter-app file transfer to work on the same document.

So it's a bit like saying that "this bandsaw doesn't is terrible for hammering nails." It's true, but that doesn't mean a bandsaw is a useless tool.

I find it interesting that your first example of a file-centric (rather than app-centric) workflow describes the file by the application that creates/views/edits it. Can you do anything with this "Excel spreadsheet" on an iPad other than open it in Excel?

Search for “Electronic Flight Bag tablet”. Not only is it a thing, there are competing products.

Pilots fly planes using iPads. It’s a ludicrous suggestion that that isn’t real work.

I guess where I diverge from the author is that I don't really think it's a problem that it's mostly a consumption device. I think desktop computers are so thoroughly better as creative devices that maybe its fine that the ipad has its own niche.

I used the term "real work" because that's the term people use when they write "you can actually use the iPad for real work" articles. I think it's clear from context that "real work" means the kind of work Steve Jobs introduced the iPad for, i.e. the work people traditionally do on PCs: writing letters, creating presentations, doing spreadsheets, and so on.

I do acknowledge that people do real work on iPads; I pointed out some examples in the first paragraph. The problem is that these are clearly niche tasks, as is reflected in the iPad's sales numbers.

The iPad works well for some people, who do very specific tasks. That's genuinely great for them, but it's clearly not what Apple had in mind for the iPad. And in my opinion, it's not what the iPad's true potential could have been.

Real computer work is making software or graphics that require either computational power (video, graphics, music) or access to the Unix shell (programming). The first category is ready to go, capability wise, on iPad, but like the author said there's no incentive for those companies to make iPad versions of their software. The second category is a non-starter because of the App-centric nature of iPadOS.

I do most of my spreadsheet work on an iPad.

I've owned 3 iPads (currently iPad Pro 12.9) and while I love them for reading and consuming media I've never been able to do any kind of work on it other than answering a quick email.

So... are there any web developers here (since it's a common occupation of many HNers) who do all their work on an iPad without any kind of desktop or laptop?

Referring to documents on an iPad while doing other work != doing work on an iPad.

Other people have posted examples of things where the primary/producing part of the work is done on the iPad though (drawing, audio production, presumably Excel/word/PowerPoint or equivalents are decent)

I don't think it will ever do the stuff out at the edges very well.

Everything else is just pretend Work :)

/s

No I just gave examples of people doing real work who don’t need lots of files.

An outdoor instructor may just need a single file - their map. A train engineer may need a single file - their reference manual. They’re still doing real work!