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.