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.