I’d wager that much of your incredulity regarding the suitability of iPads to doing “real work” hinges very sensitively upon what your conception of “real work” is, and that your judgement of utility follows suit.

I’ve been using a succession of iPads as my main computing platforms since the first iteration was released ten years ago. Initial releases were a bit of a compromise, but the arrival of multitasking, multi-view, and filesystem access (latterly with iPadOS) have come a long way towards ensuring that I have nothing to miss. The addition of native support for an in-built trackpad further accentuates this trend.

Sure, I cannot develop or compile natively on the iPad, but that is something I do very rarely.

[EDIT: Spelling error corrected in ‘arrival’.]

> the risk of multitasking

Do you worry about iOS's overaggressive autocorrect?

(I'm just kidding, I know people are actually pretty close to as fast and accurate on mobile vs. desktop/laptop: https://userinterfaces.aalto.fi/typing37k/)

Thanks for pointing that out. I corrected it.

Neat: I can type at 95 wpm on my phone.

It seems like they're slowly implementing paradigm safe versions of features from Desktop OSes into iPadOS in order to gradually bleed off the MacOS userbase since locking MacOS down to the App Store paradigm didn't pan out.

I like how you've seamlessly switched from the decade-old conspiracy theory that has become untenable to this legend where it "didn't pan out". (Just barely, and probably thanks to opposition in the far corners of the internet)

The alternative explanation, which has far fewer moving parts and doesn't require an assumption of bad faith, is that the Mac App Store was obvious after the iOS Store success, and so was a major push in security/sandboxing beyond chmod -R 600.

It's five years since SIP was introduced, and none of the dire predictions were correct. The mechanism to disable it has not changed even incrementally. But almost no one bothers to disable it because it doesn't actually stop you from doing anything, while it does seem to be effective at stopping malware.

> I like how you've seamlessly switched from the decade-old conspiracy theory that has become untenable to this legend where it "didn't pan out".

I'm not really sure what you're talking about but sure.

Apple was hoping they'd introduce the MacStore everyone would flock to it in droves. Unfortunately the revenue sharing scheme and onerous requirements and restrictions put upon the Developers have made it an undesirable distribution mechanism for anything that isn't given away free.

Apple's improvements to MacOS have all been about locking down and protecting the user because for years they claimed it was immune to malware and virus right up until the problem was too big to ignore. The past few releases of MacOS have been reminiscent of Windows Vista.

Apple would love to lock the platform down to be like iOS but the users have spoken with a resounding "f*ck you". So instead they're gradually developing a competing platform that is build from the ground up to be the unprivileged walled garden with a big ass toll booth at ever point of entry.

And you're sitting here taking the Apple approach of deny deny deny right up until you switch and say "it's better this way".

Which is why I hope this doesn't pan out either. I like desktop OSes and I like having major OSes that are not locked down by ridiculous app stores. Stop doing app stores.

They work in Linux because they're open package repos, we can add our own tress/signatures in and can have a lot of control over them. App stores are bastardizations of this concept. They offer some additional security for the non-tech user (maybe? It's questionable) but it also makes your devices not your own.

> They offer some additional security for the non-tech user (maybe? It's questionable)

It’s not questionable at all, the App Store has been a cornerstone of the iOS security model for years. You can look at how many millions of Android users are constantly infected because it turns out that most people have zero concept of when to trust a third party or not.

Either way Apple does let you run your own apps if you jump through some hoops with MDM and Xcode and whatnot. So it’s not completely locked down either.

It’s locked down enough that I feel comfortable that the average user would be secure and taken care of when using iOS.

> It’s not questionable at all, the App Store has been a cornerstone of the iOS security model for years.

It's pretty questionable. The most obvious reason iOS has better security than Android is because iOS has far better sandboxing than Android.

I don't necessarily dismiss claims that moderation reduces malware, but I am at least skeptical of those claims. I haven't seen compelling statistics that moderation on the scale of the iOS App Store has specifically made an impact beyond banning a few high-publicity, wildly bad actors. The evidence I have seen suggests that moderation is likely not a scalable solution to malware.

More to the point, what we do know pretty conclusively is that app stores on their own are not a magic bullet. We can look at Windows, Chrome, and Android and see that app stores don't automatically improve security.

I think you can make a strong case that iOS shows why having a locked down OS in general helps -- the restrictions around the filesystem in particular close off entire classes of malware. But I think it's mostly conjecture to try and separate the App Store from those other improvements and credit it in specific.

You see sand boxing and app stores as two different things, but they’re not—the iOS security model relies on this sequence of steps:

1. The application developer creates a manifest that lists the privileges the app wants, and includes it as part of the code-signing request;

2. Apple’s App Store review team audits the application more thoroughly according to the privileges it has claimed;

3. Apple only code-signs the app bundle if the app stays on the strait-and-narrow;

4. The OS (through Gatekeeper) enforces the content of a code-signed app bundle, and therefore makes any included capability manifest immutable (in the sense that, if you change it, Gatekeeper considers the app considered and won’t start it);

5. The OS (through the capabilities system) enforces the restrictions from any included capabilities manifest on any high-level framework calls.

Note that there’s no actual linkage going on between code-signing and the capabilities manifest, in a way you’d expect from e.g. a Docker image. There’s no real “application sandbox” here. There’s just an Apple signature on the app bundle, telling you Apple saw this app as-is and approved it; and then, separately, an entirely optional opt-in capabilities system for which an app can claim any capabilities it wants.

If you take Apple out of the picture as a central signer, then 1. apps could claim any capabilities they liked, and nobody could tell them different (this is more like Android, where installing something presents you with a list of the capabilities it claims); but more importantly, 2. apps wouldn’t even need to use the capability system at all. Like I said, it’s opt-in; regular binaries run on macOS (and iOS!) just fine without living in an app-bundle with a paired capabilities manifest.

So, the whole security model of iOS (and macOS under Gatekeeper strict mode) comes down to “Apple verifies that apps are doing the right thing at some point.” Without that, there’s pretty much no sandboxing on either OS beyond what little you get from BSD user privileges and Mach port ACLs.

You are missing the forest for the trees.

When people talk about app store moderation, they're talking about a moderation team deciding which apps are abusive and which ones aren't. They're not talking about the underlying mechanism of, "there's a system that verifies an app doesn't violate its manifest."

The relevant part of the app store that people in this thread are talking about are the decisions about, "should a specific app that asks for location permissions be allowed on the store?" Code signing doesn't have anything to do with that decision. It's an implementation detail. The important part is not "Facebook is signed to a specific manifest", it's "Facebook's app will be rejected if it's submitted with a manifest that asks for privileges that aren't consumer-friendly."

The decision about which apps are allowed on the store is the part of the App Store that's relevant. When people question whether or not app stores improve security, what they're asking is, "does a centralized malware filter improve security?"

You could have a Gatekeeper model that worked the exact same way as Android, where the Manifest was required and the user confirmed the Manifest. Even in that world, Apple's sandboxing would still be better than Android's, because the capabilities Apple offers in the manifest are more intelligently split up, and can be granted in more limited degrees.

The question is whether Apple's security stats are due to moderation, or largely due to having a better set of permissions. I strongly maintain that there is not enough clear data for anyone to claim that the moderation is objectively the main contributor to those stats.

And that's really the only claim that djsumdog was ever making -- that it's questionable whether every company adding an app store to every platform is actually going to make most people safer.

IMHO if you had “a Gatekeeper model that worked the exact same way as Android”, then the granularity of the permissions in iOS wouldn’t help you, because developers (and especially malicious developers) would have no incentive to use the fine-grained capabilities.

The only reason anyone bothers with the finickyness of capabilities manifests in the first place, is that Apple forces developers to take exactly the capabilities they need, and rejects apps that ask for more than they need, or ask for capabilities that are too coarse-grained for what they need. Without Apple there to do that human-intelligence-complete task of determining whether an app “needs” the permissions it’s asking for, devs would have a much simpler incentive: to avoid work (and “you must re-approve this app” prompts) by just using as far-reaching of capabilities claims as they can. Just as Android-ecosystem apps do today!

And so you’d have iOS malware that simply asks for permission to rootkit you and then rootkits you (just like on Android), and it wouldn’t look out of place, since everything would ask for those same permissions. (Yes, system-equivalent capabilities like that exist in iOS. Apple doesn’t issue them to third parties, but they exist for the sake of system apps. Without a curator, nothing would stop any random app from putting those root-kit-y capabilities in its list, and then socially engineering people into thinking they were sensible things for said app to need.)

tl;dr: The security of an ecosystem doesn’t just come from its mechanics, but also its economics. If nobody has any reason to “only claim what they need”, then why would they? Right now, Apple (and their rejection of apps that are too coarse-grained in their capabilities requests) is that reason.

> If nobody has any reason to “only claim what they need”, then why would they?

That's a reasonable question that at first glance seems to have an obvious answer.

And yet, the web works. The web works brilliantly -- the web isn't perfect by any metric, but it is still almost objectively the most secure general-user computing platform that we have today. There are a lot of reasons for that, including just locking down capabilities in general, but where permissions are specifically concerned:

- The current permissions model that platforms including iOS are moving towards is granting permissions piece-meal post-install. Asking for lots of permissions up-front looks a lot more skeezy in this world, which reduces user trust. I particularly respect that iOS pops up reminders of what permissions you've granted apps, I think that's a brilliant UX move, and I wish other platforms would copy it.

- The more sophisticated model that Firefox/Chrome are starting to play with (and that I suspect more platforms are going to adopt in the future) is that apps can't ask for permissions directly, users need to grant them themselves by going out of their way, which helps cut down on people mindlessly clicking OK on everything that pops up and introduces a UX/development cost for apps that want to enable tons of permissions, because they now need to explain to users what to click on.

- The really sophisticated model that people are looking into for stuff like filesystem access is that the app never knows whether or not a permission was granted. If it asks for location, it gets an incorrect answer. If it asks for access to your media files, it gets a blank folder with nothing in it. Under this model, the app is completely isolated by default, and never knows how many permissions the user has granted it, so it never knows whether or not to ask for more of them.

So this is one of those questions that intuitively points towards moderation, but in practice we're starting to learn that with good UX there are a lot of ways to teach ordinary people to be safe, and there are a lot of ways to restrict apps without encouraging users to circumvent those restrictions.

Of course, I don't think it's impossible that app store moderation helps security. I mean, certainly moderation helps on some level. I suspect it doesn't help as much as people assume, just based on what moderation looks like across the entire industry right now. But I'm not going to die on that hill.

I just don't think people should blanketly assume that's the case. MacOS also has a better security track record than Windows even when you're not running Gatekeeper apps, and even though MacOS doesn't force apps to go through a moderator. Any user can bypass Gatekeeper, but through a combination of multiple factors, MacOS still has less malware than Windows/Android.

People look at iOS and Android and make very strong claims based on two environments that are substantially different on multiple security axes: in terms of sandboxing, in terms of market share, in terms of userbase demographics. There's a lot of stuff at play here, and there are multiple ways that platforms (including iOS) are trying to create the economics you're talking about. Even iOS is not all-in on moderation, even iOS is trying to train its users at least to some degree to think about their own security.

> Under this model, the app is completely isolated by default, and never knows how many permissions the user has granted it, so it never knows whether or not to ask for more of them.

This model has benefits, but it also has a major downside: if the app doesn't know it doesn't have privileges, it can't inform the user of that fact. The user has to realize on their own that the reason their search for a local bakery returned something on the other side of the country is that they forgot to enable location permissions.

But the OS can. So if photos are accessed for example, the OS can popup the same old dialog asking for permissions as always and you as the user can decide.

> More to the point, what we do know pretty conclusively is that app stores on their own are not a magic bullet. We can look at Windows, Chrome, and Android and see that app stores don't automatically improve security.

I've yet to see evidence that those stores actively review apps in the way that Apple does. You never see articles like "my app was rejected from the Chrome store". It's less about having a store and more about having a decent review process.

In any case, there are no silver bullets in security. Not one.

> So it’s not completely locked down either.

iOS and iPadOS pretty much are.

The parent comment very clearly and explicitly described how one can work around that lockdown on iOS and iPadOS with MDM and Xcode or something like TestFlight functionality. They weren't talking about macOS, because you can run whatever you want on it after disabling a couple of toggles in the security settings once (just like on Windows10).

For most people, your argument is akin to saying "you too can go into space if you just start your own commercial space company".

I would argue that this is by design. If you cannot figure how to do it, despite fairly simple and quick instructions, you probably shouldn't be sideloading apps on your phone.

It costs you nothing to sideload an app (other than time), but it costs money to make a company. Not a fitting analogy.

Sideloading an App is non trivial and not something that one would expect their userbase to undertake and it requires the user to have access to a Mac to perform it.

It is more about bleeding off the Windows userbase than the Mac userbase for Apple. Also, the MacOS App Store not panning out is far from over. It's hard to imagine an endpoint for MacOS where the App Store doesn't succeed. While most see the App Store as a destination for discovering and installing apps, it's really a secure distribution technology that will succeed because the market has already proven it necessary for safe and secure computing at scale.

Yeah you're right, I'm coming from a developer perspective. I think I would make an exception if your work benefits from a good touchscreen.

As an illustrator, the workflow on the iPad Pro using a tool like Procreate is amazingly simple, quick and portable. Compared to something like my old com tablet, I am much more likely to grab the iPad and pencil and draw, then go to my studio where my computer is setup and draw.

Even the difference between wacom/graphics tablet and iPad with the pencil is almost night and day, no lag or parallax on the iPads is a huge draw card.

For an illustrator, the iPad is a perfect (digital) tool.

Interesting. Using a Cintiq can be better than a tablet with some applications ("feels more natural") too.

https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-displays

Have you used a Cintiq much? Would be interested in a comparison of that vs the iPad Pro's. :)

The wacoms with bonded glass (everything except the cheap cintiq 16) are better than the ipad but its very close. The ipad is more than good enough, its good.

Meanwhile the portability of the ipad and apps like procreate have made the ipad a very compelling tool for artists.

Most professional digital artists I know of use both a large cintiq in studio and an ipad.

There are a trillion comparisons on youtube. Also a contender (but a smaller size) is the ipad air 3 which also has a bonded glass display.

> if you want to any real work

Here we go again with this 'real work' nonsense.

What counts as 'real work' to you? A friend of a mine is a barrister and uses an iPad pro to take and use notes. He's definitely doing 'real work' just fine on his iPad.

He didn’t claim you couldn’t do real work, he claimed there were better alternatives for your money.

And if real work is just taking notes, then I think you really need to question whether an iPad Pro is the right choice among the iPad lineup.

It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.

I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.

Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.

Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).

Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.

I’m in the same boat: Wolfram Language has enlightened me (or you may say, corrupted me completely), so a prerequisite for any new computing device is that it can ran Mathematica.

Which is way I had to switch back from OpenBSD (which doesn’t run it) and Linux (which until today’s update, didn’t have HiDPI support) back to Mac OS.

Yes everyone has different use cases - so why do we denigrate some people's use cases as not 'real work'?

I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.

A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further.

I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.

I have relied on my small iPad Pro with the older Prompt SSH app for occasional light programming while traveling. For more regular SSHing, a laptop or Chromebook is better. That said, I love my iPad Pro and I admit a positive bias that may not face honest analysis.

Stop shutting your brain off because you don't like peoples terminology.

This argument pops up regularly on HN and it's always the same - it's all people talking past each other. One half is saying "iPads don't cover as many use cases as laptops" and the other half is saying "but look, my specific anecdotal use case is covered". You're not even disagreeing with each other, just missing the point.

He's not being a barrister on his iPad though, he's just taking notes. And I question whether an iPad pro gives you anything over the cheaper options for that.

> he's just taking notes

That's how a barrister does part of their work.

When I develop software I'm 'just writing a program'. But I'm not - I'm forming a mental model of what I want to do and working out how to express it.

You can make any job sound silly by reducing it to its constitutive actions.

My point is the barrister does most of their work outside of the software - taking notes is not unique to being a barrister. A software engineer, or artist, or architect, or CAD modeller, or audio engineer, or accountant (just some examples of the kind of work I'm thinking of) do the majority of their work in software. Some of these workflows are doable on an iPad, some of them are not. All of them are doable to a professional level on a regular PC or Mac though.

Actually, handwritten note taking in particular is a professional task that you can not do on a regular PC or Mac. As a theoretical physicist, doing math "on paper" is not something I can do on a PC or Mac, and doing it on an iPad is orders of magnitude better than using actual paper, as it allows for moving things around and revising.

It makes a ton of sense if the iPad is cheaper than the Surface. It stops making sense because of Apple's pricing model.

The original argument for tablet computers in the first place was that sometimes you don't need a full-fledged computer, so you pocket $400-500 and get something cheap instead that's a limited but still quality device. And I think that would still be true with the iPad Pro. You want something that's closer to a full computer, with a real keyboard, but you still want to pocket some money.

Except... the pricing is awful.

It's like they designed a product for a real niche, and then stopped thinking about that niche as soon as they got out of the design phase and started working on implementation.

As a point of comparison, even if you hate Windows with a passion, you can get the new Macbook Air they just announced for basically the same exact cost as an iPad Pro + keyboard, and that comes with a full-featured OS. Is a Macbook Air as portable? Maybe not, but it's still pretty darn portable.

You're giving up the pencil, but you're getting a better OS on a computer with better specs. But I guess if you're a digital artist, and you prefer the iPad pencil over the Surface pen or Wacom tablets, and having a full OS doesn't matter for you -- this might be exciting. That seems like it would be a narrow demographic, but what do I know? I'm sure it'll sell well.

> Except... the pricing is awful.

Of all the product lines Apple has, the iPad is their product line with the most flexible pricing. Everything from the $250 base model up to the iPad Pro at $1000 ($1,350 with the keyboard). If you don't need the iPad Pro, there are three other models below that.

Even their highest priced iPads aren't very expensive. If you are a business buying a computer, it's less than one week's wages for the most expensive iPad.

> It's like they designed a product for a real niche

You have this almost exactly the opposite. The iPad is the mainstream product and the PC is the niche product. The overwhelming majority of people can do everything they need on the iPad. It's the niche users (Developers, Video Editors, etc) who require the additional flexibility a PC offers.

> you can get the new Macbook Air they just announced for basically the same exact cost as an iPad Pro + keyboard, and that comes with a full-featured OS.

Fundamentally, you get a MacBook (or Windows/ Linux) if you need the flexibility of having a desktop PC. A lot of people prefer the simplicity iPadOS offers.

Also, it's not just the most expensive iPad Pro versus the least expensive Mac. If you don't need the pencil or the nicer keyboard, you could get the iPad Air or the base iPad for significantly less.

> but you're getting a better OS on a computer with better specs.

You are confusing more flexible for better. The two operating systems target different purposes. For a lot of people the iPad OS is the better experience. Also, I haven't seen the benchmarks yet, but I suspect that like with the prior generation, this iPad Pro is significantly faster than the base MacBook Air.

Except the MacBook Air doesn’t have better specs than the iPad Pro. iPad processors have benchmarked comparably to laptop x86 processors for a while now. The iPad has a display which is around the same size but higher-resolution, 120Hz, and with support for touch and the pencil. Storage options are comparable. And the iPad has other random hardware like LTE, better cameras, and now LIDAR. On the other side, the MacBook does have more RAM, more ports, and a larger trackpad. But that’s not enough to call it a clear winner in specs.

It really comes down to form factor and OS.

That may have been the original argument for tablets, and if you want to save money by skipping the keyboard, pointing device, and overpowered processor, you can buy a new iPad for about $300.

The iPad Pro is expensive, but “Pro” implies you want a device that can do things which are useful to professionals.

As a developer, I am better served by an actual MBP for work and a cheap iPad for less-productive tasks, but not everyone is a developer.

I'm a developer and now that there's UTM for iOS I am going to be exploring the new ipad as a development machine, AWS Cloud9 already makes a great case for portability

> This is why I don't understand how there's even a market for the iPad Pro (outside the Apple superfans).

Quite simply, a lot of the software I want/need is only on iOS. And while, yes, it's more expensive, the cost difference is a drop in the bucket.

If I was still a starving college student, I'd care. But as a professional, I care more about time than saving literally penny I can.

I know a journalist who works almost exclusively on iPad and iPhone. Their salary is somewhere in the mid 6-figures thanks to employees owning half of the publisher. About 2 million people read a text she wrote on her balcony last week.

But, somehow, that's not "real work", apparently.

From what I was able to gleam from similar comments over the last few months, I guess "real work" mostly involves regularly swapping hardware components, overclocking the CPU, daisy-chaining a dozen USB devices, micromanaging kernel compile flags, automating the micromanagement of kernel compile flags, aggregating optimisation metrics in a dashboard, running benchmarks, upgrading npm/homebrew/gem/go packages on a daily basis, and reorganising keyboard layout.

Strawman. Saving and copying files are a standard end-user task that have little or nothing to do with your list.

Me neither. The hardware they offer is absolutely fantastic. And some of the software (from e.g. Panic or OmniGroup).

But even running a decent terminal requires purchasing an app and setting up mosh on the other side. There's no Esc in their keyboards. There are too many roadblocks and glitches.

I wish I could buy an iPad and simply open a terminal and ssh to my machine of choice.

Right now, it's much easier to buy a Surface Go / Pro. And these run Linux natively really well.

Probably because developers and system operators, while a large majority here on Hacker News, actually represent a tiny minority of actual users. Developers’ workflows are essentially outliers.

It's clear no one here knows any 3D artist, illustrators, graphic designers, UI/UX designers, photographers, videographers, musicians, etc

Because if they did, they wouldn't make some of the silly comments I've seen here.

Well beyond those (other) specialised use-cases (which are admittedly well catered-for by the current iPad hardware and software offerings), I find that the iPad Pro is a wonderful machine for most of my business workflow: constructing and editing spreadsheets in Numbers and Excel, writing documents in Pages and Word, doing serious computation using Wolfram Online (“Cloud-based Mathematica, irksome though it may be to not have a local computing instance), and of course the usual web-browsing & emailing kind of activity.

The device literally has the form factor of a thick notebook when folded inside its robust Logitech keyboard case, connects to the internet over 4G (if no WiFi is available), and is a perfect work environment.

> 3D artist, illustrators, graphic designers, UI/UX designers, photographers, videographers, musicians,

Lots of use cases in many of these professions. In particular, there are a lot of professional artists/ illustrators have switched to the iPad. I also know there is an active community of iPad accessories and software for musicians.

Also, while many of the above mentioned professionals can't move their entire workflow to the iPad, quite of few of them have already moved big portions of their workflows to the iPad.

This isn't a zero sum game. For a lot of professionals there is room in their toolbox for multiple computers.

Yeah that's what I was saying. We're in total agreement.

Simple things should be easy, hard things possible. That's the essence of good design.

Not, prevention of minority use cases.

Well at least it finally has a trackpad, after years of insisting that no one would ever want to manipulate the UI with a mouse pointer.

un-prevention, of sorts.

Sure, but a decent share of Apple's success was due to making OS X a very nice development platform. This attracted developers who created great desktop and mobile software. So I'd argue it's in Apple's best interest to keep developers happy.

Also, is it that hard for a giant of Apple's size to put a fully fledged terminal in iPadOS?

> Sure, but a decent share of Apple's success was due to making OS X a very nice development platform. This attracted developers who created great desktop and mobile software

Apple's customers are the >1 billion user install base it has for iOS and more broadly the Apple ecosystem.

Developers will develop great desktop and mobile software because that's the way to reach the incredibly valuable install base where consumer spend is 2x+ that of competing platforms.

You don't win developers purely by giving them nice developer features. You win them by giving them something worth developing for. Part of that is a nice developer ecosystem, but that not enough on its own.

Apple keeps their developers happy, those that embrace Objective-C and Swift, serving the Apple users.

They don't care about those that use macOS as pretty Linux/BSD replacement.

Just like NeXT never did, UNIX compatibility was a means to bring UNIX software into the platform, that was all.

> is it that hard for a giant of Apple’s size to put a fully fledged terminal in iPadOS?

Of course it isn’t. And that tells you that it’s a deliberate decision not to, because it’s miles from the platform’s intended use by the intended users.

Besides, it would be very confusing for users to have a terminal that can only connect to remote systems (which most people likely don’t have access to), because it’s rather improbable that Apple would choose to expose iPadOS through a shell.

OS X, now macOS, includes lots of applications that are "miles from the platform’s intended use by the intended users". A huge userbase will always have tons of different clusters, and it's good to serve them all.

Furthermore, the terminal could be simply running in a little Unix sandbox, like Termux, and that could be a great entry point for kids to lots of different interpreters to learn programming. Not exclusive to remote into other systems.

Why on earth should they go the extra mile of creating a sandboxed UNIX-like environment for the sake of a few power users who desire to run terminal commands which cannot (if they follow their own rules) affect other applications and/or interact in any stateful manner with the filesystem?

Even as a learning experience, why give (power)users the ability to acquaint themselves with a generic platform that is not tied to Apple’s own offerings? It makes no commercial or even pedagogical sense.

Try out iSH: https://ish.app It sounds like it’s what you want. Apple won’t be providing anything even remotely comparable for the foreseeable future, I’m sure.

Tiny, but very influential with deep pockets. Apple wouldn't be where it is today on their laptop business if developers haven't adopted en masse their macbooks.

[citation needed] — meaning that merely because developers perceive themselves as being directly influential doesn’t mean that they are necessarily. Sure, developers ultimately dictate the success or failure of a platform by choosing to populate its ecosystem of applications or give it a pass, but I assure you that if the only way to develop for iOS/iPadOS were a clunky UNIVAC fed with punched cards, developers would be hand-punching ‘em cards in order to get on the runaway bandwagon of the successful platform.

You're missing the point. We're not influential because we can make or break a platform. We're influential because we're early adopters and thus we can see where the future is going. And as early adopters we interface between a given technology and the general public. We're not just individuals working out of a dungeon. We have friends and family and a social cycle who turn to us for advice for their technology needs.

That's how it was 30years ago. Now companies market to laypeople directly with simple plug and play solutions

If there are any products in computing history that do not owe their success to the model you're describing, it's iPod/iPhone/iPad.

We got disintermediated with the very first iPod. Remember "less space than a Nomad. Lame!"? That was very much the attitude of the crowd you are describing.

I distinctly remember a pry-my-keyboard-from-my-dead-hands attitude when the iPhone came out. It's only benevolence that stops me from constantly reminding the "power user" among my friends that his first reaction was "Not even a stylus?"

> Tiny, but very influential with deep pockets.

While this is true, it doesn't follow that every product they produce should serve developers first and foremost. The Mac is the computer I use for development. The iPad is the computer I prefer to use for photo editing/ sketching/ house planning/ and casual use. If I wasn't a developer professionally, I suspect the iPad would be my "Big" computer.

We need to stop seeing the iPad Pro and Surface Pro as equals. iPad Pro is a luxury item, and it gives me so much more pleasure to use it. Aesthetics, design, the way I feel - these things matter. And they matter to most humans. We're not robots who only need to get a certain task accomplished. We need to feel happy.

They aren't equal products, but iPad Pro isn't "luxury" either. They are just different products with different value for different users and use cases. Both products make their own users very happy. Proof is in all the comments in this thread.

I would argue that Apple is a luxury brand, and iPad Pro is an Apple product. If you're saying the Surface Pro can make people happy too, I'll give you that. It doesn't make me happy though.

I bought one last Christmas. It broke my heart (and my wallet), but its only purpose is to serve as the CPU and screen for my wife's new ultrasound probe [1] that only has good support of iOS.

Even when you bundle the cost of both the probe and the iPad pro, it ended up being cheaper than the (much less portable) alternatives in the market.

[1] https://store.butterflynetwork.com/us/en/iq/bundle/

As an artist, there's nothing even remotely close to the iPad's hardware quality and software environment anywhere near its price range. Even well beyond its price range, it's hard to beat the software quality and comfort with regards to usage.

As a programmer, I use my desktop.

Office and OneDrive work really well. The new files system is pretty functional and getting better. There’s a decent ecosystem of utility apps now. Pushbullet is pretty handy for example. For scripting Pythonista is awesome, and together with Working Copy has a decent Git work flow.

It really depends what your work is. My iPad is my main mobile computer. I do have a desktop, but use the iPad heavily. At work at various meetings there are regularly 2 to 5 of use taking notes or referring to material on iPads. Some with pencils, others with keyboard cases.

Of course it’s not right for everyone, it just needs to be really good at the things it’s good for. That’s all. If a laptop or Surface works better for you that’s cool.

Like all Apple products, Ipads "just work," which is the most important thing for regular users. My Surfacebook has a lot of network connectivity issues, and I recall that being an issue for all Surface products at the time.

Speaking for myself, it does one thing incredibly well: email.

It probably seems absurd to imagine it would do that thing better than other places where I can do that thing, but it's probably 20 or 30% better at email than my other options.

And I do a LOT of email.

I keep an iPad Pro (with keyboard) to the left, and when I want to do email, I look left and do it there. That keeps me focused on my main windows.

I do think that it would be possible for someone to write an email client that is as efficient as the iOS Outlook app is, and maybe it already exists for non-Outlook, but in my current corporate environment the iPad pro is a lifesaver.

It's best in class for digital illustration work. My partner uses her iPad Pro (along with Procreate) exclusively for her art, and the simplification of the workflow combined with the form factor are impossible to beat. Similar Wacom products require a computer, are more expensive, not as responsive, and not mobile. The Microsoft Surface does not perform as well, and does not have the same killer apps which make illustration so easy on the iPad Pro.

I'm an illustrator, and "Procreate" is the killer app for me.

If you're not calling that "real work" I'm not sure what else to tell you.

Eventually you need to save and share your files. It would be nice to not have to do that in the cloud, with corporate gate-keepers in the way.

And here I am, a Lenovo and Linux fan, thinking this is amazing and they've finally got the tablet to be a computer.

iPads don't run iOS. ipadOS has changed quite a bit from iOS - they are not the same thing.

I really want an iPad Pro purely for the on-screen writing experience, which hasn't been as good on a Surface (in my experience)

Personally I see all iPads as an entertainment device that happens to be not too-terrible at doing productive work.

You're correct. The target demo for iPad Pro is (and has really always been) only for Apple superfans.

You can get something like an Asus Zenbook 13 for hundreds less, which has a real i7 CPU, supports much more software, has a dedicated GPU, etc. while weighing about the same and having about the same battery life.

> The target demo for iPad Pro is (and has really always been) only for Apple superfans.

There’s a lot of Apple superfans in the world, then…