Apple Kremlinology [1]

I love this term. What a fantastic way to look at this story and take a step back so that we recognize what we're doing here. Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all figured out? Maybe they're just trying stuff to see what sticks?

I think, deep down, there are a bunch of people at Apple that know they'd have to pry the Terminal, vim/emacs, and command line tools out of macOS developers' cold, dead hands before they'd ever switch to iOS full-time.

[1] https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-kremlinology.h...

Maybe they don't need to. A terminal app with a busybox-like set of tools within the sandbox would make iOS/iPadOS a lot nicer to us nerds. We already have Files.app. A terminal can't be that far.

Terminus is available now and works well enough. It’s not a shell into local iOS, but that’s fine for me. and standard external USB keyboards work fine with a $10 Lightning adapter.

https://termius.com/ios

Yeah, but that's just an SSH access point. I want a full shell.

A busybox-like set of tools would not be very useful without a package manager and the ability to install arbitrary software like compilers, editors, and the like. Just out of curiosity, I counted how many formulae I have installed with homebrew on my Mac:

    $ brew list | wc -w
    244

That's probably not that many compared to some people out there.

iSH is reasonably popular and is ripe for Apple to either Sherlock them or bless them by allowing them on the app store https://ish.app

edit: "but iSH is Linux, surely Apple would do Darwin!" you say. By looking at how poorly they're maintaining the command line experience on the Mac (deprecating their bundled Python, Ruby, not updating anything GNU GPLv3 etc), it's easy to imagine them happy to outsource that drudgery to the Linux community, like Microsoft is with WSL. Add to that all the web developers telling them they want a deploy-ready environment...

My problem with iSH is that it's x86 emulated. On a battery contrained device.

Hire the guy and do it natively in house.

Presumably not least the Apple engineering department themselves!

This is actually an interesting question for any company that makes operating systems.

* I'm sure Microsoft's Windows developers all work on Windows.

* I assume Apple uses Macs for all development right now.

* If memory serves, Google uses a lot of Macs themselves, but did at least make an effort to make it possible to do development on Chromebooks.

* Oracle... it's not clear to me that Oracle actually has anybody working on Solaris, but if they do then they have to use Solaris to work on Solaris unless they've managed to completely overhaul the build system. For everything else, OEL should at least theoretically be completely adequate.

* I'd be interested to know what IBM uses internally; AIX was a workstation OS but I have no idea if they've maintained that capability, and they own RH now so that's an option if they wanted to stay "in-house"

* I don't have any specific knowledge about it, but Red Hat absolutely could use Fedora and/or RHEL for most everything.

* Canonical is almost certainly running Ubuntu everywhere.

I don’t know about Canonical but certainly a few years ago I was seeing Windows created documents out of Red Hat.

> Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all figured out?

I wish I had a super-like for this answer.

cough There's a fair few of us - yes, even in R&D, that feel equally strongly supportive of Terminal.app, vi, and command-line tools.

And as someone on the inside, who knows the answer to this story (nope, not telling) it's interesting to read the conjecture :)

I am not convinced although I will admit this is the first iPad I am considering buying in a long time.

Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C / C++ I cannot see it happening. I could see some programming on the new iPad though. Would be nice if Apple opened it up for trivial scripting though.

In the grand scheme of things, do you realize how niche software development is?

Besides that, why do you think that the current ARM chips aren't already faster than most x86 chips that people use?

Would be nice if Apple opened it up for trivial scripting though.

You can already do that using Shortcuts and various third party apps..

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188

> In the grand scheme of things, do you realize how niche software development is?

During the Mac Pro redesign, Apple said developers are by far their largest group of "pro" users. Then they built a $6000+ workstation (with a $6000+ display) that appears to be primarily aimed at video editors. I don't see why adding some real programmability to iOS would be too niche.

I think the more likely answer is that Apple is suffering from tunnel vision in their conception of what "software development" means.

There largest group of “pro users” but not their largest group of users. But realistically, does anything about the Mac Pro seemed like it was designed for development?

As a primary purpose? Hard to be certain, but I'd say no. The base configuration is in some ways ridiculously overpowered for the typical developer, while missing some easy wins.

It looks like a great machine for developing software (if you can afford it) but all of its strengths as a development machine look like simply side effects of video editing machines needing lots of power. There is no design or feature on it that I can point to and say "this was done for developers". There are many that were obviously done for video -- like a $2000 FPGA option that's only good for 2 intermediate video codecs.

I have no inside information here, but I suspect that Apple sees the MacBook Pro as the Mac aimed at developers, not the Mac Pro. MBPs are more common in Silicon Valley than roadside poppies. So while the Mac Pro was the first stop on their Hardware Apology Tour,† the 16" MBP is the "please stay with us, developers" machine: fixing the keyboard, increasing the performance substantially, and not raising the price.

†Not that they'll actually ever say "I'm sorry" out loud, but it's pretty clear they're rolling back some of the late stage Ive-isms. Yes, I know they kept the Touch Bar and didn't add ports, but I think they're all fully committed to USB-C as the Way Of The Future™ and, uh, somebody high up loves that damn Touch Bar.

Niche perhaps, but crucial to the success of the hardware. Nobody would buy ipads if there wasn't software for them.

If the argument is that the iPad will replace a Mac then you cant just do that and provide a mediocre development experience. You will need C / C++ and other languages to use third party libraries for apps.

Without a reasonably performant platform to develop on the iPad will kill itself.

You act as this is a heavy lift.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it's required for the health of an iPadOS only future.

> Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C / C++ I cannot see it happening.

Have you used Swift Playgrounds?

Does Swift Playgrounds allow general App development? No one doubts that you could do software development on an iPad Pro, just that Apple so far has disallowed any real software development on that platform.

I bet i can do it faster.

His answer is not that Apple is moving "everybody" to the iPad. Just some.

It won't split the Mac lineup into ARM and x86, it will split it into iPad and Mac.

It's that famous quip about "Macs are trucks, iOS devices are cars"

Describe pre-pointer iPads as Model T fords, and now we're entering the 1950's…

They sure can’t move ipadOS devs to iPad since XCode is not supported on it.

That's the case right this minute, but thanks to Apple's famous secrecy, all that could change five minutes from now. Much in the way people say "I'm certain there are ARM-based Macs running inside Apple", I'd be pretty certain that there is at least one iPad running XCode inside of Apple.

Xcode will probably run on iPad soon. I still won't care. As a developer, I need two kinds of freedom: The freedom to choose or build my own language and IDE, and the freedom of my customers to install my software without paying a tax to or needing approval from $FAANG.

Apple has made it quite clear that neither of those is ever going to happen on IOS.

The ability to deny these freedoms makes getting rid of Macs so appealing. The potential for vendor lock-in is huge.

And after that you just need iPad ports of all other Mac software that Apple uses internally. What do they use to do their graphics, video, CAD, etc?

XCode or no, I can't imagine doing serious software development without a terminal and all the common *nix utilities.

The year we get Xcode on iPad is likely the same year that we get a general sandboxed terminal / developer environment IMO.

I guess I never done serious development then.

Those toy environments on Amiga, Mac OS, Windows, Symbian, J2ME, Android.

> Mac OS

What are you talking about? You've got basically a complete unix shell available there.

I am talking about Mac OS, not about Mac OS X or macOS.

Ok fair enough. My issue is, whenever a project grows beyond trivial scope, it will usually involve at least some scripting, and likely some tooling, like a process which watches the source files and performs some action when they're updated.

It's very limiting not to have a shell, and arbitrary execution environment, and the wealth of tools which have been created over the years for the *nix environment.

That is part of an IDE feature list.

An IDE is never going to be as flexible as a unix environment. It can deliver some of that, but it's likely you will run into limitations sooner or later.

From the point of view from Xerox PARC workstation experience, which is kind of replicated in modern IDEs, it is the UNIX experience that fails short.

The shell is a subset of what an IDE REPL is capable of, with OS API integration and structured data manipulation.

As for background processes, that is a basic feature of any modern IDE.

That would be something I would expect to be demoed at WWDC 2020.

Now that it isn't happening, lets see how it goes.

Yet. It is only a matter of time.