I agree. I don't think the experience is great, if you just run a mobile app on a desktop machine, but the great points are, that a) it is possible at all, so if nothing else works, you can run the mobile app on your computer, for many purposes, that is enough, and b) this gives a big incentive to the app developers to offer a proper Mac version too, which probably requires less work than ever before.

> this gives a big incentive to the app developers to offer a proper Mac version too

Maybe but I'm not totally convinced it's enough. For small apps which are only currently on iOS this might be interesting, but for the large pool of applications which currently target web, iOS and Android, doing extra work to support a mac branch of the application is still that: extra.

Those users are already supported by your web application, and even if it's relatively less work than creating a separate native mac application, adding a mac branch of your iOS app will still add effort and complexity to implement and maintain. And that would be to serve what's probably a tiny minority of your active users.

In the classic sense of an SCM ‘branch’ you would be correct, however with SwiftUI you don’t need a branch to support MacOS. At worst you need a few #ifdefs.

I mean a branch in the sense of branch of execution (#ifdef would be one way to do this) not in the sense of a source control branch.

>It's difficult to imagine how a UI designed for iOS would ever not feel strange on a laptop.

What is Apple offers a touch screen? Then it becomes essentially an iPad with a keyboard..

At one point I owned a tablet laptop and switching to pen input was extremely awkward.

Edit: imaging lifting your hand from the table and poking screen for several minutes. Screen wobbles each time. Your hand gets tired from being suspended, but putting it back is almost too much work. Apple might invent something, but there is only so much to be done with certain form factors.

All my laptop and desktop screens are touch screens, and the laptops have pens. It's not awkward or tiring if you have it set up well. Lifting my hand from the keyboard up to the desktop touch screen to tap something is often quicker than moving there with a mouse.

What kind of screens do you use for desktop?

Either all-in-ones by HP, or Dell external touch screen monitors. There are other options available, but I've ended up with multiple of each of these, as they're available and work well IME.

When was the last time you tried a tablet laptop? Microsoft now has a series of very good 2-1 under their Surface brand. I'm writing this on a Surface Book 2, the display can be detached from the keyboard by pressing one button, and that works really really well. The display is very stable in laptop mode, the pen is attached via magnet on the side so I can quickly grab it and just draw or write something. It also has the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop (though that's of course completely subjective).

You may want to try one in a store, I personally changed my mind on the 2-in-1 form factor after using one for a few minutes.

The main issue is that Windows 10 is quite bad at dealing with the transition between laptop and tablet mode, similar to when you connect an external display the screen blinks a few times, everything resize hysterically, so you have to wait a few seconds for the UI to transition.

Edit: the touch display is just way too practical when you want to quickly scroll a page or touch a button located on the opposite side of the screen. IMHO it doesn't have to be something you use all the time to be worth it.

I lift a hand a few seconds in a minute, not for several minutes because mainly use trackpad and sometimes use touchscreen. It's still useful.

Totally agree, I had a Dell XPS 15 touchscreen laptop, and while I found Windows too unproductive to replace my MacBook Pro for development work, going back to the dumb non-touch screen made the Mac frustrating.

I would use the mouse/pad/keyboard 90% or maybe 95% of the time — but the inability to just tap the button or pinch-zoom or whatever the other 5% of the time... it's just stupid.

All 5-year-olds perceive screens that you can't directly interact with to be broken... and they're right.

I was forced to get a touchscreen by dell to get 4k. I never touch it, have an external keyboard and mouse. When I clean it, it produces a lot of erroneous input.

Perhaps you should turn off the touchscreen so you don’t accidentally trigger it.

Interesting, happens rarely so never thought of it:

    xinput list
    xinput disable 11

I have an XPS 13 with a 4K touch screen. I view it as an anti-feature that I occasionally brush with weird unwanted effects.

iPad Pro uses a mouse cursor now. It feels completely natural.

I don‘t see how running an iPad app native on a Macbook would „be difficult to imagine“.

I wouldn’t say it’s completely natural, but it’s still pretty nice, all things considered. Some apps still make it awkward, especially games.

I saw someone attempt to play Slither while testing an iPad Pro with a mouse recently. It looked fairly awkward and unnatural.