> Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.

The persistent framing of i-devices this way on HN, after all these years, is baffling to me. Tons of creation happens on them, or using them as a tool in service of creation, much of which would be harder or impossible with traditional computer. Just not a lot of software creation.

Because with the exception of very few tasks like digital art the limitations placed on iOS make it worse. Some tasks are just straight up impossible (e.g compiling code), others are just hampered by things like file management and sandboxing or lack of support for hardware/accessories. Sometimes they can be worked around but often it's an exercise in frustration to do something that would be brain-dead on a desktop OS but requires a whole host of taps and trips through the share menu or whatever to get the same result.

Even in digital art where the iPad excels doing something like having a reference photo open while you work is compromised and the only good way to do is to hope the app you're using supports it a reasonable way or else throw away half your screen real estate.

All I can figure is difference in perspective is because such a large part of the potential of i-devices (or phones and tablets more broadly) for creation involves using them as a tool to get something done in the real world, and/or for the kinds of creative tasks that get overlooked by the hackerspace crowd (running an Instagram, say, involves lots of creation; tradespeople and home DIYers routinely use phones and tablets to help get things done in situations where a laptop wouldn't be a useful alternative; that kind of thing). Desktop computers are mainly good, outside of industrial uses, for creating more stuff for computers. I-Devices shine when most of your task's not on a computer, and the computer's just one of many tools at your disposal. If "creation" is making stuff for computers, they seem bad. If "creation" happens in the real world and the computer's just a tool to help with that, and nothing more, they're pretty appealing. A smart slab of glass packed with sensors that can become different tools. Super handy, and a "real" computer couldn't replace it.

For most creation-oriented tasks I do that aren't computer-centric, I'd much rather have an iPhone or iPad than a laptop. They're great tools for creation & work, just not so much for creating stuff for computers, certain exceptions aside, and for those they're mostly just about as good as a laptop, or even not-very-good but usable in a pinch, not better.

This adds a lot of great color to your perspective, but the summary becomes essentially: An iPhone makes a great metronome, but a terrible recording studio replacement. I'm not sure that's saying too much, because the latter is so much more ambitious than the former? That's really the dilemma for those of us disappointed in iOS creation, we want it to be more ambitious, and competitive with things laptops can do.

iOS shines when you create something, for while someone has already created software to create.

Desktop shines when you create something novel.

It's as simple as that -- there are tons of things people have created really polished iOS "happy path" software to create on, but they're not general purpose creators.

Specifically because anything general purpose threatens Apple's App Store toll gate, and thus cannot be allowed to exist.

What are the creative apps on Android that Apple is not allowing to exist on iOS?

Android isn't desktop.

Neither is iOS

Yes, that was the original point.

GP was talking about desktop, not which android is not, but to give a serious answer: I can run a full linux terminal on android, run vscode-server (has to be in a VM, but still) and edit and compile my code. All without needing a connection to some remote "cloud".

If apple would just get over themselves and allow sideloading (or, gosh, a terminal!), it would go a long way to improving iOS usability for creatives.

> A smart slab of glass packed with sensors that can become different tools.

…as long as it’s sanctioned by the platform owners.

Desktop computer have some advantages that the so-called i-devices lack even for tasks that are not computer-centric.

The main one for me is the longevity of your data. It is connected to the control over your data you have in a desktop OS. Good luck finding what you did five years ago in an app in some device and reproducing it now. You are at the mercy of some proprietary format the app creator chose, the availability of the app at a later stage, whether you saved your work in a cloud service, whether you kept your old device running, the operating system updates you installed, .....

With a desktop you can archive your work, whatever it might be, in sequences of bits that reside in your disk. Open source software and virtual machines go a long way for helping reproducibility.

Not all tasks benefit from reproducibility and longevity but I'd argue they include a lot more than computer programming

> Because with the exception of very few tasks like digital art the limitations placed on iOS make it worse. Some tasks are just straight up impossible (e.g compiling code)…

Compiling code isn't impossible; every webpage that contains JavaScript uses the Just In Time compiler to execute JavaScript. The ability for 3rd party apps to compile code is limited due to security reasons—Apple's Lockdown Mode [1] specifically disables the JIT.

iPad users have been able to write code using Swift and submit apps to the App Store since late 2021. [2]

I have no doubt you'll be able to create apps using the Vision Pro in the future… there's probably a version of Swift Playgrounds [3] running on a prototype Apple Vision Pro right now.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-lockdown-mode-ios-16/

[2]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apples-swift-playgrounds...

[3]: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

I've written about this https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...

I think the disconnect is in the type of creation, the higher-end production quality you want, rarer iOS devices are. And the corollary is, if you only care about the highest-end of creation, they essentially become invisible.

> I think the disconnect is in the type of creation, the higher-end production quality you want, rarer iOS devices are. And the corollary is, if you only care about the highest-end of creation, they essentially become invisible.

For producing stuff for computers or for industrial design (e.g. CAD or architectural drafting), yes. In other areas, tablets and phones are ubiquitous tools, and if they vanished tomorrow they wouldn't be replaced with e.g. laptops—they'd be replaced with paper, with various single-purpose devices, et c.

The Mac is a "real computer" because it can be used to create new types of software and platforms, such as the Vision Pro.

iPad is not because it cannot be used to create the Vision Pro. It may still have advantages where it's better for some uses cases, but it still doesn't make it a general purpose computing device in the same way that a TV is better for watching videos than a Macbook, but a TV is not a "real computer".

They're not great for making software. That doesn't mean they're not a decent-to-great tool for a whole bunch of productive or creative activities, often in ways that a "real computer" cannot be reasonably used as a substitute—that is, if they vanished tomorrow, in many roles they wouldn't be replaced by a laptop, but by paper, a stack of single-purpose tools, and more human running-about or time-wasting.

I think the real/not-real computer thing's not especially illuminating, but I don't take issue with it the same way I do dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption-only", a perspective I find simply baffling, because I see them used for creation and productive purposes all the time in a ton of contexts by ordinary people.

If you count streaming a Mac running xcode, then yes.

If we count that then we count an iPad remote-deskoping into a Mac, which severly limits the actual use.

But with the Vision Pro there is zero latency and the possibility of having many big screens, whilst when remote-desktoping into a Mac from an iPad you gain nothing and the high latency makes it worse.

This is how I work now, with my Quest Pro and my MacBook.

It's using local Wifi (or USB), so the latency is very low.

Why would the latency be lower on the AVP?

Because it's not remote, if you are streaming from your Mac, it's right there, at 2m at most. It's much different than remote connecting from an iPad 100 km away.

Why would an iPad be forced to be 100km away?

It wouldn't, but why would you use an iPad as your main screen if you are near a Mac? It's just a screen, it doesn't bring anything special like the Vision Pro would.

This isn't correct. The AVP can run apps side by side so you can have a window for xcode open along side your app. With the iPad you only get one app at a time, which is a bummer. (Even if you had multiple windows open only one app can have the full screen experience at once.

Beyond that, even though an iPad can act as another monitor, it's not a big monitor. It doesn't really achieve the ideal of a workstation replacement.

Can it? The ad showed 1 single virtual window that acted as a mirror for the macbook's screen. It never showed 2 mac apps side-by-side, each in their own independent virtual window.

This is my question as well. Is this just showing just going to show one screen with the entire macOS in it? Or will we be able to individually project different macOS apps onto the canvas?

They said it runs xcode, so I'd assume so

iPad had lots of producer-esque features, so I’m not sure what you mean by that.

This is a valid question and should not be downvoted.

Are we going to be able to create a large software project using it without carrying around a MacBook as well?

It’d be nice to be able to run macOS when I travel and not have to bring my MacBook.

We don’t know about running only on the headset.

I suspect the downvotes are because the keynote literally featured someone using their Mac inside the headset. And another video (session? State of the union?) showed developing a Vision Pro app on the Mac and testing it right next to the Mac from inside the Vision Pro.

Right, it sends the message that the developer is better served by using a Mac, or that the Vision Pro is not capable. Maybe that was honest/intentional?

It’s got a full M2 and (reportedly) 16 GB of RAM. In theory it’s capable.

That doesn’t mean Apple will expose that. Maybe just not today. The original iPhone had a full OS capable of multitasking but it wasn’t a feature given to the user due to memory and battery constraints. We’ve now had it for years.

This was the first we’ve seen of it, and I suspect the on device development story was not one they wanted to spend limited time on. Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.

Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.

apple is so determined to prevent any serious code execution that even ssh apps require janky workarounds just to provide a terminal emulation that still needs a second device to communicate with just to do any real work

A terminal for an integrated ssh client should not require any just-in-time code execution functionality.

Or are you speaking instead to a local terminal environment, like iSH or a-Shell on iPad?

> Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.

Apple announced just before WWDC the iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, their professional media creation tools. We've all seen shows and listed to music (and podcasts) created with these tools. While most of the core functionality is the same between the Mac and iPadOS versions, the iPad versions take advantage of multitouch and other iPadOS features, as they should.

> Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.

Yes; that's how Apple does things.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, iPad users can already use Swift Playgrounds to code and submit an app to the App Store [1].

It's just a matter of time before there will be a version of Xcode for the iPad.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36303426

Final Cut Pro has significant limitations over what can be done on the Mac, which limits their ability to do project sharing between the two platforms.

Thats nothing compared to the bash build stages and custom permission setups, third party libraries, bespoke source code management scripts, ruby-based project initialization and preprocessing scripts I've seen amongst Xcode-based projects.

When those fail, you are troubleshooting through logs and at the filesystem level.

If the idea is a version of Xcode without those things but is otherwise fully featured, I think that is actually speaking about some future version of Swift Playgrounds.

Otherwise, "Xcode for iPad" is basically a jailed Mac VM.

To correct the other sibling. It's got an M2 in it.

I’ll edit my comment. Thanks. I keep making that mistake for some reason.

From the ad, it looked to me like you get a iPad-esque computing device when standalone, but that it tethers and can act as a display for macOS. Just speculative of course, but in the ad they said something like, “connect to your MacBook to extend all your MacBook apps onto the Vision Pro.”

I suspect that, like the iPad, there will be ways to force it to function as a standalone device, but that the happy path will be heavily optimized towards you buying as much Apple hardware as possible.

This seems more than a little likely, as Vision Pro has an M2 chip for processing, and the R1 for vision processing. If your work needs a fully-capable GPU, that's probably a different story, although most graphics work (like photo editing/video editing) should run well on the M2.

On the other hand, the iPad Pros also have M1s (M2s?) but so far Apple keeps them constrained.

yes, its the difference between the headset being a bold new computer form factor, or just another peripheral.

basically is it a laptop (fully independent), an ipad (excellent secondary device that can do focused work on it's own), or a smart monitor (peripheral with some built in usability)?

My understanding is that it is closest to a 3D iPad with virtual monitor support for remote devices like Macs.

They demoed this in the State of the Union I think. Vision Pro was on with Xcode + a live build of the app that was being developed side by side. I'm not sure if Xcode was running on device or on a Mac though.