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.