Once Apple can get iOS working well on x86, they'll do the same.
I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that iOS already works well on x86 and has never not worked well on x86. After all, the core OS maintains ongoing heritage with an x86 OS, and every single app in the store has already been successfully compiled for x86...
Uh? No, that's the exact opposite, the simulator is exactly a simulator. What it's not is an emulator: it does not emulate an ARM device, it simulates an iPhone by running iOS/x86.
Presumably an emulator copies the actual instruction set, while a simulator... only pretends to copy the instruction set?
A simulator -- at least in the world of Apple iOS development -- does not attempt to emulate iOS hardware, or even the iOS operating system. All the simulator does is provide a virtual display and launches an instance of Launchpad.app. Your app then runs within that virtual display, and talks with natively compiled copies of the iOS APIs, but otherwise it's a normal Mac OS X process that can be viewed and poked with Activity Monitor, or top, or whatever.
The simulator doesn't need to "boot up". There are no virtual drivers. There's no memory management. There's no emulated silicon whatsoever.
The only downside to this approach I can see is that the simulator can't be used to test some things like resource limits, and some things behave very differently, like OpenGL. But you have to test on real hardware anyway, and Apple have made native testing just as easy as simulated.
An emulator would be binary compatible with the actual device by emulating the ARM instruction set on top of x86. The iOS simulator doesn't do this but instead runs a flavor[1] of iOS natively directly on x86 that is API compatible but not binary compatible (i.e. compiled binaries for the simulator cannot be ran on the devices).
[1] The simulator OS also has distinct limitations that diverge from the real device or what you would expect from a truly emulated environment. There's no motion detection, no GPU performance, no accelerometer or compass, location data is simulated, multitouch input is limited, some frameworks are not available, etc).
Nor is it likely for the emulated environment to be able to provide a sufficiently accurate performance analogue to the devices' CPU and GPU.
The simulator is the ideal development environment: stupidly fast, and completely reliable for most day-to-day development tasks. For Apple to provide more accuracy in the simulator would be a waste of their time, when you can just as easily run your app on a device.
On iOS cross-compilation only occurs when you target an iOS device such as an iPhone which generates armv6 and armv7 code.
Really!?
But if you use the iOS simulator to develop/test your app (which I imagine every developer does), then you're running your iOS app natively on OS X, linked against a version of all the iOS libraries compiled for x86.
On the flip side, ARM doesn't scale as well as x86 to higher power outputs.
Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience. I'd assert that an iPad -- perhaps with a bluetooth keyboard -- is already enough computer for 70% of western world.
I'd say especially for the HN audience.
A lot of people around here live most of their lives in the terminal, using Vi and Git. They have no reason to work on a beefy machine, as long as they can access more hardware somewhere else. It could be a server in the closet, or "the cloud".
When I bought my first laptop and started doing webdev in 2001, I noticed that all I needed was enough power to play music, edit text and run a web/database server. It worked great with win2k WAMP on a P2 266 MHz, 96 MB, 4 GB. My much more powerful desktop was suddenly left powered off most of the time.
Maemo and Meego are dead. Chromebooks are not likely to blow up. If small ARM machines get popular it will be by running some weird mobile-type OS. Native apps seem to be much more commercially attractive than pure HTML5 apps. On the other hand, I don't see evidence that iOS and Android are going to become plausible PC platforms. Netbook sales have slowed way down. All the buzz is about expensive mobile devices like tablets, and expensive laptops, and these two categories are not converging. It only appears that a convergence is coming because mobile platforms are cannibalizing the casual uses for PCs and netbooks.
Chrome will die, and replaced by Android. Google can't have both.
I don't give a damn about these electronics anymore. I use my iPad for video and books, and my computer for gaming and everything else. I say the new MS tablet will be more convenient to use...
When I think of an iPad, I think of something that's a natural progression from the iPod and iPhone, running bigger and better versions of the apps you can get from the Apple walled garden. It's a fantastic piece of hardware and a tight ecosystem.
Microsoft isn't just trying to compete by offering its own similar piece of hardware to run its own similar apps. They are looking to offer high-performance hardware (an Ivy Bridge chip in a tablet!) with great design, and they're looking to run full-fledged Windows applications.
They're not just competing with iPad, they're offering a possible desktop replacement tablet. That's a bold move.
This is much slicker and powerful enough to amount another try, but "bold"? More like stubborn.
Fans and vents on a tablet... I just can't see that catching on for many people. The ARM model is more promising, but this competes much more closely with the iPad.
Also, the video was very funny with the pen input -- his palm interferes with the initial demo and 20 seconds later he's talking about their amazing palm rejection technology. Don't even get me started on the fact that none of the presenters seemed able to get the swipe-in-from-the-side gesture to work on the first try.
seriously, other than PC games, I don't know a single windows app I want to run on a tablet form factor.
If you have thousands of pre-existing spreadsheets in your office, many of them running fairly complex VBA macros, the idea that MS Office is necessary certainly does exist. And I've never worked anywhere where that isn't the case.
And at organizations of this type, the licensing cost of Office per desktop is peanuts. Can't remember what the prices were, but I was shocked how little it costs large organizations.
Necessary disclaimer: Microsoft employee Addendum: I did not work on this machine, and did not know about it (I don't think?) until today.
I get the feeling Apple have always wanted iPad to be an extra - an extension to the desktop experience. But the divisions between phone, tablet, "ultralight laptop" and "main laptop" are arbitrary and increasingly opaque. Many people are starting to see tablets and real possible replacements: for light users, it handles 90% of their computer usage (internet browser, video and photo viewing). Even for "serious" computer users, tablets offer many advantages. They are quiet, keep cool, look good, super portable, and last a long time. People seem quite content with the lower processing power if they afforded these big pluses.
This Surface with integrated keyboard and support for regular win 8 apps could take it the extra 10% for a lot of people.