I highly recommend reading the MacStories review of iOS and iPadOS 13 [1]. Thirty (!) pages.
It's like the manual that Apple forgot. Case in point: you can swipe from the bottom-right corner of the screen with the Apple Pencil and it'll take a screenshot of the webpage and open it for marking up.
Extensive coverage of multitasking features, as well. There's definitely a learning curve with all these possibilities - split view, side view, copying and pasting, etc - so it makes sense to get comfortable with them now.
As an occasional iPad user, I find the interface somewhat bewildering, even as a power user of other devices.
I want to search to see if an app is installed. I expect an Overview screen that's easily accessible for this like Android, Gnome or Chrome OS, but on iOS I have to swipe left a few times? Weird.
I want to switch wireless network I'm connected to. I correctly guess that I can swipe down to make a wireless icon appear. I expect that from the icon I can get into the settings, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It only seems to toggle the wireless networking on or off.
Sometimes I have good luck telling Siri what to do, but other times the comprehension of what I'm asking falls flat compared to Google's AI.
You should be able to pull down on any page of the home screen to bring up the app search screen, rather than having to swipe all the way to the left.
You can now also long press the wifi icon (twice) from the control centre in iOS 13 to quickly switch wifi networks without going into the settings app, you can also do the same with the bluetooth icon.
A lot of this stuff is really hard to just discover though if you're not already aware it exists to begin with.
> I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???
Apple products have been like this for ages. I.e., they present a "simple" interface for the "typical" user, and then they provide "advanced" features for the "power user" that are only accessible via keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. (E.g., doing a screenshot on MacOS is via Command-$.)
Their success in achieving the right balance, however, has been quite mixed IMHO.
How do you find out about the "advanced" features? Via Google or Stack Exchange or reading a book or guide, I suppose.
I'm utterly bewildered that there's no official documentation of this stuff though. This seems to be common with a lot of modern software too.
I remember when google maps changed from having a from location box and a to location box to just letting you type "from address A to address B", which is pretty nifty. However this was never actually documented so I spent months pressing randomly to get the old UI up (it still seemed to exist, but only in some states of the application) before I finally realized that was the new way.
> I'm utterly bewildered that there's no official documentation of this stuff though.
I don't know if there is or isn't official documentation everything you might typically want to know for Apple products. Clearly, they don't document the answer to every question that anyone might ever ask, but they do document many things that you might not think they do.
I know this because often when I Google for how to do something on a Mac, I often end up on some Apple page that tells me how to accomplish what I want. E.g., a page that documents a bunch of MacOS keyboard shortcuts, or what have you.
Of course, one problem is churn. I.e., the features in the software are changing frequently, and consequently, documentation can get quickly out of date. Also, Apple is likely to be cooperating with book authors. There is the "Missing Manual" series, which often seems to contain a lot of useful information (though, as I mentioned sometimes out-of-date), and I'm sure that David Pogue and friends don't figure all of this out via just trial and error. It seems like they must get some sort of assistance from Apple in the form of release notes or rough documentation, or something.
Or worse, if you accidentally find this feature, will you know what you just did? Or will you suddenly be dumped into somewhere that looks like it is still a web browser but has suddenly stopped responding like one.
It reminds me of all the old Windows users accidentally dragging their start-bar and covering the whole screen.
It's funny because this was one of the big issues I kept hearing (and agreed with myself) about Windows 8 - all the things that can happen when you hover in the corners and the hideous "charms" bar.
I really REALLY wish buttons would come back in style.
The problem with buttons is that they’re visual clutter once you learn the gesture. This is a yet unsolved problem with making an interface discoverable but having it disappear once discovered without having two separate UIs.
Can you imagine if there was a persistent button at the top of your screen that said “Open Notifications?”
The right-click mouse gestures in Maya 3d are one example of solving this problem nicely. If you do it at normal speed, you see & select items on the context menus and submenus. But as you learn the gestures that form from making these selections you can execute them rapidly and the context menus don't need to be displayed. It's a perfect example of training you to use an advanced feature with an easy learning curve, then letting the 'training wheels' come off on a case by case basis, no change in settings needed!
Does anyone happen to know of any other applications that use this kind of UI, or even better, a windows utility that adds this kind of functionality across the OS, building custom context-menus for each application?
Command palettes in modern editors (usually ctrl/cmd+shift+p) are an excellent solution to this UX problem imo.
You can discover some functionality you're looking for by searching for it and activating it from the palette for the first few times, and if you find the functionality useful enough you can spend a few brain cycles learning/configuring the shortcut to accelerate it.
I think a similar paradigm can work for gestures on mobile as well. Some master gesture to open up a searchable list of context sensitive commands, and some mechanism to map new gestures to frequently used commands.
"Can you imagine if there was a persistent button at the top of your screen that said “Open Notifications?” "
YES PLEASE! I've had enough of modern design. Text, links, and buttons all look the same. Sub-panels are hidden behind random things in random places and behind random swipes.
We're ready for a renaissance of discoverability in UI.
Since re-joining the iOS world last year, I've been amazed at how many (often nifty!) features are the exact opposite of intuitive. I was still discovering new features either on accident or via articles, multiple months into ownership of my iPhone. Once I learned about the features many of them were great, but it's very surprising given Apple's focus on intuitiveness.
I've only occasionally used Apple devices but have always thought them to be rather un-intuitive.
I remember spending a good 10 minutes trying to work out how to eject a CD from a Macbook/iMac until someone explained to me that you simply drag the CD icon from the desktop to the trash can...
OMG. This was my first Mac experience exactly. I was on a consulting project and the disk had some very valuable files on it. Someone at the company told me I had to drag the disk to the trash to eject it. I thought I was being punked and refused to do it. My favorite Mac story!
Lack of explanations for your downvotes, but the CD eject issue you described got me as well.
I’m not sure about intuitive vs unintuitive, but as a desktop windows & Linux server user, the Mac was very unfamiliar to me and took a long time to learn its quirks.
It was definitely present in MacOS classic can’t tell exactly when contextual menu was added. But on top of that there was actually a third method, select the disk (highlight) and press cmd-E. Which now now that I think of it is just a shortcut for the fourth one, select the disk then select "Eject" in the file menu. Actually this last method must be the mother of them all, the drag to trash was also maybe one of the first "discoverable shortcut".
It’s just that "drag to the trashcan" gimmick was present since first Macintosh introduction keynote in 1984 and is still usable as of today so no surprise it’s the first answer on every Q/A.
I can’t yet skim through the footage but it might even appear in the 1984 LIVE DEMO (more emphasis needed) of the first Macintosh : https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA
Rewriting using Raskin's theorem -
"
Since re-joining the iOS world last year, I've been amazed at how many (often nifty!) features are utterly unfamiliar. I was still discovering new features either on accident or via articles, multiple months into ownership of my iPhone. Once I learned about the features many of them were great, but it's very surprising given Apple's focus on familiarity."
I feel like apple focuses on intuitiveness for a basic non-power user. But they are okay with adding more complexity that power users will know but are hidden from discovery.
Seems like you know it exists within one day of the release, somehow.
Joking aside, the iPad clearly has too many features for they all to be immediately discoverable. The solution to this is for the community to share knowledge, through articles like this and through word of mouth.
Are gestures a hard requirement to use the functionality? I already hate their replacing the home button with a gesture that fails 9/10 times to switch apps. Really ruins the ability to use the os for multitasking.
The list of supported devices is impressive. The iPad Air 2 came out in 2014.
12.9-inch iPad Pro
11-inch iPad Pro
10.5-inch iPad Pro
9.7-inch iPad Pro
iPad (7th generation)
iPad (6th generation)
iPad (5th generation)
iPad mini (5th generation)
iPad mini 4
iPad Air (3rd generation)
iPad Air 2
I'm still impressed by my iPad Air 2. I originally bought it for product demos/ as a presentation tool for work, but now use it regularly for personal use. My only regret is getting the 16GB version.
I too still use an iPad Air 2 (with Lightning/3rd Gen) every single day. It is starting to slow down but is still perfectly usable. Only recently have I even considered upgrading as they now offer the 9.8" iPad Pros. Until recently, I haven't even felt like there was any point in upgrading. Only minor features have been released (most of which affect things like cameras that I don't care about). The body style has barely changed and most people can't tell that I have a 5-year-old iPad. I've been very happy with it.
To this point, I wonder how much Apple is struggling with this "problem". There is very little value in upgrading to newer iPads. Even for those of us that have the disposable income to spend on them, we can use a 5 year old iPad which acts almost identically to the newer ones. Yes, Apple has pushed some of the power features that the newer ones can do, but for those of us that just use it for notetaking, internet browsing, social media consumption, etc there has been virtually no need to upgrade. The second hand market is saturated with perfectly good devices for $100-$150 that perform in ways that are nearly indistinguishable from brand new iPads for the 95% of the population that are using these devices for media consumption.
Sure if you use the iPad for media creation then you can benefit from a newer one. But for media consumption, the older iPads perform nearly indistinguishably from the new ones.
I noticed that my iPad mini 2 finally falls off the list, but that thing is somewhat ancient.
However, my Thinkpad X220 (maybe circa 2011?) still runs Windows 10 and Ubuntu, allowing it to stay up to date on security patches. In a way, Apple's support levels are only impressive because we're inured to quick device expiration in other contexts (e.g. phones).
To be fair, mobile development is a few years behind laptop development, and it makes sense that it would plateau later (thought with the current generation of smartphones we may be reaching that plateau).
A 2011 MacBook Pro 13" is comparable to your X220 (dual core i7 available, 8GB supported RAM, Intel HD 3000 graphics) and while it does fall off the supported list for macOS Catalina (mid-2012 MBP is the earliest supported) there's no reason to expect it wouldn't run Windows or Ubuntu comparably to the X220.
When comparing (tablet) apples to (tablet) apples, I wonder if any of the tablets mentioned here are still supported in 2019 like your iPad mini 2 was? https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/best-android-tablets-septembe... It's a genuine question as I'm not that familiar with the Android ecosystem.
I think it's only a matter of sales strategy instead of a technical one.
They (be Google, Apple or whoever makes OS and/or phones) have the know-how and the tech to support older devices for a longer time. Even if they limit that support to only publish security updates for older systems (which, IMHO, I think it's the correct thing to do). Come on, see the Windows XP latest updates.
A phone it's not different. In it's core, It's a f computer running software. The main difference is that the average Joe is accustomed to replace them even quicker than desktop/laptops.
Apple et al are fixing the "errors" they made with the personal computer market: support them for a long period of time, or giving the devices a longer (and secure) life via security updates, so your sales plummet.
I think it's very unlikely that older Android tablets are supported by their manufacturers.
Of the 9 tablets and 8 phones in my sock drawer purchased since 2012, only the iPad Pro 10.5", Kindle Fire HDs, and Galaxy S8 are subject to continued upgrades. The rest are likely vulnerability Petri dishes that should never be allowed on the internet unless unlocked and moved to community builds (for the Android devices).
On Android if you are lucky, you would get one OS update and around one or two security updates. This on flagship devices.
Even Google's, are only guaranteed to get updates for three years, starting from the year the model was initially put on sale.
In any case, at least in most European consumer shops, you will see that the large majority of OEMs are migrating to hybrid laptops, convertibles with Windows 10 on them. The Android tablet section keeps getting smaller.
It supports iPads with an A8 series chip, while iOS 13 does not support such iPhones (which would be a 5S). It's presumably because the iPads of the same CPU generation usually have more RAM, more CPU cores, more GPU cores.
It’s almost certainly memory. All the supported devices have at least 2GB RAM.
The iPhone 6 had the A8 with 1GB RAM and is not supported by iOS 13. The iPad Air 2 has the A8X with 2GB RAM and is supported by iPadOS 13.
In the past the break on unsupported older devices has been down to hardware. Usually memory, but also on the 64bit transition. I’m not aware of a single break in support that wasn’t determined by hardware requirements.
The A8X also has a substantially faster CPU than the A8 (3 vs. 2 cores and 1.5GHz vs. 1.1GHz) and a much faster GPU (2-3 times faster). This would make a visible difference in day to day usage even without the RAM limitation. This is probably also what made the difference when implementing the multitasking features.
Those decisions are pretty arbitrary. Way back on iOS 5, the iPod Touch 4 got the update and the original iPad missed it, despite using the exact same processor and RAM.
Not back then. This was before "Retina" iPads, but the iPod Touch was Retina. You had a 960x640 screen vs a 1024x768 one. More pixels, but not so many more that it should block an OS update.
Ehh I sorta disagree. Many older windows machines "could" run windows 10 today, but your experience would be miserable for casual desktop use unless you have at least 2GB, etc.
So a windows xp machine "could" run windows 10 but you don't really want to. In apple's case you can't downgrade your OS version, and I've seen an iPad 2 go from "smooth and fluent" to "crashes before I can even unlock it" from OS updates.
> In apple's case you can't downgrade your OS version
You can if the old version is still being signed by Apple.
For example with the iPad Air 2 both iOS 12.4.1 and iPadOS 13.1 are currently being signed by Apple so you can downgrade for the time being. When will stop signing 12.4.1? Who knows.
> you can only rollback if you're pretty technical.
I wouldn’t say that you need to be too technical. I’ve helped elderly people do a restore of their iPhone over the phone. The process is basically this.
Step 1) download the software package from Apples servers. Places like https://ipsw.me/ make it easy to see what is currently signed for your device and get the download link.
2) Install iTunes if you don’t have it already on your Computer, Open iTunes and connect the device to the computer.
3) In the device options in iTunes, hold shift/option and click update, point the file dialog to the software package downloaded from Apple and confirm.
4) Watch bars progress across the screen of the device.
That's why Apple devices are much cheaper than Android devices. They're secure and usable for far longer, as long as you don't break them, so the amortized monthly cost is far less.
Differences among operating systems as identified by name and version are very important.
My original specification was a small, but my response to you makes a larger point.
iPadOS did not (publicly) exist prior to yesterday. Before its release, iPadOS was definitively not “then still called iOS”. Up until its release, iPadOS did not exist (publicly).
Your last comment is confusing given we're discussing, specifically, iOS and iPadOS, not Windows. Further, I have no idea what any of this has to do with "better". I was very specifically focused on OS differences as identified by names and version numbers.
To be clear, iPadOS is not the same as "iOS 13 for iPad", whatever that might mean. iPadOS comes chronologically after iOS 12 but that's about it.
iPadOS has distinct code, features, and APIs not available on iOS. Period.
Saying iPadOS is "iOS 13 for iPad" makes no sense except in the most superficial sense that it comes chronologically after iOS 12.
I've tried to use these desktop-inspired features on iPad and they are befuddling.
Using two apps at once is beyond confusing. A simple use case, like copying an address from a Safari tab into Gmail via split screen requires so many mysterious, undiscoverable gestures, I doubt almost anyone is doing that.
I think Jobs was right that convergence between workstations and mobile devices requires too many sacrifices, at least in the near term.
I think the obvious solution could be an old one discovered by PARC decades ago: applications in windows and a mouse.
A lot of discovery on desktop computers was by hovering over stuff for tooltips or poking around in menus. Touch devices don't have that, so you get the basic functionality exposed, but other stuff isn't as discoverable.
I don't think this is as much of a problem as people make it out to be. They've managed to keep the iPad just as accessible to everyone, and they prod you occasionally with notifications from the Tips app for people who are willing to learn more.
As far as moving a URL from a Safari tab to Gmail, why not just copy and paste it? Tap once on the URL bar, the keyboard pops up with all the text selected, and there's a copy button right there. Or you can tap on the selected text to bring up the cut/copy/paste buttons.
Pressing and holding the URL to initiate a drag and then dropping in a text field also works for me, but I didn't test in Gmail. It's possible Google has some custom behavior that breaks this.
> Touch devices don't have that, so you get the basic functionality exposed, but other stuff isn't as discoverable.
I don't think this is as much of a problem as people make it out to be. They've managed to keep the iPad just as accessible to everyone, and they prod you occasionally with notifications from the Tips app for people who are willing to learn more.
Indeed, I'd say the opposite: Most older folks simply do not discover stuff, or do so very rarely. They ask someone to show them how to do something, they memorize it, and they generalized/abstract from that only slightly. So they aren't missing the discoverability when changing to the tablet, while gaining a bit more intuition for swiping compared to the mouse.
> As far as moving a URL from a Safari tab to Gmail, why not just copy and paste it? Tap once on the URL bar, the keyboard pops up with all the text selected, and there's a copy button right there. Or you can tap on the selected text to bring up the cut/copy/paste buttons.
Not the GP, but I can think of one reason not to copy paste, which is to avoid overwriting whatever’s already in the clipboard. However bad the discoverability may be, this function is just drag and drop, and need not involve the clipboard unless the user wants to.
Taking it one step further, the screen recording was uploaded by drag and drop from Photos to Imgur (the webpage in Safari, not an app).
You just need to get used to the fact that “press and hold” is an action now, just like we’ve all come to accept tap, swipe, and pinch. Sure, it’s not as much of a direct physical metaphor as those, but fundamentally there’s only so much room for functionality with a finger on a piece glass. If people want more advanced features than the copy/paste from iPhone OS 3, I think it’s fair to expect them to learn one new thing.
I think something mostly unmentioned, but implicit, in a lot of the power features of iPadOS is that they work great with a keyboard using shortcuts most people are already familiar with (e.g. command-c). The three-finger gestures, I agree, are pretty weird but you always have the keyboard (and the cut/copy/paste action menu).
The touch based workstation has been a concept forever, the technology just hasn't been there to execute it for a mass audience. All these systems need to do is provide enough value to be marketable; there's no reason for tech companies to ignore this as a product category.
With more time and effort put into development it may be surprising just how effective they become. Most young kids I see are far more exposed to touch based interaction than trackpad, keyboard or mouse and I expect that will continue to be the case for most of their lives. Those of us who grew up with a physical keyboard as a primary input device can't relate.
> I think the obvious solution could be an old one discovered by PARC decades ago: applications in windows and a mouse.
I've tried both ways with tablets: using a pencil or a mouse. The mouse is a bit inconvenient because you have to carry something around with you that's a bit bulkier but the interaction with the computing device is so much more easy. It's annoying to have to pick up a pencil and doodle-gesture or touch the screen IMO.
I used split-screen and some of the other desktop-oriented features in iOS 12.x and they were OK but not great. I think iPadOS has really polished these. Split screen is a lot easier to use, as are copy/paste/undo.
Of course, the apps you use have to support these new features. There are some, like Kindle, that don't work well at all.
But the nice thing about the mysterious gestures is that you really don't need them. If you are a power user you might learn them - otherwise you just keep using it like an old-style iPad - like my wife does. It's sort of the equivalent of righ-click on a Mac.
Actually apple is pretty terrible about the discovery of right click functionality, I’d say that’s an obvious indication they prefer form over function. I wish Apple had gone Bauhaus in the 90s instead.
I just tried this for the first time with Safari and Mail and didn’t have any issue. And when I copied the text, a set of tips popped up to tell me I can do a three finger spread to automatically copy and paste, so in the future I can just do that gesture on the left and right side to quickly move text if I don’t have a keyboard connected for cmd+c/cmd+v.
You should first and foremost be able to do everything on the iPad (or any touch device) with touch and/ or gestures. As soon as you require a mouse (or stylus, trackpad/ whatever) on a tablet you've screwed up. The whole beauty of a tablet is in its portability. Having to rely on a mouse or trackpad screws that up.
That said, mouse support for the iPad can and absolutely should be much better. Just never a requirement.
It's nearly trivial for apple to add proper mouse support and just have apps self-identify as needing mouse or not. There's lots of things where touch controls just don't work well and it's not about "screwing up" the design its just touch controls are bad at pointing precision and there's plenty of reasons an app developer would want to support normal mouse controls. Not every app needs to be use-able on the bus.
They added mouse support with this release. It’s an accessibility feature, and it moves a “fake finger” as your control rather than a precise mouse pointer but apparently it works.
It "works" but an actual mouse pointer would have been much better for normal users. The accessibility feature is unfortunately not actually what people who want mouse support actually want.
I'm pretty sure Apple wants to avoid interfaces that target a real mouse pointer and aren't easy to use with finger input. And I think they are right about that: Every UI should be accessible with finger input only.
When you compare it to Android where you're lucky to get 18 months support it comes out ahead. When you compare it to MacOS and Windows 10 which run on 8-10 year old hardware, not as much. Of course how good Windows support is for that older hardware depends largely on OEMs and driver support and varies greatly. Linux can run on 20 year old hardware... or older?
> When you compare it to Android where you're lucky to get 18 months support it comes out ahead
Google keeps their own hardware updated quite well, I liked the monthly security updates.
With regards to the rest of the tablet market, basically only Samsung and Lenovo are left, and Samsung lost me as a customer a long time ago.
I've been looking at the iPad Air 3 recently and while it looks nice, I just fell in love with the Apple pencil. The fact that they update even their ancient hardware is just a huge plus -- that's commitment to the customer.
Quite well? Google abandons their phones after three years and repair options are limited compared to Apple. Apple has been supplying software updates for their phones for five years lately. On the plus side for Google phones, they are able to run third-party ROMs when Google quits supporting them.
? Google devices receive Android updates well into 5+ years. I had a Nexus 4 (2013) running Android 8.1 (2017-2018).
I also belive Android tends to have fewer breaking OS changes that render modern apps incapable of running on both older and newer OS versions, compared to iOS, so it's significantly worse for usability on iOS with a device that is ~4+ years old.
This got very rare, even for the Nexus devices. The Nexus 5X got only a little over 2 years of feature support, and 3 years of security support, which is the minimum they guarantee.
The Nexus 5X was a disaster of a phone so I don't blame them for sticking to the minimum. I actually switched back from my Nexus 5X after 6 months to my fully working Nexus 4 when I was pleased to find it was continuing to receive all the OS updates. Probably could still finagle a Android 10 ROM onto it if one tried hard enough.
I will grant shitty devices like the 5X is something that happens slightly more often with Google devices than Apple (although the Macbook pro keyboards kind of brought parity).
I still think for the layperson consumer, apps continuing to work even if they are not being actively developed is a bigger deal than continuing to receive constant security updates, from the perspective of device usability past 3 years at least.
Plus they don't have a great track record on the hardware durability. Some anecdotes: I had a bootlooping 5X after 11 months of ownership (that Google refused to replace) and my Pixel stopped being able to receive calls, also after 11 months (again, Google refused to replace it). The Chromecast I bought also only worked when it felt like it, which was, maybe 20% of the time. I won't buy their hardware anymore.
Pixel 1 just received the Q updates and is still getting security update. Are you comparing premium Apple built phones against 400$ nexus phones which were co-made by Google just to have a vanilla device for development? Nexus line was never meant to be a high-end phone with good support.
My personal pet peeve about Android updates is that they start the clock the day that they release the product, instead of say, starting the doomsday clock on the day they discontinue the product. So if you happen to wait 12 months for the price to drop from $800 to $500, you lose 12 months of software support.
(I bought a Pixel 3 this spring when it was on sale for $400, but support ends in 2 years - October 2021.)
> My personal pet peeve about Android updates is that they start the clock the day that they release the product, instead of say, starting the doomsday clock on the day they discontinue the product. So if you happen to wait 12 months for the price to drop from $800 to $500, you lose 12 months of software support.
It works the same with Apple devices too, though the supported period has typically been longer than in the Android world. For example, the iPhone 8 (introduced in 2017) that Apple continues to sell today as the lowest priced iPhone wouldn’t get five years of software updates from today. It’d likely get its last update sometime in 2023, before iOS 17 is released (assuming that iPhones usually get software updates for about five plus years).
Google only does it for 3 years, and that's from launch. Apple is supporting devices 5 years old.
I've been buying Google phones (Nexus/Pixel) because they do get the longest support, but I still get frustrated by the fact that if I buy one late in the cycle, I only really get 2 years of support for it.
I think they should be made to provide updates for all Android devices while they continue to sell devices with Android and some timeframe beyond. In both Google's and Apple's case they can easily commit to supporting all devices for as long as they commit to selling devices with these operating systems.
Imagine the travesty if Microsoft could turn off Windows updates like this and write off general purpose computers just a few years old or even five years old per Apple. This is a joke, we should not be making exceptions for Google or Apple, their software should not be allowed to render 10s or 100s of millions of competent devices obsolete annually.
This is anti-consumer and stupidly-bad for the environment, and we can see from Windows it is entirely optional and we can see from their $100+ billion in savings each, that Google and Apple could do it too.
I agree 100% for phones sold through the Google Play store. Offer security updates for 100% of their phones indefinitely. Stop the automatic feature updates when the phone becomes slow enough that the new Android version would be a downgrade, but still make it available to users who want to manually upgrade it.
The fact that single individuals in their spare time have been doing ROMs for devices that achieve this for years proves that this isn't the maintenance burden it's sometimes made out to be. The device tree stuff means that even closed source modules aren't that bad to deal with these days.
Here in Germany there are plenty of tablets to choose from, with the best being naturally Samsung, Lenovo, Asus and Huawei, thing is, they happen to be convertibles/2-1/hybrid laptops running Windows 10.
I guess they got fed up with Android tablets just being bigger phones, running upscaled phone apps.
Since apple markets their ipados for productivity as an alternative to a MacBook or a windows laptop - I'm not sure Linux can really be included. Simply put - Linux has never been focused on tablet UI UX or that kind of productivity, it's not a technical limitation sure but there's literally 0 polish on any kind of "streamlined tablet experience"
> Simply put - Linux has never been focused on tablet UI UX or that kind of productivity
Used to be true but not any longer; recent versions of GNOME 3 are now quite usable on tablets (and touch-screen enabled laptops) as long as the bare hardware support is there. Sure, this is largely a side effect of Librem's work on smartphone UX support, but the effect is quite real nonetheless. And Linux on a tablet can achieve things that are quite hard or even impossible on other "mobile-ready" OS's.
Smartphones, tablets, Windows, Macs, Linux... they are all similar products targeting marginally different markets. I use my iPad for the same things I used my Linux desktop for not long ago. There are some things one does better than the other, but ultimately there is much more overlap than differences. The bigger the difference in form factor, the bigger the difference in use cases.
> I use my iPad for the same things I used my Linux desktop for not long ago. There are some things one does better than the other, but ultimately there is much more overlap than differences.
I really really don't get this. I like the iPad, but Apple wants to sell me this idea that the iPad is an actual* computer. It's not. It's a toy computer. It's fun. It's not serious. Stop pretending, Apple.
*) An actual computer lets you mark pages as executable.
In Apple's defense, the SOCs on iPads are improving much, much faster than PC chips. Intel chips have been getting faster at something like 5% per year for the last decade, compared to 50% for Apple's A-series. So I think supporting 5 years worth of iPad devices is somewhat comparable to supporting 20 years worth of PC hardware: in both cases it's about a 100x performance difference between the bottom and top, and beyond that I imagine it's not worth it to try and tune an OS for both.
That really isn't a like-like comparison. You are looking at just one product from Apple. In the Android and Windows world for each generation there are hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations from entry level to high end that are expected to run Windows. Also MS/Google cannot test their software with future un-released hardware. If anything, this should be a cakewalk for Apple - if they choose to. I don't know what special "tuning" is required that prevents Apple from supporting the hardware.
If that is indeed the real reason, its unfortunate that they cannot get an OS to run acceptably in 1GB of RAM. Especially when they have such a tiny amount of hardware variations to support.
Microsoft and Google both release their own hardware. AFAIK, Microsoft does a pretty fair job updating software for the Surface. The same cannot be said for Google and Pixel (Or for that matter, Nexus prior to Pixel).
Microsoft supported Windows XP for 12 years, Windows 7 for 10 years (+4 years if you are willing to pay for extended support). During the lifespan of XP the Moore's law was very much working.
The big difference here is Windows XP and Windows 7 had nearly static feature-sets over their lifetimes (or in the case of XP, SP 3 quickly became the baseline). For the vast majority, Windows XP that shipped with your computer was the same for the lifetime of that product. iOS changes features every year, often quite significantly. The challenge is whether the next version of Windows supported your hardware and this was often not the case. If your OEM had funky components and didn't want to update the drivers to the new version of Windows you were SOL. Windows has changes a LOT since XP/ Windows 7 and their update model is more like iOS than XP now so it's hard to use the old model as a baseline.
The OP said that Apple doesn't have to support older devices because they are antiquated as far as performance goes. So I gave an example where software was supported for far longer during bigger increases in performance.
You are saying that as long as the OEM updates drivers for components support is possible. I agree. This is a reason why Android is often not updated even in the modding community (Qualcomm is not releasing drivers). If only Apple was responsible for both the software and hardware... Oh wait...
Adding to the whatever list, you can also use USB Optical drives with a powered hub (just tried yesterday). It appears in Files app. Seems like they’ve finally implemented proper usb stack.
Interesting implementation tidbit from a Federighi interview:
>From a security architecture point of view, we did not want to have file system drivers running in the kernel communicating with external media that could have been tampered with. Getting all of our file systems to be isolated from the kernel, it was real hardcore engineering efforts.
You can connect quite a few things via the Camera Connection Kit (CCK) which has a USB port in it. MIDI controllers and USB soundcards are two things I've used recently.
Not sure what’s the CCK. Is it one of the dongles they sell with HDMI, SD Reader, and USB?
I first got excited that it can connect to USB webcams — I have some modded webcams I use as microscope — would be super useful if I could interface it with a camera app. But it didn’t work, last I tried. Are you aware of some way to do that? :)
I believe they're talking about the "Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter."[0]. I have one of these and so far I have only used it to plug into my DAC[1] so I can use Apple Music on an old iPhone with a real HiFi, but I think this has been the preferred way to connect to multimedia stuff for a while.
A long time ago on an iPad now far far away, I had the cordless little SD card reader, but the iPad itself wasn't much use for editing RAW photos in that generation.
I haven't heard of any webcams that work in iOS via the CCK - sorry!
I'm not too familiar with how it all works, but I imagine it has a lot to do with the individual apps that are running to be able to read/write to the USB port.
Seems like it, thanks anyway! Maybe now that there’s USBKit (although not sure if it’s MacOS only), one might be able to work out a camera driver implementation. Yay, weekend project!
I’m pretty sure the USB stack was there all along, they just kept it to themselves. Just like how the iPhone baseband chip would be capable of receiving FM radio, they just don’t want to enable it.
Not arguing with your overall point, but I don't think your use of the term "real world" is appropriate.
Clearly many people are using iPads in the real world for all sorts of things and are satisfied with the results. You mean "laptop/desktop like things" which is a reasonable comparison to make, for the small subset of people who want that kind of functionality. But to say that that stuff is "real world" while other uses cases are not is condescending.
It's like the people who say MacBook pros "aren't really designed with pros in mind". I've written over a hundred thousand lines of code for work on MacBook airs and plain old MacBooks which are just great for my particular work flow. Doesn't mean I'm not a pro, any more than it means that people who need a larger machine to run Xcode etc are more pro, or less pro, than I.
I don't mean to harsh on you but I do think this is an important point.
In 2018 I took a year off fro work to be a stay-at-home dad, and one thing that really surprised me was how little I used my MacBook; the only time I would drag it out was to connect my pre-bluetooth Garmin to sync my cycling workouts to Strava.
Had my iPad supported USB devices, there's a good chance I wouldn't have used it at all.
Maybe they’re mostly used for that, but ‘made for that’ is just not true. Apple has consistently, right from the start marketed it as a productivity and creative device, even emphasising iWork apps in the launch presentation and releasing Garage Band for it a few months after launch. They’ve consistently highlighted creative apps for the iPad year after year.
For me, my iPad is m primary creative device, by far. I write on it, sketch on it, code on it, spruice up photos on it. I don’t know what I’d do without Google Docs/Drive. I’m writing this on it. A few minutes ago I was posting, while doing some fact checking in Safari in a split view. It’s awesome!
Blink is by far the best ssh/mosh app I have found. mosh is a gamechanger if you use mobile data and the interface of the app is the best implementation of a shell I came across so far. If you haven't tried it yet it's worth looking at. Steep price tag but justified by how much you use it.
I pay for the $40/mo droplet, just because I am able to afford it and I host several active, multi-user prototype projects out of that box and sometimes end up using the power. But I could probably get away with a much more lightweight instance.
The OP literally just told you stuff they're creating on the iPad. I get we should be cynical of marketing-speak and all, but "it is possible to create real things on the iPad" is not just marketing speak, it's stuff people who are actually creating real things on the iPad have been saying for years.
I'm currently kind of down on my iPad due to travails using it for writing screenplays (long story, not that interesting), but I have used it for creating -- and presenting -- slideshows to large audiences, writing multiple articles and publishing them directly to WordPress and Medium sites, creating technical diagrams for my office, writing a 110,000-word novel, doing revisions (change tracking and comments) on other people's novels, touching up photographs, doing GitHub reviews, on and on. There are people who edit successful podcasts with Ferrite, edit multitrack 4K video with Luma Fusion, on and on and on.
iPads are tricky-to-useless for most development work currently and that tends, for obvious reasons, to be a major limitation for HN's main demographic. But that doesn't make the iPad "just for watching videos". To claim that it's not capable of being used for a wide range of real work is either ignorant or trolling.
When you wonder what something was 'made for', and the people who made it tell you why they made it, and then invest a lot of money and resources consistent with that reason, it seems bizzare to deny it.
Once they give access to a terminal (even if it's sandboxed) and start letting developers port apps like vscode and sketch to iPadOS, there will be 0 barrier any more for me personally to making the leap.
I love ma iPad. It replaced laptop for me for almost everything I do. Even the MS Office suite is great. There’s even vim for it, but it’s half there. What I miss the most is having an ability to go into a zsh, spin up my vim, run node, gcc, acme+vice (I code for c64 as a hobby)... Essentially, the dev side of laptop use is missing. And I really miss it. It feels like the machine could handle it with ease, but Apple won’t have it.
Pretty sure they've specifically said that's not the case. There's always been rumors that Apple are going to switch the Mac to ARM and make it only run iOS, but this is going the other way if anything, with iPadOS splitting off from iOS.
Track record for Apple when it comes to iOS/iPadOS updates has been impressive, but once they stop updating their device it becomes more vulnerable than their android counterpart for basic Internet browsing just because Apple doesn't update Safari via AppStore and doesn't allow any other browser engine.
Case in point : Google Project Zero's latest iOS Exploit chains on webkit shows how easy it was(*is?) for an iOS user to fall victim to browser vulnerabilities by just visiting a website.[1]
The exploits covered targeted only 64-bit, so technically devices < iPhone5S which were not part of the update cycle wasn't mentioned in the GPZ research. But many of the exploit chains did use public jailbreak exploits and Semi-unthethered jailbreaks exist for 32-bit iOS devices running up to iOS 10.3.3.
I don't know whether complete exploit chain as detailed in the project zero wasn't possible for 32-bit devices or the attackers just didn't care about those devices. It is safe to assume, they are vulnerable.
Where as a 7 year old android device can still download Firefox for Android with latest security updates.
In any case, I don't think there can be any opposing arguments on the side of security for Apple not updating Safari via AppStore or now allowing proper 3rd party browsers.
> In any case, I don't think there can be any opposing arguments on the side of security for Apple not updating Safari via AppStore or now allowing proper 3rd party browsers.
Third party browsers entitled with dynamic codesigning poke a huge hole in Apple's security model for iOS devices.
> it's extra work to decouple the browser with the OS.
It is expected of a company which boasts about security and privacy of its users as a premium selling point, although it is questionable now[1]. Besides, MacOS has been receiving Safari updates separately.
Also android has been decoupling several system services with every iteration now, soon crucial system services would be updated from PlayStore and so even if the manufacturer doesn't ship OS updates, important services would stay updated.
There is a bit of nuance here. IE today still isn’t decoupled from Windows. MS has been shoving it into an ever smaller corner of Windows but IE is the OS provided webview for a lot of old crusty applications that needed to render HTML.
What they’re talking about is IE the OS component didn’t mean that IE the user-facing general-purpose browser had to be the default.
And it’s still true 15 years later. They still haven’t been able to decouple IE for all the random crap that uses it. They’ve shoved the user facing interface into a dark corner hoping everyone forgets about it but it’s still there.
Do you mean the ability to dynamically allocate executable memory? That's not necessary for shipping a browser engine (though performance would suffer, as that's how all modern JS VMs work, via jitting JS to machine code).
Yes. It's not necessary for a browser engine to do this, of course, but AFAIK the best interpreters can only approach or barely match simple templating JITs so you're probably not going to be able to write a competitive browser without this.
From that page: ”Without such protection, a program can write (as data) CPU instructions in an area of memory intended for data and then arrange to run (as executable) those instructions. This can be dangerous if the writer of the memory is malicious.”
JIT compilers are collateral damage to that mitigation; they have to write bytes to memory and then make the CPU run those bytes as code, and W^X doesn’t allow that.
Think about what a JIT compiler means: it's allocating memory, writing to it, and then executing it. That's also what malware does so if you give third parties access to that functionality you have the immediate problem that the number of people who can make a mistake which gives native code execution goes up dramatically and that any attempts to restrict it in the future will risk breaking previously-working apps — think about how many years Adobe was able to slack because nobody wanted to break Flash even though it was a huge source of security bugs affecting most people on the Internet.
Apple's security model for iOS, as far as I can tell, is to be able to analyze all executable code in applications at review time. Being able to dynamically generate code does not work with this policy.
Apple libraries use private APIs but developers must not use them directly. If you allow developers to execute arbitrary bytes, they can submit app which does not call private API but will be able to call them later after approve. JavaScript is safe, because it can't call C API, but arbitrary JIT engine is not.
Sandboxing a JIT compiler is impossible to do perfectly, so there will always be the possibility of a sandbox escape, allowing the device to be jailbroken; but alsio for bad actors to take control of the device.
> But many of the exploit chains did use public jailbreak exploits and Semi-unthethered jailbreaks exist for 32-bit iOS devices running up to iOS 10.3.3.
Apple released iOS 10.3.4 on July 22, 2019 for iPhone 5 and iPad 4g.[1] So it's not completely unheard of for Apple to release iOS updates after officially dropping iOS support for old devices. From the Apple website:[2]
> iOS 10.3.4 addresses an issue that could impact GPS location performance and could cause system date and time to be incorrect. This update is recommended for all users.
I wonder if this update quietly fixed these exploit changes.
Unlikely, if it was a security update then iPhone5C should have received it as well. iPhone5C didn't receive 10.3.4 update because its GPS hardware supposedly was an updated one than the iPhone5.
Also, Google Project Zero article(link in parent comment) gives the clear timeline of the attacks and that the exploits were updated to mitigate patches with every new OS updates; so even if 10.3.4 had security patches older devices still might be vulnerable to later attacks.
What Android phone released in 2013 is still getting security updates of any kind? You make it seem like Google and the manufacturers all update their phones consistently.
Yes, if you want a hackable system that you can root/jailbreak and run any combination of hardware & OS & browser and keep 7+ year old devices running, you're better off on Android. I don't think anybody would disagree with that.
> In any case, I don't think there can be any opposing arguments on the side of security for Apple not updating Safari via AppStore
I don't really follow. It's not about just updating it via the AppStore, it would also require making all future changes to Safari compatible with old hardware and old versions of iOS. They have a pretty impressive track record lately of supporting devices up to 5 or 6 years old, but they can't support everything forever. The security argument for it is that almost nobody is using these devices anymore, so their resources are better spent securing systems that have more users.
Sorta, the actual browser chrome is provided by the 3rd party but the underlying rendering and JS engine are required to be the OS provided facilities (i.e. Safari)
Apple’s security model is that Apple has to be able to inspect and review all the code you’re app is going to run. There is a special exception for JS provided that you run it though Apple’s interpreter.
Browsers are caught in the crossfire of a much broader rule that applications can not run code that Apple can’t see. They don’t sign anything that allows for arbitrary or semi-arbitrary code to be downloaded externally and run in principle. Apps get around this by using JS but you aren’t, as a rule, supposed to expose native API’s to your JS code.
I agree, but apple has made an exception for coding apps to run arbitrary code for some years now.
So, it doesn't make any sense for Apple to not allow 3rd party browsers apart from its intention for a walled garden even if it means compromising security for its users.
This was loosened in June 2017. Now apps can can download and run any interpreted code, using any interpreter. It’s not restricted to coding apps or user-written code.
In the developer agreement, the second paragraph of section 3.3.2 gives special permission to programming environments, but that’s for executable code, which won’t work on iOS anyway.
Apparently as part of the "desktop class" browser experience in iPad OS, Safari lost its ability to double-tap to zoom. This is a feature I use on basically every single webpage, including when I am browsing on an actual desktop computer. Chrome's lack of this feature kept me on desktop Safari for ages. I can't believe they've taken it out. It significantly deteriorates my browsing experiencing. And for what? To add more text selection gestures or something? I already find it annoying that I randomly select text as I browse a website on iOS, I don't want important features being dumped in favor of more of that.
Edit: Upon further inspection, it may just be horribly buggy? It seems to sometimes attempt to zoom out on double tap (despite being at 100%), which means somewhere the code is still trying to work...
As I understand, tap-to-zoom adds a minimum latency to every click on a page since the browser needs to wait to see if its a double tap. This makes some buttons etc. feel laggy.
Indeed. I reported this but it wasn't fixed. Very disappointed as I use this all the time.
If you pinch zoom slightly and then double touch, it works on some pages, including this page, but it's off center. On others not at all. On others it works as it should.
Fwiw Chrome on OS X supports the zoom mode you are talking about. (I'm not talking about ctrl-+ text resizing zoom.) On a mighty/apple mouse, it's a triple tap gesture iirc.
I’ve been using this for several months now, I am still confused about the hand gestures I need to do to make multi tasking work. Everything has been very confusing to me, and it’s been hard finding information online as it was a beta.
There is no difference in closing vs hiding apps in iOS. When the app is hidden, the process is stopped. Yes, you can force kill the process by swiping up on the dock and then swiping away the frozen apps, but you should never do this unless the app is unresponsive. It gets you zero benefit, other than using extra battery next time you launch the app to run its initial setup again.
In fact Apple originally got rid of this gesture too in iOS 12 but so many people still try to force quit apps out of habit from their desktop computers that Apple was forced to bring the gesture back in 12.1
> you should never do this unless the app is unresponsive
In theory, yes, but not in practice. For example, the chromecast icon sometimes disappears in Hulu, which requires killing the app and reopening to get it back. The stock Mail app used to get stuck in fetching mail and refused to refresh, again requiring you to kill the app. Facebook Messenger's text input sometimes disappears entirely, requiring you to kill the app. Some apps get badges stuck, requiring you to kill the app. The list of bugs in apps that are only remedied by killing the app goes on and on.
The iOS 12 issue was just an example of Apple being overzealous and believing there's no reason to kill an app, when even their own apps had issues that were only remedied by force quitting the apps. The uproar was well deserved.
Unresponsive = the app’s main event loop is not processing events. On macOS this is when the beach ball cursor is shown. In fact there’s a built-in watchdog in iOS that’ll kill your app after 10 seconds if the main thread is not processing events.
On the other hand an app can break in a variety of ways which won’t involve blocking the main thread, e.g. by simply opening a popup that can’t be closed, or getting stuck inside the wall in a game, etc.
They’re iPhone-style gestures for the most part, except some of the Slide Over/Split View stuff requires a bit more work. The beta broke some of these too so if you were using that I’d try to use those gestures again and see if they do what you want.
Cool, but nothing about any focus on making the machine realistic for development.
My current MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth and after suffering through the 2016 and later versions at work, I will not be buying one of those until the keyboards are fixed. If iPadOS has first class terminal support I would consider making it my full time machine.
Terminal support isn't the issue, there are a couple nice terminal apps you can get which are solid. The big problem(s) I've had are:
* Lack of a common file system so you can't use multiple apps to edit/ compile source well.
* Inability to build and run locally (for iOS/ local apps)
* Inability to deploy locally (for example to a web server running on your machine)
* No virtualization... which would solve the above plus a few other issues.
* Inability to establish persistent network connections in the background.
You can use Coda to do remote web editing which can be useful if you have a remote build environment. There are a few other decent ways to do remote work, but building out a full local workflow on iOS is pretty much a non-starter right now.
"Kinda" meaning... not really. It works well for something like having a common place to open documents, but not very well for source code where you have a pile of related and interdependent files which you need to share among 4-5 apps. Things like Working Copy (https://workingcopyapp.com) help a bunch, but it's mostly a PITA. For example what kind of workflow would you have trying to set up to enable a typical build environment.
> You should be able to do this.
I'd love to see this. We have a fairly straight forward web development environment: Node.js + React + Typescript to build the client. The server runs on Koa and uses a MySQL database as the backend.
You think I should be able to get this going? ... I love my iPad, and I've dug around and looked for solutions and come up largely blank. Just getting the client stuff up and running using local files is... exceedingly difficult and impractical. Getting Koa + MySQL running seems like a non-starter.
This isn't some obscure stack, these are some of the most common web-dev building blocks around and it's just too much of a PITA.
I'd LOVE for this to work. So if you have some secret sauce, please share.
Blink shell on the App Store is a fantastic terminal that works wonderfully on iOS/iPadOS. Highly recommend it even with its steep price of $20. It supports mosh out of the box and has ability to store/import private/public keys. Multiple terminals can be opened as well. It even has a limited native shell which you can use to SCP files from your iPad to servers.
> Highly recommend it even with its steep price of $20
It's GPL3 [1], so you are welcome to compile and install on your own personal devices even if you do not have a paid Apple development subscription, though I'm pretty sure that this would require periodic compile/install cycles (every couple of weeks?).
I also use Blink and have been mostly very happy with it -- great Magic Keyboard support, though I wish the onscreen "extra keys" could be configured e.g. so you could have ":" when working in vim.
Unfortunately, lately I have found that it drops input on spotty WiFi connections, both in ssh and mosh. Mosh works fine if I go offline for a while, but if the connection is really weak and packets are getting dropped I start losing input which gets scary when doing "sudo apt blabla."
Still happy with my purchase, just hoping it gets more reliable.
I am using Blink as it seems to be the best terminal app I could find so far and would recommend it, but it does struggle a bit in some corner cases, as split-screen and switching between apps.
I don't own an iPad so I'm not really the target audience but even after reading about the app I must say that I'm rather confused: it's called Blink shell but it's actually a terminal emulator at the core, right, not an actual shell in the technical sense?
It's a terminal emulator, but most of its UI is in a character terminal that's like a very limited shell.
So you have some commands including most obviously "mosh" and "ssh" but also a few others. To get a GUI configuration window you enter "config" and hit return.
built in terminal with access to (even a sandboxed) filesystem where I can do the stuff I do in the terminal on a mac -- install and use packages (homebrew might work? it's Darwin underneath iPadOS too, right?) and do other bash/zsh stuff; text editors/IDEs (I'd personally like an iPadOS version of vscode); and some mac-only software, like Sketch.
If they had those, I'd switch to an iPad Pro today.
FWIW my brother carries around a little Raspberry Pi with all his Linux dev stuff on it and uses that when he wants to work on his hobby projects using the iPad. One big advantage is he can use the same thing with a Chromebook or phablet or whatever is handy, since he's just ssh-ing in.
I've thought about doing the same, but it just kinda irks me that I have this insanely powerful and robust tablet-form computer with good security, and I can't even have the equivalent of a Docker container. So instead I mosh into a Digital Ocean droplet and grind my teeth whenever the café's WiFi drops out. :-(
This is EXACTLY my thinking on this, too. An iPad Pro is, I think, more powerful than the computer I used for work just a couple years ago. Let me use it like a macbook pro already! It's way too powerful (and not to mention, expensive) to just be an ssh client. I could use an underpowered out of date samsung tablet for that.
Pretty much all of this. If I could have sandboxed dev environments, a terminal interface is all I really need since I do most of my dev work in a terminal. I suppose some nice-to-haves would be the ability to spin up local servers that I could access from Safari.
For non-developers, yeah. People whose work necessarily involves file management are hosed. But that's a small minority of what gets done on computers these days.
Not that target audience, definitely. But I wouldn't underestimate how much productive software was used on Macs via Telnet, at corporations and at universities as well as by random hackers who loved the Mac GUI.
I kind of would, given how little presence Mac OS (pre-OS X) had outside US market.
We were all using a mix of MS-DOS/Windows, Amiga and Ataris.
What I remember was getting Small-C and K&R C compilers to kind of get corporation/university work done at home, no one was that rich enough to pay for telnet connections over long term dialups.
Why do you want a extremely limited computer, one that you hardly have any control over, as your development machine. Do you really want Apple making all of your decisions for you?
I won’t even use macOS due to the limitations that don’t exist anywhere else, but mostly because I think Apple makes bad decisions and then does not give me any options to change the behavior. They are such a “one size fits all” company that I just don’t understand why creative people would want to support them. Their tech is more draconian than anything.
I don't know what GP has in mind, but you normally can't do basic developer stuff like run dtrace on system binaries or use TotalSpaces. The only way to do that is to disable SIP by holding down a bunch of keys at startup, and that mysteriously re-enables itself after reboots with a pattern I haven't figured out.
It's beyond frustrating to have to type in terminal commands in a special recovery zone to have a functional computer. Reminds me of typing grub commands at each boot to get graphics on Linux computers circa 2000 or so.
I don’t believe that this much willful obliviousness actually exists here, but I’ll state the obvious anyway: the big one that you failed to realize is about the hardware.
And, it’s recursively limited because of the limited choices even within their own lineup.
Honestly, I just wanted to know a real world case where this person had a mac, didn't know the limitations, discovered the limitations, and then switched.
Well, I am that person. I can go through a ton of other limitations that macOS has if you want…
But you moved the goalpost on me because first you just asked for a limitation and I gave you probably the largest one. You didn’t say anything about it being an unknown limitation before I got started using it… You said “I’ll bite“ as if you could not think of one limitation of the platform. I knew about the main limitation, that you can only run it on Apple hardware, before I bought it but I decided to go forward anyway because I want to compile an app for iOS and I decided that it would be much better than trying to maintain a hackintosh.
There was zero sarcasm in my response. Not even the part where I said “enjoy your center ship I guess”, because Apple fans seem to love making my text disappear for others if I don’t gush over Apples products. If you really want to know about all of the limitations that I did not know about before I purchased into the platform I’ll be glad to do that.
Here’s a big one: you simply cannot operate the entire OS with just a keyboard unless you add some third-party usability-correction utilities. It’s impossible. And those utilities are suck and they don’t work well and there’s a chance that Apple will take them away from you or cause problems with them in any given update. That’s why Stephen Hawking always used Windows, same as just about every other disabled user in the world.
The biggest problem I've found with using my iPad pro as a full time device is that the iPad does not have a real concept of keyboard focus. This is a big deal in split-screen apps, where hard as I try I can't get my terminal emulator to accept keyboard input -- I just keep typing in Safari.
Hopefully this is something that Apple addresses now that they consider iPad OS to be a real OS and not a scaled-up iOS.
What happens when you Command-tab into your terminal emulator directly?
I agree that split-screen input/output priority is wonky -- for example, if you have a video player app and Safari side-by-side and an external display connected, the video player app will only output to the display if it's the app on the left.
I wonder why they aren't advertising mouse support. This seems like one of the most useful features to me. They didn't mention it on the keynote and I can't find it on their website anywhere.
Any thoughts on why Apple wouldn't be pushing this as a major advancement for iPad?
Because it's not very good mouse support. It's basically a simulated finger. If they started advertising this, people would rightly criticize it for being mediocre. For the moment anyhow, the iPad is a touch device with an optional virtual finger you can plug into it.
> Because it's not very good mouse support. It's basically a simulated finger.
All I want for them to do is allow third party applications to support real mice in the way that you'd expect a real mouse to behave. The killer app would be remote desktop. I understand that there's literally one model of mouse that works with one specific remote desktop app, but I don't want that, I want to use my own mouse.
I've always thought the idea of programming on an iPad with a keyboard + mouse would be cool, but now it is very apparent that if that idea has any chance of working, it would pretty much be centered around using the iPad solely as a remote desktop tool.
I would also imagine the latency that comes with that would be annoying.
I wonder if Apple will ever do what Microsoft did with the surface and just put full blown Mac OS on it. I'm going to guess no due to this iPadOS with swipey gestures thing.
That's basically what the Surface is, and the vast majority of people who own them use them as laptops. At that point, why not just use a laptop?
I've done a fair amount of dev work on the iPad, if you have a good SFTP friendly editor like Coda, you can do development work on a remote server, but ultimately you are tied to that server for a build environment. It works fairly well, but since remote shells tend to disconnect in the background it can be frustrating to build stuff.
I think one reason is that it looks half baked. Instead of a cursor you get a blob which simulates a finger.
Another reason might be because Apple has been avoiding mixing touch screens with mice. Not sure why. Maybe because Microsoft did it first or maybe because Apple doesn't want to canibalize sales between products. Anyway, a macOS touch laptop would be amazing or an iPad pro runnning an iOS/macOS combo. Sidecar will get us a bit closer to that.
I've never been convinced about a touchscreen macOS. The quality of the interface in Windows took a nosedive when they started trying to account for both finger-poking and precision cursor use. I would hate to see that happen to macOS. My preference is to let macOS/MacBooks stay keyboard/mouse, and let iPadOS/iPad be the touch device.
It's really an implementation problem not a conceptual one.
Windows didn't implement it properly. The last time I tried it something as trivial as changing the screen brightness in tablet mode required you to open the Windows setting if you wanted to be able to use a slider. The quick shortcut was tapping the system clock, then tapping on a setting that would cycle through 20% increments IIRC.
Some apps like Bitwig Studio or even some Adobe apps IIRC change the UI depending on whether you are in tablet mode or mouse mode.
You may not be convinced, but the generation of younger kids expect every screen to be a touch screen. It's amusing to watch my kids (3 and 5) touch the screen expecting it to react the same way an iPad or iPhone responds.
I've had the iOS 13 beta for several months and am using the mouse support to teach our four year old basic mouse usage. It is a nice compromise, because an iPad is a simpler device for her to navigate and understand than a PC (and has much better parental controls) but this gets her familiar with a PC's peripherals for when we do introduce her to a PC later.
The Logitech M535 worked without hassle, and fit her hand well. We combined it with a OMOTON Ultra-Slim keyboard for a full "PC peripherals-like experience."
I still feel like mouse support is half baked. Almost like Apple hobbled it on purpose to make sure you KNEW it wasn't the primary way to interact with an iPad. It should be a first class citizen like the keyboard support in my view, with basic settings like auto-hiding the cursor when it isn't connected and cursor configuration (no more giant blob).
If it's not good enough for everyday users then it's also not good enough for people with disabilities. Who, I note, also use the device every day and deserve a good experience too.
The 'mouse' support is not meant for use as a mouse according to Apple, it's exclusively meant to be used for accessibility for people who have difficulty in movement (trackball use and such)
Everytime I read about greenpeace talking about how Apple's products are so terrible for the environment while saying nothing about android products I roll my eyes.
Same thing with the fix it folks saying Apple's products are "unrepairable". There is a great market for both repair and reuse / re-sale in apple products.
It's interesting comparing a 4 year old android tablet or phone (which was sometimes a year behind when shipping already) to apple's products.
While I personally wish Apple would be more supportive of 3rd party or at-home repairs, I think what they've been doing there actually helps with extending the life of their devices.
Let's say you're thinking of buying a used iPhone. If you had reason to believe that used iPhones were mostly repaired by 3rd parties that didn't necessarily know what they're doing, or were using cheap or even dangerous (in the case of batteries) parts. Would you buy used, or would go just buy some cheap new phone? And if people weren't interested in buying, would you bother trying to sell your old phone or would you just throw it away?
Making sure the quality of second-hand market is high is essential to encouraging re-use. I think a lot of those who are criticising Apple when it comes to repair should remember that. It's not that they're wrong in saying that Apple should support 3rd party repair, but their complaints are not gonna come to much unless what they propose is actually reasonable.. i.e. makes it easier for 3rd parties to repair iPhones while maintaining a healthy second-hand market for iPhones. And that's not easy.
The ic is not part of battery chemistry- in case this comment isn’t a joke a common workaround would be to grab ic from dead batteries and put them on fakes.
You're right, keeping keys in SRAM and other trivial anti-tamper measures are way too expensive. Cutoffs are performed by the same IC. Should be trivial.
This was a business decision for sure. Apple doesn't want anyone but Apple to work on their devices. Now maybe you can say that alone is good for resale, but it's extremely shitty for customers, especially when their attitude is to tell people they need a new board and all their data is gone when a repair, often even a simple one is entirely possible.
The issue w bogus undisclosed batteries was causing problems for apples brand rep. Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.
The lie you are spreading, that you can’t use non apple batteries is false. The phone will work fine, but apple will let you know it can’t model the batteries health.
Having the phone recognize if the battery key has changed is a simple and effective way to manage this.
For MANY people, being able to rely on the apple battery health check is far more important than allowing scammers to do a cheap battery swap, sell phone with a “near new” battery, and then have customer in apple store complaining a few weeks later only to be told they were ripped off
As I pointed out there's fairly simple ways for them to resolve this without these practices. No where did I suggest that the batteries don't work at all. The extents people go to on this site to defend Apple's shitty anti-consumer behavior is utter insanity.
Go ahead and describe the fairly simple solution you've come up with understanding there is a surprising amount of money out there to defeat it.
If by "brand new" battery you mean an unused battery there are actually issues there, sellers do sell "unused" batteries as "brand new" but the mfg date turns out to be really old. Technically true I guess - the battery has not been used? Would I want a 3-4 year old battery? No - who knows what SOC it has been maintained at.
What is interesting is apple's focus on "shitty anti-consumer" behavior which is "utter insanity" has resulted in a lot of consumers buying their product.
iFixit and the other "right to repair" advocates are talking their own book. Apple products are uniformly the same across the entire installed base so it's easy to keep parts in stock and meet expected demand for repairs. They also have higher residual values so people are much wore willing to spend money on repairs for them.
Last summer, for example, Greenpeace teamed up with iFixit to rate the repairability of Apple devices, accusing Apple of shortening device lifespan with difficult, proprietary repair processes and components, ultimately leading to more electronic waste. - 2018
I just got the iPad Pro and have been using the iPadOS beta for the past few months. I don’t know how I was doing without it before.
I now have a place where I can sketch my architecture diagrams, wireframes, live sketching for my team when I work. Everything is in one place and does not get lost. I can plug it into a projector and write notes on things to explain things to my team. Doing presentations is easy. I now pretty much only use my MacBook Pro for coding. Almost every other task is done on my iPad Pro.
My 2 most used apps at this point are Concepts and Flow by moleskine.
I'm by all means no Apple fanboy (almost all my devices are Android-based, work laptop is a MBP) but this sure is impressive.
All of the presented features seem to be thought through and made to increase my productivity. Back in the day, I was one of the first people to own the original iPad in my country (small, central European country) and I regretted that decision almost immediately since it was just a bigger phone that I could use on the couch, albeit one that couldn't even do phone calls. I finally get the feeling that tablets get to be real devices.
Anyone here familiar with photo management know what the likely implications of the new USB storage support are?
My elderly mother has gotten into photography in the past few years and shoots with what I assume is a prosumer camera (high-ish resolution, swappable lenses). The Windows laptop she plugs into is a disaster waiting to happen, in that I’m pretty sure nothing is properly backed up. I think she also barely understands what’s happening on her computer at any given time.
If an iPad, plus camera kit, plus external storage, plus maybe some iCloud backup is a reasonable way to manage photos, I'd consider getting her one.
What might an iPadOS + camera workflow / setup look like? Is this likely to be a replacement for a camera + traditional computer photo management setup?
Edit: I should add that, while I’m comfortable with Linux and coding and other nerdly pursuits, I know nothing about current norms and tech for photography.
I jumped to an iPad Pro this year because of the announcement of USB storage support.
I'm not a pro photographer by any means, and my workflow is pretty simple, but here's my hardware workflow is: iPad Pro, Fujifilm X-series camera(s), USB-C Memory Card reader, and a Samsung T5 SSD.
I import directly into my iCloud Drive from the memory card, then plug in the SSD, and move the unnecessary files onto the SSD. Edit the photos from iCloud Drive via Affinity or Darkroom. I'm mostly just doing exposure adjustments to RAW files, and both apps work incredibly well. Export the edited images back to either the iOS Photos app, or just back to the directory on iCloud Drive. It's incredibly quick and efficient. I've been running the iPadOS beta since July/August, and haven't encountered any reason to be concerned.
I have been travelling a couple times this summer with this setup, and don't miss my Macbook at all. iPadOS with the new storage support, and a real USB-C port really feels like a computer replacement.
The standard option would be to import the images into the Photos app. I’ve yet to install iPadOS but I’d imagine simply plugging in a USB would present such an option to the user. They may need to open photos and tap import.
Once you’ve enabled Photo syncing in iCloud and pay the monthly fee (€3 per month for 200GB etc) then that’s all there is to it.
My parent’s iPad backs up all their encrypted device content to my iCloud storage via Family Sharing, they don’t pay a thing. I’ve no access to it but it eats slightly into my quota. My mother has the USB A to lightning dongle and she’s can easily import from her Canon P&S. Normally I have to explain every step to her but I was away when the dongle shipped to her and she managed it just fine.
The Photos app has a reasonable editor that get the job done. Add Afinity Photo to that and it’s ability to open from iCloud and you’ve a Photoshop killer.
The nice thing about Apple Photos Library is that it keeps the original image and all edits so you don’t lose anything.
Tried the flow out, it's really slick and FAST as all get out. Just plug and play, you can import files into the Photos app (the drive shows as an import location like in MacOS Photos app) or in the files app as if it is Finder. Really powerful, a modern iPad Pro might be faster than the old Windows hardware for run and gun processing, large scale editing is better on an actively cooled device. The screen on the iPad is likely more accurate.
I wish I could upvote this more, as I've been blown away by the speed as well.
Also, the deep integration of Siri Shortcuts with iOS opens up so many possibilities for automation for this - maybe OP can help their mother with setting up one or the team at an Apple store could help (I've had some experience with making an appointment with them to help me with a shortcut I was building for Apple Health.)
But I also agree with some of the other commenters that just leveraging iCloud / Apple Photos out-of-the-box should suffice.
Two questions... does she use Lightroom or another photo editing/management tool? Does she shoot raw, or just jpg?
If she isn't using Lightroom or shooting raw, the siblings cover it. Just use Apple Photos with iCloud backup. If she wants most of the photos in full-size on local disk, buy the largest capacity iPad you can.
If she is using Lightroom, they have their own cloud storage that is included (or discounted?) with the monthly software subscription. So, you can still use the iPad, you just have an extra step of importing into Apple Photos, then exporting into Lightroom (this may have changed, but AFAIK, iPad still doesn't allow direct import of files into non-native apps).
There are a few tutorials and blog entries that describe the above process, though I expect there will be updates or new coverage in a month or two, once people have time with the latest iPadOS updates.
FWIW, I use an Ipad and the camera kit on vacation, use Apple Photos, and also have a MacBook at home (it's a bit easier to do some tasks with a mouse, but an all-mobile workflow is possible). My mother use a hodgepodge of Lightroom on Windows, with some photos synced to her Apple product ecosystem, but I don't know the details.
I think she shoots in JPG because of memory budget. A family friend talked her into buying some kind of photo management / photo touch-up application (can’t remember its name), but I think it mostly just makes her angry because it took over as the default handler for photos on her computer, and her computer is too old and slow to run the software acceptably.
How seamless is the iCloud backup when the total volume of pictures is greater than the local storage? Does the photos app smartly fetch the full photo as needed?
The iCloud photo backup work very well, in my experience. My phone and older iPad are lower capacity and have to keep optimized (smaller) photos local. The full size images are downloaded automatically when viewed in Photos.
As noted by another post, iCloud will delete a photo from the whole system if deleted on one device, so you may want periodic backups elsewhere. I just drag the entire photo library file (MacOS keeps the library, photos included, in a single “file”) from my Mac to an external drive. Can’t speak to the best way to do this from an iPad, but with the new external drive support, that might be easy?
For an elderly person, just use iCloud for photos backup. It works incredibly well, and works through the native photos app, so it will totally eliminate the need to think about backing up unless it's offline all the time.
While I agree that iCloud is indeed great, it is more of a "sharing between devices" solution than a backup. If you delete a photo, it gets deleted on all your devices, and the only way to get it back is through iCloud.com.
What don't you like about that? It becomes the de facto storage for everything you can see. I don't really understand why you'd delete a photo that you want to keep?
There's also a multitude of cloud solutions. Instead of forcing your mom into some weird ipad work flow, work with what she already does and is familiar with.
I think she went that route mainly because of cost rather than preference. She’ll obviously use what she wants to use, but she seems pretty unhappy / frustrated with status quo, so I don’t think helping her explore options is unreasonable.
I think it's great that Apple is attempting to design an OS for a specific form-factor and the use cases that go along with that. I worked on Windows 8 and the idea of putting the same UI on every device regardless of its size or inputs was really abhorrent to me. (If I've got a keyboard and a mouse connected to a big screen then I want something keen to that.)
The multitasking functions are very confusing, as are the new multi-finger gestures for performing undo/copy/paste etc. Nothing is obviously discoverable either, it all feels accidental at best, though that's been the case since they removed depth from the UI.
Wasn't the promise of iPad that it was much easier than a Mac or PC? I don't find that to be the case.
Anyway, I use mine as a couch browser. I still can't find a heavier use case for it.
A major thing that iOS doesn't have and even iPadOS 12 didn't is the ability to do a side-by-side view of two windows of the same app (two Mail windows, two Safari, two Pages, etc). Sounds pretty basic, but previously the split-screen view had to be two different apps.
I swear to god, every single iOS release I see a comment lamenting how buggy the new version is in developer preview, and every time, by the time it's on my device, I never have issues.
Well boy do I get to eat my hat. What happened to Safari? Major broken behaviors and—get this—rendering bugs on HN. Impressively bad. This is like browsing on IE6.
13.1 releases today and is supposed to be much much less buggy. Not sure how buggy 13.1 is but you should really focus on that as 13.0 was extremely unusual and out for only 5 days. Essentially a beta that may have been rushed out for tarrif related reasons, as some have speculated.
As a bedside YouTube machine, my iPad Air 1 is absolutely fantastic at it. Web browsing stutters like no other, but the YouTube app is still very smooth despite the device's hardware being ~6 years old now. I'm happy with my purchase despite Apple cutting off iOS/iPad OS updates for my device.
As a productivity device, the device is basically useless since app switching is annoyingly slow.
Once the OS updates stop, App updates follow shortly after. And once developers stop updating their apps, they become unusable over time, especially when they cannot communicate with server side API. My first iPad lasted about a year after the OS updates stopped.
Officially, per the App Store metadata, the YouTube app supports all devices on at least iOS 10 [0]. I personally intend on holding out on upgrading until YouTube is no longer supported.
I appreciate how slowly they depreciate. I've been able to resell my used Apple products year after year, consistently getting a solid price that I'd never get with a PC or Android device.
Am I the only one still disappointed that with a dedicated pseudo-desktop experience we still don’t have Xcode? The iPad Pro will truly be a pro portable device when it can make its own apps.
One thing which has increadibly annoyed me on the iPad so far was, that even if you had music files in your iCloud drive, there is no way to add them to the Music app. The same applies to videos and the TV app. There doesn't seem to be an iPad based flow to add your content to those apps.
Also, while I love the ability to play video as picture in picture, I cannot grasp, why the video size is limited to 1/4 of the screen size - if something interesting comes up, you cannot enlarge the video beyond that limit.
> Apple will never track or profile you when you sign in with Apple. The most information you’ll have to share with an app or website is your name and email address.
My fiancee has been looking for a mobile drawing computer. The only thing I could recommend until now was the Surface Book since Apple doesn't make anything mobile that could run the full Adobe suite. If you can sketch with the iPad Photoshop and there is sidecar support for Illustrator and the other apps, it might be a good deal.
I'm currently using my ipad pro as a secondary monitor with full wacom tablet-like functionality using the duet app. it works pretty well and has full support for the apple pencil. I have paperlike as a screen protector which gives a paperlike "resistence" when I'm drawing on it too..
The painting improvements to Notes look nice, but I gotta say: not having an official Apple Paint program seems like a huge missed opportunity. Even just the nostalgia pull – whether it was Mac Paint or Windows Paint, how many people's love affairs with computers began with a system-bundled paint program?
One under-rated "creation tool" that the iPad (regular and pro especially) has is its front-facing camera.
I have been playing with low-key streaming with the iPad Pro, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well I can prop up the iPad to stream, and use the extra real-estate to read or check-in on stream chat.
I don't want / need the super high quality tools of a professional streamer, but I don't want grainy 2001 feature phone video - just something that can allow me to keep it as a fun side hobby without investing thousands of $ in a set-up.
And there are a bunch of decent apps to do some light video editing, but iMovie tends to satisfy my needs.
I wonder if this is partly so Apple doesn't have to keep licensing the term "iOS" from Cisco. Now that they have a premium market, it could be cheaper for them to migrate to iPhoneOS/iPadOS and no longer have to pay Cisco for the license to use the term "iOS".
One interesting thing is the number of apps that use stuff you did not think about. For example SlingTV ask to use bluetooth!?! Why?
One other thing, the icons have become smaller on my iPad Pro 10.5. Looking at it in landscape mode right now there is room for 5 rows of icons where I believe there used to be 4?
Has anyone been able to successfully get Sidecar to work? I just upgraded to the Catalina beta and have not be able to connect to my iPadOS 13 iPad Pro. I tried physically connecting the two machines with a thunderbolt cable, and connecting them with bluetooth but nothing so far has worked.
Nice list of feature improvements. Still, it doesn't look like there's a way to support multiple accounts on a single device (e.g. parent and child with different configurations.)
Maybe I'm wrong and missed something? There's a long list of improvements and I definitely skimmed it.
Not in there, that would have been a pretty big shift for Apple to concede that not every member of the family needs their own iPad and support multiple accounts. Only whatever the Apple educational software is called unlocks the ability for iPads to share accounts.
I very much like that it's becoming more mature and close to a desktop-replacement OS, I just wish it wasn't so locked down. I wouldn't really feel comfortable using it as a daily driver if I can't dig into the nuts and bolts of things and control my environment.
There was, but it's more of an accessibility feature -- the cursor is a relatively large circle, simulating a fingertip, rather than a pinpoint cursor.
That sounds almost vindictive in its desire to make sure no one uses a mouse for anything important while still checking off some legal accessibility requirement.
iOS has been dead to me since iOS 7. I stopped buying iPhone/iPads and stopped developing for it. Now that Jony "no taste" Ive is gone, can we go back to the classic look already?
Just trying it out right now and it already feels like they shot themselves in the foot by forking away from iOS.
iOS13 had for the past two weeks fixed one of the biggest annoyances in Apple's horrible keyboard UX: For people like me who type in multiple languages, the keyboard switching button cycles between "English", "Portuguese", and "Emojis". iOS13 FINALLY put a dedicated emoji button in there and after 2 weeks living with it on the iPhone, iPadOS apparently completely forgot to port this over and the feature has been taken away from me.
This is just one example out of probably a crap-ton of things that they forgot to bring along from iOS. This crap happens all the time with Database vendors too, when they try to keep a separate closed-source Enterprise version. I get that feature flags are annoying, but thinking you can manually keep two different OS codebases synced and consistent is delusional.
_On a side note, the rest of the keyboard is still a mess._
No number row (not even as an option in Settings), no hold for punctuation, but worst of all (especially if you're coming out of Gboard to try their keyboard again), Slide-to-Type is just horrible. The accuracy is SO bad, I tried typing "hello world", and not only it just couldn't understand that I was trying to type "world", it wouldn't even suggest it as an alternative, the best I got was it suggested "world's" once, and if you tap it and try to delete the "'s" it just deletes the entire word.
Not to mention that since I use two languages, it even tried portuguese words before it tried "world", even though I had the english keyboard selected (and there is no way to disable multilingual typing like there is on Gboard, even IF it worked decently). Also not being able to turn off Memojis on the Emoji keyboard... why?
It's like the manual that Apple forgot. Case in point: you can swipe from the bottom-right corner of the screen with the Apple Pencil and it'll take a screenshot of the webpage and open it for marking up.
Extensive coverage of multitasking features, as well. There's definitely a learning curve with all these possibilities - split view, side view, copying and pasting, etc - so it makes sense to get comfortable with them now.
1: https://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-and-ipados-13-the-mac...