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by Ninn 2037 days ago
Whew, good thing you're not in charge then.

To me it would seem that the vision for iPad OS is the exact opposite. An attempt at bridging towards having the iPad as a much more generic, almost laptop solution. Close to what the Surface has been trying.

3 comments

I'm not making an assertion about whether that's what I would personally do if I were in charge. I'm making an assertion about how I think Apple sees the difference between the iPad and the Mac. :)

I know it runs counter to what a lot of folks seem to think (and definitely what a lot of folks want). But it's genuinely the way I read the tea leaves. The iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard arguably is an "almost laptop solution" already -- what I'm saying is that I don't think Apple has any desire to give the iPad a Unix shell, a fully open file system, the ability to sideload apps, and so on. If you want to run Microsoft Office or Photoshop on your iPad, they think that's great, because there are iPadOS versions of it that fit within their vision of What iPads Are. If you want to run a Docker container with a local web server and Visual Studio Code on your iPad, though, I don't see that fitting in that vision.

I would love an iPad pro to run Xcode, I think prototyping an app where you have direct access to a touch screen and all sensors would be really productive.
That looks like the aim. Every change to the ipads and macbooks have taken them closer together. It seems that the end goal is you will be able to do almost anything with both of them. With the macbook being more powerful and the ipad being more portable.