[kmeisthax]

Apple advertises their own iPads as computers now, they certainly don't want their customers to look at iPads and think, "that's great, now I'm going to buy a real computer instead". They want their customers to buy an iPad. The only real way for iPadOS to go is "up", as in, absorbing more "real computer" features.

Also, what you're describing already exists, it's called iSH. It runs an x86 emulator with a copy of Alpine Linux inside. Somehow, they even convinced App Review to allow it (yes, Apple did threaten to remove it at one point, they backed down). You can use this penalty box to run pretty much any developer tool you like, you can mount file providers inside of the VM, etc. The only limitation is that it's x86 emulation is incomplete, I can't get it to run cargo so I can't compile Rust programs on it yet.

[alsetmusic]

> they certainly don't want their customers to look at iPads and think, "that's great, now I'm going to buy a real computer instead". They want their customers to buy an iPad.

They want their customers to buy both. Apple has nothing to gain by killing off the Mac via the iPad.

[culturestate]

> Apple has nothing to gain by killing off the Mac via the iPad.

If tablets are going to replace laptops for consumers in the long term, Apple would prefer that those tablets be iPads. If that shift means the iPad eats the Mac, so be it.

This already worked for them once - the iPhone cannibalized the (then-very profitable) iPod business with Apple’s explicit support, and now the company’s worth a trillion dollars.

[imwillofficial]

They clearly want ipad to replace macs for consumption, not coding.

[culturestate]

> They clearly want ipad to replace macs for consumption, not coding

I don't know what they want, but they're clearly preparing for a future where iPads are the default for consumption and creation.

There are multiple physical keyboard options, the Pencil is consistently refreshed, iPadOS has mouse/trackpad support now, and there's even an official - if very limited - iPad IDE[1] for learning Swift.

1. https://www.apple.com/sg/swift/playgrounds/

[imwillofficial]

Swift playgrounds does not change their “app console” philosophy as can be seen from their documents shown in their legal battle with Epic (I’m on mobile so I don’t have the link handy)

[culturestate]

If we’ve learned anything from Apple’s history, it’s that what they say today has little bearing on what they’ll do tomorrow.

[dwaite]

The line is that the adding additional functionality requires an informed user's explicit and understood consent. This is a blurry line of policy which is not able to be limited via technology. The developers of tools like iSH and Pythonista have to tread carefully.

[ulfw]

Apple advertises their own iPads as computers now, they certainly don't want their customers to look at iPads and think, "that's great, now I'm going to buy a real computer instead".

Just because most of us on HACKERnews write code doesn't mean your average 'computer user' does. iPads work very well as computer replacements for the majority of people who just want to browse the web/do shopping/use their favourite video and other media viewer etc etc.

It's an everyday computer for the masses. Not a developer's workstation.

[donbrae]

Wow, you can actually use iSH to install PHP, run `php -S localhost:8080` and view index.php or whatever in Safari. I had no idea this was possible on iOS. Thanks!

[dev_tty01]

Yeah, iSH is cool, but x86? Seems odd that they didn't run an ARM version of linux in a container or VM.

[kmeisthax]

The iSH author had more experience with x86 than ARM.

I would not be surprised if iPadOS 15 ships with virtualization support, since the M1 has ARM EL2. If that is the case and Apple allows iSH to use it, then it probably would make sense to add ARM support to iSH for extra performance.

[dwaite]

You cannot download and execute arbitrary files, so had to have something interpreted.

They could pick something easier to emulate perhaps, but x86 has benefits from a compatibility standpoint.

Maybe one day there would be a benefit of targetting WASM with a natively implemented syscall api?

[saagarjha]

We looked into it; the problem is that this makes system calls unbearably slow because they require IPC.

[saagarjha]

There isn’t any support for this in iOS.