[derefr]

Y’know Samsung’s DEX, where you plug a Samsung Android device into an HDMI output and the output is not a mirror of the phone’s mobile UI, but rather a full Android desktop UI?

There’s little reason that Apple couldn’t do the same thing with iPads, where the “desktop UI” is macOS. Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor.

Apple are already training us for this with the new version of Continuity — there’s little difference between “control your Mac from your iPad” and “control the macOS DE container running on your iPad, from your iPad.”

The only real differences in interaction paradigm between Continuity and a DEX-like approach, now that I think of it, would be:

- a shared filesystem

- [possibly] moving iPad/Catalyst apps freely between screens, where they swap between being fullscreen on iPadOS and being windows on macOS

This would also be a (rather-charitable) explanation for why iPadOS has never done anything smart so far when plugged into an HDMI display. If they were planning to do this, they wouldn’t bother with half-steps like giving iPadOS apps multi-display support.

[hexe]

I want this, but not limited to only tablets.

I want to own a single "pocket computer" and that's it, no more syncing, just a single device. I can drop it into a dock on my desk, that breaks out the I/O into a 30" display, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, and it activates the Mac desktop environment.

Unplug from the dock, it pauses everything I'm doing on the desktop, and it goes back into my pocket and uses the touch screen.

[derefr]

You mean like this: https://nexdock.com/samsung-dex-laptop/

[hexe]

Yeah, but have it power all the peripherals of a full desktop. It could hot swap by dropping it into a magnetic dock/cradle whenever you need to "do some work", and then pick it up and walk away and all the desktop peripherals go back into hibernation.

[idle_zealot]

> Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor.

I want basically what you’re describing, but rather than having 2 distinct desktop environments I posit that the iPadOS environment, with a few refinements, would be better for desktop usage than macOS’ DE. Specifically, the refinements I’d want would include allowing more than 2 apps in a split view, and perhaps some reconsideration of that floating app-stack thing to make it less clunky. As a daily user of tiling window managers on a Linux desktop, floating desktop windows seem like a UI dead end that we’ve somehow been trapped in for decades. Growing existing “smartphone/tablet” UI to offer more power seems like a more realistic way to widespread adoption of a better desktop paradigm than removing “features” that most current desktop users have become familiar with.

[spideymans]

>I’d want would include allowing more than 2 apps in a split view, and perhaps some reconsideration of that floating app-stack thing to make it less clunky.

iPadOS 15 has limited support for floating windows and more than three "windows" on screen at once. I'd posit that they are preparing the APIs for floating window support for external displays in a future version of iPadOS.

>As a daily user of tiling window managers on a Linux desktop, floating desktop windows seem like a UI dead end that we’ve somehow been trapped in for decades

As a Mac user, I agree. On my 13-inch notebook, I more or less always use applications in a full screen configuration. The notebook screen is too small to allow for effective uses of floating windows.

However, even on a 27-inch display, I still find myself using full screen applications more often than not.

In fact I'd be ecstatic if a future version of macOS stole some of the multitasking features from iPadOS. Managing fullscreen apps on the Mac is a lot clunkier than it is on the iPad.

[walterbell]

Many people were expectantly waiting for this to be announced at WWDC 2021, especially with the M1-based iPad including silicon support for hypervisor/virtualization and the 16GB RAM / 1TB storage model. Yet nothing was announced, suggesting that the only use of 16GB RAM will be upcoming memory-consuming Adobe "Pro" apps.

[vbezhenar]

IMO this is the first future-proof mobile device from Apple.

Apple has bad habit to install absolutely minimum amounts of RAM into their mobile devices. iPhone had 2 GB RAM when Androids (with similar price) had 8 GB RAM. It means that RAM will be main issue for supporting those devices in the future iOS versions and eventually they'll be dropped, despite extremely powerful CPU and huge storage.

But with 16 GB it won't be the case ever. And, of course, CPU will not significantly progress in the future and certainly will not the limiting factor. So this tablet should easily last for another 10 years (if battery could be replaced with reasonable efforts).

[walterbell]

Agreed, but not worth almost $2K for the 16GB/1TB model. Until Apple un-cripples the iPad Pro, it's better to buy a lower-end iPad + MacBook.

[saagarjha]

My iOS devices with 2 GB of RAM are still going strong today. Actually, I’m responding to you from one running the latest iPadOS 15 beta.

[1123581321]

Adoption rates of these new features is too low to train a substantial portion of users.