[jrmg]

The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function! Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream. But we can only dream right?

Safari is not known for being slow.

That machine is _old_. The iPad was released in 2010 - 13 years ago. And even when new it was substantially slower than contemporary PCs or Macs - Apple then was not the CPU powerhouse it is today. It has 256Mb RAM and early (so, slow) NAND flash storage.

I really think you would (or, at least, most people would) be very disappointed at how well it would run Linux now. Things like web browsing and running recent applications, and more ‘HN’ things like coding, would be very sluggish.

[Donckele]

Nah. I have older netbooks (remember them?) and they are still more usable (with linux) than my old ipad.

[scarface_74]

Does your old Netbook have only 256MB of RAM and 500Mhz processor?

[smoldesu]

Because if so, that's enough to run 4 simultaneous instances of Linux!

[scarface_74]

How well will that work with the modern web and modern web browsers?

[smoldesu]

Great! On paper it could handle Apache and NGINX like a charm, your modern web browsers would have no trouble accessing it.

[scarface_74]

What does that have to do with running a modern web browser on a device with 256MB RAM and a single core 500Mhz processor?

[bunga-bunga]

> Safari is not known for being slow.

Yes it is slow on older hardware. It was slow even back then. You must have forgotten the time it took to paint the rest of the page if you scrolled or zoomed out a liiittle too fast.

Sure this was due to the minuscole amount of RAM Apple ships their product with, but “Safari is slow” is appropriate.

Also “Safari is slow” on my i9 as well, I just need to open a GitHub PR with 10+ files to see it come to a crawl, whereas Chrome never feels it. But hey, its scrolling is buttery smooth even if clicking doesn’t work.