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by walterbell 603 days ago
iPad was ignored to work on VisionOS and desperately needs competition to end 5+ years of stagnation.

Any insight into the failure/withdrawal of Qualcomm X Elite dev kit? They had every opportunity to hit the ground running in 2024, with huge pent-up demand from the Linux community.

Is there a viable path for Pixel Tablet (Samsung + Google) silicon to compete with Apple and Qualcomm?

> AMD/Nvidia ARM SoCs using TSO execution for x86 translation, and some 16k page size patches on Linux

That's exciting news. Hopefully they can avoid QC fiasco with device trees, by fully implementing Arm SystemReady.
2 comments
hmottestad 603 days ago
I don’t think the iPad was ignored. Otherwise they wouldn’t have introduced the iPad Pro with an SoC that was newer than any other Apple product and with a screen that none of the competitors are using.

iPadOS does feel like it’s missing a lot of love. I can’t fathom why stage manager doesn’t have a way to show all the apps that are open at the same time. I’ve had to drag apps to the side to get to the one that is underneath. Not to speak of how hard it is to use an iPad for dev work. I don’t want to have to remote into a server and use a terminal and learn vim. I’ve tried VSCode hosted on GitHub through Safari and it’s absolutely terrible.

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walterbell 603 days ago
> introduced the iPad Pro with an SoC that was newer than any other Apple product and with a screen that none of the competitors are using.

Whether intentional or not, the expensive flagship M4 iPad Pro served as a low-volume developer hardware preview for upcoming M4 Macbooks, providing months of early access for developers to work with the latest silicon.

iPad users have been sadly ignored for years, except for a brief period of Microsoft Surface competition. At this point, iPad Pro can only be saved by EU regulators or change in Apple leadership. There is no meaningful competition and Qualcomm has stumbled again.

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hmottestad 602 days ago
The differences between the M3 and M4 aren't that big are they? The GPU is unchanged and the core architecture is slightly adjusted. Biggest difference is the increased clock speed.
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pjmlp 603 days ago
No one cares about Pixel Tablet in Europe, everyone that cares about Android tablets is using Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi.
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walterbell 602 days ago
Any Huawei or Xiaomi tablets you would recommend to replace iPad Pro?

Do any of them support non-OEM Linux?

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pjmlp 602 days ago
Currently in Germany many folks are enjoying Xiaomi Pad 6.

I don't care about non-OEM Linux support, I love what Android with a managed userspace is pushing for, instead of yet another UNIX clone.

My only beef with Google is the Android Java vs Kotlin vs proper Java story.

As such, I usually don't bother researching about non-OEM Linux support.

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