[mschuster91]

> With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro.

Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.

[close04]

The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals.

They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.

[mschuster91]

> They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't.

Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.

The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.

[close04]

> On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that

But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.

Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.

[Topfi]

> Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.

The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode.

Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.

Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.

[nicoburns]

You can configure an iPad up to 2TB. I don't think storage if going to be the blocker

[evilduck]

A 2TB 13" iPad with a Magic Keyboard is more expensive than a 2TB 14" MBP with double the RAM.

They may sell a capable enough iPad but it doesn't make a lot of financial sense unless they closed all the gaps.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yeah, but it's not a monolithic code block.

I suspect there are dozens of tools, that are years old, have very few folks that know how they work, and probably only work on Mac.

[mschuster91]

Most of its size, I think, comes from the device emulator images.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I’m not sure of that.

It stores that stuff in a different container.

[UPDATE:] I just looked at the contents.

The single biggest component is the toolchains (Swift, SourceKit, etc).

The next biggest components, are the platforms (which may be used to construct simulator images).

These are all wrapped into the app, itself.