The iPad App Store is perhaps an even more dysfunctional place than the iPhone in how much it holds hardware and use cases hostage to the manufacturer's vision. Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it in the moments you want to do anything remotely tinkery on an iPad.
Apple's hardware since the 2021 iPad Pro (with M1) has had the ability to do this. The iPads have the RAM (16gb on higher storage models), appropriate keyboard and trackpads, the works. Great hardware being held back by Apple's vision people weren't allowed to deviate from.
A straightforward reading of the DMA suggests that Apple is not allowed to restrict apps from using hardware features. Let's hope that means Parallels/VMware style VMs are possible without too much of a fight.
totally agree - the iPad Pro could be a great second coding/programming tool - I'd love to justify buying myself one, but.. I just don't see a use-case if I can't work on it. I don't design stuff, don't really feel like I need a separate browsing device either
Yep, I've got one and don't use too much. Too big for scrolling, too limited (software) for work. But Apple knows iPad might cannibalize mac and limit it's uses on purpose
Felt the goal was to overtake Mac during the 2015-2019 era, all the real engineering focus was on iPad, the Macs were underpowered and not really fit for purpose.
Why would Apple choose a platform where they don't get 30% of every Creative Cloud sub when they could have had that.
Only reason they backtracked was because Mac sales didn't fall off and the iPad just isn't that good to do real work on.
I believe it's simply more lucrative to keep selling both devices to the same target group, than try to solve the users' problem with a single device.
Everything in Apple is designed to silo off the two product groups.
An "iPad with MacOS" would just shift revenue from the MacOS division to the iPad division, losing a MacOS customer and probably NOT gaining a iPad customer (as he would have purchased an iPad anyway).
Just as much as developing an MacBook convertible is not an issue of user experience but an issue of unnecessary cannibalization of iPad sales...
By that logic, the iPhone wouldn’t have been able to play music as soon as it launched. Yet that was part of the whole pitch: “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator”.
Not so sure.
From mid-to-late 90s onwards a mobile phone was basically an essential item.
I was never tempted to buy an iPod, but combine the phone and iPod and give me internet access to boot... sold.
Before the iPhone there were already phones which could play music and access the web. I even remember some Motorolas which interacted directly with iTunes. The iPhone didn’t succeed just by smooshing those together.
Either way, that’s neither here nor there, the point is precisely that Apple didn’t shy away from cannibalising their own product.
I don't know how it is relevant what Apple did on other products, especially "pre-iPhone".
The point is that TODAY the PC line and the iPad line of Apple are quite notable silo'ed to very specific usage-patterns.
There is no technical reason for that, but the distinct commercial reason that there is nothing to gain in terms of revenue or profit by combining the two products into one.
They both sell fine and at great margin separately, there is little to gain by building an iPad Pro that is 2000 USD and supports the use-cases of both a 600 USD iPad and a 1600 USD MacBook respectively.
Quite bluntly: You want the iPad to be convenient in a workflow as far as possible, and then SUCK really bad in a way only a fully synchronized Macbook can fix.
It was cannibalizing a cheaper iPod for a more expensive iPhone. iPad would be taking from the more expensive MacBook market.
And then the iPod died.
Yes, exactly, that’s the point. Apple did it to themselves. They didn’t “silo off the two product groups”.
Then either your point is the same as the one I made, or I don't get your point.
The iPod is a product of the pre-iPhone times. Apple used its dominance in Music players to enter the cellphone space.
The iPhone was an iPod combined with an iTunes store, allowing the user to buy content without being in front of a PC, and only buy from Apple.
It was an iPod and a Browser that could be sold in huge volumes via a carrier.
Ah yeah. And a Phone.
This is the same reason behind the Apple Pencil not working on the iPhone. Despite the iPhone approaching sizes of an iPad mini, I can't use the incredibly expensive pencil on an iPhone because according to Apple only the iPad should be used for tablet stuff.
What? The Apple Pencil works because there’s a special digitizer layer on the screen for pencil compatible devices that allows it to work. This isn’t included on the iPhone. Same reason a Samsung S-Pen doesn’t work on devices that don’t support it.
I think the technical reason why the Pencil doesn't work is beside the point here.
Apple is building the hardware, and they decide that the Pencil use-case a iPhone user may have shall not be covered by buying an Apple Pencil, but by buying an iPad (and a Apple Pencil)
The technical reason is important, though. If it was totally free I suspect they’d allow it to function, but it doesn’t… so burdening the 200M iPhones with the additional cost of the pencil hardware is a trade off not worth taking. Just like Samsung not “allowing” S-pen to work on most of the phones since adding the digitizer element would be a silly cost adder, especially for their super cheap phones.
Wasn’t that the period when Apple were positioning themselves to get the Macs away from Intel? I’m not sure the goal was to let the iPad overtake as much as it was to get its processors ready to take over from Intel.
Not sure if this is true. I mean wasn’t the vision that you actually don’t need the mac for most things when the ipad came out?
For certain groups of people (the majority?) that is reality, as long as you don’t need compilers, IDEs, or virtualization you can do pretty much anything on an iPad.
Apple isn’t afraid to cannibalise its own products. They did exactly that with the iPhone in regard to the iPod. If someone is going to displace one of your most successful products, it better be yourself with something even more outstanding.
It would have been in Apple’s best (financial) interest to have the iPad cannibalise the Mac because they’d have more control and earn more money from app sales.
Why not buy one of the hundreds of non-Apple tablets which can do what you want?
Because they don’t run iPadOS? People love all the things the OS can do. They just wish it wouldn’t stop them from doing that one thing in particular that they it to do.
Tantalizingly close to perfection with one glaring flaw is extremely frustrating!
What can it do that other ones can't? Integration with Apple's walled garden is the most common complaint.
It's the UI. It is designed from the ground up for touch. People who like iPadOS do not like Windows Surface tablets for that exact reason. A desktop UI that's been shoehorned into a tablet is not as good as a purpose-built touch UI.
iPad (any model) with keyboard-cover can be used as a great portable ssh/mosh terminal (eg with Termius app). I work in Emacs--most functionality is available via terminal.
The keyboard cover keyboard is shit though, I hate every second with it. Plus no escape etc.
I've never owned a keyboard cover, but one could bring a TKL or 60% mechanical keyboard for the full typing experience without a laptop - might be a good compromise for some.
I switched from an iPad to a Surface Go 3 running Fedora a while ago and it really transformed my tablet use. I mostly just watched Youtube videos and did some light browsing on my iPad, but never really any serious work. Occcasionally I would ssh into other machines using apps like Blink, but even with the external keyboard the UX just feels ... off. Same for other apps that have IDE-like environments. They work, but they're never really great to use.
I was skeptical about getting a Linux tablet because of the worse battery life and less polished overall experience, but having a desktop Firefox with all add-ons, my text editor of choice, and the ability to open a terminal and run whatever I want really more than makes up for it (Plus GNOME is a pretty good tablet experience out of the box these days as long as you broadly stick to their 'official' apps).
you can work on it
https://blink.sh/
see also https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code
Is it right to say that currently the cost of the hardware is being partly subsidized by the profits Apple makes from the software? If some of the profit from the software gets taken away will we see the price of the hardware rise?
Probably not. If the current price is optimal then it will remain optimal even if costs rise.
That's really not true. The optimal (in the sense of where the supply and demand curves intersect) price for maximum profit rises as costs rise. It's true that the revenue-optimal price remains the same, but I think Apple's shareholders care more about profit than revenue.
To build intuition on this, it helps to think about the extreme cases: If the marginal cost of production is zero, you can sell the product for close to zero to pick up pennies from almost every human on earth. So the revenue-maximizing and profit-maximizing prices depend on demand elasticity, but are both low.
If the marginal cost of production is a million dollars, selling for anything less than that will result in negative unit economics. You can still maximize revenue with low prices, but that incurs negative per-unit profit. In fact, the price must be more than one million dollars per unit to make any profit. That might imply that the profit-maximizing condition is one unit sold for $1m+1.
For certain demand curves, that might even imply the profit-maximizing condition is to tell zero units! A real-world example of this is Rivian. They have negative unit economics, and would be more profitable if they simply stopped production.
I think what confuses some people is that all these things can be (and are) true at once:
1. The price where Apple achieves maximum profit under the new rules is higher than before.
2. After raising prices, that profit will be less than what they earned before.
3. Units sold will be less than before.
4. Apple won't reduce prices in response to the lower profit because the new higher prices, lower quantity and lower profit are profit-maximal under the new market conditions.
What we will observe in practice is not higher MSRPs in Europe, but fewer discounts (it is an open secret that you should never buy an Apple product without at least a 10% discount).
I see a lot of people claiming (I believe disingenuously) that the changes forced by the EU will convince them to consider buying Apple's products in the future. If you believe those people, that's yet another reason to think Apple hardware prices will rise in Europe: Both the supply and demand curves are moving in directions that imply higher prices.
You are right. My earlier claim is incorrect. It is not a certainty that the optimal price doesn't change when costs rise. It really depends on demand elasticity.
My reasoning was this: If Apple can get away with a higher price without demand dropping off, why would they not charge this higher price in the first place?
But the idea is flawed. Apple could ultimately make more money selling fewer more expensive devices at higher margins than selling more devices at lower margins. So you're absolutely right.
Of course they could also make less profit by protecting their margins. We don't know.
The cost of custom chips is massive, but then manufacturing is cheap - after selling N units to pay off the initial investment, it's almost free (unit cost) when done at scale.
I don’t think manufacturing would end up almost free for any of the newest chips since there are such tight tolerances and high failure rates. At least not for quite a few more years when (if?) there are competing fabs.
In an economic textbook sense, yes.
In the current situation Apple has to consider that a marginal price rise in hardware will lose marginal revenue in software, thereby shifting the equilibrium price of hardware lower.
No, Apple already earns legendary profits (something like 30%) from hardware alone.
Margins on Apple hardware are generally quite robust.
>Is it right to say that currently the cost of the hardware is being partly subsidized by the profits Apple makes from the software?
No, it wouldn't be. You're probably thinking about gaming consoles who's HW is sold at a loss or at very thin profit margins and subsidized by the more expensive game purchases, but Apple hardware already has the highest profit margins of any HW manufacturer out there, and at their 200 USD per 8GB of commodity RAM and NAND chips, you better believe it.
So no, they don't need the walled garden SW money to fund HW. Their HW alone brings in plenty of cash.
> Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it
After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.
Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to allow macOS and Linux VMs, even if the feature is initially price segmented to devices with extra RAM. The iPad 4:3 high-resolution screen offers unmatched vertical real estate for text editing.
As long as the majority of the target group keeps buying MacBooks AND iPads, I doubt that Apple has an incentive to cannibalize its own product line.
They are well-aware of this, visible from the fact that they never bothered to add a touch panel or Pen-support to any MacBook, or make the Watch a standalone device: Customers wanting this either buy the devices individually anyway, or wouldn't be willing to hand over the sum of all combined devices for a single "superset" device.
Just imagine that Apple's view of the "iPad Pro with MacOS" demographic are customers who purchased a 1600 USD MacBook and a 1000 USD iPad. Is the "iPad with MacOS" able to replace either of those? Would they be able to charge 2600 USD for that device and sell comparable volumes?
I see the Watch the same as a late 90s Palm device. You can’t make it standalone, because it depends on a larger device for configuration.
Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that it be made available for Android users as well.
I have the large Apple Watch. It has cell capabilities. I wish it was a standalone device. I don’t need a phone. The cellular watch could replace my phone if Apple allowed standalone devices. I doubt they will ever allow people to have a cellular watch without being tied to a phone.
I also have a cellular Watch. Combined with some AirPods it works great if all you need is phonecalls which is a good use case if you want to be available without a time sucking little monster in your pocket.
I think their point was that you have to pair Apple Watch with an iPhone in order to use cellular, and they wish you could use cellular Apple Watch without having to own an iPhone.
Yes, also for Android users.
Yes, but the LTE-variant is more along the lines of a Palm Treo.
Apple could probably make it link to a MacBook with very little effort, and to all other platforms with just a little more.
It's just a direction not worth for Apple to explore, because in their view those are just customers who have "not yet bought an iPhone", so why try to win them with the Watch if it just prolongs their journey to the iPhone
I bought some Apple Watches (because of reasons). I am wearing one right now. Model 3 (Nike edition or something). I've switched everything off (WiFi, Bluetooth, analytics, the whole thing). It only shows the date and time. The battery lasts 4-5 days.
It's amazing when you shut down the telemetry-battery-draining functionality of devices. And to add some more insult, I am using an Android phone, which ofc don't even try to connect to my watch :) I believe -and Gemini just confirmed- that they don't work together.
yes, the architecture was purposfully made, so that the Watch only collects your bio-metrics, with limited own/independent functionality. They (Apple) does want everyone in the 'garden', so why open it up?
Oh gosh if I could use a series of iPad apps to run a Linux system on an iPad I’d be so happy. I mean I could get an android tablet but I don’t really like android. I’m fine with iOS and I love Linux, so sticking those two together would be really nice.
Actually I’d love to run a Linux VM on my iPhone too!
What’s the benefit to you of a VM on your iPhone when you can simply ssh to a vm somewhere else? Not saying there isn’t a benefit, but curious about what you want to do. Other than people who are in the middle of nowhere, which at that point I’d recommend a raspberry pi and a battery bank or a laptop or something.
I use the pi and battery for running various ham radio stuff while out in a park or whatever and connect from an iPad, and that works very well in my use case.
>iPhone when you can simply ssh to a vm somewhere else?
Like not having reliable internet access everywhere. In a lot of areas mobile internet is spotty. Or you're in roaming so it's insanely expensive.
Plus we already have these powerful devices in out pocket, more powerful than PC's were 10 years ago, sitting idly doing nothing most of the time, why not put them to use when in need instead of paying for some extra remote cloud compute on top of that.
Also, VMs don't just mean Linux for web development, it could be a VM for retro gaming or running things in VM for security sandboxing etc. That would be really neat to always have with me instead of having to ssh all the time.
While I agree with your use case, doing nothing most of the time is how those devices last day long on a battery and can run without a fan. My MBA get toasty when I OCR a pdf, I cannot imagine a phone on a sustained load.
Apple silicon?
>doing nothing most of the time is how those devices last day long on a battery
But It will run down the battery only for me, not for you. Why do you care about how I want use my battery life? You don't have to do what I do, with your own phone. You can just keep using like a regular phone if that's all you want. Me having more freedom with my own device, does not reduce your freedoms you have with your own device.
I paid for the device and I own it so why shouldn't I be allowed to use it how I like even if it runs the battery in 2 hours? That's why I have portable power banks and GAN chargers. They can even throw in a disclaimer about waving your rights to warranty for devices used like that.
Otherwise what's the point of all that technological progress of M* chips if all that we're allowed to wo with them is browse Instagram but now even faster, and play Candy Crush but now with ray tracing.
I have some benefits in mind.
First, in the major European city where I live mobile internet is not super reliable and flat data packs are relatively expensive - I have one because I develop a lot on trains, but most of my friends don't.
Second: it's a waste of hardware and money. If I can already run the thing on my device, renting twice as much hardware for the same result is hard to justify.
And finally, it keeps my data under my power. Some of the work I do has strict requirements on what I can do with the data, and "upload it to a cheap cloud provider" is not on that list.
Another thing is the issue of e-waste.
At some point i had multiple older iPads with perfectly great screens, and i wanted to use them as "hubs" for a home setup to control various things, another option was using them as secondary screens, or maybe just give them to a kid.
You couldn't, they were simply to old for the new IOS update, and almost all apps including browsers requires the newer IOS and update automatically without asking - essentially bricking them on purpose.
Anyway i ended up giving them to a "safe e-waste center" but i'm sceptical they'll actually be recycled.
I think locking down a device should be illegal especially e-waste considered, and if there's some reason not to, then it should at least be opened the day official support ends so the device can be used to watch videos/games for kids/whatever.
Of course they were recycled, there are valuable minerals in these devices.
Well, in my country there's been multiple scandals about waste handling where it was found very little ended up being recycled, the sorting people did in some cases created more pollution because it had to be transported and huge amounts ended up in big dumps of toxic assorted garbage either here or in some third world country where kids then make a few cents a day scavenging in the toxic piles.
So yeah, i'm sceptical. There's a reason it's called reduce, re-use, recycle as a very distant third as far as i've seen.
Same, I wish once device stops being supported it should give easy option to be jailbroken and unlock bootloader. Such devices could be retrofitted for many other roles e.g robotics toy with arduino/raspberrypi, smart home, smart router etc.
A story going in completely different direction --
I have a Sony Xperia phone from 2017. It has stopped receiving OS updates after Android 8, and I don't use it any more other than occasionally as a backup phone. A while ago, I discovered that people on xda are putting LineageOS (a custom ROM based on AOSP) with Android 14 on it, tried that myself, and it works! As slow as the phone is, it can run apps without any problem. This is truly amazing.
As a counterexample, the other day I found my old Nexus 5, from 2013, running Android 6. While it was not completely straightforward, I was able to reset the phone and link it to a new Google account, and after several cycles of updates the entire Google suite seems to work, including Maps, and not slowly at that. I was, and still am, genuinely impressed.
I don’t think versatile devices are possible. I love iPad Pro for what it is. I tried Surface Pro and it was a much inferior tablet experience, even though the device is more “versatile”. I just doing think that you can get an excellent tablet by trying to be a laptop at the same time.
It’s a screen. Add a regular Bluetooth keyboard mouse and you have a PC. There’s no compromise here from hardware perspective, it’s just software that’s in the way.
Remember the size of the original iPhone? I have long wondered why nobody makes a universal compute brick in such a form factor without a screen. Then sell 5" or 7" or 10" or 27" screens with and without touch that connect to the little brick.
I can buy a 15" screen right now for under $75. It's the ultimate super-thin laptop if you remove the compute and keep the brick in your purse/backpack/holster.
For extra points, connect two compute bricks for more muscle.
The UI elements on iPadOS are necessarily larger to accommodate touch.
It's just a lot less information dense than macOS, and making it the same scale will make using it as a touch device harder.
I have a Surface Pro and really like it. But for sure it is 100% a compromise experience, especially on the tablet side.
But part of it was reconditioning myself; the “proper tablet experience” largely comes from limitations of what they let you do with it. And with more features comes some complexity. For me it’s worth the tradeoff.
Yep. Repeating a collage from 2020 ( https://imgur.com/a/CQwApt8 ) and comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644188 ) on the strange workarounds done to use Linux (or possibly even windows) on an ipad.
Isn't iSH is a toy shell? The last time I looked at it, it didn't provide any access to the actual iPad OS or file system details.
Well it will probably never, since all apps are always within the sandbox. The idea is to ssh out to some other system. Besides the actual iOS shell is not so interesting or useful anyway. (Jailbroken devices have had them for a while, you won't be running your nvim and git stuff locally anytime soon.)
I've been so confused about Apple advertising the capabilities of the M1 iPad -- it's got a _real_ processor, it's so fast!
...but nothing on the iPad can _really_ use it.
That’s simply not true. For example, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve and Logic Pro all exist as iPad apps.
You can run Linux on iPad today, see the options: https://ipadlinux.org
While this is doable, it is far from an enjoyable experience -- many packages are not available on iSH or have issues, for example. Most people are not going to replace their laptop with these two apps.
Not just VMs, you could technically also run things like PC emulators, with real PC operating systems, especially older ones, with acceptable performance. Just imagine using Windows 98 on an iPad!
Reminds me of running Windows 95 under Bochs on the Sony PSP. The the CPU turned up to max (333MHz) it was just barely fast enough to impress your friends. ;)
VMs on iOS:
https://getutm.app/
Coding work on iOS:
blink shell
https://blink.sh/
Lmao at UTM still being harder to install than QEMU
the FreeBSD project has a unique opportunity