Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You continue to miss the point. The cool thing about the iPad is not that's a laptop. It's that it's a great device in it's own category, that also more and more can replace a laptop.


Between touch screen and the Apple Pencil I would say the mouse is the least important input device, unless you really want to play a first person shooter. If you are a keyboard centric developer then ideally everything is accessible by a keyboard shortcut.

Several years back I used my iPad remoting in to my desktop exclusively for about half of the year. There are terrible ways, mediocre ways, and good ways to simulate mouse input with a touch screen. The critical difference between touch and mouse is that a mouse can precisely hit much smaller UI parts (which, a lot of people are going to have trouble seeing anyways.) The Apple Pencil effectively does this — though not with the keyboard mouse pairing most are used to.

I’ve been using Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro for quite a while. Their iOS app is a 1:1 UI port from their desktop app. The app is basically Photoshop for illustrators and painters. It works way better than I would have predicted. Without the Apple Pencil, I don’t think the UI would be usable, but the Apple Pencil is the primary input device for the artist.

I’m expecting the iPad to behave very much like a desktop/laptop soon. My bigger concern is all of the software charging by subscription, which is a lot easier to implement with iOS than MacOS/Windows/Linux (kind of ironic that the unsustainable 99 cent price points makes subscription the only viable revenue model.)


In other words, all you do in use the iPad as a thin-client.

Which a Chromebook could do. Which your phone could do.

Which any of those laptops from 2002 could do.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: