Why are we running these high end CPUs on tablets without the ability to run pro apps like Xcode?
Until I can run Xcode on an iPad (not Swift Playgrounds), it's a pass for me. Hear me out: I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but I need Xcode. Because of this, I have to pick the Macbook every time. I want an iPad, but the iPad doesn't want me.
Didn't have to look long to find a comment mirroring how I feel about these devices. To me it feels like they're just adding power to an artificially castrated device I can barely do anything with. See no reason to upgrade from my original iPad Pro that's not really useful for anything. Just an overpowered device running phone software.
I feel the same way. I just can't justify upgrading from my 10.5" Pro from years ago. It's got pro motion and runs most apps fine. Sure, the battery isn't great after all these years, but it's not like it's getting used long enough to notice.
Something has changed with how the iPads behave at rest. When I got my first iPad in 2010
I could leave it for weeks, pick it up, and it would hardly use any battery at all. Today, it seems like my iPad mini will eat 10% or more per day just sitting on a table untouched. I don’t like leaving it plugged in all the time, but with it being dead every time I go to pick it up, I simply stop picking it up.
Even a good battery isn’t that good. That seems to be a software problem.
My only theory is it’s turning on the screen every time it gets a notification. However, I have a case that covers the screen, which should keep the screen off in my opinion. I have thought about disabling 100% of the notification, but without a global toggle that seems pretty annoying to do.
My guess is something to do with Find My/ offline finding. That would cause it to wake up all the time, maybe Apple thought it was worth the trade off.
I’ll have to play more with it for the other things. I haven’t invested much time in troubleshooting, since it seemed like that’s the way iPads just are now. Hopefully that’s not actually true.
When I looked at the top battery consumers in the past there wasn’t anything that stood out. I think home screen was at the top. It wasn’t one or two apps killing it with background activity.
Since the biggest battery consumption associated with home screen is the display, and users are only briefly on the home screen, before using it to navigate elsewhere, home screen should be near the bottom (1%) of power consumption.
I've been saying this for years, I would love to get a desktop Mac and use an iPad for the occasional bit of portable development I do away from a desk, like when I want to noodle on an idea in front of the TV.
I'm very happy with my MacBook, but I don't like that the mega expensive machine I want to keep for 5+ years needs to be tied to a limited-life lithium battery that's costly and labour intensive to replace, just so I can sometimes write code in other rooms in my house. I know there's numerous remote options but...the iPad is right there, just lemme use it!
I've been giving some thought to this. I wonder if an iPad would suffice in front of the tv and just ssh into a Mac Mini for dev work. I'd love an iPad but I can't justify it either because of the limitation of hardware capabilities. I also don't really want to purchase two machines just for dev tasks and travel. But, I think having that kind of lifestyle will be expensive no matter the approach.
I’ve had success using cloud dev environments with an iPad - the key for me was also using a mouse and keyboard - after things weren’t _that_ different
Visual studio code running from remote servers seemed like it was making great progress right until the AI trendiness thing took over... and hasn't seemed to advance much since. Hopefully the AI thing cools down and the efforts on remote tooling/dev environments continues onwards.
If we're going down that route then what's the point in putting good hardware in the device? It might as well just be a thin client. Having the same SoCs as their laptops and desktops but then relegating the iPad to something that needs to be chained to a "real" computer to do anything useful in the development space seems like a tremendous waste of potential.
iPadOS is still mainly a fork of iOS, a glorified mobile interface. They should really switch to a proper macOS system, now that the specs allow for it.
WWDC is a month away. I’m hoping for some iPadOS updates to let people actually take advantage of the power they put in these tablets. Apple has often released new hardware before showing off new OS features to take advantage of it.
I know people have been hoping for that for a long time, so I’m not holding my breath.
In all seriousness, you're right. Sandboxing Xcode but making it fully featured is surely a nightmare engineering problem for Apple. However, I feel like some kind of containerized macOS running in the app sandbox could be possible.
“…but the iPad doesn’t want me” is exactly it; I used iPad from the very first one - that chunky, hard-edged aluminum and glass slate, and remained a heavy user up until a few years ago. For half a decade, the iPad was my only computer on the go. I spent two years abroad with a 12.9” Pro.
The conclusion I came to was that I loved the hardware but found the software a huge letdown for doing real work; I tried SSHing into VPSs and the like, but that wasn’t enough.
But man, the power in these thin, elegant devices is huge, and greater with the M4 chips. If Asahi ran on the M4 iPads I’d probably give it a go! – in an alternate dream universe, that is…
I love and hate Apple as almost everyone else and have an iPad for 'consultation' only (reading, browsing, video), but on Android, you have IDEs for games dev (Godot), real android apps IDE (through F-Droid), Python, Java and C/C++ IDE (through Android Store) which are close enough of the Linux way...
So the iPad devices could handle that too if Apple allowed it...
Once Apple will enforce the European Union requirement to allow 'sideloading' on iPad, maybe we will be able to have nice things also on it.
That could also be a good thing for Apple himself. A lot of people in Europe have a bad opinion of Apple (partly?) because of the closed (walled) garden of iPad/iOS and other technology/IP which make their portable devices apart of the Android ecosystem.
Until I can run Xcode on an iPad (not Swift Playgrounds), it's a pass for me. Hear me out: I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but I need Xcode. Because of this, I have to pick the Macbook every time. I want an iPad, but the iPad doesn't want me.