Because it's an artificial limitation to make the company more money, at the expense of customer experience and the environment (yes, locked-down hardware is also a sustainability issue!).
Ideally, companies would exist to serve the public and so such selfish anti-consumer behaviour would be illegal. Unfortunately, they don't and current law seems to affirm that.
I’d also like to be able to run anything on an iPad. But I know I can’t so I don’t buy it.
I find this notion that companies should do what we want ridiculous. You know the features and capabilities upfront or you can at least and then you can decide to buy or not.
There are many problems with the "just don't buy it" argument. Mainly, that often times, the alternatives have huge unrelated down-sides. Apple makes the best tablet hardware by a large margin, but it's totally locked down. If I want a good tablet, I have bo real alternatives.
No, I'm saying that Apple is so far ahead of the competition and this market is so hard to enter, that they essentially have a monopoly in the category "tablet computer that isn't shit".
And no, it's not that they should make what I want, it's that they should not prevent me from using their device in a way that I want.
Microsoft and Google are not tiny little companies. They have their own operating systems and the resources to make a good tablet.
Microsoft has just announced a tablet running full blown Windows running Qualcomm chips that from all indications is competitive with what Apple makes.
The latest Qualcomm ARM chips were designed by a bunch of ex-Apple folks.
But every hybrid solution sucks in one way or the other. I would much rather work on my MacBook Air M3 with a 2TB SSD and 24GB RAM with a 20+ hour battery life than an iPad Air/Pro with a keyboard and mouse attachment that hypothetically runs MacOS.
What problem are you trying to solve by not having both a MacBook and an iPad?
Cost? Give me a fully decked out MacBook Air + a cheap $349 low end iPad any day over an iPad Pro. Just the specs of the MacBook Air makes it better. As a bonus I can use my iPad as a second monitor.
The M4 in the iPad may be just as capable as an M4 in a future Mac. But the MacBook Air has better battery life and the iPad still makes trade offs between portability and power like less RAM (RAM takes battery), OS optimizations, sustained performance tradeoffs, etc.
Portability? The iPad is so light you don’t even feel it in a backpack. I literally traveled with both the entire year last year.
Short version: my wife and I took one way trips last year across the country visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely…
> I find this notion that companies should do what we want ridiculous.
The thing is, we actually have a vote in this by buying or not buying their products. So apparently, too many people are content enough with what Apple (for example) is doing.
Temporarily at best. If I invent fire and lock it down so that only my grill can use it, while also releasing feel good propaganda to convince people that it is the only way fire works, yes it’s more beneficial than not for a time. As society grows around the concept, the artificial limitations begin hindering the elevated stage more than helping.
These companies have convinced unwitting masses that this is in their long-term best interests. I assure you it is not. It is about being controlled, and the invisible limitations placed on an individual when they grow to love their chains.
> Ideally, companies would exist to serve the public
That would not be "companies" in the common sense anymore, but rather something like the East German "Volkseigener Betrieb" or the Russian "design bureaus". Which is something worth considering probably, but then you'd need larger changes, not just some laws that prohibit companies artificial limitations like this.
> Because it's an artificial limitation to make the company more money
Market Segmentation 101.
Even back in VCR days the el-cheapos would let you set (say) 4 recordings, the mid-range 8, and the high-end 16. All the manufacturers did was tie down pins.
Hobbled hardware is a (dis)honorable tradition in tech.
Because it's slowing killing the the environment for kids to learn. Parents give kids an iPad, they don't give them a notebook. Kid has hands tied for really exploring programming.
I'd be willing to bet if the same restrictions were in place in the 80s and 90s that 30-50% of the people who are programmers today wouldn't be programmers because they'd never have gotten started.
There are many excellent web based programming environments that cater for beginners.
As someone who was learning how to develop in the 80s your comment is hilariously ridiculous. It is 1000x easier to learn now with the wealth of tooling, content, AI assistants etc than it was for me trying to learn C++ on a Mac Plus with no internet.
There is Swift Playgrounds, but if you're talking more about general purpose programming - sure. But, I don't think it changes anything. As devices have entered all aspects of our life, the vast majority want to use them as an appliance to take and edit pictures/video, draw, communicate, and play games. To say it's killing the environment for kids to learn feels a bit myopic by implying programming is the only way to learn.
Because we want to. Of course the political capital of bunch of nerds isn't enough to make it happen but while the reasoning is different, I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign. Of course, those are for safety, but I also can't buy a car that won't do at least 55 for the freeway unless I want a golf cart, so suitability for purpose is another concept. We'd just have to define computer in a legal sense, and then categorize the iPad as a computer, and finally make it a requirement that you can run your own code on computers. Of course, carrots are better than sticks, so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista. There's a small ecosystem of apps using that, as well as the official Shortcuts app, which I'd call programming. it's not Xcode on an iPad (though I'm sure there's a lucky engineer at Apple that has one that can do that, but then doesn't get to have any fun with it), and it's not really close either.
Who is "we"? Apparently not enough people want this.
> I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign.
That's a strawman argument. Not having cars without seatbelts has safety implications. A better analogy would be cars which don't allow you to replace the built-in car stereo for example.
> so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista.
Then maybe we should also have a tax for computers that run Python, because it's so energy inefficient. Only make the ones tax-free that only allow C++ and assembly language.
Everybody who wants Xcode on iPads to happen. If you do not want such a thing, I am not talking for you. There may be dozens of us and we don't have the political clout to make it happen, but maybe we can agree that something has been lost here.
Is it still a straw man argument when I explicitly point out that I know it's not the same thing, twice, with the phrases "while the reasoning is different" and "Of course, those are for safety"?
As far as taxing Python for energy inefficiency goes, If it means violating Wirth's Law, I can't say that I'd be entirely against it in the hypothetical because we both know that's never going to happen. It takes longer to open some apps on my iPhone that's a million times faster (though, to be fair, also does a million more things) than it took to open vi on a Linux box in console mode (no X) in the previous century.
