To me, the shift to USB-C signifies a fundamental change in how Apple is approaching the iPad and computing going forward. Those stupid "what's a computer" ads make a little more sense. With USB-C, developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals we all bought for our laptops/desktops will now begin to work with iOS too. This feature alone grows iOS into a much more powerful OS.
By this logic, it's pretty clear Apple is killing macOS x86 dependency (and macOS itself) in two ways. 1. Shifting compute intensive workloads to A level chips. This started with the small stuff around "security" and ApplePay but today the video encode/decode functionality in the T2 is a huge leap. This will extend into graphics next year (thank god cause fuck Intel's integrated graphics) with APIs like Metal and going forward almost anything I/O, Display, and every function outside of the CPU. #2 strategy is the iPad - by offering a compelling device that has all the features and capability of laptops without 2 decades of baggage.
We've all been so worried of the convergence of iOS and macOS, but after today I don't see a macOS future. Sure it will move to Apple's ARM chips, it will last another decade, but the shovel is out of the shed, it's called the T2.
The biggest pain for me of lack of access to the underlying OS has turned out not to be any of my thousands of tiny gripes with the way the software works that I can't change (e.g. setting dns on the cell connection), but the lack of transparency and ability to debug basic processes. What is the computer doing now? Why is it hanging? Why did that app crash? Why is my network failing? Who is that app talking to? My main fear is not, in the end, that I won't control or own my device (though I do feel this), but that it will turn computing from a transparent network of understandable processes—which I find beautiful, and which drew me deep into programming—into a Kafkaesque nightmare of inexplicably bad software and automated computer support, not just from apple, but from all the apps in the market they created.
I am absolutely sure that they will port XCode to the iPad itself and allow visibility into my own apps. This is not the same as a workstation.
EDIT: in retrospect, this is only tangentially related to parent post—my apologies. Also: wording, punctuation.
Still, it's funny to see Google beat Apple to the punch here and make ChromeOS a valid dev machine for most people before Apple. USB-C doesn't let me run Docker, VSCode or IntelliJ. I'd love to bring an iPad pro for the weekend when I'm on call, but it's still not anywhere near.
None of what I use a Mac for is available or practical on iOS. Atom, Git, bash, ssh, llvm, Python, R, PostreSQL, CouchDB, Docker, nginx, Node.js, homebrew, curl, wget, ffmpeg...
I’m typing this on an iPad now. I mainly use it for web surfing, Netflix, email and casual gaming.
When you're starting from a change in plugs and end up predicting shifts in CPU architecture ten years down the road, there's a pretty high chance it's just fitting noise into your pre-existing narrative.
FWIW: the death of the Mac has been predicted constantly since at least the original iPhone came out. If it takes another decade to happen, at least we can lay these accusations to rest that publicly traded companies are forced into short-termism.
> developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals...
What are you talking about? Apple won't allow developers to do any such thing. They only recently allowed a narrow range of NFC uses even though the hardware itself has been there forever. You think they're going to let people develop your own kernel drivers? Maybe with a $10,000 "hardware developer" account.
"The new Liquid Retina display goes from edge to edge"
I've never owned an iPad, perhaps I'm missing something here. How does the above statement reconcile with the pictures I see on the page where there's clearly a black bezel?
Do they just mean there's not an area at the bottom with a physical button?
Am I the only one who actually like to have an edge on my devices so they dont break by looking at them? At least if there is a metal edge it can take some of the force and you have a chance of not breaking the screen. I dont understand why metal is bad and glass is somehow good? Also, I need to grab my ipad, move it around, spin it, grab it with the other hand etc. I see the edges / bezel's as very useful in these cases.
Presenter: “...all the way until it ends! We call this ‘entire’.”
Audience: <mad applause>
Audience Member 1: (whispering) “I can’t wait until I can get a device with an entire display. I’ll have to put in some OT at the job to save up, though.”
Audience Member 2: “What do you do?”
AM1: “I work at a company that specializes in digging half-holes.”
I own many Apple products, and I like Apple as a company a lot; but I would have to agree with your observation. The reality does not agree with their marketing. I understand marketing can be employed as a tool to favorably present reality, but still, the edge-to-edge statement is quite a stretch.
It's like saying 'lightning fast', when in reality it could be faster or slower than lightning, it's a metaphor that does well in marketing and doesn't leave you open to legal challenges as much as a more technical reference (e.g. 'zero bezels) would, but gets the point across that bezels are thinner than usual.
Problem is, the iPhone X family got rid of the chin... but have the dreaded notch, and not even the mostly acceptable teardrop everyone else standardized on.
At least the iPad Pro adopted chinless and also notchless design. First time in years Apple has made a product that isn't weirdly ugly.
From the keynote, Cook claimed the new A12X Bionic[1] is faster than 92% of portable PCs[2] (in English, laptops, Surfaces) sold in the past year, including some i7 models.
- 8 core CPU (4 low and 4 high power cores)
- 7 core GPU
- HEVC encoding/decoding
- Neural Engine (they haven't made any comparisons to the A12 sans X neural engine, so at this point I think it's the same)
- Audio DSP, Storage controller, Image Signal Processor, Apple performance controller, Depth Engine, &c.
The hardware specs of the new iPad Pro read like the dream mobile machine. If only there were not too many software limitations in iOS which would prevent it to replace a laptop for many tasks, it could take over the laptop space in no time.
- Files is way too limited. It should be possible to exchange the system supported data types between all apps via files. You can't even add a audio track to Music or a video file to the TV app as it is right now.
- The split screen feature is a good one, but so far I rarely found it useful. Not all apps support it, many apps differ in their behavior. The 50:50 split is nice, but the other split ratios I fould less useful. For some tasks you need overlapping windows.
- On the same page, one of my favorite features is the picture in picture for playing video - unfortunately again, apps differ in behavior and I don't understand the size limit. I would like to be able to put the video to any size.
- And of course, coding and running plain Unix utilities. While I am happy about the security the app model with sandboxing brings, for a "Pro" machine, this is too restrictive. Apple should allow something like Termux on the iPad, even if it were limited to a sandboxed file system, it would make the iPad soo much more useful as a computer. Apple might even release a lightweight Linux-VM as an app.
If Apple could remove these pure software-restrictions of the iPad, they could attract a lot of "Pro" users, I think. Disclaimer: I am an iPad Pro owner, fully in the Apple universe :). iCloud sync already makes it a much more useful device, but I keep hitting my head against the limitations. Running "Blink" to connect to my Linux server makes it almost a laptop, but is very limited.
Faster at -what-? People make tons of speed claims, but what is it faster at? I'll be interested to see real world bench marks. I highly doubt the new iPad Pro can outperform the newly released Surface Pro with the base i7. I mean...he did say -in the past year- and the new Surface has been available for...a few weeks. Also mind you that the new Surface line doesn't even used Intel's latest chips, the latest are 9th gen, but the new Surface is only packing the 8th. Honestly, when you think about it, their claims weren't overly impressive given they were comparing their hardware to the 7th gen Intel chips.
That's not to say what they've done isn't impressive and that they don't plan to kick Intel to the curb...but it is entirely possible this will be another PowerPC thing, where PowerPC outperforms for a while, Apple switches and then Intel gets their shit together and others are no longer able to compete. If Intel were to merely get a good integrated GPU that could compete with Nvidia's, there is no chance Apple could compete.
Yet 90% of the apps that people will use on it are optimized for a phone with lower specs. If I use a laptop with GPU I know I am going to use games or productivity apps (Photoshop, modeling software) that uses the available computing power. With an iPad I am not so sure.
There's a point in the press conference where the presenter went "And you can scroll the UI as fast as you want, and it doesn't lag! We have 8 cores in our CPU!" (or something: not literal transcription) and the entire audience clapped.
That's about as serious an indictment of the competence of the software development industry as I can imagine.
Edit: to clarify: the line is "It's a real PSD... it's over 3 gigs, it's a 157 layers, 12000x12000 pixels, and I'm zooming through it at lightning speed, with no lag". While she's doing this she's scrolling the layer list, which is why I was confused in my earlier statement.
Note, btw: when she's zooming, it's not loading the higher resolution in "real time". It takes a second or so for the higher resolution to pop in. So when she's saying "zooming through it at lightning speed", what she's saying is "the UI doesn't hang when I zoom, and the higher resolution pops in quick enough". This should not be an applause line for a device of this power in 2018.
Why none of the top comments on a site called Hacker News are about the fact that this is far from anything that could be used for software development surprises me. Only feasible way to use this for dev would be using a cloud IDE, since I have no access to the OS or ability to install dependencies.
I love the idea of the iPad becoming something that could replace a laptop, but for me I wait for the day when I can at the very least have sandbox access to the filesystem, and OS kernel to be able to set it up for local development.
Why Apple continues to refuse support for BSD Jails or the sort confuses me.
I was hoping we would see XCode for the iPad. The Swift Playgrounds app really does not cut it.The Swift Playgrounds app really hasn’t gotten any love[1] since it was first introduced. You can actually import UIKit and the other frameworks and compile them on the iPad but this is pretty much undocumentated. The preview views are tremendously buggy (really the whole app is) and there is all sorts of hidden debug stuff running in the background[2] that slows down performance. Everything has to be in a single file so doing anything moderately complicated is a pain, the editor is buggy and will sometimes highlight just the last three letters of a word, and there is no Interface Builder[3]. I would love a real XCode.
[1]There have been new playgrounds added (e.g. “Learn to Code with Swift”) but the app itself really hasn’t been changed at all. The same bugs have been present for years. And they aren’t obscur either. You will run into editor bugs within the first 5 minutes.
[2] The debug stuff is to help facilitate the different playgrounds, but doesn’t really provide any benefit to someone coding in a blank file outside of a playground. You can’t turn it off within the app.
[3] I know a lot of people don’t like IB, but it’s great for throwing together simple apps quickly. It’s odd that it is absent from the official apple App but Pythonista, an app made by one person, has an visual interface editor.
This page makes it sound like the Apple Pencil and the foldable keyboard come in the box, when in fact they are sold separately and are very expensive.
So on top of your £769 for the entry level 'Pro, the Pencil is an extra £119 and keyboard is £179, topping the whole package to £1047. Even more if you go for the 12" model.
What are your thoughts on this Wacom Cintiq Pro? Do you think this is too expensive?
A lot of designers I know are replacing that with an iPad Pro. For many, the iPad is a much more flexible tool AND cheaper AND more powerful. The Cintiq still has it's place and for people that very specifically need it, it's useful. But many are finding that an iPad Pro is a better tool for them.
So that's the pricing perspective you need to understand the iPad Pro.
Very impressive demos, but unfortunately the number of apps that can make full use of the increased power is still limited.
A common complaint I saw during the presentation was the emphasis of the A12X for gaming, but Apple is still very bad at incentivizing developers to make games with premium experiences and prices (to say nothing of the lack of an official gaming controller!)
I'm curious whether you can actually import RAW photos into this iPad. According to [1], importing huge (42 Megapixel) RAW files into the last gen iPad Pro was pretty much unusable. I can definitely see myself making this my travel laptop, replacing my 2013 Macbook Air if I could connect my camera, import all of my photos for the day, maybe do some light editing and then export them to an external hard drive.
I wish they made an iPhone SE as a miniature form of this iPad.
square-ish edges (easier to hold), better & larger LCD displays within the same body size, and powerful internals.
The new iphones are just too big for one-handed use. you want to type the name of the website on top bar of mobile Safari - bring the next hand out or drop your phone....
I just wish Apple would put the internals of the iPad Pro into the Apple TV and bundle it with a decent controller. The gaming potential is massive, and they even compared it to the Xbox One during the keynote. They are squandering a massive market opportunity - I just can't work out why.
Huh looks like most of the predictions I'd heard came true: USB-C and no home button. Wonder if they're going to do the same shift on the rest of the lines? I'm a little surprised that the iPhone Xs and Xr weren't switched over to USB-c if this is planned for the whole line. Charging the pencil attached to the side is pretty neat the old solution was very... odd and seemed pretty dangerous (having such a long lever arm on the relatively small lightning port).
It's such a shame that there's no thunderbolt 3 in the iPad Pro. I would love to ditch my MBP to just plug an iPad into a TB3 monitor and get a mouse, keyboard, drawing tablet, and charging with 1 wire. I can get close to that with a MBP. The only downsides are a MBP is heavier for mobile use and I'd have to buy an expensive tablet.
Slightly wider aspect ratio... 1.43 close to the square root of 2, isn't that new for iPads? They were 4:3 for a while.
One of the things I think this industry gets backwards is aspect ratios. I primarily use my tablet to watch movies/tv and 99% of them are squarish. I primarily use my laptop to work, and almost all of them are now 16:9. PCs anyway.
Do you all use iPad for serious work? Curious what apps you use?
Other than Apple Notes(with Apple Pencil), and watching NetFlix, I dont make good use of it. I'd love to get some recommendation for useful apps to try...
I just don't understand why they would release all-new phones literally 2 months ago with Lightning ports, but then release iPads with USB-C. Makes no sense, especially with how they market the X-family as "future-proof". Clearly they aren't. They should have gone with USB-C all around.
This is a new for apple. My iPad Pro 10.5 is continuing to appreciate, instead of depreciate. They keep raising the price. Fist from $879 to $899. Now it's $929. What is going on at Apple where older products cost more?
I love my iPad Pro so much, this is a really great upgrade IMO. I'm sure I'll be planning on a way to upgrade. Only downside is that I prefer touchId to FaceId but I'm mostly switching back to a passcode in any case.
[+] [-] RubberShoes|7 years ago|reply
By this logic, it's pretty clear Apple is killing macOS x86 dependency (and macOS itself) in two ways. 1. Shifting compute intensive workloads to A level chips. This started with the small stuff around "security" and ApplePay but today the video encode/decode functionality in the T2 is a huge leap. This will extend into graphics next year (thank god cause fuck Intel's integrated graphics) with APIs like Metal and going forward almost anything I/O, Display, and every function outside of the CPU. #2 strategy is the iPad - by offering a compelling device that has all the features and capability of laptops without 2 decades of baggage.
We've all been so worried of the convergence of iOS and macOS, but after today I don't see a macOS future. Sure it will move to Apple's ARM chips, it will last another decade, but the shovel is out of the shed, it's called the T2.
(Jailbreakers, we need you)
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
I am absolutely sure that they will port XCode to the iPad itself and allow visibility into my own apps. This is not the same as a workstation.
EDIT: in retrospect, this is only tangentially related to parent post—my apologies. Also: wording, punctuation.
[+] [-] pkulak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|7 years ago|reply
I’m typing this on an iPad now. I mainly use it for web surfing, Netflix, email and casual gaming.
[+] [-] matt4077|7 years ago|reply
FWIW: the death of the Mac has been predicted constantly since at least the original iPhone came out. If it takes another decade to happen, at least we can lay these accusations to rest that publicly traded companies are forced into short-termism.
[+] [-] kanishkdudeja|7 years ago|reply
Only being able to touch the screen while using the iPad Pro in laptop mode feels really limiting.
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
Why don't you see a macOS future? It can use the T2 just as well as iOS, no?
[+] [-] Steltek|7 years ago|reply
What are you talking about? Apple won't allow developers to do any such thing. They only recently allowed a narrow range of NFC uses even though the hardware itself has been there forever. You think they're going to let people develop your own kernel drivers? Maybe with a $10,000 "hardware developer" account.
[+] [-] tyingq|7 years ago|reply
I've never owned an iPad, perhaps I'm missing something here. How does the above statement reconcile with the pictures I see on the page where there's clearly a black bezel?
Do they just mean there's not an area at the bottom with a physical button?
[+] [-] calgoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bch|7 years ago|reply
Presenter: “This display goes from its start...”
(Audience gasps)
Presenter: “...all the way until it ends! We call this ‘entire’.”
Audience: <mad applause>
Audience Member 1: (whispering) “I can’t wait until I can get a device with an entire display. I’ll have to put in some OT at the job to save up, though.”
Audience Member 2: “What do you do?”
AM1: “I work at a company that specializes in digging half-holes.”
[+] [-] rpeden|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziftface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timcederman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plainOldText|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicebill8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeroname|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiabloD3|7 years ago|reply
Problem is, the iPhone X family got rid of the chin... but have the dreaded notch, and not even the mostly acceptable teardrop everyone else standardized on.
At least the iPad Pro adopted chinless and also notchless design. First time in years Apple has made a product that isn't weirdly ugly.
[+] [-] SllX|7 years ago|reply
- 8 core CPU (4 low and 4 high power cores)
- 7 core GPU
- HEVC encoding/decoding
- Neural Engine (they haven't made any comparisons to the A12 sans X neural engine, so at this point I think it's the same)
- Audio DSP, Storage controller, Image Signal Processor, Apple performance controller, Depth Engine, &c.
[1] http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-october-30-2018-more-in-t...
[2] http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-october-30-2018-more-in-t...
[+] [-] _ph_|7 years ago|reply
- Files is way too limited. It should be possible to exchange the system supported data types between all apps via files. You can't even add a audio track to Music or a video file to the TV app as it is right now.
- The split screen feature is a good one, but so far I rarely found it useful. Not all apps support it, many apps differ in their behavior. The 50:50 split is nice, but the other split ratios I fould less useful. For some tasks you need overlapping windows.
- On the same page, one of my favorite features is the picture in picture for playing video - unfortunately again, apps differ in behavior and I don't understand the size limit. I would like to be able to put the video to any size.
- And of course, coding and running plain Unix utilities. While I am happy about the security the app model with sandboxing brings, for a "Pro" machine, this is too restrictive. Apple should allow something like Termux on the iPad, even if it were limited to a sandboxed file system, it would make the iPad soo much more useful as a computer. Apple might even release a lightweight Linux-VM as an app.
If Apple could remove these pure software-restrictions of the iPad, they could attract a lot of "Pro" users, I think. Disclaimer: I am an iPad Pro owner, fully in the Apple universe :). iCloud sync already makes it a much more useful device, but I keep hitting my head against the limitations. Running "Blink" to connect to my Linux server makes it almost a laptop, but is very limited.
[+] [-] partiallypro|7 years ago|reply
That's not to say what they've done isn't impressive and that they don't plan to kick Intel to the curb...but it is entirely possible this will be another PowerPC thing, where PowerPC outperforms for a while, Apple switches and then Intel gets their shit together and others are no longer able to compete. If Intel were to merely get a good integrated GPU that could compete with Nvidia's, there is no chance Apple could compete.
[+] [-] Redoubts|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeecollins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guardian5x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OskarS|7 years ago|reply
That's about as serious an indictment of the competence of the software development industry as I can imagine.
Edit: to clarify: the line is "It's a real PSD... it's over 3 gigs, it's a 157 layers, 12000x12000 pixels, and I'm zooming through it at lightning speed, with no lag". While she's doing this she's scrolling the layer list, which is why I was confused in my earlier statement.
Note, btw: when she's zooming, it's not loading the higher resolution in "real time". It takes a second or so for the higher resolution to pop in. So when she's saying "zooming through it at lightning speed", what she's saying is "the UI doesn't hang when I zoom, and the higher resolution pops in quick enough". This should not be an applause line for a device of this power in 2018.
[+] [-] theduro|7 years ago|reply
I love the idea of the iPad becoming something that could replace a laptop, but for me I wait for the day when I can at the very least have sandbox access to the filesystem, and OS kernel to be able to set it up for local development.
Why Apple continues to refuse support for BSD Jails or the sort confuses me.
[+] [-] Pulcinella|7 years ago|reply
I was hoping we would see XCode for the iPad. The Swift Playgrounds app really does not cut it.The Swift Playgrounds app really hasn’t gotten any love[1] since it was first introduced. You can actually import UIKit and the other frameworks and compile them on the iPad but this is pretty much undocumentated. The preview views are tremendously buggy (really the whole app is) and there is all sorts of hidden debug stuff running in the background[2] that slows down performance. Everything has to be in a single file so doing anything moderately complicated is a pain, the editor is buggy and will sometimes highlight just the last three letters of a word, and there is no Interface Builder[3]. I would love a real XCode.
[1]There have been new playgrounds added (e.g. “Learn to Code with Swift”) but the app itself really hasn’t been changed at all. The same bugs have been present for years. And they aren’t obscur either. You will run into editor bugs within the first 5 minutes.
[2] The debug stuff is to help facilitate the different playgrounds, but doesn’t really provide any benefit to someone coding in a blank file outside of a playground. You can’t turn it off within the app.
[3] I know a lot of people don’t like IB, but it’s great for throwing together simple apps quickly. It’s odd that it is absent from the official apple App but Pythonista, an app made by one person, has an visual interface editor.
[+] [-] djhworld|7 years ago|reply
So on top of your £769 for the entry level 'Pro, the Pencil is an extra £119 and keyboard is £179, topping the whole package to £1047. Even more if you go for the 12" model.
[+] [-] askafriend|7 years ago|reply
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1408960-REG/wacom_dth...
What are your thoughts on this Wacom Cintiq Pro? Do you think this is too expensive?
A lot of designers I know are replacing that with an iPad Pro. For many, the iPad is a much more flexible tool AND cheaper AND more powerful. The Cintiq still has it's place and for people that very specifically need it, it's useful. But many are finding that an iPad Pro is a better tool for them.
So that's the pricing perspective you need to understand the iPad Pro.
[+] [-] codezero|7 years ago|reply
Also, I use an iPad Pro without a keyboard or pencil, so I saved a good 300 clams, and I am really happy with the rest of what I got.
[+] [-] minimaxir|7 years ago|reply
A common complaint I saw during the presentation was the emphasis of the A12X for gaming, but Apple is still very bad at incentivizing developers to make games with premium experiences and prices (to say nothing of the lack of an official gaming controller!)
Also, the new Apple Pencil will only work with the new iPads; it's not compatible with previous Pros: https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/
[+] [-] maverick2007|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://paulstamatiou.com/made-on-an-ipad-pro/#photo-editing
[+] [-] reacharavindh|7 years ago|reply
square-ish edges (easier to hold), better & larger LCD displays within the same body size, and powerful internals.
The new iphones are just too big for one-handed use. you want to type the name of the website on top bar of mobile Safari - bring the next hand out or drop your phone....
[+] [-] emdowling|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __alias|7 years ago|reply
but the audacity to talk about intuitive design and then fucking make my vertical scroll wheel scroll the page horizontally is outrageous.
[+] [-] davemp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
One of the things I think this industry gets backwards is aspect ratios. I primarily use my tablet to watch movies/tv and 99% of them are squarish. I primarily use my laptop to work, and almost all of them are now 16:9. PCs anyway.
[+] [-] rerx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reacharavindh|7 years ago|reply
Other than Apple Notes(with Apple Pencil), and watching NetFlix, I dont make good use of it. I'd love to get some recommendation for useful apps to try...
[+] [-] wishinghand|7 years ago|reply
I'm glad they fixed the awful UX on charging the pencil. Also stoked there's no notch in the screen, but sad that there's rounded corners.
Still no ability to let people make apps for the iPad on the iPad, which I think is truly disappointing.
*edit: I just realized it doesn't have a headphone jack and does have a camera bump. Booooooo
[+] [-] umeshunni|7 years ago|reply
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but don't all (most) mobile devices use USB-C to charge these days?
[+] [-] throwaway413|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] post_break|7 years ago|reply
https://imgur.com/a/JB7fR4a
[+] [-] jaegerpicker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschaef|7 years ago|reply
Why? What is your use case? (Genuinely curious.)