I would love it if Apple allowed us to run Big Sur on the iPad, if I could use one as a more real computer I definitely would. Probably would cannibalize a lot of Mac sales though.
Honestly I really wanted them to announce containers on iPadOS in a vein similar to how ChromeOS does it.
Having them later in the presentation say "Hey look at all these ARM containers running on Apple chips on macOS" was an especial kick in the teeth.
I used my potato-tier iPad with a Logic Folio as my main computer for a couple of months while my MacBook was getting replaced and it was honestly a vastly better experience for me save for not being able to get work done because of the absence of spinning up a Linux workspace.
Even if they artificially limited it to iPad Pro (it's Apple after all) I'd still be happy.
Current iPads just don’t have the hardware support to make this possible. Hence why the DTK won’t support all the features mentioned in the keynote. (It’s using the iPad chip.)
Even if Docker wasn’t possible (because no virt), a sandboxed terminal with enough utilities to bootstrap Brew is just a software problem. It wouldn’t require special hardware stuff, just as chroot doesn’t. As long as it could be accessed by other apps and stay alive in the background, it’d be a great way to code on the go.
They can make something work if Swift Playgrounds works (which is a pretty silly experience anyway. “Hey kid, great job learning Swift. Want to make a real app? Buy a $1200 MacBook and get to work!”
Or hyperbole. Macs are “expensive” or “overpriced”, at least to the populi.
I’ve always found that strange given the demographic of HN. I’ve never considered good tools to be expensive. Continuous lost productivity is usually more costly than “Apple Tax”.
Right, but I’m sure someone would just recompile Linux with the right page size :) And I guess I’ll figure out what magic the DTK is doing to make 4K pages work once it arrives.
Some people have said ARM EL2, but virtualization in hardware isn't required if we can get a terminal with a jailed environment (akin to chroot) with brew. At worst you could spin up a Linux kernel in userspace if you needed to.
iPads work with standard mice, and have an on-screen mouse pointer. I used mine with an old mouse I had lying around a couple of weeks ago. Works fine.
iPad OS does have mouse support actually. I'm really not sure why they haven't made it possible to develop on iPads yet, I know I would get a 13 inch iPad Pro in a heartbeat if I could develop on it and sideload apps onto it.
The Dev machines come with 16Gb of RAM, iPads have nothing if that sort so probably it won't be more than a fun weekend project.
On iPhone and iPad, apps are terminated when the memory is scarce so all the apps are build to expect that to happen.
What I would expect to happen is Mac OS constantly complaining that you are out of memory and you need to choose one of the following apps to terminate.
Sure, a lot of swap can be used but this would degrade the performance significantly IMHO.
