canukstorm

anantksundaram said:

EU regulators are seriously a bunch of losers. The people I run into from all over the EU are mostly somewhere else on these issues, however. 

It’s a matter of time, with the UK at the vanguard… 

dewme said:

Didn’t AI recently publish an article about how the iPad Pro, even with its multi-gigabytes of system RAM, was still setting a HARD LIMIT on how much RAM an application can utilize? That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about why the current XCode will not run on the iPad Pro.

 iPadOS != macOS

There are more underlying architectural differences between macOS and iPadOS than you may believe, despite the fact that they are rooted in a common code base at the kernel level. As long as Apple is intent on maintaining and enhancing Mac and iPad separately there will always be a gap between these two products. The “solution” to the Blown Pinto dilemma is to put macOS on the iPad Pro, the “MS Surface Model,” but Apple has not yet demonstrated a desire to do so.

The problem with Surface Model is that it is a compromise. Another phrase for “compromise” is “both sides are losing something.” For Surface this means a shitty tablet user experience for tablet aficionados and a puny ass screen for desktop PC aficionados. With compromise everyone loses something. Apple is not yet willing to commit to pushing this sort of compromise on its customers. 

As far as XCode is concerned, in a two OS model, Apple would either have to dumb down XCode or smarten up Swift Playgrounds. As a developer I always prefer to start with a clean slate and would go for the latter approach of incrementally adding more capability to the newer and less complex implementation. This approach does not have to deal with legacy cruft. Dumbing down XCode from the top is bound to cause a lot more problems because you have to constantly ask the question “Who am I screwing out of a feature that they’ve counted on being there for years?” Building from the bottom has no such concern because they can’t miss what they never had.

If you’ve ever worked a real software product you would know that adding features is easy. Removing features is terribly difficult. 

Microsoft dealt with this by having two separate products, Visual Studio (in many versions) on top and Visual Studio Code building from the bottom and gradually adding more features and capabilities over time. Will these two products ever converge? I doubt it because the “top end” product continues to grow and add features for ever larger and more expansive requirements, like integrated DevOps support and cloud (Azure). I think Apple will encounter many of the same concerns and doesn’t want to hold back the top end product by chaining it to what they still see as a less capable platform. We may all be enamored with the M1 today, but in a few years the M1 will be the 8088 of Apple’s SoC lineup with far more capable chips overshadowing the M1.

Finally, building in overcapacity is a way of life for many new products. Over time the workload thrown at the product may consume some of the capacity, but this is not always the case. I live in a household with two people and four bathrooms. Is this a Blown Pinto problem? Maybe we should “go pro” and start visiting Chipotle far more often to justify the excess bathroom capacity? 

foregoneconclusion said:

canukstorm said: There is literally only a handful of apps for iPad Pro that can truly be classified as Pro apps.  If Apple can't be bothered to make Pro apps available for the M1 iPad Pro why should third parties?

FYI: the iPad software market doesn't support prices that are as high as the Mac software market. It's always been like that. That's the first thing to consider when you're wondering why certain high-priced applications aren't available. There is no 1:1 correlation between what iPad users are willing to spend and what Mac users are willing to spend. iPad users expect cheaper prices. That expectation can limit what is made available. I already used the Xbox analogy earlier in this thread. An M1 can blow through Xbox One games, but do you see MS rushing to release a bunch of Xbox One ports on iPadOS just because they would run well? Price. They won't get the price they want on iPadOS. 

DAalseth said:

I just did a test. I took my 10.5 inch iPad Pro (6GB RAM I believe) and created a Procreate canvas 5100px x 5100px. I was able to create 14 layers before it reached the maximum. After that it just wouldn’t let me make any more. I’m guessing my unit is limited to 3GB for a particular app because of the low amount of system RAM. So an M1 unit with 9GB should theoretically be able to make 28 layers of this size perhaps? 

Does anyone want to test this out?