rcfa

I own an iPad since the first model that Apple brought to market. I justified the purchasing prices for my by now three iPads (original, Air, Pro), by comparing it with the cost, weight, bulk and hassle of producing, maintaining and carrying paper photo albums vs. carrying an iPad.

Everything else, like watching Netflix in bed, jotting down a note, or quickly checking an e-mail, are fringe benefits. Despite the latest iPad of mine being a 12” A12X based iPad Pro with 1TB of storage, it NEVER was more for me than a photo album and media consumption device, and certainly NOTHING that deserved the name Pro, not even for something as trivial as e-mail does it deserve that name, for what sort of “Pro” solution is an e-mail system that doesn’t allow the user to inspect a messages RAW content to see if something is real or an elaborate phishing e-mail? At best, it might qualify as a semi-pro accessory to a Mac, if one uses it as a Wacom Tablet replacement with Sidecar or some third party software like AirDisplay.

When the MagicKeyboard hit the market, it endeavored into an expensive experiment: would a MagicKeyboard change how I worked with the iPad Pro? Would a cigarette box sized Raspberry Pi 8GB RAM Linux system attached, networked and powered over the USB-C connection and operated over RDP, make up for some of the shortcomings of iPad OS (e.g. by running a real e-mail client like Thunderbird on the Raspberry, by having Mathematica on the Raspberry, by having development and network testing tools on the linux system, etc.)?

The answer was a resounding YES in both cases, but more importantly, it showed me that the iPad Pro with MagicKeyboard was the HARDWARE I always wished a MacBook Air would be: Much better screen, touch screen, pen input, etc. At the same time, the more I worked with the MagicKeyboard, the more painful the shortcomings of iPadOS became.

Yes, I get the difference between a mouse/trackpad&keyboard driven UI and a touch UI. I get that macOS is the former and iPadOS is the latter…
…BUT, branding aside, macOS and iPadOS are fundamentally the same OS (Darwin), with different UI layers. With the new iPad Pros (A12X and up with 6GB RAM or more) there is no hardware issue with running macOS. And just as macOS apps can have a windowed mode and a full screen mode, there’s nothing that stops the same app from in addition having a touch UI mode. So one could have an adaptive OS, which adjusts the UI based on whether docked with pointing device and keyboard, or used standalone in touch UI mode.

With the M1 version, and its up to 2TB of SSD and 16GB RAM, there could be even another solution: virtualization. Run macOS virtualized in an iPadOS app, and switch to it when docked, and suspend it when undocked. 

Even working on a slow-poke system like a Raspberry Pi “remotely” over USB-C and RDP makes the iPad Pro feel like a seamless laptop, that lets me miss nothing (except for macOS rather than Linux), so how much better would a virtualized macOS be, that would run at nearly native speed, and would gain tablet input, and instant switching between iPadOS and macOS? How cool would it be to run Xcode on the virtualized macOS system, and then test the app directly on the iPad?

It would be awesome, beyond words. And what would Apple have to do to make this possible? Nothing. Less than nothing. All they would need to do is to stop actively sabotaging virtualization apps on iPadOS, and a third party solution would spring up in short order.

Now, why is Apple getting in its own way?

The answer is easy: they don’t have “software and hardware divisions”, which if they did, they wouldn’t care which of their operating systems you ran on which of their hardware devices, but they have “Mac, iDevice, aTV, etc. divisions”, and so the Mac division has no interest in driving iDevice sales by spending man hours making their software available on the competing division’s hardware, while digging their own hardware’s grave. The video of how the iPad division went to steal the M1 chip from the Mac division, was in a strange way revealing of why we have the problems as Pro users with the iPad Pro and its media consumption platform operating system.

foregoneconclusion said:

rcfa said: Likely neither. Apple itself pushes “universal apps” where one license, for one price, installs on both macOS and i(Pad)OS.

That's one vote for "freebie".

A paid app is not a “freebie” <facepalm>
It’s up to the developer to figure out his costs and price the app accordingly, and users shouldn’t have to pay extra because the app runs on one hardware or another. You don’t buy separate licenses for “full screen mode” apps, laptop apps, desktop apps, etc. 
An iOS version is simply another display mode for the same code, one would hope, and not a toy version of the app, at least not in 2021 on an M1

foregoneconclusion said:

Would the writer of this article be willing to pay $199 for Logic Pro or $299 for Final Cut Pro on iPadOS? Or would they be expecting it to be a freebie that's thrown in with the Mac version of the software? 

Likely neither. Apple itself pushes “universal apps” where one license, for one price, installs on both macOS and i(Pad)OS.

GeorgeBMac said:

Instead I bought an FDA approved device that, using my iPhone, tests my vision and outputs a prescription.   Then i followed their advice for an online lens/frame maker and ordered a pair for $99.   The glasses are better than any I could have gotten from the American optical industry and I can repeat the process whenever I need new glasses.

Any pointers/links to the service/device in question?

Most people never heard of lossless? Really?

Anyone who’s ever heard of these silver discs calls “CD”s has heard of lossless.

Only Napster, music piracy in conjunction with slow internet, metered cellular data and expensive flash memory brought us the “blessings” of lossy audio compression algorithms.

So, no, lossless isn’t “niche”, it was and should always be the normal case, lossy compression should be the exception.