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.
The reason Apple cares so much more about iOS than MacOS is vastly increased control. With iOS, they control the hardware from the chips up, the OS, which apps you can run, and via Safari-only access to the internet, even what you can and can't do using external services.
It makes computing & communications an Apple theme park, where you can't bring anything forbidden into the park, have to buy everything you need from Apple concessionaires, and can't do anything that they haven't planned for you to do. The people in the "park" pay to enter and then become a new type of domesticated herd to be milked.
You can't allow people to bring heavy equipment and power tools into a theme park, but you also can't build the park's controlled features without them, so how do you give power to authorized builders while keeping it away from users? In a physical theme park, they have controlled users during the day and empowered builders at night.
But in Appleworld, I'm thinking they'll keep iOS locked down by limiting the building tools to MacOS.
A unix-style workstation that gives maximum power to its users is so antithetical to everything Apple stands for that MacOS would never be created today, but since it already exists, they can take advantage of it to make iOS even more locked down than it would have been. (And refuse to let any other company use MacOS and not port Xcode anywhere else.) You want to see what your computer is doing (file sys, CPU procs, memory, network, etc.)? Do it with a Mac. iOS is not YOUR computer. It's Apple's. You only paid for admission to iOS, and you aren't allowed behind the locked doors. If you want control, you're in the wrong place.
I'm afraid that if they ever figure out how to sandbox an iOS partition of some sort to allow builder tools to run on iOS itself in a totally controlled way, then the Mac is toast, but the Mac gives them time. I think that for the foreseeable future, they won't risk any accidental empowerment of iOS users and will limit the power tools to the Mac.
A decade ago, I never would have thought that Apple would be the ones mainstreaming Trusted Computing. (Well, the iPhone was out... maybe 12 years ago.) These were machines that supported the hacker ethos of tinkering and experimentation, even if the company involved was dedicated to abstracting more and more of the computer's guts away from the user.
There are lots of tools you can use to develop iOS apps other than Xcode. Phonegap/Cordova/OutSystems, Visual Studio, Xojo, Mendix, LiveCode et al.
End of the day, Apple like any other corporation does what it does because it makes money for them. The alternative is to use a "free" operating system like Android and you subject yourself to constant surveillance. It's like that scene in The Big Short; "tell me how you're f*ing me." At least with Apple, you know straight up what you're getting yourself into. Your relationship with Apple ends when you stop using their devices. Not so with Google/Facebook, where your data lives on in perpetuity, used for purposes beyond your control.
Now I'm not saying it's not possible to have your cake and eat it too. I'm saying, where is this mythical product, where a user is free to do whatever he wants with his device? What's the market size? How come no one has built it yet?
Because conferences require money to run, and the kinds of people who back conferences tend to only run Linux on their servers, not their workstations. Enterprise Linux in general is happy enough being in the data center, and could have made harder pushes for the desktop for years now, but haven't.
(Apple user disclaimer) Apple isn’t really offering just a CLI, it exposes the UNIX on which it is built. My understanding of Windows is that it just offers a runtime and abstraction layer.
Windows offers a complete personality for Linux syscalls.
Objective-C/Swift Frameworks have nothing to do with UNIX, Apple could easily port them to another kernel architecture.
Likewise OS X driver model has nothing to do with UNIX, being modeled on an C++ subset, which was originally written in Objective-C back in the NeXTSTEP days.
The only UNIX GUI certified as such is Motif, which Apple certainly isn't offering on their products.
Nor is the audio stack in any way related to UNIX.
We don't all grow our own crops, make our own clothes, brew our own beer, refine our own crude oil etc, even though we may have the knowledge to do so. Some things are better left to specialists, due to efficiencies/legal reasons. Surely we can agree on this?
1. It's not Safari only. It's Webkit only and there are legitimate security reasons for this.
2. The idea that UNIX is antithetical to what Apple stands for is just ridiculous. It is still at the core of iOS and MacOS and is one of the areas where Apple continues to innovate.
3. Apple licensed MacOS in the past. It nearly killed the company since third parties like PowerComputing went straight after their core base and did nothing to grow the ecosystem.
4. You can see what your iOS device is doing. Plenty of apps allow you to see what processes are running, file system behaviour etc. Apple just doesn't build it in.
5. Anyone who thinks the Mac is dead needs to go have a lie down with some chamomile tea. Apple even today doubled down on the Mac with the new Air + Mini. And they will continue to grow and invest in the platform since content creation will always be largely done on a Mac.
There are not legitimate security reasons for Webkit only. That makes zero sense. Chrome has hands down beat every other browser on security for years. Go read the CVEs. There is absolutely zero reason to believe that iOS webkit has a better track record than webkit at large. Therefore it's nearly certain your iOS device is less secure browsing the net with webkit/Safari than if Apple allowed real chrome to run there.
Which are both control issues not security issues.
There's no actual security reason for iOS to be locked to Apple's webkit exclusively and there's no actual security reason for iOS to not allow JIT'd code. Those are both control issues, not security ones. JIT in particular is purely a control issue - the process itself is already sandboxed which is the one and only actual security boundary here. Preventing a JIT doesn't prevent arbitrary code execution, after all, especially if there's an interpreter in play which Apple sort of allows.
Google has a track record of fixing Chrome bugs far far faster than Apple fixes Safari bugs so the point still stands. You'd be safer and more secure if allowed to run real Chrome on iOS than Safari by every measurable metric. In other words it's effectively provable the restriction is not about security.
> Apple doesn't want to allow that.
Yes, that's all it's about. Apple's control. Other excuses people make up for their reasons are demonstrably false.
WinRT sandbox has always allowed for JIT'ted code, all the way back to the original Windows 8 release - all .NET Store apps back then were running on a JIT. .NET Native is a later addition that is there solely to improve performance, and it is still opt-in.
Now, Win8.x did not allow for third-party JIT compilers in the sandbox; it was only CLR or Chakra. But UWP does - look for the "codeGeneration" capability here:
WP 8.x did not JIT code on device, hence the whole MDIL and cloud compiler on the store.
WP 8.x only did dynamic linking at installation time and when OS updates were done, by replacing symbolic labels with the actual target destinations. Everything else was already compiled at the store and downloaded as binary into the devices. This was the whole point of MDIL.
There is a BUILD session and a further Channel 9 deep dive interview showing how MDIL deployment works on WP 8.x.
> You misunderstand. Apple can fix WebKit bugs, but they can't force Google to fix Chrome bugs.
If apple could make their browser the defacto browser of tomorrow in the way chrome is today then google would surely work harder to fix the pain points apple identifies
>4. You can see what your iOS device is doing. Plenty of apps allow you to see what processes are running, file system behaviour etc. Apple just doesn't build it in.
Do you have any examples? I've never seen anything like this in the app store.
Some apps give you limited access to their filesystem but (as a Jailbreaker) I'm pretty sure the larger system isn't viewable under normal circumstances.
Apple was always focused on their own platform, even Steve while at NeXT saw UNIX just as a way to lead developers into their hardware, but the real juice was in NeXTSTEP Objective-C world not POSIX.
What is happening now are those that only discovered the Mac world after OS X, don't care about Objective-C/Swift development, now feeling that their pretty UI Linux replacement is no more.
Apple naturally cares about their Objective-C/Swift developers in first place.
I do feel it odd to say content creation will be done on a desktop OS rather than a mobile OS when it seems that more and more people are using their mobile OS as a primary means of creation and sharing. Maybe in a less powerful way, but mobile OS apps and hardware have really democratized content creation and I don't see that trend reversing.
The majority of "new content" is being created with mobile OS apps today. Family photos, social media, etc. The fact that it's mostly all low quality junk is orthogonal to that reality.
Mobile systems have democratized content creation not because of price (though that too; not everyone buys the most expensive device) but because they are demonstrably easier to use for content creation than anything that came before them.
Source: personal experience with multiple over-65 people for whom an iPad or iPhone is the first internet-connected computer they've ever owned.
"Content creation" isn't usually referring to "family photos and social media". Besides, family photos are made with digital cameras, not mobile apps.
In the context of this thread, the target user of iPad Pro is more than someone taking pictures of their kids and pets on weekends.
As for my opinion on this, I believe in using the right tool for the job, AND using multiple tools to get the job done. Sometimes an iPad Pro might be fine for certain stages of a project, for sketching out backgrounds or initial ideas for a design, and then importing that into another system such as animation pipelines or other applications on desktop or laptop or workstations. Depends what the job is.
I've never met a professional designer who works only on their tablet. Professionals love their workstations, multiple screens, and all the comforts and power of a proper setup. If you're just marking up a PDF, I wouldn't count that as professional work!
> "Content creation" isn't usually referring to "family photos and social media".
I wish I agreed with you, but I can't but see that as elitist condescension against unsophisticated content.
> the target user of iPad Pro is more than someone taking pictures of their kids and pets on weekends.
I wish I agreed with you, but in reality the iPad Pro is marketed as a tool for "serious professionals" but in reality that's just an aspirational message and a large number of iPad Pro buyers will use them to take pictures of their kids and pets on weekends.
The same is true of DSLRs. They're supposed to be professional work tools but the overwhelming sales numbers are to amateurs taking photos for trivial reasons. (That said, the DSLR market has now matured to the point where they do target the amateru audience.)
You can also go to Settings>Privacy>Analytics>Analytics Data and see some pretty specific logs on why things crashed or why they were slow. You can see if an app used too much CPU time, OOM kills (a.k.a. JetsamEvents, in iOS-lingo), and explanations for app crashes (I can see that iOS killed an app for trying to write to the photos library without permission, for instance).
You have to keep in mind that apple is going to dogfood any potential "iPad as workstation" product with it's own developers. If their own developers jump out in rage then they'll fix it before release.
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.
I do a lot of scientific computing and data analysis development work and most of the time during my dev cycle I'm working on tiny test data sets developing and testing new approaches to certain problems. Most of that work could absolutely be done on something with the capability of the new iPad pro. In fact I do a fair bit of development on a mid-range surface pro 4 which has pretty similar specs as the new iPad pro.
there's plenty of non-JS dev work that isn't scientific or financial. Since ChromeOS now runs Linux apps, any dev is feasible; arguments about machine specs are about the hardware, not the OS.
I would take an iPad Pro with the overpriced keyboard and an Apple mouse. I think if they can jailbreak iOS 12 to support a Bluetooth mouse... we might be onto something.
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.
All of that can be done in a remote VM. I use Coda + Shelly on an iPad pro and it's a pretty decent development experience. The real barrier is for (non-web) GUI development.
Coda has a local server/browser pair you can use for simpler things. But usually the kind of web work I'm doing barely exercises a single core, it all runs on a $2.50/month VM.
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.
It's not only the fact that a finger is so much less precise than a cursor, but also that UIs made for fat fingers take up a lot of space. Buttons are bigger, when dragging you need to know what's going on under your finger, etc.
I also think that the lack of a desktop UI and a mouse is a huge limiting factor of the iPad Pro.
You can do mouselike pointer selection via the on-screen keyboard: a force press on iOS devices that support it, else two fingers together: your keyboard is now a mouse pad.
I"m not much of a mouse user so this is adequate for me.
Okay, then say that. Don't downvote, or if you have to downvote, justify it then and there.
BTW, people use the mouse to select and change the cursor position all the time, so it's very relevant to the topic since it's a step toward desktop-like mouse support.
I always forget about it but that is a great feature, especially since it's nearly impossible for me to modify the start of a url in safari since my finger bumps up against the edge of the case.
"Pixel-accurate" might be an obsolete term today when you have 9 or more pixels where previously there was 1. (I know, that isn't what you meant ;-)
See how Autocad was using a command line for ages to implement precise control over coordinates. Don't need a mouse for that. At the same time, the imprecise things that you use mouse for (e.g. dropping a symbol from a library into a workspace, or connecting controls with outlets in an interface builder) are much easier to do using a direct touch.
apple: we won't give you touch screen laptops because touchscreens are garbage
also apple: here's a laptop with only touchscreen.
fan boys are going to have a field day to sell this one up. (edit: it already started with a workarounds for text input only. let's see how far it will go :)
Touchscreens are garbage on a desktop-oriented OS like macOS. The giant-ass buttons and controls in Windows 10 are one of the things that make it so infuriating for me. I don't want big buttons sucking up screen real-estate everywhere when I have a mouse available for precision input.
No, they said they're unviable on laptops because of having to lift your hands up. Now they're pushing the iPad Pro with a keyboard that props it up to stand vertically, without a touchpad, requiring the user to lift their hands up more often than, say, a Surface.
> 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.
Jailbreaking will never be mainstream when people worry about the warranty on their 1k-2k+ devices. If you want people to own their own devices you will have to write it into law presumably in a more consumer friendly jurisdiction than the US which cares about business first last and only.
I'm aware the jailbreak community often felt Apple was targeting them specifically, and perhaps they were, but every jailbreak was also exposing a security flaw. Personally, I've never been worried about jailbreaking voiding my warranty -- I just never got sufficient value from it to make it worth the drawbacks. (Both value and drawbacks are subjective measures, obviously.)
While I understand the "you must own your own device" line, that's more of a rallying cry than a useful description. (I have a similar pedantic complaint with "if you're not the customer, you're the product," for what it's worth.) It's interesting to think about a regulatory framework that mandates companies build software-driven devices with the ability for end users to do their own software loads, but figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't let companies wiggle out of it and doesn't essentially mandate insecure back doors in all "smart" consumer electronic devices seems to me to be a non-trivial problem.
I remember some of that. I didn't really get into the jailbreak scene too deeply, though. Usually, what happened is I heard that some Thing I wanted to do that you couldn't on iOS was available if it was jailbroken -- "tethering," for instance, back before that was added to iOS. I'd jailbreak the phone (which could be really easy or involve a lot of hoops to jump through, depending), and install Cydia, and install the App That Did The Thing. By that point I was usually already frustrated because the whole user experience of the software from the jailbreak side of things tended to be noticeably worse. (I'm sure there were exceptions, but in general, that was consistently my experience.) Then I would discover that the App That Did The Thing was a little buggy and not very well designed, and sometimes didn't even consistently Do The Thing, and I would look around the Cydia store and discover that there was very little other stuff that I actually wanted, and then something would crash in a way that took the whole phone down in a way that official iOS apps very, very rarely do, and I would say "enough of this" and put the phone back in jail.
tl;dr: I tried to be adventurous, but was too impatient. :)
Letting the user control the device inevitably means letting the user hurt themselves that is inevitable and impossible to fix.
The least intrusive method is too allow users to add additional software sources and either opt out of sandboxing wholly or totally for select vetted apps.
This isnt hard it would just hurt Apples ability to get a 30% cut as third party stores would spring up.
User owned personal computing devices have been a thing for decades can we not pretend this is uncharted territory?
The comment of yours that I replied to explicitly mentioned jailbreaking, which is not the same thing as "additional software sources." I'd like to see Apple allow users to install signed apps from places other than the App Store, and I suspect that protecting revenue is the main reason they don't. But I'm not particularly interested in jailbreaking, even though I'd like to see functionality that iOS doesn't currently allow.
Well technically you can do that. Download code, build in Xcode, and install to your device. Probably not what you meant, but it does enable some side loading.
Jailbreaking has never violated the warranty. Apple just doesn’t support it so they won’t service your device until you update it to the latest software, which is completely reasonable.
But the first thing they'd do even if you didn't jailbreak would be to restore your device and pull a backup from iCloud. If you want to keep your jailbreak, then they can't help you, because who knows if the latest version of iOS included a patch for your problem, a tweak you installed borked the phone, or if Apple borked it?
i disagree in that i do see a future for macOS. steve jobs said it best - sometimes you drive a convertible, sometimes a pickup truck.
macOS may be the pickup truck. but it isn't going to go away without a fight. not unless you can make software engineering work on an iPad the same way it does on macOS today.
A shift from lightning to usb c is apple losing because they didnt donate their port to the spec. They could have "invented" usb c. I understand why they didnt, but I still prefer lightning to usbc.
They are doing this before the EU makes them do it. What apple did do was force the market to adapt to a plug that can go in both directions. And they thinned out the plug quite nicely, it never needed to be so thick.
Lightning is awful. It looks nice, but that’s because all the fiddly bits that are prone to failure are hidden in the port. Ever had your iPhone’s Lightning port fail? It’s not particularly rare, and Apple can’t fix it without replacing the whole phone.
USB-C puts the parts that wear out quickly in the cable where they belong.
> Ever had your iPhone’s Lightning port fail? It’s not particularly rare
Really? In another life I worked at an apple store genius bar, and can't recall ever seeing a failed lightning port (physical damage aside). You know what's extremely common though? Schmutz. The port picks up pocket lint, and then the connector packs it all down to the bottom of the port. Eventually your phone stops charging. Often the gunk is packed so tightly it's not obvious even looking with a flashlight that there's anything in there, or that the connector isn't sitting properly. Just dig it out with a pin and you're fine.
Obviously I don't know what happened with your phone or etc. All I can say is in my experience (which is sadly extensive), if you had your phone replaced for a failed lightning port the real problem was almost always schmutz + incompetent tech support.
Edit: Didn't notice jen729w's comment when I posted. So... seconded.
> Often the gunk is packed so tightly it's not obvious even looking with a flashlight that there's anything in there, or that the connector isn't sitting properly. Just dig it out with a pin and you're fine.
That's a great tip - it never occurred to me and I've just been living with a unreliable connection for months.
My concern with USB-C is lint. My iPhone’s Lightning port regularly collects pocket lint, which I fish out with a toothpick. That’s easy to do.
(I notice the lint in there because the Lightning cable doesn’t quite snap in all the way; each time I’ve pushed it in, I’m compressing the lint up at the back of the port, and eventually it gets too much and prevents a solid connection. Only happens about once a year, but it happens.)
Looking at a USB-C port, there’s still space for lint but much less space to get in and remove it. Can anyone with a USB-C phone share their experience?
> Looking at a USB-C port, there’s still space for lint but much less space to get in and remove it. Can anyone with a USB-C phone share their experience?
You anticipated my experience exactly. My iPhone 6 got lint impacted as much as my Pixel, but it was a lot easier to fix the iPhone. Lightning does seem to require a more solid connection. USB-C will work longer with a "partial connection", which really just means I'm going to wait longer to clean it out.
Edit: I've never gotten any lint inside any of my USB-C cables though. Looking at the cable in front of me, it would be a bitch to clean out.
I didn't know that, so I'm glad you mentioned it. I have had at least 20 failed cables and 0 failed ports (of maybe five or six devices) in my experience with Lightning.
Actually, I'm not glad you mentioned it since that makes it even more perplexing. I was glad because if a port ever failed I would not have easily diagnosed it because I thought they were pretty good. But it must be my fault the cables are failing....
My phones seem to eat cables, at the rate of about one a year, per device, but the ports last the lifetime of the device - which is a huge improvement over microusb.
Another issue with lightning: the contacts arc. The middle pin on any non-brand-new cable is almost always a bit burnt — it’s pretty easy to see. I don’t know whether USB-C has mitigations for this.
They may not have invented it, but 18 of the engineers on the certification work for Apple and they were the first laptop manufacturer to announce support. They’ve pushed heavily and quickly into USB-C so I really don’t see any signs of coercion.
I prefer it because it feels way better. The snap, and the way the plug feels secure in the socket.... I had a nexus 6p for a year and the plug was so damn unreliable and wiggly. Bought multiple different types but they were all bad. That said, I haven't used any Apple devices with USBC and I would not be surprised if they felt much better.
I have an iPhone and a MacBook with USB-C ports, and my experience has been the exact opposite. The lightning port on my iPhone is really weak, all cords can way too easily lose a connection so my music stops or it stops charging. The USB-C on my laptop snaps in really nicely, I'm never worried about the cable not being fully connected.
Sounds like you’ve got some lint in your iPhone’s charging port. I recently used a cocktail stick to remove a big lump of it from my wife’s 6s where she had the same issues.
I understand what you mean about the feel but lightning ports have a fundamental physical flaw that is part of its design. The pins are on the iOS device side so if they wear down or break that device needs to be repaired. With USBC, the pins are on the cable side so any damage to them is just a simple cable replacement.
Is this an actual problem? In all my experience I've seen cables fall apart (mainly USB Micro or HDMI) but beyond lint, never had any issues relating to the actual ports.
The lightning contacts are flush with the port, so very unlikely to get damaged. On the other hand the USB-C has that fragile looking wafer on the device-side.
I agree. I will often knock out the USB-C cable from my MacBook when it's on my lap causing it to stop charging, whereas I can hang my phone from a lightning cable.
The simpler explanation is that Apple simply wants to move to USB C because they see benefit in being on the "standard" mobile device port now that it does not have marked drawbacks vs their proprietary solution and can used for their entire line of mobile devices, including laptops
It's kind of amazing how much the lack of a real Chrome (not just a wrapper around WKWebView) prevents me from caring about this.
I suspect the drawing experience on here is better than with a ChromeOS device, but I care more about my web browsing/creation experience than I do about sketching.
What is it about Chrome's renderer that specifically appeals to you?
I agree it's somewhat ridiculous that you can't get (real) third party web browsers, but Apple's is so damn good that I don't consider it a real problem.
Do you mean the extension cable that came with the original Apple USB keyboard?
It was only for the extension cable -- which are prohibited by the USB spec, so it was technically a "captive" extension. (The USB specs define captive as having a non-standard-USB plug, even if it's not physically captive.)
Blame the USB spec, not Apple. They're actually the only company I've ever seen make an extension cable that meets the letter of the spec.
>Apparently you're not old enough to remember those apple "USB" keyboard plugs with the little v-shaped indentations so you couldn't plug in non-apple approved devices.
Wasn't that because of the extender cable? As I recall extenders couldn't be USB compliant, so apple made a notch in the extender so that it wasn't technically a separate USB accessory from the keyboard?
The keyboards themselves didn't have the V, it was the extension cord, and it was because it was out of USB spec. If you push hard enough, any old USB port went in just fine.
Seems like it'll be really difficult for them to ever make the iPad suitable for software development while also preventing users from installing software except through the app store. But if they ever figure that out I'll probably replace my laptop with an iPad.
I wish they'd make the iPad more development-friendly. I don't know exactly what that looks like… but if they did that, I'd use it as a daily driver in a heartbeat.
So so so done with Apple laptops, though. It seems like the butterfly keyboards are here to stay, and they're just plain awful.
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)