Some 15 years ago, A friend of mine said to me "mark my words, Apple will eventually merge OSX with iOS on the iPad". And with every passing keynote since then, it seemed Apple's been inching towards that prophecy, and today, the iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
The fact that they haven't done it in 15 years should be an indication that they don't intend to do it at all. Remember that in the same time period Apple rebuilt every Macbook from scratch from the chipset up. Neither the hardware nor software is a barrier to them merging the two platforms. It's that the ecosystems are fundamentally incompatible. A true "professional" device needs to offer the user full control, and Apple isn't giving up this control on an i-Device. The 30% cut is simply too lucrative.
Secure Boot on other platforms is all-or-nothing, but Apple recognizes that Mac users should have the freedom to choose exactly how much to peel back the security, and should never be forced to give up more than they need to. So for that reason, it's possible to have a trusted macOS installation next to a less-trusted installation of something else, such as Asahi Linux.
Contrast this with others like Microsoft who believe all platforms should be either fully trusted or fully unsupported. Google takes this approach with Android as well. You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
> You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can trivially root a Pixel factory image. And if you're talking about how they will punish you for that by removing certain features: Apple does that too (but to a lesser extent).
On Android devices with AVB (so basically everything nowadays), once the bootloader is unlocked, so many things already either lock you out or degrade your service in various ways. For example, Netflix will downgrade you to 480p, Google Pay will stop working, many apps will just straight up disappear from the Play Store because SafetyNet will stop passing (especially on newer devices with hardware attestation), banking apps (most notably Cash App) will often stop working, many other third-party apps that don't even have anything to do with banking will still lock you out, etc.
On many Android devices, unlocking the boot loader at any point will also permanently erase the DRM keys, so you will never again be able to watch high resolution Netflix (or any other app that uses Widevine), even if you relocked the bootloader and your OS passed verified boot checks.
On a Mac, you don't need to "unlock the bootloader" to do anything. Trust is managed per operating system. As long as you initially can properly authenticate through physical presence, you totally can install additional operating systems with lower levels of trust and their existence won't prevent you from booting back into the trusted install and using protected experiences such as Apple Pay. Sure, if you want to modify that trusted install, and you downgrade its security level to implement this, then those trusted experiences will stop working (such as Apple Pay, iPhone Mirroring, and 4K Netflix in Safari, for instance), but you won't be rejected by entire swathes of the third-party app ecosystem and you also won't lose the ability to install a huge fraction of Mac apps (although iOS and iPadOS apps will stop working). You also won't necessarily be prevented from turning the security back up once you're done messing around, and gaining every one of those experiences back.
So sure, you can totally boil it down to "Apple still punishes you, only a bit less", but not only do they not even punish your entire machine the way Microsoft and Google do, but they even only punish the individual operating system that has the reduced security, don't punish it as much as Microsoft and Google do, and don't permanently lock things out just because the security has ever been reduced in the past.
Do keep in mind though, the comparison to Android is a bit unfair anyway because Apple's equivalent to the Android ecosystem is (roughly; excluding TV and whatever for brevity) iPhone and iPad, and those devices have never and almost certainly will never offer anything close to a bootloader unlock. I just had used it as an example of the all or nothing approach. Obviously Apple's iDevice ecosystem doesn't allow user tampering at all, not even with trusted experiences excluded.
Fun fact though: The Password category in System Settings will disappear over iPhone Mirroring to prevent the password from being changed remotely. Pretty cool.
Its reasonable to install a different OS on Android, even if some features don't work. I've done this, my friends and family have done this, I've seen it IRL.
I've never seen anyone do this on iPhone in my entire life.
But I flipped and I'm a Google hater. Expensive phones and no aux port. At least I can get cheap androids still.
That is a good point. I wish dual booting with different security settings was possible on Android as well. The incentives for Google to implement that aren't really there though.
I used Android until around last January year when I switched to iPhone, because it works better with Mac (which I'd switched back to about a month prior, after having enough of around four years of dealing with Windows's bullshit). Not that Android worked well with Windows... I just didn't even have the idea in my head that devices could work well together at all. AirDrop changed my mind! (And all the other niceties, like Do Not Disturb syncing, and so on...)
I used to tweak/mod Android and most recently preferred customizing the OEM install over forks. I stopped doing that when TWRP ran something as OpenRecoveryScript and immediately wiped the phone without giving me any opportunity to cancel. My most recent Android phone I never bothered to root. I may never mod Android again.
If anyone wants to read up on all the features Apple didn't implement from Intel Macs that made Linux support take so long, here is a list of UEFI features that represents only a small subset of the missing support relative to AMD and Intel chipsets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Features
Alternatively, read about iBoot. Haha, just kidding! There is no documentation for iBoot, unlike there is for uBoot and Clover and OpenCore and SimpleBoot and Freeloader and systemd-boot. You're just expected to... know. Yunno?
To be fair, this is how homebrew for Apple devices has always worked. You've always had to effectively reverse engineer the platform in order to write privileged code. Although I get the argument that if Apple were explicitly trying to support alternative operating systems they probably could have done more to make it easy, really what they were doing with this was first and foremost enabling additional use cases for macOS, and then maybe silently doing it in a way that third parties would also be able to benefit from. The Asahi wiki does a bit of a better job of explaining this, but the suspicion is that Apple did this not necessarily to make it easier for alternative operating systems to exist but to prevent the Mac from needing to be jailbroken when alternative operating systems were bound to happen anyway.
It's not how homebrew worked on Intel Macs, or even PowerMacs[0] either. It's a change made with the Apple Silicon lineup - I cannot speak on Apple's behalf to tell you why they did that. But I can blame UEFI as the reason why the M3 continues to have pitiful Linux support when brand-new AMD and Intel chips have video drivers and power management on Day One.
The EFI environment does provide some basic drivers for the boot environment, but they all go away once the OS loads, except for a handful of functions such as EFI variable management. (Linux can also reuse a framebuffer originally obtained from EFI for a very limited form of video support - efifb - but that’s not proper video support.) So EFI doesn’t get credit for video drivers or power management.
For power management, you can however give some credit to ACPI, which is not directly related to UEFI (it predates it), but is likewise an open standard, and is generally found on the same devices as UEFI (i.e. PCs and ARM servers). ACPI also provides the initial gateway to PCIe, another open standard; so if you have a discrete video card then you can theoretically access it without chipset-specific drivers (but of course you still need a driver for the card itself).
But for onboard video, and I believe a good chunk of power management as well, the credit goes to drivers written for Linux by the hardware vendors.
Sorry, I should have specified Apple Silicon rather than just "Apple devices". Obviously the devices that used widely supported CPUs running pretty much widely supported firmware were pretty easy to install non-Apple things on. My Mid-2015 A1398 ran a triple boot between macOS, Windows and Arch Linux thanks to rEFInd.
the only macbook I’ve tried to put linux on was a t2 machine, and it still doesn’t sleep/suspend right, so I’m a bit skeptical that apple is really leading the way here, but maybe I’ve just not touched any recent windows devices either
To be fair, sleep/suspend has been a rather infamously difficult problem for Linux when it comes to devices that weren't designed to run Linux. I think the Macs with T2 chips were a bit weird anyway and I wonder if they had already been working on Apple Silicon Macs that far back and that's why the T2 became a thing?
Apple is also rather notorious for tinkering with Intel's ACPI files, for better or worse. Suspend is finnecky enough on hardware that supports it, and probably outright impossible if your CPU power states disagree with what the software is expecting.
They don’t want to overtake their desktop device market. If the UI fully converges, then all you have a iPad with a keyboard across all devices (laptops, desktop).
I think practically everyone is better off with a laptop. iPad is great if you're an artist using the pencil, or just consuming media on it. Otherwise a macbook is far more powerful and ergonomic to use.
I think perhaps you are overestimating the computing needs of the majority of the population. Get one of the iPad cases with a keyboard and an iPad is in many ways a better laptop.
I'm not sure - I just looked casually at some options and it appears one can find an iPad between $700-$900 for a pretty solid model, which includes the $250 folio keyboard. The base model MBA starts at $999. So depends on whether you want a traditional laptop or a "computing device."
The problem is that almost everything, including basic web browsing, is straight-up worse on the iPad. Weird incompatibilities, sites that don’t honor desktop mode, tabs unloading from memory, random reloads, etc. all mar the experience.
I'm guessing you are coming at it from the perspective of a laptop user and likely a power user. The majority of the population just needs to scroll social media, message some friends, send an email or two, do a little shopping, maybe write a document or two. For this crowd an iPad is plenty. When I was a software developer - yeah, I had a Mac Pro on my desk and a MBP I carried when I traveled. Now as a real estate agent, an iPad is plenty for when I'm on the go.
I used to think that, not having used an iPad. Now I carry a work-issued iPad with 5G and it's actually pretty convenient for remote access to servers. I wouldn't want to spend a day working on it, but it's way faster than pulling out a laptop to make one tiny change on a server. It's also great for taking notes at meetings/conferences.
It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested wasteland. There are so many ads in YouTube and streaming music. I had no idea.
It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need to figure out a better solution for that.
So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming media. Who knew?
There's native ad blocking on iOS and has been for a while—I've found that to significantly enhance the usability of the device. I use Wipr[0], other options are available.
Try the Brave browser for YouTube. I used Jellyfin for my media library and that seemed to work fine for tv and movies.
I just got a Macbook and haven't touched my iPad Pro since, I would think I could make a change faster on a Macbook then iPad if they were both in my bag. Although I do miss the cellular data that the iPad has.
I don't understand why my MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen. I'm switching to an iPad Pro tomorrow. I use Superwhisper to talk to it 90% of the time anyway.
My theory is because of the hinge, which is a common point of failure on laptops. Either you are putting extra strain on it by having someone constantly touching the screen, and some users just mash their fingers into touch screens. Or users want a fully openable screen to mimic a tablet format, and those hinges always seem to fail quicker. Every touchscreen laptop I've had eventually has had the hinge fail.
There seems to be some kind of incompatibility between antiglare and oleophobic coatings that may also contribute.
Every single touch screen laptop I’ve seen has huge reflection issues, practically being mirrors. My assumption is that in order for the screen to not get nasty with fingerprints in no time, touchscreen laptops need oleophobic coating, but to add that they have to use no antiglare coating.
Personally I wouldn’t touch my screen often enough to justify having to contend with glare.
> The iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want. Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode - only runs on MacOS.
The changes to window management are great - but iPad and iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
I don't use an iPad much, but it's been interesting to watch from afar how it's been changing over these years.
They could have gone the direction of just running MacOS on it, but clearly they don't want to. I have a feeling that the only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it more in their walled garden.
I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get, ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary branch.
Yeah, it's like we're watching two parallel evolution paths: macOS dragging its legacy along, and iPadOS trying to reinvent "productivity" from first principles, within Apple's tight design sandbox.
Whether or not they eventually fuse, I don't know—I doubt it. But the approach they've taken over the past 15 years to gradually increase the similarities in user experience, while not trying to force a square peg in a round hole, have been the best path in terms of usability.
I think Microsoft was a little too eager to fuse their tablet and desktop interface. It has produced some interesting innovations in the process but it's been nowhere near as polished as ipadOS/macOS.
ipad hardware is a full blown M chip. There's no real hardware limitation that stops the iPad from running macOS, but merging it cannibalizes each product line's sales
Right. But as long as touch is the main interface to you tablet, at least the desktop UI should be designed for that. So in my eyes it totally makes sense not just to use plain MacOS for the iPad.
Another item is that so far they resist giving users full control over their iPad.
A Macbook Air is cheaper than an iPad Pro with a keyboard though. Not to mention you still can't run apps from outside the app store, and most of these new features we're hoping work as well as they do on MacOS, but given that background tasks had to be an API, I doubt they will.
iPad+keyboard is also awkwardly top heavy and not very well suited for lap use. That might cease to be an issue with sufficiently dense batteries bringing down the weight of the iPad though.
There's still software I can't run on an iPad which is basically the only reason I have a MacBook Air. Maybe for some a windowing system may be the push to switch but that seems doubtful to me.
I really wish there was some sort of hybrid device. I often travel by foot/bike/motorbike and space comes at a premium. I'd have a Microsoft Surface if Windows was not so unbearable.
On the other hand, I have come to love having a reading/writing/sketching device that is completely separate from my work device. I can't get roped into work and emails and notifications when I just want to read in bed. My iPad Mini is a truly distraction-free device.
I also think it would be hard to have a user experience that works great both for mobile work and sitting-at-a-desk work. I returned my Microsoft Surface because of a save dialog in a sketching app. I did not want to do file management because drawing does not feel like a computing task. On the other hand, I do want to deal with files when I'm using 3 different apps to work on a website's files.
Yes and no. What they are currently doing, and it is working out greatly, is having a single hardware platform and a common code base on all devices. They still have branches of the main OS body for each device with the device specific customization. Which absolutely makes sense. Macs don't have touch. But iPads have. Which has at least some differentiation in the desktop UI. Then they try to keep up strong limitations on what iPad software can do - probably to a large extend to keep the lucrative app store alive. And of course, TV OS looks quite different for obvious reasons.
Yeah I think the majority of users, even in an office environment would be better of with an iPad in 99% of cases. All standard office stuff, like presentations; documents and similar are going to run better on an iPad. There are less foot guns, users are less likely to open 300 tabs just because they can.
If you are a developer or a creative however, then a Mac is still very useful.
I still find iPadOS frustrating for certain "pro" workflows. File management, windowing, background tasks - all still feel half-baked compared to macOS. It's like Apple's trying to protect the simplicity of iOS while awkwardly grafting on power-user features
With Microsoft opening Windows's kernel to the Xbox team, and a possible macOS-iPadOS unification, we are reaching multiple levels of climate changes in Hell. It's hailing!
I wish Apple provided the MDM, rather than relying on a random consumer ecosystem of dodgy companies who all charge 3-18$ per machine per month, which is a lot.
Auth should be Apple Business Manager; image serving should be passive directories / cloud buckets.
I don’t think that’s bizarre at all, there’s a clear financial incentive for things to be this way. Apple can’t have normal people sharing a single device instead of buying one for each.
> Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough
In education or corporate settings, where account management is centralized, you want each person who uses an iPad to access their own files, email, etc.
Nothing Apple can do to iPadOS is going to fix the fundamental problem that:
1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled from an iPhone app, and
2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.
Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1. Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those things not immediately chew through your battery.
[0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software lockout.
