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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Apple's been moving toward unifying their OSes for over a decade now. They're playing the long game. They probably still have another decade (or two) to go.
Apple's stance now is clear: developers need to make universal apps if they want them to run on both platforms, using tools and frameworks that are common to both. It's much easier to make an iPad app run well on a Mac than vice-versa. I use some Mac apps that were ported from iPad, and the experience ranges from "okay" to "perfect", depending on how much care the devs put into it. This is obviously the future of Mac software development, but it would require rewriting many apps almost from scratch. Apple's not going to pull that rug out from under us anytime soon.
The next natural step would be to allow iPads to use the "desktop" UI of universal apps when connected to a keyboard and mouse. But I don't think we'll ever see iPads running arbitrary Mac apps. When I think of the Mac-only apps I use, I just don't see how they'd run on iPad. How am I gonna run BBEdit on an iPad when there are hundreds of menu items, and a ton of UI elements that are like 8 pixels square? Never mind the lack of a real file system.
Microsoft tried this with Windows 8. It went poorly. The experience of using desktop apps with a touch screen sucks, and trying to make desktop UIs touchscreen-friendly across the board just handicapped desktop users. Apple has a better strategy here. They're slowly molding the software ecosystem to make this Not Suck.
I doubt it will be a decade or 2 we are basically there on iPad and android can do this. If Apple opens the flood gates on this devs will jump aboard quickly.
How so? You mean running a full Linux VM or something? Android doesn't run any desktop apps natively.
if you mean the tablet UI mode, yeah, that's an easy thing for Apple to implement. I think they already have, more or less. iPadOS already has mouse support.
I’m referring to Samsung and dex mode. There are phones that do this, I just don’t know the official name.
Dex mode and spoofing magnetic strips are the two things I really miss about using a Samsung device.
What do you think about the s20 as a device today?
I have an iPhone 15, but I need to have a backup phone on hand for my work. I was thinking of selling my old xr and getting the s20 as they cost about the same.
Not sure if it’s just better to hold onto the xr.
My wife is still using her S20+ and has no intention of changing anytime soon. I think it's still a really solid device that should stick around for a while.
Does she ever use the dex mode? This is particularly interesting to me, but it doesn’t seem that many people use their phone that way.
She doesn’t, but she doesn’t have a usecase for it. I used it a lot. My work takes me to a lot of different sites run by my company and all our desk workstations have a USB-C dock with monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard. So, if I was unexpectedly without my laptop, I could work reasonably well with just my phone plugged in.
Thanks, it's too bad that Apple hasn't implements this yet.