The fact that newer iPads use the exact same silicon as MacBooks is just insult to injury. There's a grown-up computer hidden inside but you're not allowed to use it.
If they let you use it, they'd have to triple the price or everyone would connect a keyboard and mouse and use it like a desktop PC, decimating macbook sales.
I think the limitations are entirely for business strategy reasons, not because they believe there is no demand.
Reminds me of how Microsoft require paid Office subscriptions for screens larger than 10.1 inches, but the entry level iPad For students just so happens to start at 10.2 inches…
I've been using a Bluetooth mouse and a keyboard with my old 2018 iPad Pro for at least 5 years. It's basically our travel computer when we're on vacation.
In older versions of iPadOS (it might even have just been iOS back then) you had to enable the mouse under Accessibility to make it work, but in current OS versions it "just works"..
You can even cmd-tab between apps and a lot of the keyboard shortcuts you know and love work in most apps.
Not even that, the newest pro has the best single thread CPU out there because it's the only device on M4 (or at least it had until AMD's Zen 5 not sure how it compares now)
Talking off the cuff, it feels to me like Apple is trying/tried to hail back to the early days of the Mac where there is no hierarchical file system and "files" concept is minimized in favor of apps that correspond 1:1 with a file to edit or view.
I'd say past 40 years proves this model is not what people want, but they are so persistent about not doing a normal file-focused UI that it feels intentional. Like some directive from Steve before he passed.
I love the iPod as a physical object, but it always hurt not being able to just put files on it. (Not to even mention the "you have to sync and wipe your entire iPod library" situation.)
I ended up putting Rockbox on my iPod Classic, which makes it be what it actually is: an MP3 player! (Alas the UI is not as pleasant, and battery life is worse...)
Similarly I've been so confused about files on my iPhone, whereas on Android I never had any confusion (except on some newer versions where there's both a Documents folder and a Documents "smart view" which are indistinguishable except when you realize nothing makes any sense and you ended up in the screen that's trying to give you an Apple-like files experience for some reason, and then you navigate back to the actual file system and are actually able to find your files...)
I actually disagree, I think the success of the iPhone has proven Apple correct that people don't want to deal with "files." Personally I despise it, but as iPhones have become nearly ubiquitous in the US, I can't help but feel the sting of being in a minority group that actually wants a general purpose computer rather than an "appliance"
You can't really evoke revealed preference here; there's a lot of incentive for platform builders to lean away from general-purpose use and towards appliance-ification, and there's no real option on the market for consumers to flock to if they want a capable general-purpose pocket computer.
I hope you are correct, but I'm skeptical. May I ask what demographic? Among the youth, nearly 90% or more have iPhones, seemingly regardless of socioeconomics situations.
Don't read too much into it, it's not about the principle insomuch as its about the efficiency of killing off Chrome OS to merge it into Android, and a continual game of whac-a-mole to woo Samsung execs so they don't put too much investment into software. It'll work about as well as the years of efforts to get devs to do apps the Google way in time for the Pixel Tablet launch.
Your wording makes it sound like you think Google out of its way to break termux. What makes you believe that? Its execution model is at odds with the security model Android pushes for so of course it'll come with some challenges. It tries to provide an environment suitable for a legacy application model that doesn't really take security as seriously. The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did. That allows sufficient isolation such that it need not try to force something to work in an environment not built for it.
On the one hand, no, I don't think there's some whiteboard inside Google titled "master plan to make Termux stop working". On the other hand... so you know how on iOS, Apple has a policy of disallowing apps to have their own JIT? It probably does make the system more secure (JIT engines are historically a good place to find vulnerabilities), but it does so by prohibiting valid behavior and preventing entire classes of apps from existing. I'm on Android specifically because I don't think that's reasonable, so no, I'm not really cool with Google trying to rule out running Linux programs on a Linux distro (Android is a weird Linux distro, but it still is one). And a VM does help with security, but it also isn't a general solution; there are perfectly valid usecases that termux can do that a VM would either make needlessly difficult (little things like "open files" or "listen on a port") or impossible (get a root shell and invoke /system/bin/input for automation).
> Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations.
> Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries.
Google seems to have fully bought into the philosophy that the user is a security threat. The devices are no longer about protecting the user from other threats, but also about protecting the device from the user. Termux is the type of application that enables the user to do stuff that the Google designers don't think is safe (like send SMS messages programmatically!) so maintaining the APIs it depends on is not a priority.
I doubt anyone at Google is trying to break Termux, but they don't care about power users and they think Android should function like their iPhone and treat users accordingly.
That's not the reason. The host android has full access to the child VMs; the VM can't hide anything from the hypervisor. It's about isolation. The child VM can't leak your photos or contact list if it doesn't have it in the first place, and sticking things into their own VM provides an additional layer of isolation beyond what exists currently.
...right... which is why I said it would be nice for Google to officially bless the thing that already works so that it is official.
(And can we just pretend that I replied the same thing to the other places in the thread you posted the exact same response? No point in duplicating threads)
"We're excited to announce that Android Tablets now have a terminal, with full support of terminal applications like 'ed' and 'grep'!"