A follow up to the two-part series on imagining Mac OS big Sur running on the iPad Pro. I came across this blog post that described what it would take to free the iPad itself from the current constraints of iPad OS without running Mac OS on it. Some of the writer’s recommendations:
Introduce Gatekeeper and app notarization for iOS. The process of side-loading apps should not be as simple as downloading them from the App Store. Bury it in Settings, make it slightly convoluted, whatever: just have an officially-sanctioned way of doing it.
Ruthlessly purge the App Store Guidelines of anything that prevents the iPad from serving as a development machine. Every kind of development from web to games should be possible on an iPad. And speaking of games—emulators should be allowed, too.
Introduce Time Machine backups for iPadOS.
I don’t disagree with her. But I wonder if it’s simply better to optimize the two operating systems – iPadOS and Mac OS – for different types of users, and let them choose what they want to run on their Apple hardware. The iPad app ecosystem is already open on the Mac. The logical next step is to make Mac OS available on the iPad
There are some big differences, such as the L2 cache and the GPU “execution cores”. Also, the A14 was designed for iOS, which is a lot more restrictive with resource management than Mac OS, a desktop OS where user applications can run indefinitely in the background. Could the A14 support this more freewheeling approach to process execution without killing battery life? Or will Apple need Mac OS’ resource management algorithm to adapt depending on whether it runs on an A-series or M-series chip?
On the other hand, there are similarities beyond just both being ARM64 machines. Big Sur expects certain security capabilities of the M1 chip: “… the latest generation Secure Enclave, a high-performance storage controller with AES encryption hardware, and hardware‑verified secure boot.” These capabilities used to be provided by the T2 chip, which was present on most (all?) Macs from 2018 onwards, has now been moved into M1. But the iPad Pro 2020 has this T2 chip, which Apple says is used for “hardware microphone disconnect“, but potentially has the same capabilities as one in a Mac.
If you think of the iPad Pro as a Mac optimised for even greater portability than the MacBook Air, sacrificing some of the supposedly unbelievable performance for flexibility, it begins to make more sense. It could be the Macbook with 4G that people have wanted for years.
The iPad hardware ecosystem, even Apple’s own product,s already has a wide range of pointer and keyboard accessories. Apple’s Magic Keyboard for the iPad has multitouch support. One could interact with Mac OS using iPad accessories quite easily.
Then there’s touch. Mac OS Big Sur is a lot more touch-friendly than previous versions – some changes like the new Control Centre seem more from the touch-first world than a trackpad-first one. The Apple senior VP Craig Federighi recently denied designing Mac OS for touch, and that might well be true – it’s just elementary interactions with the OS like changing settings and dragging windows – may work well with touch.
And finally, Mac OS Big Sur can run iOS/iPadOS applications without them needing to be modified, since they’re built for the same machine architecture. So Mac OS could still run Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu and other iPad-optimised entertainment iOS apps without issue, instead of running them in the browser as today. Those apps were built for touch, and will respond to touch just as well as if they ran on iPadOS.
So there you have it. The iPad Pros are gorgeous, powerful machines. And have been for a while. But iPadOS is still quite limiting for a variety of work, despite a ton of progress in the last three years.
If Macs and iPads now run on chips of the same system architecture, that opens the possibility of the iPad being able to take advantage of Mac OS’ capabilities. Mac OS Big Sur can run iPad apps natively. That makes it technically possible – though not straightforward – for Apple to make Mac OS itself run on the iPad, truly creating an entirely new type of portable, flexible, capable computer.
Apple’s always marketed the fact that buyers of its devices benefit from having hardware and software designed in conduction with each other. Well, now it’s been taken all the way down the chip level, resulting in what seems to be an exceptional step-function leap in performance.
The M1 MacBook Air (and M1 MacBook Pro) are now the best laptops regardless of operating system. They’re the new gold standard by which all laptops will be judged, and this is just the start. In a few years, we’ll look back and wonder how we ever tolerated laptops with anything less than this kind of performance.
Other reviews have described how its great to have their laptop get the same sort of performance has high end laptop with the power consumption of their iPhone and iPad.
A sad but inescapable conclusion from the impressive launch of the M1 is just how much Apple squandered the potential of the iPad. The iPad has had amazing performance for a while, so why is the M1 a game changer? Because it’s finally in a machine we can actually do things on.
It’s been an open secret for a while that the iPad could embarrass MacBooks in more and more benchmarks. If the iPad had meaningfully advanced in any sort of product vision, this would be the iPad’s time to shine, not the time to shove an iPad’s guts into an old MacBook case.
11 years after the launch of the iPad, we settled for the Intel transition when we could have had an iPhone-style revolution. The great triumph is “wow, emulation is really fast!” instead of “remember when we used to use clunky laptops”. Meanwhile the iPad… got trackpad support
I understand this. I used a 12.9″ iPad Pro as my main computer for most of 2020. It was great in many ways. The portability is unbeatable. The flexibility of being able to ditch the Smart Folio and turn it into a gorgeous magazine is unlike any laptop. The power is several times what I need from even my work machine. The Apple Pencil just works, turning it into a sketchpad in a trice. The battery lasts all day, even with work breaks to watch TV shows.
However, it’s limiting. And the problem is iPadOS. Not the iPad hardware.
For instance, the iPad has supported multiple windows for a long time, but manipulating them is still far harder than it should be. Revealing, dragging, dropping, resizing, sliding is constant. I have to keep thinking about it. On Mac OS, I can launch and move between windows without a thought. I can drag them around – including using three-finger drag. Why, I can drag them between different virtual desktops. I can see all open windows with Expose with a single button or gesture. I can also use third-party tools like Shift It to snap, move and resize windows. And I can do all of this through muscle memory, leaving me to focus on my work.
This isn’t because I’m just used to Mac OS. I’ve used Mac OS – then OS X – from 2010. I bought my first iPad in 2012 and immediately began using it as a part-time work machine. I bought a Bluetooth keyboard-with-stand for it that works just fine. And in recent years I’ve used iPadOS a lot more than Mac OS.
But the OS continues to bother me in many other ways.
The Files app isn’t nearly as capable as Finder, and I deal with files a lot.
Throughout the OS, unless I use the Magic Keyboard with the Trackpad, which I don’t, I have to tap and hold to reveal action menus, which are an instant right-click or Ctrl-click on MacOS.
I can drag and drop music files, podcasts, audiobooks into my iTunes library. Add lyrics. My own album artwork. None of this is possible on the iOS/iPadOS Music app.
Then there’s constantly having to specify that I’d like something opened in a browser window, not in an app. Or vice versa. It’s exhausting.
iPadOS supports a wide variety of hardware accessories, but you still can’t connect an external webcam to an iPad – the OS just doesn’t recognise it.
A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline. Some of them, like the Roomba vacuum, have physical buttons and could still be used without the app-based remote. Others, like Amazon’s own Ring ‘smart doorbells’, stopped working altogether.
Our previous coverage on smart devices rendered dumber than dumb by outages or outright corporate policy changes:
A few times a year I think about this post that’s now over ten years old:
Under [a 40 hour work week] people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.
I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.
The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
This is not a post that rails against capitalism, or suggests that employment is a corporate conspiracy – a few quick Google searches throw up much in that area for entertainment.
I share this simply so that we’re aware of the bargain we make – money for time. Especially since time is your only finite resource.
We’ve discussed the finiteness of time before in the context of attention being a scarce resource, but there’s an opportunity cost of time for everything in your life. Since you can’t do anything but spend your time, do so wisely.
The move to working from home is a plus for many of us because of the inherent flexibility. Depending on the amount of agency you have at your job, you can take a mid day drive or a nap. Do the crossword. Fix yourself a quick lunch. Take your calls from a park, and continue on a quiet walk once you hang up the phone.
But perhaps most importantly, you can indulge (some) of your interests during a workday that otherwise would have to wait until the evening or the weekend.
By asserting more control over your time, there’ll be less pressure on your to make up for it by spending money. Spending time on something you love is also more rewarding than spending money on it.
I’ve optimised my life for optionality. I do this by being judicious about what obligations to take on and which not. This means I miss out on a lot, but allows me to give the few things that I do take on the degree of attention I’d like to give them. Recently I came across this post:
Be very deliberate about taking on obligations. The obvious example is debt, which I talk about all the time. Most people make debt decisions based on their current situation, and not an evaluation of all reasonable outcomes over the term of the loan. Rather than worrying about the debt before they assume it, they are forced to worry about it over the term of the loan… Obligations extend beyond finances, though. Everything you purchase, especially large purchases, comes with some obligation.
This was another, new way of looking at my principles. Consciously minimising obligations not only means I can focus on things that matter to me but also that I remain mostly carefree. Of course the things that I decide to involve myself with will have their worries, but I know they’re part of the journey.
End note: I’m still not sure why optionality is valuable to me. I’ve been told that it’s a fear of commitment, that I shirk responsibility. As I’ve cultivated a better relationship with myself, I’ve begun to realise that I have always been a curious person – more than average, and about a wide range of things. Because it’s difficult to indulge one’s curiosity without flexibility, it’s natural I’d want my life to have optionality so I could explore or experience things I was interested in at any given time.
This writer tried the usual techniques to kick her phone addiction – turning off notifications, deleting apps, tracking usage, using apps to block usage, going cold turkey – none of it worked. Then she turned to a technique people use to quit smoking – one of the hardest addictions to kick. From the book she read:
… there is a huge disconnect between what we want and what we actually enjoy. They’re different neurological processes. That’s why you can desperately crave, for example, an entire blueberry cheesecake, but when you actually eat it, it’s only OK… He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness. How does it taste? Not, “how did you imagine it would taste when you were craving it,” but how does it actually taste?
When the writer tried it with her phone consumption,
I paused and paid attention to my body. Do I feel better than I did 30 seconds ago, or worse? Inevitably, it was worse. My brain felt frazzled and crunched up. My body felt more tense and defensive. The experience had been a net loss… The more I really paid attention to the reality of how much I “liked” checking my phone, the easier it became to resist the impulse.
It’s fortuitous I should come across this. As I’ve been going through my second 30-day Reddit isolation, I have realised that I do enjoy browsing the site, but I pass from happiness to mindlessness pretty quickly, without realising it. Quitting entirely is a net negative, but so is consumption without self-awareness – I’m working on understanding what that transition point is for me.
While Shawn Blanc schedules every minute of his day so he can make “make sure I do all the things I want to do”, the investor Marc Andreessen, in a famous 2007 blog post, described the polar opposite:
Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule. He’s crazy, you say!
I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t — this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity. By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day. As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.
Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it! Want to spend all day coding? Do it!
You don’t have to follow either extreme – although if you do and find that it’s working, I’d like to know and learn.
The three important principles here are
Be mindful of the fact that distractions will fill up space that you don’t actively schedule.
Since your life is the sum total of how you spend your time, a reset of the boundaries of your time means a reset of the boundaries of your life. This year is an opportunity to change power balances, almost all of which involve you trading your time. Seize it.
My Morning Routine is an website we have referred to once or twice on this site. It describes itself as
… a retired independent online magazine that published a brand new, inspiring morning routine every Wednesday between December 2012 and July 2019.
It’s unfortunate that they aren’t publishing new interviews this year, or even updates to existing one. It’d be interesting to see how people’s routines changed in the new work-from-home world in 2020. What would it say about those whose routines had not changed much?
I view the first few hours of the day as “free,” unclaimed time. If I don’t use it deliberately, I’ll squander it on email or Twitter or the news or some other mindless timesuck that doesn’t make me feel good. Plus, I’ve learned that my focus is better in the morning than it is later in the day; I want to make good use of that time.
This resonated with me, because even last year it revealed an awareness of the need to claim time for yourself, however you then choose to spend it.
We had discussed the question of how in my post about stretching out time:
We can choose to restart an interest of ours. Re-engage with communities and groups we’ve fallen out of touch with. Start a new hobby we’ve always liked but didn’t know if it’d stick. Pursue our physical and mental well-being. Join a local cause. Whatever it looks like for each of us. And do it for no reason than because we can.
I used to think a schedule meant I’d never get to have fun. Because if you’re scheduling your time then you should only put Super Duper Important things on your schedule.
Well, I do only schedule Super Duper Important things. I just have a smarter definition of Super Duper Important.
Did you know I schedule time to watch Netflix? I schedule time for a mid-day nap if I want. Time to read for an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon. Time to take my wife out for dinner once a week. Time to go running at the gym. Time to play trains with my kids. Time to have lunch with a friend. Time to help my wife with dinner. Time to write for as long as I can handle in the morning.
In fact, by scheduling every minute of my day, I help make sure I do all the things I want to do — for work and for play.
In the old world, boundaries used to be imposed naturally, although they were not always welcome. Leaving for work was a sharp boundary. The start of the work day at the office was another. Then there was the lunch break. Your commute back. Your evening at a pub or a restaurant. And so on.
Those boundaries were almost always set by (or with) someone else. Typically the only one you truly set was your run or gym session.
In the absence of those boundaries, your time is up for grabs. This is a threat and an opportunity. If you’re passive about it, it’ll be claimed – all of it – by your boss, by your kids, by social media and online TV, and by a hundred parallel low-attention messaging threads.
I’ve seen this story before: back in 2009, I ran the consumer Internet division of a company. The flagship product was an SMS subscriptions store that promised to fill up the tiny free moments in your life: waiting for your train, taking the elevator, standing in line. It was designed on the premise that you had a finite number of such moments in your life, and therefore needed a finite (though renewing) amount of content to fill them. It was a great idea and took off immediately. Within weeks we had over a quarter of a million people try it out, and a significant number of them jump through hoops for paid content on the store.
But in just the next couple of years, most of the Indian middle class had smartphones, everyone had Facebook – and Twitter – on their phones. They had games from Zynga and from local studios. They discovered YouTube! And just like that, you had an infinite amount of content to fill those little moments.
But the tide shifted even further. Filling crevices of time wasn’t enough, this new content created new gaps for itself. You’d quickly scroll through Facebook at traffic stops until the car behind honked at you. You’d interrupt meals to post photos on Instagram. You’d check Twitter during conversations. You’d play games while putting off chores.
By the middle of the 2010s, we were already living fragmented lives. At the end of the decade, the pandemic has knocked down natural boundaries of time too. Everything is fluid.
