iPad The iPad is not a computer replacement

[Unregistered 4U]

The standard music production tool is still Pro Tools,

So, in your opinion, if a person isn’t using a DAW, they’re not producing music? Just wanting to be VERY clear.

BTW, have you ever been nominated for a Grammy and would you consider someone that HAS been nominated for a Grammy a pro?

 

[Abazigal]

The standard music production tool is still Pro Tools, which does NOT run on an iPad. Neither does any leading DAW. All require a PC/laptop. Sorry, I know of -0- pros using GarageBand.

It's true that no client really cares how you make their music... until you've been commissioned to write a virtual orchestral score and you deliver a turd that was made on an iPad cuz that's what your teacher and school friends use... "But, but it's awesome for loops 'n stuff!" Yeah, you'll be doing just "fine" until you're stretched beyond your iPad's capabilities, which will happen very quickly in the real world.

No, the schools are doing students a huge disservice if they purport to prepare them for the real world with inadequate tools. And they're cocky in their inadequacy. They're about to get their ass kicked by reality, and doubly so with the attitude.

I can also argue that the the medium isn’t as important as the skills when you consider that not everyone learning coding or music making or video editing is going to work in those respective industries when they enter the workforce.

Take video editing for example. There are a lot of steps involved. From planning your script to preparing a storyboard to illustrate the flow to handling the camera. Editing the final product is but a final piece of the puzzle, and so long as it gets the job done, does it matter if the video was done using movie maker, iMovie on an iPad, or Final Cut Pro on the Mac?

Same with coding. I could rather focus more on the problem solving mindset and how that could be better applied in real life, then rush into dragging blocks around in scratch right from the get go.

Likewise, for writing, does it matter if the composition was drafted in word or google docs, so long as it is a good piece of work? If anything, google docs makes managing it much easier, from the ease of sharing to better management options via google classroom.

Same for music creation. Tools are going to change, especially when you are dealing with younger children who won’t enter the workforce for another 5-10 years. If you ask me, nurturing the love for music and the skills being music making is more important than mastering Logic Pro or whatever the flavour of the month is. It’s just a tool, and one of many to boot.

There will always be time to learn a particular piece of software. I wouldn’t put too much weight into having to master any one particular app by a certain time.

 

[mi7chy]

For me, it's rather cumbersome to carry around my MBP, iPad and iPhone. I doubt it would happen as Apple would prefer you to buy all these devices separately.

True. Unlikely to happen proven by the fact that they've fragmented iOS and iPadOS so you have to buy two devices. There's no technical reason why iPadOS can't run on iPhones.

 

[I7guy]

True. Unlikely to happen proven by the fact that they've fragmented iOS and iPadOS so you have to buy two devices. There's no technical reason why iPadOS can't run on iPhones.

True, but slide over to pick on one example, on iphones might not be the best user experience...although one could argue let the user decide. Typically that is not the apple way.

 

[nickdalzell1]

True, but slide over to pick on one example, on iphones might not be the best user experience...although one could argue let the user decide. Typically that is not the apple way.

Then what made Apple decide to stop offering iPhones with a 3.5" display or 4" display? I always thought the 'market' (users) decided there?

 

[I7guy]

Then what made Apple decide to stop offering iPhones with a 3.5" display or 4" display? I always thought the 'market' (users) decided there?

I can't say for sure, but there is a difference between a good user experience as I was suggesting and making a buck. At some point, I'm guessing Apple decided in the aggregate it wasn't were they wanted to go with phones. Whether or not they changed their minds and if that was the original reason, we will find out.

 

[throAU]

I can also argue that the the medium isn’t as important as the skills when you consider that not everyone learning coding or music making or video editing is going to work in those respective industries when they enter the workforce.

I still occasionally listen to chip-tunes from 1980s computers. So yeah... software doesn't replace talent.

 

[Jethro!]

So, in your opinion, if a person isn’t using a DAW, they’re not producing music? Just wanting to be VERY clear.

BTW, have you ever been nominated for a Grammy and would you consider someone that HAS been nominated for a Grammy a pro?

If they're not using a DAW, they're likely not a professional. They're probably a hobbyist whose real job is Starbucks. Just wanting to be VERY clear.

BTW, Grammy nominations are mostly political matters, and those nominated are not necessarily producers. The vast majority of music you hear is not by Grammy nominated anybody, but it's valiant effort conflating artist with producer.
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I can also argue that the the medium isn’t as important as the skills when you consider that not everyone learning coding or music making or video editing is going to work in those respective industries when they enter the workforce.

There you have it. If your primary technology for making music is an iPad, you're generally a hobbyist. Nothing wrong with that, but don't go telling people who are making a living at it "how it really is," cuz that's annoying.

Same for music creation. Tools are going to change, especially when you are dealing with younger children who won’t enter the workforce for another 5-10 years. If you ask me, nurturing the love for music and the skills being music making is more important than mastering Logic Pro or whatever the flavour of the month is. It’s just a tool, and one of many to boot.

There will always be time to learn a particular piece of software. I wouldn’t put too much weight into having to master any one particular app by a certain time.

You were doing well until here. Logic Pro is hardly the flavor of the month. No that that will not change, but to dismiss it because "we do something different in school" is bad planning. Maybe sometime tablet computers will be powerful enough to emulate a virtual symphony convincingly. But we're not there yet.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

If they're not using a DAW, they're likely not a professional. They're probably a hobbyist whose real job is Starbucks. Just wanting to be VERY clear.

Hedging your bets there, I see 🙂 While I don’t agree that you have to use a DAW to be a professional, since iOS has several DAW’s available, you’re blanket including them in your assessment, and I don’t have a problem with that. UNLESS a professional has to be using a DAW that’s on YOUR preferred platform.

BTW, Grammy nominations are mostly political matters, and those nominated are not necessarily producers. The vast majority of music you hear is not by Grammy nominated anybody, but it's valiant effort conflating artist with producer.

Then, I’m assuming you haven’t won a Grammy and, as a result, you see no value in the recognition. 😉

I get the impression that if you were older, you’d be one of the ones saying “You can’t be a PROFESSIONAL music producer using a LAPTOP. You need to be in a music studio to make that happen!” And, there’s no amount of examples that you could show of music being produced outside of a studio that would convince them because they’d just say, “Well that’s not PROFESSIONAL music, we all know professional music requires a symphony and you’ll never get that on a Laptop!”

So, I concede the point that you cannot produce music on an iPad. Others can, however, and do so. Professionally.

 

[subjonas]

For me, it's rather cumbersome to carry around my MBP, iPad and iPhone. I doubt it would happen as Apple would prefer you to buy all these devices separately.

Do you mean you want one device that combines all three of those? How would that be done well? I don’t see many people wanting to carry a bag with a big tablet in it at ALL times and pulling it out every time they want to text.

As for combining the Macbook and iPad, there’s probably a much more reasonable market for that (how reasonable, I don’t know). Although, of the people who say they have to carry both a Macbook and iPad (not necessarily you), I think many of them really just mean want to. Because between an ultra light Macbook and iPhone (which most would carry anyway), the only thing I can think of that those devices really can’t do passably, or at all, is the Apple Pencil. Unless all of those people are Apple Pencil users, which is possible.

True. Unlikely to happen proven by the fact that they've fragmented iOS and iPadOS so you have to buy two devices. There's no technical reason why iPadOS can't run on iPhones.

What do you mean? iPadOS is just iOS with additional features to make use of a bigger screen (just like iOS for iPad was before), so the iPhone’s small screen size is a technical reason that those features can’t be added to the iPhone.

 

[Dave245]

The iPad Pro is getting closer than ever, with iPadOS and apps like FULL Photoshop the gap is getting closer. I don't think that desktop computers will EVER go away, but i do think they will get more and more rare with time. Steve Jobs said the same thing years ago, he compared computers with trucks, they still exist and some people still use them but the majority drive cars.

I think the iPad Pro is a great piece of technology, i just want Apple to stop releasing buggy software (like IOS13). iPadOS is a step in the right direction and the hardware on the iPad Pro is insane, it's capable of beating some PC's.

 

[Jethro!]

Hedging your bets there, I see 🙂 While I don’t agree that you have to use a DAW to be a professional, since iOS has several DAW’s available, you’re blanket including them in your assessment, and I don’t have a problem with that. UNLESS a professional has to be using a DAW that’s on YOUR preferred platform.

You're expanding the definition of DAW beyond its professional understanding. It's like calling yourself a professional race driver because you deliver pizzas fast. I know of nobody making a living from music with an iOS "DAW" -- because they're severely limited and not in the same category as pro DAW's.

Then, I’m assuming you haven’t won a Grammy and, as a result, you see no value in the recognition. 😉

Michelle Obama just won a Grammy for recording herself reading a book written by a ghostwriter. That's how meaningless these awards have become, and why I pay no attention to them.

I get the impression that if you were older, you’d be one of the ones saying “You can’t be a PROFESSIONAL music producer using a LAPTOP. You need to be in a music studio to make that happen!” And, there’s no amount of examples that you could show of music being produced outside of a studio that would convince them because they’d just say, “Well that’s not PROFESSIONAL music, we all know professional music requires a symphony and you’ll never get that on a Laptop!”

So, I concede the point that you cannot produce music on an iPad. Others can, however, and do so. Professionally.

You'd be wrong. I learned recording on tape, but migrated to computer where I still am. I know both worlds and what works on each and why.

And sorry, but no. There's not a pro music producer, save those doing only their own "artist" stuff exclusively, doing it only on iOS. Show me one and I'll give them a music assignment that will bust their production chops in 2 seconds.

 

[iPadified]

I bet there is no technical hinder to port any full app to iPad OS. The obstacle is if the market will adapt it and if the AYYX processor is powerful enough. Considering the OTOY made a ray tracer for Mac and iPad (!) things are changing. I had to read it twice that they put ray tracing of 3D models on iPad. I expected that was the last application that would reach iPad due to the weak power of AYYX chips compared to GPUs.

 

[Ubuntu]

It's difficult because on one hand I think iPadOS is greatly lacking in vision and intuitive UX. It's just a mess, IMO. It doesn't know where it wants to sit between the Mac and the iPhone and this makes it difficult to use as a pro user.

However, on the other hand, it's a lot of fun and it reminds me of when I used my Mac back in 2003 at school. It was quite a nightmare getting it to work with the 100% Windows system but I enjoyed using the Mac so much and I imagine that's what the people who enjoy using the iPad feel.

For me I found an area in my life where I can use the iPad more than before but I look forward to the day the product team figures out where they want iPadOS to go.

 

[egrimo]

To be honest, If they support Xcode, I would sell my Macbook Pro. I have 6th Gen 32GB(yeah no 128...) but the only thing lack for me is Xcode. I am reading my books there, managing my files in Files app, manage all my mailing, instant messaging(using telegram), YouTube and Safari on iPad pretty easily with Magic Keyboard(I also had Apple pencil but sold because of less usage). I know that most of the Safari reloads are related to the ram and cpu so I could see myself on pure iPad Pro. I just need my iOS Development there and everything else would be okey for me.

 

[throAU]

To be honest, If they support Xcode, I would sell my Macbook Pro. I have 6th Gen 32GB(yeah no 128...) but the only thing lack for me is Xcode. I am reading my books there, managing my files in Files app, manage all my mailing, instant messaging(using telegram), YouTube and Safari on iPad pretty easily with Magic Keyboard(I also had Apple pencil but sold because of less usage). I know that most of the Safari reloads are related to the ram and cpu so I could see myself on pure iPad Pro. I just need my iOS Development there and everything else would be okey for me.

I'd say its only a matter of time before Apple offer a cloud-hosted variant of Xcode. Amazon and Microsoft already offer cloud hosted development tools for their cloud platforms.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I'd say its only a matter of time before Apple offer a cloud-hosted variant of Xcode. Amazon and Microsoft already offer cloud hosted development tools for their cloud platforms.

Interesting point, I hadn’t considered that.

 

[throAU]

Interesting point, I hadn’t considered that.

I very much suspect it is coming. All the apps for the app store end up in the cloud anyway, why not offer a service to do the compiling in the cloud for you as well? If apple have the source up there, they can recompile for new platforms (with optimisations specific to their new hardware!) as they are released as well.

As i understand it there already was talk of (not sure if it actually happened) the App store recompiling some form of intermediate byte-code for new platforms for apps that people uploaded. Would be even easier if your source was there - and as a side benefit mean that there's no need to have iPads and other end user devices burn cycles doing it.

 

[spiderman0616]

Crap—thanks for this post—I had no idea. I guess I better delete all these vector art files and photo editing projects I’ve been creating with my Apple Pencil for the last few years! They’re of no use to me now that this post made it clear to me that they weren’t made on a real computer!

 

[ipponrg]

I very much suspect it is coming. All the apps for the app store end up in the cloud anyway, why not offer a service to do the compiling in the cloud for you as well? If apple have the source up there, they can recompile for new platforms (with optimisations specific to their new hardware!) as they are released as well.

As i understand it there already was talk of (not sure if it actually happened) the App store recompiling some form of intermediate byte-code for new platforms for apps that people uploaded. Would be even easier if your source was there - and as a side benefit mean that there's no need to have iPads and other end user devices burn cycles doing it.

I have tried some of these cloud IDEs, and they really aren't quite there yet. The latency is what really hurts as well as a not so great offline experience. I also would be hesitant to host your entire uncompiled code base in the Apple cloud.

 

[Ubuntu]

To be honest, If they support Xcode, I would sell my Macbook Pro. I have 6th Gen 32GB(yeah no 128...) but the only thing lack for me is Xcode. I am reading my books there, managing my files in Files app, manage all my mailing, instant messaging(using telegram), YouTube and Safari on iPad pretty easily with Magic Keyboard(I also had Apple pencil but sold because of less usage). I know that most of the Safari reloads are related to the ram and cpu so I could see myself on pure iPad Pro. I just need my iOS Development there and everything else would be okey for me.

Same for me, but my concern is that the general workflow would still be a pain. If you think about how many times you switch from Xcode to other tools like source control (especially when there's no Terminal app) it wouldn't be ideal imo. Still, I'd absolutely love to be able to take my iPad Pro out only to do some coding.

 

[egrimo]

Same for me, but my concern is that the general workflow would still be a pain. If you think about how many times you switch from Xcode to other tools like source control (especially when there's no Terminal app) it wouldn't be ideal imo. Still, I'd absolutely love to be able to take my iPad Pro out only to do some coding.

For source control-because I work with 2 people team- I was always fine with Github integration on Xcode.

Cloud is actually a reasonable idea and as far as I know, people started to create mac servers so you can reach a mac device from cloud to do something, this may open Xcode ability on iPad too, but could be costly...

 

[throAU]

I have tried some of these cloud IDEs, and they really aren't quite there yet. The latency is what really hurts as well as a not so great offline experience. I also would be hesitant to host your entire uncompiled code base in the Apple cloud.

Sure, but it will happen. Code is just another document type and enterprises are already storing all their data in 365, etc. So it WILL happen, and it might be a bit rough starting out. But it will be sorted. Just a matter of when.

You can hide the latency somewhat via caching, etc. - uploading source in the background and using cloud compiler you wouldn't notice so much. I mean how fast can you type? I don't think you'll outrun a 56k modem, never mind broadband 😀

And then your iPad is basically just a dumb terminal. No reason it can't be a code editor.

 

[ipponrg]

Sure, but it will happen. Code is just another document type and enterprises are already storing all their data in 365, etc. So it WILL happen, and it might be a bit rough starting out. But it will be sorted. Just a matter of when.

You can hide the latency somewhat via caching, etc. - uploading source in the background and using cloud compiler you wouldn't notice so much. I mean how fast can you type? I don't think you'll outrun a 56k modem, never mind broadband 😀

And then your iPad is basically just a dumb terminal. No reason it can't be a code editor.

I can actually type up ~140 wpm but that's beside the point.

What kind of code do you write? Just scripts? I definitely don't store my code in 365 😀. They have been at this for the last few years. If you have AWS creds, check out Cloud9.

The issue is you're doing most of this in the browser that is probably connected via websockets to the Cloud. Caching might be done in the browser. We already know how much memory/processes bad Chromium builds eat up. I'm pretty sure you don't want that to be a source of losing all your code when something fails. Maybe there are swap file solutions but for most complex apps, I don't think this solution is there in the next few years.

 

[throAU]

I can actually type up ~140 wpm but that's beside the point.

Yeah, it is because a 28.8k modem will outrun that. 14.4k yes. Also 9600. If you can type more than 4 characters per second (which at 140 WPM yeah probably), you’ll just outrun 2400 baud.

The issue is you're doing most of this in the browser that is probably connected via websockets to the Cloud. Caching might be done in the browser. We already know how much memory/processes bad Chromium builds eat up. I'm pretty sure you don't want that to be a source of losing all your code when something fails. Maybe there are swap file solutions but for most complex apps, I don't think this solution is there in the next few years.

Who said browser? You know the iDevices have cloud connected native applications, yes?

Edit the code in local, native editor. It uploads/syncs it to cloud server in the background (just like the background compilation works already on the mac - and just like MS 365 or iCloud applications already do today and have done for years), and does background compiling on the cloud server.

All the pieces are already there to do it. iCloud and 365 applications already do most of this. The only missing piece is the cloud compilation. The cloud editing/saving model is already there and in use by billions of people already.