Nice Things that Apple doesn’t let us have (on an iPad)

This is a follow-up to a couple of previous ramblings (last week and before) about the iPad and its limitations, and is a list of things that I would love to have on an iPad, but that Apple still doesn’t really want us to in 2024, fourteen years since the iPad’s debut.

Call it product vision, use cases, or just plain old monopolistic behaviour, but I’m going to list them here in the hope that someone at Apple reads this and realises that they could make a lot of people happy by just flipping a few switches.

Oh, and having more enlightened App Review guidelines. But I digress.

This is the number one, all-day, every day annoyance that I have. We’ve had ssh clients since the very beginning of iOS, but we never got a first-party one, let alone one with enough command-line capabilities to do simple scripting.

And yes, I know that is a can of worms, and that nobody would be completely happy with whatever Apple decided to include inside such a thing. But it’s completely feasible now.

Like I mentioned two weeks ago, a-Shell goes a long way towards fixing that, and proves that you can do an incredible amount of stuff with a simple sandboxed environment (that is even extensible via WASM binaries).

Yes, game emulators are a thing. Fine. I honestly don’t care–what I do care about is having something like iSH (which, sadly, seems to have gone into maintenance mode) to have a better terminal sandbox that could at least run emulated binaries at a usable pace.

And I’m using iSH as an example because I’ve been using it for far longer than UTM SE, which, as I wrote only last week, is borderline unusable but tantalisingly close to what I would love to have as a mobile development environment.

Other people (besides emulators) have more mainstream uses for JITs (like browser engines), and I really think this could be solved with a new application entitlement (and more knowledgeable people in App Review, but I want to avoid going down that rabbit hole–I’ll just say that I recently helped a pretty big company navigate that, and my blood pressure didn’t improve).

But even if UTM SE could employ an actual JIT, there are literally much better ways to give developers usable tools.

This is the Brontosaurus in the room, and the thing that frustrates me the most about the iPad from a purely technical perspective.

It’s a fact that Apple decided to remove Hypervisor.framework from XNU in iOS 16.4. This was done in October 2023, just as M-series chips finished taking over the top tiers of the iPad portfolio.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but removing support for something that most of your “Pro” tablet hardware portfolio could leverage to run third-party software with tremendous benefits (and perhaps taking Apple out of the equation) seems… biased?

Maybe this is the sort of thing the European Union should be looking into next. Just saying. Because, you see, removing the ability to run third-party software via virtualization when your hardware supports it should also be seen as an anti-competitive move.

Now, this is not an immediately appealing prospect for just about anybody (usability-wise), but just imagine if I could take my Windows on ARM image, copy it over to an iPad and use it to work all day without downloading any more apps from the App Store.

I know it’s technically feasible. People have made it work on jailbroken iPads–and not just “work”, but work properly.

And, after years of running Windows on ARM on several machines (including the MacBook I’m revising this on) I have a pretty good idea of how well it would work for me.

Sure, Parallels did a lot of polishing on the Mac, but UTM works nearly as well and very few, if any of Parallels’ desktop integration features would be needed or make sense on an iPad.

And I don’t even want a desktop environment, as long as I get a console and some sort of filesystem integration–the base wrappers that we’ve had to run Docker and Linux VMs on the Mac would be more than enough.

But that reminds me…

Files is a half-hearted, half-baked attempt at giving people just enough Finder features that they forget about the complete mess that lies underneath, and as someone who constantly deals with iOS file providers as I use a-Shell to access Working Copy repositories or Blink’s excellent vim to power-edit some iA Writer long-form, I would love to see it metaphorically taken out behind Apple Park and shot (politely), or at least given a very stern talking to.

Oh, wait, Apple Park is a circle. Nevermind.

I would love to ditch my iPhone, get a cellular Apple Watch instead and just pair it to my iPad mini–which, by the way, cannot do voice calls, but I’m going to let that one slide because this list is already getting too long and I understand about handset certification.

We finally got a Health app on the iPad that is actually good enough to use (in general), so the only real reason for tethering the watch to an iPhone is… making sure people buy one even if their lifestyle, professional constraints (or even handicaps) make it pointless to have it.

This is a hobbyist musician’s gripe (and, of course, also a hipster podcaster’s concern, so I suspect it might get more visibility that way), but the iPad is completely hopeless at handling external audio devices.

MIDI, being a simple signalling protocol, works fine, but multi-channel audio, despite (finally) getting a modicum of support in Logic Pro for iPad, is still a mess and isn’t properly supported anywhere in the iPad’s standard UI.

So routing inbound and outbound audio along different device paths falls somewhere between a crapshoot and no option at all.

And finally, being unable to control a Mac’s mouse with a local trackpad or mouse when you use Continuity to extend (or mirror) your Mac’s display to an iPad makes me absolutely certain that Apple does not want people to run macOS on an iPad, either vicariously or by proxy.

$DIVINITY forbid that I should be able to use my iPad to use my desktop Mac from my couch. That would be too much, and certainly a missed opportunity for me to by a MacBook Air.

Oh, and I just realized that I was only able to use a mouse with my iPad in 2016 because there were workarounds. We only got official mouse and trackpad support four years later anyway…

This was the first feedback I got within minutes of this going online, and I have to agree. I’ve been so used to the way Apple thinks of iPads as single-user devices that it was a blind spot in my criticism.

Multi-user support is already supported in educational settings, and I distinctly remember that the Nexus 7 (we actually owned two that I bought off eBay for my kids) supported that out of the box six years ago. Android tablets seem to have quietly dropped or hidden the feature as well (haven’t tried any recent ones), but even a 128GB iPad has enough storage for two people to use it comfortably for e-mail, browsing and media consumption.

Instead of any of these, last WWDC we got ChatGPT and… a calculator.

Thank you, Apple.

In the meantime, I will keep using my linux sidecar and will be looking closely at things like the Minisforum V3 (which by all accounts can run Linux perfectly, “ticks all the boxes” in Bad Gear parlance and is already on my wishlist).