Secure Boot on other platforms is all-or-nothing, but Apple recognizes that Mac users should have the freedom to choose exactly how much to peel back the security, and should never be forced to give up more than they need to. So for that reason, it's possible to have a trusted macOS installation next to a less-trusted installation of something else, such as Asahi Linux.
Contrast this with others like Microsoft who believe all platforms should be either fully trusted or fully unsupported. Google takes this approach with Android as well. You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can trivially root a Pixel factory image. And if you're talking about how they will punish you for that by removing certain features: Apple does that too (but to a lesser extent).
https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/RecordingIndicatorUtili...
On many Android devices, unlocking the boot loader at any point will also permanently erase the DRM keys, so you will never again be able to watch high resolution Netflix (or any other app that uses Widevine), even if you relocked the bootloader and your OS passed verified boot checks.
On a Mac, you don't need to "unlock the bootloader" to do anything. Trust is managed per operating system. As long as you initially can properly authenticate through physical presence, you totally can install additional operating systems with lower levels of trust and their existence won't prevent you from booting back into the trusted install and using protected experiences such as Apple Pay. Sure, if you want to modify that trusted install, and you downgrade its security level to implement this, then those trusted experiences will stop working (such as Apple Pay, iPhone Mirroring, and 4K Netflix in Safari, for instance), but you won't be rejected by entire swathes of the third-party app ecosystem and you also won't lose the ability to install a huge fraction of Mac apps (although iOS and iPadOS apps will stop working). You also won't necessarily be prevented from turning the security back up once you're done messing around, and gaining every one of those experiences back.
So sure, you can totally boil it down to "Apple still punishes you, only a bit less", but not only do they not even punish your entire machine the way Microsoft and Google do, but they even only punish the individual operating system that has the reduced security, don't punish it as much as Microsoft and Google do, and don't permanently lock things out just because the security has ever been reduced in the past.
Do keep in mind though, the comparison to Android is a bit unfair anyway because Apple's equivalent to the Android ecosystem is (roughly; excluding TV and whatever for brevity) iPhone and iPad, and those devices have never and almost certainly will never offer anything close to a bootloader unlock. I just had used it as an example of the all or nothing approach. Obviously Apple's iDevice ecosystem doesn't allow user tampering at all, not even with trusted experiences excluded.
Fun fact though: The Password category in System Settings will disappear over iPhone Mirroring to prevent the password from being changed remotely. Pretty cool.
Its reasonable to install a different OS on Android, even if some features don't work. I've done this, my friends and family have done this, I've seen it IRL.
I've never seen anyone do this on iPhone in my entire life.
But I flipped and I'm a Google hater. Expensive phones and no aux port. At least I can get cheap androids still.
I used to tweak/mod Android and most recently preferred customizing the OEM install over forks. I stopped doing that when TWRP ran something as OpenRecoveryScript and immediately wiped the phone without giving me any opportunity to cancel. My most recent Android phone I never bothered to root. I may never mod Android again.
Alternatively, read about iBoot. Haha, just kidding! There is no documentation for iBoot, unlike there is for uBoot and Clover and OpenCore and SimpleBoot and Freeloader and systemd-boot. You're just expected to... know. Yunno?
I wouldn't want a numpad. A track point would be ape.
I struggle with keyboard recommendations b/c I'm not fully satisfied lol.
Several small things combined make it really different to the experience that I have with a desktop OS. But it is nice as side device
It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested wasteland. There are so many ads in YouTube and streaming music. I had no idea.
It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need to figure out a better solution for that.
So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming media. Who knew?
I just got a Macbook and haven't touched my iPad Pro since, I would think I could make a change faster on a Macbook then iPad if they were both in my bag. Although I do miss the cellular data that the iPad has.
The majority of the world are using their phones as a computing device.
And as someone with a MacBook and iPad the later is significantly more ergonomic.
Every single touch screen laptop I’ve seen has huge reflection issues, practically being mirrors. My assumption is that in order for the screen to not get nasty with fingerprints in no time, touchscreen laptops need oleophobic coating, but to add that they have to use no antiglare coating.
Personally I wouldn’t touch my screen often enough to justify having to contend with glare.
No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want. Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode - only runs on MacOS.
The changes to window management are great - but iPad and iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
They could have gone the direction of just running MacOS on it, but clearly they don't want to. I have a feeling that the only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it more in their walled garden.
I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get, ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary branch.
I think Microsoft was a little too eager to fuse their tablet and desktop interface. It has produced some interesting innovations in the process but it's been nowhere near as polished as ipadOS/macOS.
On the other hand, I have come to love having a reading/writing/sketching device that is completely separate from my work device. I can't get roped into work and emails and notifications when I just want to read in bed. My iPad Mini is a truly distraction-free device.
I also think it would be hard to have a user experience that works great both for mobile work and sitting-at-a-desk work. I returned my Microsoft Surface because of a save dialog in a sketching app. I did not want to do file management because drawing does not feel like a computing task. On the other hand, I do want to deal with files when I'm using 3 different apps to work on a website's files.
If you are a developer or a creative however, then a Mac is still very useful.
Auth should be Apple Business Manager; image serving should be passive directories / cloud buckets.
Haven’t tried it though, still using JamF.
In education or corporate settings, where account management is centralized, you want each person who uses an iPad to access their own files, email, etc.
Parents and spouses would appreciate if they could take the multiple user experience for tvOS and make it an option for iPadOS.
For the same price, you still get a better mac.
I dgaf what the UI looks like. It’s fine.
1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled from an iPhone app, and
2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.
Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1. Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those things not immediately chew through your battery.
[0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software lockout.