I've argued for a while that they need to do, as part of their services push, is a "cloud compile" service. I know they want to sell hordes of Mac Pro boxes to devs, but what a cool way to open up development (like, on the iPad). Write code, save in iCloud Drive, tap "compile my app". It handles all the signing and so on, and then boom, it's on my home screen. You limit distribution to your devices at first - maybe you still need a Mac to sign it for everywhere distribution, but you let any device you own run it. You can share source via the usual open-source methods, since everyone just needs to get the code onto their iCloud Drive to build it.
There's a huge number of moving parts to get an MVP and we mustn't cannibalize desktop and laptop sales, but it seems like an obvious part of their services push AND "make the iPad a 'real' computer".
I’m not even sure the Mac Pro boxes are for devs. They seem pretty laser focused on Hollywood and similar for whatever reason, to my estimation anyway.
Well, they're first workstations for video/3D/ad/music/etc production houses (the ones who would need the accessory 6K screen), and secondary for Apple ecosystem devs.
Meh, I wish they said if you have one registered mac device already and are part of the apple developer program, you can legally run MacOS vmware on a non mac device with 4 VMs and just be done with it.
They will still get mac sales because corps want to be legal and not use hackintosh and all their developers are getting macbooks anyway. The vmware compute licences would be used for CI and for beefy compile machines to run xcode that will run on whatever thread ripper equivalent.
The cheap small shops would do hackintosh vmware either way, so they won't be missing much in sales in practice. MacStadium and huge iOS / macOS development must only represent what, 50k-100k unit sales? Which is a drop in the bucket for apple either way, but a very important partner in making good stuff for apple.
A "Pro" device shouldn't have so many limitations built in, just give me a regular UNIX-y environment with a (pro-)user-friendly UI on top (meaning: just put macOS on the iPad Pro and attach a proper keyboard... wait a minute...).
How do you imagine the coding UI would work? It strikes me that coding is extremely keyboard dependent, and also a case where screen space is important, so it's like a worst case scenario for a soft keyboard.
Take a look at the Continuous IDE for iOS and iPadOS. It's C# based, but it will compile and run any code supported by the platform, including UIKit, SpriteKit/SceneKit and Xamarin.Forms. The compiler is the Roslyn compiler. The only limitation is that it uses an interpreter to run the code.
Do you every time you check a file in? I certainly don’t. I make a bunch of edits / changes / new code, compiling as I go, checking the code in when I am at various useful sequence points, and only push upstream when appropriate.
This highly depends on where the code is executed, and how debugging is implemented. A medium-sized project (say, 300K lines of code) would require to transfer hundreds of megabytes of data to be able to debug things.
There's a huge number of moving parts to get an MVP and we mustn't cannibalize desktop and laptop sales, but it seems like an obvious part of their services push AND "make the iPad a 'real' computer".