Tag Archives: UTM SE

The iPad Pro is such a neutered device

I have had a long & complicated history with various devices in the iPad lineup over the years. Don’t get me wrong, the iPad is a fantastic device for what its made for. Is just not made for some of the things I want to do; which is making it work like a real computer.

What it is good at

After using iPads (Mostly Pro versions) over many years, I have realised that the iPad is good at:

  1. Media consumption – Great for watching movies, TV shows on the go, browsing through photos. The mini-LED Display is great with high contrasts and peak brightness.
  2. Reading magazines and newspapers.
  3. Sketching stuff & taking hand-written notes.
  4. Looking at websites.
  5. Photo and Video editi…

I love the sexy slab design and the folio cover. But spending this amount of money just for the above items doesn’t make sense (at least, to me).

What it is bad at

Again, not blaming Apple. The iPad can do exactly what Apple claims it can do. The fault is squarely on me for expecting the iPad Pro to act and behave like a real computer.

Why did I even have these expectations? Because I assumed that surely a device this expensive would be able to do some of the things that a computer can do. Why else would you put an M4 processor or 16GB RAM in a tablet? Also, after Apple bought Stage Manager to the iPad, I hoped they would bring more features. Obviously, I hoped wrong.

Over the last year, my frustrations kept mounting till I felt compelled to write this post.

Virtual Machines

You can read about my tryst with UTM SE here. The powerful CPU/GPU are so severely crippled by iPadOS that a 27 year old OS runs slower on it, than it used to, back then.

Again, this is not what the iPad is built for, so my fault for expecting this.

Mouse/Keyboard

The iPadOS technically does support mice, but the experience is severely crippled (stupid round shaped pointer, jumping from element to element, no pointer acceleration).

My frustrations with the external keyboard experience on the iPad is unrivalled. It would keep capitalising the first alphabet of each new sentence, even for things like URLs etc. You can disable this globally, but then it also gets disabled for the on-screen keyboard.

Correction – I found a way to disable this, just for the hardware keyboard.

Disable Auto Correct for Hardware Keyboard on iPad
Disable Auto Correct for Hardware Keyboard on iPad

Web Browsing

Every time I try to scroll up to the top of my WordPress post compose page too fast, it refreshes the whole page and I lose gobs of data. Strangely, this problem didn’t exist on the Magic Mouse 2.

Many websites are not optimised for Safari on iPad. Eg. WordPress hyperlink popup doesn’t show the save option (Is hidden below the window).

Wordpress hyperlink popup on Safari, iPad
WordPress hyperlink popup on Safari, iPad

Wordress also frequently gets stuck on saving a post with the page unresponsive and the button greyed out.

Wordpress stuck autosaving, Safari iPadOS
WordPress stuck autosaving, Safari iPadOS

Basic Text Editing

I discovered this one when recently trying to make a small change to an HTML file. To open an html file from files, you need a 3rd party option and there are no good free ones. They either all require you to pay or have loads of intrusive ads.

Don’t blame developers for this, they have to go via Apple’s App Store and hence pay fees to Apple, why should they release apps, even basic for free?

Eventually I settled on the excellent Runestone Text Editor.

GitHub

I know, I know, the iPad is not meant for application development. But all I wanted to do was upload my website landing page, some 200 files in different folders.

I was horrified when I found out that there’s no support for uploading multiple files and folders to GitHub from the files app. GitHub’s iPad app is just a glorified mobile app, not the Desktop equivalent.

Working Copy to the rescue, which is paid, but very powerful.

Proper File Management

Recently I transferred 400GB of data from mega to my NAS. Although the Files app does have basic file management, I couldn’t find a way to get all 400GB to my iPad to further transfer to the NAS.

Mega (Like most other file sharing apps) does support the connector in the files app, but the experience is buggy at best and times out after a few GBs and needs to be started from scratch.

Eventually, I had to use my daughter’s notebook to get it done. She laughed at me.

Proper Photos management

The only reason I got the 512GB variant of the iPad was because I wanted to store all my photos offline and in case Apple terminated my account for some reason, I would be able to export everything out. However, the only way to export all the photos from the Photos app is to start selecting photos and hold your finger at the bottom of the app for more than an hour for it to select all the photos.

The fun part? Even when you manage to do that, export fails and it knocks you out of the selection mode to start again from scratch.

What, then?

Switch to a Macbook? Even that doesn’t tick all the boxes.

TaskiPad ProMacBook
Reading Books/MagazinesExcellentPoor
Watching VideosExcellentAverage
Virtual MachinesPoorExcellent
Mouse/KeyboardPoorExcellent
Web BrowsingAverageExcellent
Text EditingAverageExcellent
File ManagementAverageExcellent
Photo ManagementAverageExcellent
DisplayExcellentAverage

I really don’t want to also buy a Macbook to complement or replace the $2000 iPad Pro.

My opinion is that if not for the Pro Motion (120Hz) Display, the iPad Air is perfectly sufficient for most purposes and there’s very little market for the Pro model.

I can just hope that iPadOS matures enough to do some basic computing tasks in the future and makes use of the powerful hardware.

Retro Computing: Windows 98 SE/Setup

Continuing my adventures with UTM SE, the first thing I did was run Windows 98 SE Setup.

Windows 98 SE was the first OS on my first computer, so this was a huge trip in nostalgia. I made an ISO from my old and scratched Windows 98 SE disk, mounted it in UTM SE and let it boot.

Windows 98 SE, Start Computer with CD ROM Support
Windows 98 SE, Start Computer with CD ROM Support

The boot screen sent me into throes of nostalgia. So did the next steps.

I could feel myself going crazy when the setup GUI came up.

Windows 98 Setup, To begin Setup, click Continue
Windows 98 Setup, To begin Setup, click Continue

I got stuck for a while here because I couldn’t make my keyboard and mouse work. Eventually, I figured out that I needed to disable support for USB peripherals and I could continue.

After the first reboot, I was presented with the famous “first time” Windows 98 boot splash screen. Another huge dose of nostalgia.

Microsoft Windows 98, Getting Ready to run Windows for the first time
Microsoft Windows 98, Getting Ready to run Windows for the first time

The second phase of the setup is (was) my favourite. I especially like the part with the beating drums animation.

Eventually, after an hour and 50% of my iPad’s battery, setup was complete and it booted into Windows.

More to come, soon.

Retro Computing: UTM SE

Last week, something unthinkable happened. Apple finally allowed emulation of any and all OS on iOS and iPadOS. The intended purpose is to emulate retro Windows based games, which matches their recent trend of approval of gaming-system emulation apps. However, for me, it restarts a long-time hobby of running retro OSes purely for nostalgia and hobby purposes. This was not possible before because I don’t have a real computer, just an iPad. The first app to take advantage of this change of heart from Apple is UTM SE.

Now, UTM SE has been available on macOS and jailbroken iOS and iPadOS for quite some time, but this is the first time the app is officially available through the App Store.

Overview

The process to configure a new VM is much like most virtualisation apps out there. You use either an existing image or create a new one, select various parameters like RAM, HDD, CPU architecture, cores etc.

Your Bluetooth mice/keyboards can be mapped to the guest OS via USB or PS/2 emulation. For older OS (Pre Windows ME) which don’t have out of-box support for USB peripherals, you need to disable USB support for Mouse/Keyboard so that they are emulated as PS/2. Even touch gestures can be used in lieu of a mouse, although the experience is clunky.

UTM SE: Switch between USB or PS/2 for mouse and keyboard
UTM SE: Switch between USB or PS/2 for mouse and keyboard

Another useful feature is that you can map a folder on your iOS/iPadOS filesystem to the guest machine allowing you to transfer files easily.

UTM SE: Select Shared Directory
Select Shared Directory

Also, you can choose to include your VMs in your iCloud backups.

The Bad

Instead of proper virtualisation that is possible on other computing platforms, UTM on iOS and iPadOS uses software emulation, making it very-very slow. Apparently iOS and iPadOS had virtualisation support (only with jailbreak) previously, but they removed it a few years ago.

The other limitation is, iOS and iPadOS don’t allow JIT compilation for apps from the App Store which negatively affects performance further.

For me, the performance is roughly similar to my first Celeron 400Mhz computer. Which, when compared to the 4×3.49Ghz high-performance cores on the Apple M2 means there is an approx 35x performance penalty for emulation. No wonder the “SE’ in UTM stands for “Slow Edition”.

Also, switching to another app causes UTM to suspend the VM after a few minutes. None of this is UTM’s fault, but needless restrictions from Apple to stop iPads from cannibalising Mac sales.

Also, the iPad screen locks after inactivity, which I think is on UTM, because apps (especially games) have been able to keep the screen unlocked through inactivity.

But the good thing is, you can resume from where you left off. Also, you can run multiple windows of UTM itself, even with multiple windows mapping to multiple monitors on the guest.

Battery usage is also extremely high because of the inefficiencies.

Look forward to many (many) posts on this topic.