Apple M2 & M4 Ipads

[vale]

Apple just released two new iterations of their product.
The cheaper one, the Air, with M2 chip, which is faster than my macbook air. The other one, the Pro with M4 chip, which is at least twice as fast than my laptop.
Those are thin, portable, and cheap products that push productivity in more ways that we can imagine right now.
Just like an old record: Will we ever see support for Ipads and M architecture?

[Morten Vassing]

Seriously, the iPad Pro M4 performs up to 38 trillion (with a t) operations per second and comes with a brand new state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology called Ultra Retina XDR with optional nano-texture glass option and up to 2TB storage, and Camera Bits be like: -Nah, not there yet for Photo Mechanic....

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Regarding iPads: The new iPads have impressive hardware specs, agreed. However, they still are limited to iPadOS with its limited filesystem and sandbox structure. The way Photo Mechanic operates in terms of caching, reading & writing bits of metadata to hundreds of sidecar files, etc. is not something that iPadOS is really set up for.  We are interested in pursuing mobile solutions, but the functionality is not something you can just easily "port over" from macOS.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but the OS on iPads complicates things much more than just anyone saying "Nah."

Mick

[Morten Vassing]

I'm not saying it is impossible, but the OS on iPads complicates things much more than just anyone saying "Nah."

Sorry for being so snarky but after 14 years of iPad on the market and the new iPad Pro M4 being specifically targeted towards (pro) photographers among others and seeing what Lightroom can do on iPad Pro, I just thought the M4 would be a slam dunk for PM.

I was unaware of the technical limitations inherit to iPadOS, please accept my apologies for being disdainful.

But how about a lite version of PM within the possibilities of the current iPadOS?

[vale]

IPadOS was released almost 4 1/2 years ago. To developers with 6 months before. There was enough time to make a solution, within OS requirments for PM to work.
I have a IPad mini with older processor, not M's and it is super fast in Lightroom or any programs/games that I run on it. Their hardware it doesn't seem to be a problem with old cpus, not to mention the new ones, so the software is the trouble.
Yeah, maybe you cannot do a 1:1 clone of PM to ipad, but something. It's unreal that we can encode streams of 4k video or us AR apps on those devices but we cannot have a image with some text attached.

[MacUnix]

Regarding iPads: The new iPads have impressive hardware specs, agreed. However, they still are limited to iPadOS with its limited filesystem and sandbox structure. The way Photo Mechanic operates in terms of caching, reading & writing bits of metadata to hundreds of sidecar files, etc. is not something that iPadOS is really set up for.  We are interested in pursuing mobile solutions, but the functionality is not something you can just easily "port over" from macOS.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but the OS on iPads complicates things much more than just anyone saying "Nah."

Hi Mick,

I believe that most of us, at least I am, are not asking for the full PM with everything but the kitchensink for an iPad version.
I have made a few posts with what I, and I feel others, need :

• Add IPTC/XMP metadata like : subject, caption, keywords, copyright
• Batch rename of files
• culling of photos

No fancy ingesting live from camera, Cascable and ShutterSnitch can do that. An App can browse the folder structure of the users home directory, can even enter into the public sandboxes of other applications or copy files from a connected storage card, drive or device like a Gnarbox.
I have looked inside PM for macOS and see quite some libraries and Ruby code, so this would pose challenges to get this ported to iPadOS.
iPadOS can support the basic culling and Metadata editing using xmp sidecar files, but you cannot use the common codebase currently in use, it would need a Swift codebase.

Keeping this in mind and Camerabits 'insistence' that the OS used on iPad is not capable of supporting the type of application requested, further strengthens me in the conviction, that a PM version, even stripped down, for iPad will not emerge from the Camerabits offices, unless Apple bakes a macOS emulation layer into iPadOS.
Reading your post above, together with the high subscription price (or buying a yearly perpetual license to stay supported) convinced me, that the camerabits application is not the way forward for me.
I recently, after using your software for over 13 years and paying for every upgrade, wiped PM from my computers and switched to a complete xmp sidecar files based workflow for metadata and image editing on both iPad and macOS.

I wish you all the best with 'thinking inside the box'.

[greg2024]

Regarding iPads: The new iPads have impressive hardware specs, agreed. However, they still are limited to iPadOS with its limited filesystem and sandbox structure. The way Photo Mechanic operates in terms of caching, reading & writing bits of metadata to hundreds of sidecar files, etc. is not something that iPadOS is really set up for.  We are interested in pursuing mobile solutions, but the functionality is not something you can just easily "port over" from macOS.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but the OS on iPads complicates things much more than just anyone saying "Nah."

Mick

This is perfectly understandable given the unique performance capabilities and functionality that has been built into Photo Mechanic. I'm quite sure that the level of performance achieved was reached through extensive performance tuning and optimization. 

There is a point where computer performance is good enough that that performance tuning isn't so critical to a person's use model. Maybe it's at that point for some people, but I'm not ready to give that up yet, even with a recent M2 Max Studio Mac. This will likely be a point of discussion for the next generation Photo  Mechanic product. These decisions will be crucial in positioning future Photo Mechanic products in relation to other products on the market. What workflow and value would an iPad version of Photo Mechanic bring over other iPad products? This is crucial in determining what an iPad version of Photo Mechanic would look like.

I would like to see native Apple silicon support as a first priority to decrease the likelihood of Apple OS releases causing critical defects in Photo Mechanic. This would allow Photo Mechanic to better handle future iterations of Apple Silicon and Apple operating systems.

Product design strategies for tracking operating system and silicon advances in software products is always challenging. What folks observe with Photo Mechanic doesn't reflect poorly on Camera Bits. The highly tuned nature of Photo Mechanic just makes it more difficult to navigate.  This challenge occurs over the lifetime of most software products as computing platforms change. I'm very familiar with this challenge after decades of managing significant software products. Admittedly my perspective is different as a lifelong photographer as a hobby with a lifetime of software product development that paid for that hobby.

On the other hand we could be seeing the end of life tail support of Photo Mechanic, though it looks to not be the case as Camera Bit's staff continues to actively participate here.

[Stuwhitt]

I think an iPad app is a non starter, I have wasted many hours trying to work out a decent workflow to integrate my MacBook and iPad Pro for creative work, and constantly hit obstacles, the file system is pants, there doesn't even seem to be a way manage Photoshop Cloud documents in Lightroom Classic.

All the apps I have tried that purportedly mange IPTC metadata, I haven't found one that comes close being usable.

Disaster struck a couple weeks back when my M1 iPad Pro managed to brick itself, do you know I've not missed it, my MacBook is more capable and is about the same weight as an iPad Pro and magic keyboard.

I suppose we will have to wait and see what comes out of WWDC, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

As for PM I think most users including me would want it to be native to Apple Silicon, an updated interface and be at an affordable price, the latter is nowhere near. When Rossetta is removed from Mac OS, then sadly it looks like me and PM will have to part ways