The weird part for me is that everyone I know who tried an iPad for getting work done (ie: PROfessionals) gave up on it. iOS is simply not geared towards productivity nor content creation, it is a consumption device. The surface pro is the exact opposite, it is a machine that works for getting shit done on the go (for some people, not all obviously).
You're the wrong kind of user. I do end user architecture in a large enterprise, we ran into this with a lot of early adopters.
People who are mobile (as in floating around an office or travel) whose job tasks are easily attributable to specific applications are very happy with iPads. Ideally, the number of applications they use every day on a traditional PC is less than 5. Examples: Sales, Executives, auditors, policemen, medical professionals, case workers.
We had one group of auditors who literally sent my team a $200 fruit basket in appreciation for their iPads. The card said something like "You changed our lives. Thank you!" Executives spend 95% of their day in mail or approving things... again, perfect use case as long as that workflow doesn't require IE6 :)
If you're a consultant, whose specific tasks may change day to day, a full-stack devops guy using any of 15 tools, or a professional writer churning out copy, than an iPad doesn't work. That's ok... a $500 nailgun doesn't make sense for hanging a picture. We have the luxury of choosing tools these days... in 1999, mobile == 12 lb laptop with cable!
Have those users also used a surface pro or a chromebook? I'm wondering if they're just happy to have an extra tablet device or if they have a frame of reference.
It was a web app. With a laptop, their compliance requirements required hibernation. So the workflow was:
- Pre-boot authentication.
- Windows sign-in
- VPN two-factor sign-in
- Web Portal access
- Find your thing.
Best case, that process took 7-9 minutes, at a customer site using guest wifi or air-card in an office building, with a potentially angry customer. Not fun. The typical user does that 5-10 times a day, and in many cases the workers were actually preparing paper reports on their own time to function.
Enter iPad. Access was a snap, and it performed better with marginal cellular connections. Accessing the web portal did still require a two-factor challenge, but that two factor was effective for ALL of their internal access. We used a web browser that gave them a native iPad browsing experience (vs. an SSL-VPN'd IE) and access to several different systems via app.
From your description it sounds more like process changes were needed rather than hardware. If the sensitive data is all in a web app, you don't really need pre-boot authentication, and could even allow windows to automatically sign in. I'm guessing you exposed your web app to the internet with 2 factor for the iPad, you could have done the same thing for windows clients and eliminated the VPN.
"Sadly" (or not) the compliance requirements for mobile vs PC's are completely fubar.
If you run under any regulation (PCI-DSS, HIPAA etc.) your PC will have to be hardened, have anti-virus, full disk encryption, 2 factor auth for remote connection and tick every other possible "security" box to be compliant.
Mobile well it's easy just have an MDM and do what ever the fuck you want, so if you want to use your laptop from the train in a regulated industry you'll have to stand on one foot, hold the laptop over your head while giving a blood sample to authenticate you and on the other hand you can just hope on your tablet/mobile phone connect to your office using VPN on-demand or even a regular web app (as long as it's SSL because dur-dur security!) and you're golden.
I've had to deal with both HIPAA and PCI-DSS and in both cases if the sensitive data is all stored within the web app, and the authentication to the web app is good and communication to the web app is encrypted, you do not have to secure the endpoint. Both of those are about securing the sensitive data, and keeping sensitive data off the endpoint is a perfectly valid method of doing so.
I don't know what you had to deal with regarding PCI or HIPAA but if the endpoint is in scope you have whole chapters about how you should "secure" it, same goes for remote access (VPN, Jump boxes etc.).
If the endpoint was in scope I would like to see the QSA that signed an AOC/ROC which stated that the endpoints weren't secured...
PCI-DSS the endpoints you use to connect to the CHD environment are in scope, other endpoints that are used to interact with CHD data e.g. POI's or CS terminals are also in scope.
HIPAA endpoints that are used to access, view or input patient data are in scope.
We could technically do something like that, but we couldn't meet the compliance requirements.
A better alternative in a laptop form factor would be a zero client laptop, but they are very niche devices.
I didn't really go into detail about the full use case, they get other benefits from the overall snappy iPad experience in terms of switching apps, etc.
The starbucks full of students typing out reports on iPads with bluetooth keyboards begs to differ. I mean, obviousy, you can't do all work on an iPad, but for a certain class of "work" it works fine.
Of course. And don't get me wrong, the iPad is far from worthless and Apple is far from Trivial in the space. The point is that Apple is no longer the leader/innovator in the space. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think that a lot of iOS devices get sold on intangibles rather than concrete benefits or capabilities. Apple has created tremendous value in these intangibles by being so awesome/innovative/ahead for the last 8 years, that has created a tremendous amount of loyalty in iOS users and sells a LOT of iOS devices every single generation despite the substantial (to most people) costs. People who depend on tech to make their living (often) require more than intangible benefits, and the competition has now caught/surpassed them as far as tech goes, and usually for a lower price.
I don't see where the competition is coming from. Samsung? Google? Xiaomi?
Outside of Microsoft (disclosure: MS employee), I don't see much competition for Apple in the innovative premium tablet space. They still execute well in the phone space, watch seems to be shaping up fine, they are still the only PC maker that is known for producing PCs that can last. The costs don't seem too off from the competition, unless we are talking about Xiaomi or Lenovo, but then the tradeoffs are obvious (no longer in the premium space).
I do see Apple slowing down a bit in innovation. I mean, if iPad Pro was released last year (stylus, yeh!), I might have bought it, but the Surface 3 came out instead, which is quite decent (I won't go SP3 because of the fan). But Apple is still executing well, they aren't making many mistakes. They have built up a loyal fanbase and haven't done anything to betray them yet.
People who depend on tech are usually about the shiny more than normal consumers, who just want to get what they need done. The rabid irrational Apple fanboy isn't grandma, no, it is the young kid working in tech.
> People who depend on tech are usually about the shiny more than normal consumers, who just want to get what they need done. The rabid irrational Apple fanboy isn't grandma, no, it is the young kid working in tech.
This may perhaps reflect the different professional subcultures we're around, but IME "people who depend on tech" are _less_ prone to this (not necessarily the rabid fanboying but the equivalent effect). I think you're underestimating the effect that an unwillingness to do (relatively) in-depth research has on the purchasing decisions of "normal consumers". I.e., "wanting what they need to get done" is a wonderful wish, but it's somewhat meaningless when decoupled from knowing the differences/capabilities of each device. I don't think it's controversial to say that normal consumers put much much more faith in the wisdom of the crowds, and (if they can afford it), Apple products are the beginning and end of their search. The fact that "Android" or even "high-end Android" isn't a cohesive brand to the casual observer means that iPhones seem like a plurality of their cursory data set, even when it's not the majority (which, at least in the US, is pretty often).
Even in 2015, I have people asking me in slightly shocked tones why I don't use an iPhone, and their certainty is always based entirely on social proof (they generally have no knowledge about whatever is I happen to be using).
I have people asking me in slightly shocked tones why I don't use an iPhone, and their certainty is always based entirely on social proof
I cannot count the amount of times I have experienced this phenomena. A couple of years ago, when I first got an android phone, I remember someone say "Ha, you don't have an iPhone, your poor!"... the content of the comment didn't really disturb me, what did was the reasoning which lead the person to generate such a perspective.
> Outside of Microsoft (disclosure: MS employee), I don't see much competition for Apple in the innovative premium tablet space.
Care to break down Apple vs. Microsoft's revenues in tablets? I can't imagine it's within two orders of magnitude, at which point I'd hardly say that Microsoft counts as competition. But maybe I'm wrong about the numbers.
(Granted, you said "pro tablets". I doubt we can get numbers on that, but I think the relevant distinction is "tablets used for work" rather than "tablets with XYZ specs", and in that space too I suspect without data that Apple is far and beyond the leader in terms of revenue.)
I'm really just an outside observer like everyone else :). But the Surface Pro 3 and even the Surface 3 (S3) aren't really competing with the iPad, they really have different use cases (I do work on my S3, but I'm typing this post in bed on my iPad Air!). So Apple definitely leads in the tablet market by far, but I think we could be more competitive in the prosumer tablet space that they are entering with the iPad pro. More to the point: Apple is basically validating this market, which can only be good for us as long as we can provide a decent alternative (which I think we do). What is clear is that android tablets are in a bit of trouble at all ends...they really need to do some rethinking.
> iPad is far from worthless and Apple is far from
> Trivial in the space
Far from trivial doesn't really capture a device that combines being the most expensive with a 75% market share in the US[0] and where US tablet ownership among internet users is 54%[1].
> The point is that Apple is no longer the leader/innovator in
> the space
Oooh, is there (yet another) new iPhone killer out again this month?
> People who depend on tech to make their living (often) require
> more than intangible benefits, and the competition has now
> caught/surpassed them as far as tech goes
Those silver rectanges with the pretty apple logo on them have absolutely dominated every single developer event I've been at in recent memory.
Note: I'm not taking a position on the actual capability of iPads in the professional space, but this comment is a masterstroke in setting up strawmen and bravely knocking them down.
I'm not the parent commenter, but from the top...
> Far from trivial doesn't really capture a device that combines being the most expensive with a 75% market share in the US[0] and where US tablet ownership among internet users is 54%[1].
As hinted at by the first part of the sentence you're responding to, this thread is talking about the quality of iOS devices for professional work, not their popularity.
> Oooh, is there (yet another) new iPhone killer out again this month?
The snark here handily hides the lack of substance: once again, the reason there's no iPhone-killer (and I don't anticipate there being one for some time) is a different question from whether there's an alternative better-suited to professional work.
"The point is that Apple is no longer the leader/innovator in the space"
But Apple never created new product categories successfully in the past. People bought Macs in lieu of PC's; iPods in lieu of Discmans/minidisc/other MP3 players; iPhones in lieu of flip phones, candy bars, or blackberries.
They tried to create a new product category with the iPad and get people who don't own a computer to buy one (or buy one in addition to their normal computer purchases). It's been mildly successful so far, but sales have been falling. Apple should probably stick with replacing existing product categories with a well-designed, premium alternative.
The most annoying bit related to getting real work done on iOS is how long it takes to switch apps. Switching from one app to the other should be 1 click if you want to get serious work done. This is how windows and the surface work. 1 click. A taskbar at the bottom. It works. The current iOS takes 2 clicks, a swipe, and a tap. Unacceptable for multiasking.
Now that iIOS has multitasking it changes in an important way. I wonder if it can be a productivity device now. But its still not great when it comes to balancing more than 2 apps.
If you swipe with four fingers to the left or right, you can move between your two most recent apps. Hopefully iOS9 will make "multi-tasking" even easier.
True, it is iPad only. To be fair, it's a bit of a struggle for me to even get 4 fingers on 5s at the same time, let alone swipe them, but it would be handy on my 6+. I use swiping to switch apps on my iPad heavily. It revolutionized how I use the device.
I would still be using my iPad for development, except for the fact that I found the 9.5" screen to be just too limiting. The other reason was that all the bluetooth keyboards require a separate cable for charging, which I hate.
The larger screen and the fact that they keyboard cover is powered by the tablet itself makes this super compelling.
Not for my "every day development" machine, but for use on road trips or so I can go spend some time in the middle of the woods without a full-sized laptop in tow.
Also, the updated screen tech for the pencil hopefully means I don't need to buy a separate Wacom tablet.
May I ask what kind of development tools are available on the ipad? What is the dev workflow? I am very interested in this and hope this becomes more and more common as tablets evolve to support development. But havent seen anything serious enough yet.
Working Copy[1] is the first app I've seen to come along and really change the situation. A pretty glaring limitation of previous solutions was reliance on SSH for git control. Working Copy provides a great subset of git tools graphically. It's got a great editor, and lets you bounce files into any editor you please to be committed when appropriate.
Coda[2] for iOS is also very compelling for a number of tasks, most importantly web development with a live preview. Editorial[3] is worth mentioning as well for it's deep customizability and scriptability.
So, the workflow is still pretty reliant on a desktop or VPS somewhere but the tools are becoming much cleaner and more integrated along the newer app communication features of iOS.
Thanks. These tools are very nice. WorkingCopy looks seriously awesome. Will try it out. Like you mentioned there are lot of limitations on these tools and iOS itself. Would love to see local servers (is that even possible?) or other deployment strategies to test when access to desktop is not possible.
Interesting to hear a user not interested in the angle of the screen. This is something that is a big concern for productivity focused sessions on any device. Mainly comfort and posture come to mind, but I also think viewability is worth mentioning. It is one of the reasons why monitors tilt. It looks like the the iPad Pro is limited to one angle when the keyboard is in use. I am curious to see how consumers deal with the first-gen and how apple will solve this going forward.
I use my iPad for content creation every day and it's fantastic.
Editorial is perfect for writing and blogging.
Procreate is awesome for painting(of course it's not PS+Wacom, but it is surprisingly good).
I can use Recorder to record audio for my videos.
And Pinnacle Studio is a surprisingly awesome for editing videos.
Maybe they don't exactly compete with pro tools available for mac and pc, but they are amazing. And Pinnacle/Procreate totally crush everything available on Linux(for my purposes).
Editorial is a fantastic app, as is procreate, use both of those constantly. The first iPad mini with editorial took over from all my other computers for writing, well everything.
From notes, to scripts for clients servers, it just took over.
Being able to quickly sketch, or take a photo of something and add notes too it quickly is super handy.
I got a Surface Pro 3 almost exclusively for using OneNote on it. It's pretty great for that, but having Windows in the way was sometimes annoying. The Surface is capable of a lot more than I do with it, but I have my MacBook for everything that isn't handwriting. The iPad Pro is exactly what I wanted - a device for writing down notes, sketching designs, and doing so seamlessly without the "bloat" of a full OS in the way.
True, but I think the problem was that the WinRT looked like ordinary Windows but couldn't run any of the applications that people put on them (x86 binaries). Plus, it was competing against another form of itself (the Pro) in a squashed market anyway (Android gazillion models + iPad), where people typically saw tablets as a consumption device (I could be wrong, but my dad still dislikes my mum's iPad and will go to his laptop to do anything any day).
So WinRT and SurfaceRT struggled. My sister bought one and liked it though.
X86 wasn't there then it is there now the non-Pro Surfaces don't run WindowsRT anymore and they are very cheap for what they offer and unless you actually run Photoshop then there's also very little reason to get the Pro these days.
I think this is the angle of attack that Apple is taking here. They want to catch up to the handwriting and sketching abilities of Surface, but they don't want a hybrid OS.
In a lot of ways the Surface is a laptop with a detachable keyboard and the OS and eco system is still based on that. Apple wants their eco system to develop from a clean touch OS base into productivity areas. Having said that, they are really lagging in this area and the momentum has shifted well away from iPads in the business world.
The Surface might beat the iPad pro, but I do wonder if the either will be the future of productivity compared with a laptop and a tablet.
> In a lot of ways the Surface is a laptop with a detachable keyboard
I picked one up on a curious whim, and often use this language to describe the Surface 3. It really does act like a laptop, all the way down to going to sleep while I'm playing music, and hibernating during periods of inactivity.
Out of interest, are Surfaces gaining in popularity in the business world?? I do not mix with sufficient business types (I associate with penny pinchers who scoff at buying cheap Windows laptops and gag when anything Apple comes along).
My brother-in-law will probably love this iPad Pro as he is a financial advisor and spends a lot of time getting quotes from websites, so he loves his iPad.
He hates his MacBook Pro as he says "it keeps too many things open and doesn't shut them down properly" which is indicative of not understanding how apps close on OSX (or bothering to learn), and an interesting side-effect of the 'freeze-dried' app states on iOS for multitasking. I would have thought that OSX > iOS (I find using the iPad frustrating as it is like using a child's toy with no filesystem access) but for "real world" users it is obviously different. Enlightening to me anyway!
Yes, Surfaces are especially popular for enterprises right now. I think most enterprises had started to embrace iPads because iPhones are the number one phone choice, but it's a pretty easy sell to get an enterprise back on Windows when they are so entrenched in the desktop.
My dad loves his iPad he got one with a keyboard cover. I think he does everything he can on it.
Before that he got a bulky Vista laptop that was on sale. He said that he felt silly walking around the airport with it when everyone else had some light tablet.
Surface Pro is nice since you can run all the existing enterprise apps, but how many of those apps will offer great user experience on tables? Apple is kind of forcing companies to create apps specifically for the tablet use.
Obviously there is nothing preventing companies from creating new tablet version of apps for surface as well, but there might be a problem with the corporate "if it works, you won't get a budget to fix it" thinking.
I really don't give a shit who is copying who. It's technology; we're all building on the backs of inventions created by other people. The important thing to me is who does it the best, not who does it first.
The iPod was nowhere near the first mp3 player, it was just the best one. The iPad wasn't close to the first tablet. Will it be the best tablet? I don't know, but whether or not the Surface had a keyboard first won't be the deciding factor.
Every company is incorporating an absurd number of innovations pioneered by other people. When it comes to hardware, I just want to love using the device.
The really galling part is the total refusal to admit they're not doing anything innovative. "There has never been another product like the iPad Pro before" was a real quote from today's presentation, and is a complete falsehood.
It's not a complete falsehood but it's a totally empty statement.
Virtually any device you put out that's not exactly, spec-by-spec the same, you can say 'never been a product like this before'. It's true and empty.
They do a lot of those, they're true, hyperbolic, and totally devoid of any significance.
For example they'll say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone ... EVER'. As if it's significant. But that's completely unexpected and it's not news, either. I'll happily take a 10 trillion dollar bet that the iPhone 7 will sell even better. And that the new Galaxy S 6 sells better than the 5, and the 7 will sell better than the 6, too.
Or they'll say the iPhone 6S is the most advanced iPhone ... EVER. As if, again, that's news. As if we think they built a 6S that's worse than the 6.
It's a truthful, hyperbolic, totally insignificant statement. It's different from a falsehood.
Calling a 3 second video, a photo, in the sense that it's a bunch of photo frames, that's more of a direct falsehood to me. We use the word photo to denote a still image, and video for multiple frames of photos. But that's a marketing gimmick that's more ridiculous than it is disingenuous.
As for innovation, I mostly agree. The ability to execute extremely well and polish your work isn't innovation. It can be driven by innovations of course but it's not the kind of innovation we talk about when we refer to Apple's history. Since the iPhone 4 I've mostly felt a ton of polish but no real breakthroughs on the phone department for example, tablet wise... mostly just solid iterations like everyone else, nothing fundamentally innovative about the iPad 4 or Air or mini, really. Pro feels like more of the same, split screen we've seen before, styluses we've seen before. Again, executed well and polished.
I mean of course there's innovation, but it's not what sets them apart. Look at Force Touch for example, now 3D touch. People probably missed the fact Huawei demo'd force touch last week on their android phone. And that's a feature we'd think of as their innovation. Others, like a large tablet, split screen, type covers, wireless charging, a stylus, 3-second videos (called live photos) etc are all seen before.
Their ability to churn out better and better devices, year after year, is what's remarkable. That we come to expect it, and don't consider it news, is a testament to their achievement. This is not normal; the industry -- both hardware & software -- is plagued with regressions, with many older models or releases that are preferred by the users to newer ones. Apple are truly unique in their ability to deliver improvements, introduce new technologies, and implement existing technologies in ways that are actually usable, while keeping regressions and serious problems low, much lower than the competition.
What's the best Microsoft desktop OS? Which is the best Dell screen? Which is the best keyboard? Motorola phone? The current year's Apple lineup has always been better than the last year's, and that's what the "best ever" statements mean to me, and I believe that's what they mean to the target audience: "This is new, and it works at least as well as the old stuff."
Which other company, which other product line of comparable complexity, introduces features without compromising usability?
> Apple are truly unique in their ability to deliver improvements, introduce new technologies, and implement existing technologies in ways that are actually usable, while keeping regressions and serious problems low, much lower than the competition.
I like Apple products as much as the next guy, but cmon, this is some serious kool-aid drinking here.
Apple doesn't produce software that is any less issue prone than any other vendor. In fact the chorus complaining about software regressions has been getting louder and louder, even from Apple fans.
Yosemite was a particularly low point with regard to Apple software.
Software is hard. Apple aren't special, their software has just as many issues as any other vendor's, which is actually kind of disappointing given they have full control of the hardware, MS actually does a lot better with regard to software quality given the varied HW landscape Windows is deployed to.
Edit: Software quality isn't just a Yosemite issue with Apple, it's a long running joke that you should never install a X.0 OSX release due to bugs.
Well cars get better every year, so do appliances, so does just about every consumer product if you're not talking about Walmart-type "price is all that matters" stuff.
I don't think it's remarkable at all. It would be remarkable if they weren't getting better year after year.
>For example they'll say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone ... EVER'. As if it's significant. But that's completely unexpected and it's not news, either. I'll happily take a 10 trillion dollar bet that the iPhone 7 will sell even better. And that the new Galaxy S 6 sells better than the 5, and the 7 will sell better than the 6, too.
You understand that sales growth can't last forever right?
Actually it's also limited by tons of factors: competition, fashion, etc. People have been announcing the "end" of the iPhone and iPhone killers ever since 2008 (that was BS of course, but it still can happen that some revision, e.g. 6s sells less than the previous).
iPad for example has had that happening to it (later revision sold less well).
iPad is much more niche compared to iPhone. Not everyone wants/needs a consumer device to lounge around with for the price point. Everyone wants a phone. And to people like me, the iPad keyboard is simply unusable in landscape mode. Has this changed? No idea why they insist(ed) on stretching the keyboard across the entire screen instead of leaving half of the keyboard accessible to either side with thumbs. Even if the keyboard has been updated, the larger form factors are just too large and clunky for 2-handed use.
Hrm, I'll have to try one out with that setting. I have both a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, but being able to watch video on a tablet while lounging around would admittedly be nice. I suspect the device will still be too bulky and heavy to comfortably type on for longer than a minute at a time, even if the keyboard allows for it. I'm always puzzled when I see a photo of someone typing with 2 hands on a tablet while lying down. I can't imagine physically arranging myself in such a way that this is even possible.
But as long as it lasts, they can make statements like that while ignoring any other trends that explain the popularity and make their marketing pitch sound more impressive.
I mean, the fact that they continue to sell more iPhones than they ever have of each new model says something. A lot of companies' popularity only lasts one or two product cycles.
What is this obsession with thinking that Apple (or any business) should present new products by going... "well, shucks, this is kinda crap, but we had a production plan to meet. Sorry, it's not very good..."
Of course they're selling the hell out of it, that's what companies that take in billions of dollars do: make a decent product and then promote it. At least the stuff Apple makes usually works and the features they add into their products are actually useful - yeah, I'm looking at you, Samsung, and your list of Samsung XXX functions that were obviously designed and implemented over a weekend.
There has never been a product like it before. No one else has ever made an iOS tablet like it. :)
It's an admittedly nuanced statement, but not an outright falsehood.
I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro. Just like they were inspired by the original iPad, which was inspired by... which was inspired by... etc...
This is an inductive statement very close to the doubly linked assertion presented by [Dr Milton Erickson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Erickson) from witch the academic example is "Save money, buy now". Here the induced assertion is "There has never been a product like it before" which is obviously false. This is beyond marketing. It is manipulative talk.
In my opinion, this should be made illegal. We have seen in Germany during the years 1935 to 1945, and more recently with ISIS, what manipulative talk could lead people to do.
>I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro.
Perhaps that's true for a room of tech experts and media. As for the thousands of common consumers watching at home, they may not draw the same conclusions.
You do realize that the iPad was the first mass market multi-touch tablet, and that the Samsung and Microsoft tablets were introduced as a response to its success?
It's marketing. And when it comes to marketing its far more true than that Lynx will get you laid (lol), or that some new detergent will revolutionaze how clean your clothes are, or that some GAP clothes will make you part of the "in" crowd.
It's also depends on the level we're talking. If we just take "product like the iPad pro" to mean "a large tablet" then yes it's a "complete falsehood".
But it obviously means "a large tablet with this attention to detail, with the supporting OS and app ecosystem finely tuned to work along with it". Which is true -- as all Surface tablets I've seen are if not subpar, different in several ways.
Oh yes, it will. Getting teen-agers to start applying basic precepts of personal hygiene is like trying to drill an oil well with a toothbrush. Those commercials get it exactly right: (1) you stink (2) only men who don't stink get laid (3) use a bloody deodorant, you testosterone-laden pig!
> It's marketing. And when it comes to marketing its far more true than that Lynx will get you laid (lol), or that some new detergent will revolutionaze how clean your clothes are, or that some GAP clothes will make you part of the "in" crowd.
Yes. It's marketing - the magic context in which we suspend our disbelief and let people lie to our faces, and we then applaud and pay them.
Marketing is the process of figuring out who a product is for and how to get them to want to buy it (through channels like engineering, design, and yes, advertising). Apple being an excellent marketing company isn't a slur — it's an incredible complement. They absolutely excel at understanding who their target audience is, building devices that appeal to that audience, and advertising to ensure that audience is aware of how those devices address needs they may not have even known they had.
Eight, let's not try to twist words here. Apple is great at marketing but I don't think that was person's intended meaning. He means that Apple is good at manipulating people.
They make okay products (in absolute terms, not implying that anything is better) and would not have their completely rabid following did they not manipulate people into buying into their status, lifestyle, and that they're more valuable than their worth.
Do we really "suspend our disbelief"? I don't think we're naive 50s tv viewers in this day and age.
If anything gets us is not us believing the ad, but just getting pumped with the nice visuals and subtle suggestions (so more subsconscius manipulation than convincing us).
The question is, why do we allow it? If you took the behaviour that is standard-pracitce for marketers and journalists and tried that with a friend, you'd get punched in the face. Somehow we shielded a few areas of our lives (like advertising, journalism, politics) and decided that it's ok to be deceitful in those areas.
I prefer to think of this as mermaid marketing. It's nice to hear them sing, but don't fall for it or they will eat you.
Watching theses events is like this famous passage of the Odyssey. Once you are tightly attached, and don't risk to go overboard (and start buying stuff you don't really need), then enjoy the show. I've been told their exciting song is the most detailed and beautiful thing you've ever heard :)
The considerate seafarer might consider warning others, rather than sitting back with popcorn. All these arguments really center around two points, will the mermaids eat you, and even if they will eat you, should we care that the singing tricks people or just accept it?
It's not the copying that worries people, it's the lack of not-coping, i.e. innovations.
iPod is not the first mp3 player, iPhone is not the first smart phone, but they were packed with innovative ideas that stood them out. We see less and less such ideas from Apple.
Their execution/quality control is still top notch though, but other companies are catching up.
The problem is that after a string of successes like iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, there is no way to out-do that. There is no market so ripe for disruption that plays to Apple's strengths the way that the iPhone setup. That's why the iPad is so disappointing to analysts and why nothing Apple does is that impressive now. There is no opportunity for the next iPhone-level success in the market today. It's out there somewhere in the future, but everyone carrying around a $700 pocket computer is a game changer of a magnitude that can only be approximated by physical implants. It certainly is not approached by any imaginable Watch or Google Glass type of device.
Touch-screen steering wheel? What could possibly go wrong?
As an aside, I find the obsession with touchscreen interfaces in cars to be irritating because obviously the testers test these things whilst sat perfectly still in a stationary vehicle or in a car with hydrogas suspension (just kidding), and not on a typical road that has bumps. They're impossible to use whilst in motion as your arm bounces around.
If Apple had made the Surface Pro (which hasn't existed for very long) before Microsoft then it would have been the next in that line of major innovations. They didn't, because of a lack of foresight, but the opportunity to create it was readily available.
By what metrics is it a failure? Because when I last looked at Microsoft's financial statements, their revenue was up due to the Surface (Profit was down for unrelated reasons).
I'm assuming you haven't used a Surface Pro but you can mark my words now, Apple will release a direct copy of the Surface within 3 years. The iPad Pro is a glorified iPad and will be utterly unusable for doing anything professional, so it's not a copy at this stage.
This is already demonstrably false. The iPad is already in use for professional purposes, and if you'd watched it, you have seen the stage demo prove you wrong.
The main innovations that the iPod and iPhone launched with was in regards to their business models.
iPod had iTunes, true flat rate pricing for all music. Giant articles (if not books) have been written describing the huge challenge that was.
The iPhone was a completely new relationship between the phone manufacturer and the cellular carrier that allowed Apple to rake in unheard of profits. Their other main innovation with the iPhone was making a touch screen UI that was good. To be fair, that took a lot of engineering and UX work (early gen cap touch was terrible).
Apple was then able to pivot and make an app store built on existing infrastructure, another innovation that none of the other phone manufactures made. Yes "app stores" existed before the App Store, but they where not the one stop shop with guaranteed assurances that Apple offered. Executing on the App Store idea perfectly involved innovation for sure.
That's because they are not a OEM that throws hardware together trying to differentiate, no matter what the software using it will be like. Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type, and that makes them make money but without charging more neither the users neither the merchant, and is interoperable with existing credit cards and banks (including the per-bank customized provisioning process).
Putting everything together is several order of magnitude harder than adding a part number to a BOM years before the ecosystem is ready to use it appropriately. They had to get there feature by feature, one at a time. Touch ID was a stepping stone for instance, and that's a whole engineering and design task by itself. It's a multi-year evolution to get to the point of adding a service that incidentally happens to use NFC as one of the many involved technologies. So, no, they did not "add NFC" without Apple Pay.
>Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type...
What specific changes have made it possible for NFC to work in this way? All those things you listed seem possible in 2012.
Market changes - POS credit card machines were scheduled to be phased out in favor of chips and NFC by EOY2015 [1].
Apple Pay didn't come out of the blue. The impending POS infrastructure change created the opportunity to launch a better payments user experience in the 2014-2015 timeframe. Apple knew this, and developed/acquired/refined a better security method (touchID + tokenization) and corresponding user experience to negotiate on favorable terms with banks and merchants, which sealed the deal for many and created momentum toward getting stragglers onboard and reaching broad market penetration.
Just adding an NFC chip and calling it a day changes nothing. Few markets are penetrated by hardware - or even hardware and software - alone.
That's not quite right. That article is about chip & pin only, and not about NFC. Apple made the business decision to build their own payments system and lock merchants in using Passbook, rather than use NFC, which is more open.
When it comes to market adoption of hardware, typically the market leader gets picked up for adoption. By forcing their own version of mobile payments (passbook) and not allowing NFC, the market was split and NFC adoption stymied.
Apple Pay does not require Apple-specific contactless payment terminals and will work with Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, and American Express's ExpressPay terminals.
So merchants are not "locked in" to passbook.
The reason for Apple Pay success is that they worked with the companies in question so that the infrastructure was already in place when the phone was launched. I was in the UK the week of the Apple Pay launch there and the same terminals that 3 months prior were accepting my contactless card were now accepting my iPhone.
None of that was true in 2012 when Apple released Passbook. [1]
The only reason Apple has support for those now in 2015 is because merchants weren't falling for the walled-garden ploy. Apple has finally caught up with other forms of payment, which is why Apple was a major staller for NFC technology adoption.
Um... your link doesn't refute parent. Passbook in 2012 was just an endpoint for things like boarding passes, tickets, and gift cards you bought elsewhere.
From related link [1]:
> There's no NFC in the new iPhone, but you'll be able to use your screen as a scannable gift card/plane ticket/voucher/etc. with Passbook, which creates a virtual bundle of all those annoying cards you cram into your wallet. Here's an ideal little scenario for you: a free cup of coffee at Starbucks, because you've got a $25 credit built right into your phone. Hand it to the cashier, beep, coffee, slurp, bye.
If you think this somehow stymied NFC... thats an incredible stretch. Before Apple was it the gift card mafia stopping NFC? Were merchants going to just throw away their perfectly usable POS machines... because technology?
Yes it does and you're splitting hairs. Passbook was Apple's mobile payment response to NFC, and why they didn't adopt NFC in iPhones. They were trying to build an app ecosystem using credits for their mobile payments, and it didn't work so years later we see them catch up with Pay.
The entire context of this discussion was how Apple killed NFC adoption in 2012 by not supporting NFC and splitting the market with their own walled-garden solution. Even your quote shows the surprise on Gizmodo's part that they released some gift card substitute...
It only seems like I'm splitting hairs because you're making huge leaps that aren't supported by logic or evidence and sound vaguely conspiratorial.
Lets say Apple had stuck NFC in an iPhone 4S. What then? Mobile payments is not a faucet you just turn on. They'd have to convince the entire market - retailers, banks, and credit card companies alike - that they needed to incur tens of million dollars of infrastructure changes and possibly more with fraud in order to... well, what exactly do they get? They'd move from something that people were used to (credit/debit cards) that had clear risk profiles to something unknown with little evidence of consumers willingness to adopt and no added benefit to retailers or banks.
You might respond - its a better user experience! Banks don't give a shit about user experience, thats why they close at 4pm. Retailers don't either, thats why they'd buy POS machines with crap UIs and never replace them even when the digitizer could barely create a signature.
Banks and credit card companies care about risk, and retailers care about keeping costs down and seeing clear benefit in the form of evidence of consumer interest before adopting. Banks and credit card companies are also powerful, quite conservative, and are middle-men that do not necessarily have users interests at heart. Nobody in this industry turns on a dime (heh). Knowing this, Apple chose to wait for the steady trickle of POS machine replacements in the coming POS transition that would follow from Visa's EMV migration announced in 2011 [1], focus on risk-reduction and gaining leverage with credit card companies and banks through TouchID, and launch Passbook as a proof of concept both to train users and show retailers that people want to use their phones. Passbook wasn't an mobile payments competitor, it was a progenitor. It sidestepped major gaps in infrastructure, and it was placed in the second or third tier of iOS features due to its limited usefulness.
Passbook seems to be what you're hung up on. Here's a question - if Apple is so amazeballs that it could have moved the market in 2012, why then are there still retailers and banks that are slow on the Apple Pay uptake? Is it because Google and the coalition of second tier nobodys is missing? No, its because banks and retailers generally don't give a shit about user experience, manage their infrastructure at their own pace, and have all sorts of issues and internal politics that affect their decision making about _anything_.
You keep saying the same thing and haven't provided nearly enough evidence to support the leaps you're making that Apple somehow killed the beautiful 'open' fairyland that would have been NFC in 2012. There was no NFC market in 2012 to split, just bumbling attempts that misread how to make headway in the market, and a handful of Android phones with the hardware just so they could say 'first!' I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
You've created a string of hypotheticals and argued them down like they're straw men. I kind of like the one you created about where I would say something about "user experience", because it's fluffy and mocking (on your part) at the same time. Bravo.
I had said that Apple stalled NFC development by not releasing it in 2014. Are you saying that NFC market adoption would have been the same, if Apple had released NFC in 2012?
They were _possible_ in 2012 but getting everyone on board is difficult. Google included NFC on the Nexus S in 2010. The Nexus S was an atrocious piece of junk compared to its contemporary, the iPhone 4. NFC did nothing to make using the Nexus S more pleasurable. Android beam? Nobody used that. Google did not release the NFC-capable Wallet app until 2011, and at that time the integration between the app, the phone (still the Nexus S) and the payment terminals was ghastly. Nobody used it because it was much slower than paying by any other way and half the time it didn't work. The 2011 Galaxy Nexus didn't make things any better. The NFC antenna was attached to the flexible battery cover and the spring-loaded contacts didn't really work. Google was still pushing Wallet but the merchants didn't care because they weren't getting a better price on transaction clearance and close to nobody had the hardware.
NFC was a complete basket case, and still remains that way except for Apple.
What you just described is exactly how Apple killed NFC adoption.
The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful.
June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.
What are you talking about? Passbook was never a payment system, it just had gift cards. Passbook isn't a payment system NOW. Apple Pay is, Passbook is just the app that shows users their credit cards.
Right, Passbook was Apple's first play at mobile payments. They were trying to build an app ecosystem that used credits to to make mobile payments. It was Apple's response to NFC which wasn't very good.
It wasn't a mobile payments play, though. It was a solution to storing things like movie tickets, airline tickets, gift card vouchers, etc. "Payment" was never in its vocabulary.
They wouldn't have had fingerprint readers and the deals with credit card companies to make it then. In my view they didn't kill it they saved it by waiting until they could do it well.
Google added NFC years ago and few added it to their phones - manufacturers have started adding it but then Google doesn't offer Wallet here in the UK and then chucked Wallet in the bin I think, so they REALLY didn't help NFC in my opinion.
Well it's there for apple things like Apple Pay. There's no real incentive for them to open it up to developers unless they're controlling the space. i.e. for Apple Pay it's nice, or say to unlock your car, or unlock your home's door with Home Kit, but random NFC thingies? They're not really interested.
Disagree. This is a really commonly held viewpoint that I think is the product of our fast news cycles, and I don't think it approaches truth for another several years.
You are totally right that iPod and iPhone were not the first. While these were cool products when they came out, I think what's often lost is that it was only in the years of incremental improvements that defined how important these products were.
Tons of use cases are being unlocked in health, education, home automation, transportation, payments, enterprise, etc that these markets have been waiting for and wanting and are truly transformative. They're just not talked about as much, or hit that level of 'omg' for people who aren't dealing with those use cases, but they're real. The less sexy incremental stuff is amazing, and in fact, way more interesting because so few companies get the details right.
Just like you're saying about not being first, most blow-your-mind ideas that will come out in the next 10 years are probably already thought of, prototyped, or launched in some highly crippled form to an extremely limited audience. Two amazing things we can assume are in the pipeline are:
1. Driverless car, which will fundamentally change our transportation infrastructure.
2. Eye tracking and face tracking, which unlock new interaction paradigms that are even more natural and seamless. See the recent Faceshift acquisition [1] for evidence.
These are going to be awesome! But they'll take time to perfect.
I'm not sure what qualifies as innovations for you. I'll admit I'm not blown away by today's stuff, it is S-cycle after all, but I am impressed by the way they've implemented 3D touch. Its the first force touch implementation (vs watch and macbook) that I really like because it looks incredibly intuitive and everyday useful - like something that I'll wonder how I lived without.
Well anyway, I think we'd probably agree about a lot things, but I'd be curious as to what big innovation you've got in mind that's missing. Cheers.
I guess that test track for driverless cars that they've been in talks with [1], and all those auto executives and autonomous vehicle engineers they're hiring are going to work on something else?
Just because they've been a computer company thus far doesn't mean it'll always be that way. They're the largest company on earth with over $100B in the bank and incredible consumer goodwill looking for any space with large profit margin potential where they can differentiate with good user experience.
Display size, resolution and performance in a passively cooled device are things that seem to differentiate it from competitors. IMO these are significant.
Also let's not forget the better aspect ratio of the iPad - this has always been my biggest gripe with the Surface besides the IMO terrible UX of Win8. Win10 could become a much better deal if they can pull off Desktop / Touch UI integration properly, so far there are still many edge cases to fix from what I hear.
On the other hand, as long as we don't know how good the Apple pencil is for writing (e.g. palm recognition), it's quite unclear how well suited the iPad Pro really is. A year from now the Pro tablet market will look very competitive I think, but for now it's still too much of a toy for my taste.
iPad has always had 4:3. And it's still quite a difference between the two, 3:2 still feels very strange when you hold it in portrait. Holding A4 paper in portrait makes this even more obvious.
Yep. Now add some buttons while viewing an A4 paper. On an iPad they fit nicely next to where you're holding it, on a Surface you either have to put them in an awkward position, shrink the content or have them it popup in some generally non discoverable gesture.
When the litigation attorney for Samsung can't tell the difference between the two devices in open court, they might have gone a little too far in copying the iPad's design..
> Koh frequently remarked on the similarity between each company's tablets. At one point during the hearing, she held one black glass tablet in each hand above her head, and asked Sullivan if she could identify which company produced which.
> "Not at this distance your honor," said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.
I get what you're saying, but they were asked to tell the difference over an unspecified distance.
Since the companies adopted the slab form factor for the devices. all smartphone and tablets look the same esp. from the front.
I don't see this argument holding water and it seems to me that my interlocutor is comfortable with Apple stealing/copying other people's work but when they do to Apple it's all hell breaks loose, double standards maybe?
In all fairness I know many people who love to draw on the Surface and really wanted a more precise pen type of input on the iPad; I think this was a long time coming and really necessary.
The keyboard cover thing? Sure I could agree with you on that. I actually think Surface did a better job with it especially with the adjustable kickstand but we'll see when I can actually touch and play with the iPad Pro one.
I'm a dinosaur still waiting for something to replace paper.
Maybe this is it, maybe not. What I want to do: read things, highlight, scribble notes, diagrams, outlines, sync, search, etc. Basically I want something that completely replaces paper coming out of a printer. It seems like the younger people maybe are more adapted to digital documents, but I have very strong spatial memory for paper and can find things I've written or read in paper very quickly.
Surface Pro has this, but is overkill frankly. iPad, kindle, other tablets have not been sufficiently usable to actually replace a printed or blank sheet of paper. This device may fit that use case, but it inhabits a priced point that's worse than Surface Pro. For some reason I'm waiting for something in the $200-300 price range to show up--things that are more expensive I feel like I have to protect and coddle. So, yes something like iOS definitely could work there. There are even some interesting eink devices that go after the paper replacement route. But they are also too expensive compared to Surface Pro.
Maybe this will be a big enough kick in the butt for Google to start supporting pen input in ChromeOS or Android (there are Android tablets that have pen input, but IIRC that support is plastered on top by manufacturers increasing support and integration costs significantly, so software updates don't happen).
> Maybe this will be a big enough kick in the butt for Google to start supporting pen input in ChromeOS or Android (there are Android tablets that have pen input, but IIRC that support is plastered on top by manufacturers increasing support and integration costs significantly, so software updates don't happen).
This is what I'm hoping for as well. I'd love to use a phone with pen support, but as long as it's not built into the core OS, pen support is going to come at the cost of timely OS updates. And that's a trade-off I'm not willing to make since I generally buy unlocked and tend to skip quite a few generations before upgrading.
Yeah, the Mac book is really huge within certain tech/creative circles and not in a million years would they get a windows machine (well,a few do albeit very reluctantly).
Every mac illustrator worth his salt is going to throw money at the screen to get this and I'm sure many many apps for the pen aren't far behind. Smart move by Apple
The enterprise market is more tricky... I can see some fancy plastic surgery office having iPad Pro's but when it comes to "less sexy" enterprise uses I still think Surface and Windows might be ahead
I wonder how long it'll take AstroPad (http://astropad.com) to support the Apple Pencil.
I'm an illustrator and this is definitely on my list. I am not a big fan of drawing where I'm looking any more, but Astropad + an ipad Pro will let me work in Illustrator in a cramped environment.
And maybe in a couple of years we'll finally get an Air/iPad Pro hybrid. Like the Surface, except running OSX.
haha that makes me laugh. Either a big wad of cash notes, or bags of metal change, or flicking a credit card at it like ninja stars. Even funnier would be the attempt to pay contactless by waving their NFC phone repeatedly over the screen like we used to do with magnets on CRTs before we realised the damage it did...
I have a MacBook and every time I use a Windows laptop I find the touchpad to be a complete joke and clicky clicky clicky. Even booting to Windows on my MacBook is painful as the touchpad suddenly becomes very dumb.
The stylus is interesting in that it's a total about-face for Apple. So far as I can tell, no Apple store has ever stocked an iPhone- or iPad-compatible stylus -- not the cheap capacitive ones nor even the iPad-exclusive pressure-sensitive Wacom stylus for artists, despite stocking Wacom tablets.
And you're deliberately misinterpreting that keynote. Unlike the devices that basically were on the market, you don't need a stylus to navigate the OS or use the device at all.
Apple strives with the nuances of its hardware. It's not necessarily how innovative and unique the product is, but the strength at which Apple secures the most unique hardware that sets them apart from the competition. Their touch sensors are different than everyone else's in supporting multi strength touches. They have good battery life with larger than HD displays. The device weights 1.5 lbs, which is much lighter than the surface. This is no trivial feat. The blanket statements on the device's general purpose and how it has been done before is a huge generalization and a refusal to grasp the power of Apple as a company. It hasn't been done before in the way Apple does it.
>the once innovative company is now playing catch up
Apple never did the VERY first products of a category. There was Xerox before Lisa, PDAs before Newton, mp3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad, smartwatches before the Apple Watch, etc.
The only did the first products of a category that were where at least half-thought out (instead of rushed crap), and people actually wanted to buy in droves.
Just that their "signature thing" is not coming up first with something, but coming with something that's somewhat thought out and people actually want to by. People remember them for these things: the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, iMac, etc (and IIRC Apple Watch too, did better than all competitor smartwatches combined).
What really is happening is the usual trolling that happens after every Apple event.
Apple has different priorities. They'll make tablets more functional as CPU and battery improve. There will be a conversion with the desktop, or at least low-end laptops, at some point. When they put a fan in the iPad then you can question if they've lost their way.
(And Wang beat that by several years with a 3" thick monstrosity that, IIRC, went nowhere.)
Yes, the trolling reoccurs. Key is how excited the marketplace is for which product, naysayers aside. As others note: the iPod wasn't new, but it was subjectively better than anything else out there.
It was about a foot square (or more), at least 3 inches thick, had a large handle to grip, a wired stylus, and a painfully low-res B/W LCD display. I got to handle it a few times, but saw no compelling use (the concept was great, but technology was far from there). IIRC, 3 came with a Wang minicomputer at the time, late 1980's or early 1990's.
I've tried to find a picture of it several times since, but nothing yet.
Agreed. Apple and MS have completely different strategies. Apple chose to go the multiple OS route. MS is going with one OS to rule them all. (Also Apple ultimately wants to sell complete gadgets, whereas MS wants to sell software and services)
Yes, they are playing catch up in the cover keyboard and stylus categories. However, they are still dominating mobile, revamping their TV line, and growing in a shrinking PC market. Oh and also they just released a pretty successful watch.
Just saying, I think Apple is still a pretty innovative company.
Person-hours of actual use; app purchase & use; web use; user satisfaction.
For example, if you're developing a business website, iOS dominates the market, because optimizing for Android is nigh impossible, and iOS users have more money, and spend more money (on average, your market segment may differ, mine does).
Or, if you're considering making an app, iOS dominates the market, because Android users don't like using apps, much less paying for them.
Apple is dominating the high end mobile market, where profits and the most desired customers are. (People who pay for apps and spend money within apps)
The "free with contract" or sub $400 market is a cut throat race to the bottom between Samsung and Xiaomi. Apple chooses not to enter that race (despite several journalists claiming they NEED a cheap phone to survive).
Yes,92% of industry profits is domination in my book. Without sustainable profits, marketshare is meaningless. Only profitable players are Samsung and Apple.
They dominate the profits -- and the people that actuall do anything "smart" (most web use in the US for example, is from iOS devices, despite Android devices being far more percentage-wise).
Androids huge sales are mostly low end of the market -- people who don't care about smartphones or computers, and just get whats cheaper with a 2 year contract.
> most web use in the US for example, is from iOS devices
Any proof?
Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
I realize that sites vary by demographics, so I'm curious if you're just making this statement up, using your own site's stats, or found something that actually backs this up on the wider web.
The latter is about Android "beating" iOs in web usage for the first time -- but in fact usage/users ratio is much higher in iOS, so you get more web usage from far fewer users.
>Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
Depends if it attracts the demographic who would opt for cheaper Android phones.
My numbers are from several generic articles (by ad companies, sites etc) on the respective platforms web use.
But most mobile web browsing worldwide is from Android devices, and iOS's share of the mobile device market in the US is much larger than in most other countries (not quite parity, but Android's lead is much smaller).
Apple does reap the lion's share of profit from smartphone sales, but they don't dominate smartphone use.
>But most mobile web browsing worldwide is from Android devices
Of course it is -- there are way more of those Android units.
But I wanted to point which users are more active, not mere volume. Even in the US Android could have more volume, but iOS users still generate far more traffic (not as total: as traffic per head).
If the 10% or 5% iOS users in a country generate the 20% or 30% of web traffic, then they are much more heavier tech/web users than the others.
The only reason why they are growing is because they have a much smaller market share. Which is why Tim Cook only revealed relative numbers: Apple is falling behind a bit more every year in absolute numbers.
That doesn't even make sense; the only way they could be growing in relative market share but shrinking in absolute numbers is if the market is shrinking, and I'm pretty sure it's not.
If you have 1% market share and you grow to 2%, you have doubled your market share. That's the angle that Cook used.
If the market leader has 90% market share and they grow to 95%, they have grown a lot less than you relatively (so the minor player can claim they have grown the most) but they now own a bigger piece of the pie than they used to.
This is why you should always be skeptical of anyone who uses relative numbers (growth) instead of absolute ones: the reality is probably that they have lost market share.
Which is what we have seen Apple do compared to Android these past three years.
You will notice that the early keynotes right after the iPhone and iPad came out were showing absolute numbers in shipments and dollars, and now, they just stick to percents and vague claims ("We're growing the fastest").
I think they simply worded that poorly. Apple could be growing at higher Y/y %, but still be loosing ground in terms of actual units being sold depending on overall market growth.
For example, below appears to be the report Cook used for his "+14% vs -0.4%" slide, which at best, is very misleading.
"In the worldwide mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), vendors shipped 464.6 million units, down -0.4% from the 466.3 million units shipped 2Q14.[1]"
Truth is, the smartphone market actually GREW by 11.6% (Q2 2014:302.1m => Q2 2015:337.2m).
Depends on your interpretation of "behind in absolute numbers". A toy example:
1980: Apple has 10% of a 100,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 90,000,000.
1981: Apple has 15% of a 200,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 170,000,000. What happened was that while Apple's market share grew, it grew much slower than the market itself.
I guess you might want to look at the world that way; for example, if you wanted to know how difficult it would be to convince the entire market to switch to your product. But I tend to agree that market share would seem to be more useful for most purposes.
Check out the sales figures [0]. Consumers didn't begin to adopt the iPod in detectable numbers until the third generation (when it got USB syncing), and it didn't really take off until the fourth (full USB connectivity, various other improvements.)
Yup. It was. And no USB either, also not usable with Windows, not usable without Firewire. It was utterly useless for 99% of people out there - Rob Malda was right, despite all the retconning. It took years and several hardware generations to actually fix all these problems...
Only up to Opera 12, when they suddenly decided to become a theme creator for Chromium and chucked all their decent code and features in the bin, sadly.
It began a while ago, it is just now more apparent because the level of innovation in each successive generation has become so small. I wonder if we will look back at the last 8 years as Apple's golden years, because it is really feeling like their best is now behind them. The level of innovation that has created their most loyal of fans and zealots no longer exists, and there is so much less to indoctrinate the next generation. Newcomers no longer think that Apple is a head and shoulders above the rest innovator and Apple is built on the loyalty created by being different.
Given it's one of the largest companies in the world, they deserve some slack.
Their story against Microsoft over the last decade has been nothing short but astonishing. No one could have predicted the dominance they have now in year 2000 or even 2005.
In what way is the Surface Pro 3 (which is really the only currently available competition) boring? I'd say it is the most innovative product in the tablet space in the last 4 years. Really they are trying to catch up to the only real competition they have in the space.
Plus, Apple has been playing catch up for a while now. I can't remember precisely which iOS release it was (I believe iOS 7) but the release was pretty much catching up with essential features already present in Android.
I don't think it's particularly hard to see the distinction between "do whatever you feel like, but someone will write down that you did" and "no, you can't do that. You'll do what we tell you to do".
And if "do whatever you feel like, but someone will write down that you did" is too much, one can readily install a GNU/Linux distro on a Surface. You very likely won't be able to do the same on any iOS device, even the iPad "Pro".
They sure copy, but so did others too all the time.
Apples move with the pencil is more targeted at businesses, hospitals and such. Win the users at home first, convert them easily at work later, at a higher price with a better margin.
Do you mean 10 bits per channel? (i.e. 30-bit RGB.) The 10" retina iPads have routinely scored very well as 24-bit displays (not the best there are, but certainly they seem acceptable to a lot of professional photographers).
It is so crazy how this is the PC wars all over again. Apple comes out of the gate with huge marketshare, begins to lose it due to their insufferable snobbery, panics and tries to copy everyone without alienating their base of insufferable snobs and with frilly copies that only the kool-aid drinkers fall for, and continues its descent into irrelevance. Will Samsung have to save Apple from extinction in 10 years in order to keep the DOJ off its back? Stay tuned.
I know what you mean, my MacBook is so irrelevant I want to throw it in the bin. I mean, it literally has ZERO use at all......................... right?
I don't think it's accurate to say Surface Pro presaged the iPad Pro by three years. Surface Pro was a basically different vision (not to mention a severely compromised device). A laptop without a keyboard but with a fan and short battery life. A software stack that requires you to go into the desktop to access non-trivial settings.
The iPad Pro is a big iPad. No x86, no fan, touch-based software stack, etc. It's not a computer, it doesn't have USB ports, it can't run desktop software. You can't plug it into a dock hook use it as a desktop machine.[1] On purpose. It's a very different point in the design space.
[1] Some people may consider the iPad Pro to be a Surface 3 with less features. And maybe it is depending on what you want from it. My take is that I've got a quad-core laptop with 16GB of RAM as my workhorse. I don't want a compromise device that's part tablet and part ULV laptop. I want a companion device with a big screen that I can mark up PDFs on. I want a bigger iPad, not a laptop with a detachable keyboard.
You're spot on. The fact that they moved all settings to one place and forced applications to do the same means a consistent feel - this is something that Windows has not got; each app may have options, preferences, hidden registry settings that can be tweaked, config files that can be tweaked, the system has Control Panel, MMC and snap-ins for other settings (or Computer Management) and then a new series of settings interfaces for Windows 8 and 10; settings can be accessed via multiple entry points (do I join a wifi network using the charm, the icon on the taskbar, control panel or something else???)
OSX has this to some extent with icons in the menu bar and changes in menu options when you press Alt, but on the iPad they were VERY wise to keep it in one place and to market the device as NOT a PC or workstation.
> Some people may consider the iPad Pro to be a Surface 3 with less features.
I think that's possibly because that's what a lot of people seemed to be wanting / hoping for, from this announcement. And it's not what Apple was looking to deliver - which is fine.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between the stylus which Jobs was referring to then vs. the ones we have now.
Nobody wants to use the equivalent of a thick toothpick to point at things on the screen, like we did with old Windows Mobile and Palm devices. (Just dialing a phone number required pulling the stylus out of its sleeve.) Being able to just poke at things with your fingertip, drag, gesture, etc. are all far superior methods of interaction. However, for precise operations, such as drawing or handwriting, it's a very different tool.
The surface pro didn't do anything new at all. It was windows for tablets with decent industrial design (great design aside from the keyboards). It's not like Apple hadn't dicked around with keyboard covers et al since back in the Newton days. This isn't a question of who did hardware feature X first but who did user feature Y right. The jury is out but when I went to a Microsoft store ready to buy a maxed out surface pro, five minutes with the keyboard and microsoft's horrible UI designs turned me off. (I see in the MS office demo that they've removed some cruft but still don't design decent touch UIs. )
The ground work for Surface Pro was Windows 8, so yes, Microsoft did hybrid OS, and Surface Pro was their "Hero" device. The touch/type cover was innovative but annoying. Surface Pro (with Windows 8+) like it or not is a ground-breaking device.
Yep I loved the idea of the surface; tried to use it to replace my mb air for but ended up returning it because the ecosystem was terrible and the keyboard was annoying.
I have a Surface Pro. I'm generally pretty happy with it.
But the selection of programs that are comfortable to use with the touchscreen is very small. In my case, pretty much web browsing, email, Netflix, and OneNote.
For typical programs, you'll either be fat-fingering buttons that are too small or you'll be pulling out the stylus frequently. The tablet experience does not compare well to an iPad.
'Full windows' is exactly the reason the ecosystem is terrible. The uniqueness of the Surface hardware is not matched by the software. Thus, besides a few brand-name apps, most ignore touch capability and code for regular Windows to reach a broader audience. Its a perfectly rational response to Microsoft setting the wrong context for an otherwise fine product.
Very interesting. Does the windows API have dedicated touch events? I listen for mouse down, mouse up, mouse motion (or use a timer and poll the mouse location is a button is down), drag and drop events etc. but I suspect on a touchscreen device all of the touch events are just handed to the system as mouse events.
I wouldn't like to think how MFC handles pinch to zoom, for example.
haha... so good. I think the features at a high level are probably on par with the surface. The only difference is one of them is more or less limited in terms of functionality depending on how you look at it.
Its funny, at the presentation they mentioned the cover and how the magnets transfer input from the keyboard to the computer as if it was a revolutionary idea. Then again, it is Apple. They can come out with a bottle water product and swoon the masses.
It is interesting comparing Microsoft and Apple's convertible tablet strategy. Microsoft's devices use the full OS and are basically laptops first and tablets second while Apple is doing the opposite. If this is truly designed to be "Pro" as in enterprise , I think Microsoft's strategy is going to lead to more productive and therefore better enterprise devices.
EDIT: And after the price is revealed the scales tip a little more in Microsoft's favor. The entry level iPad Pro is the same price as a Surface Pro 3, but has half the disk space and doesn't include the stylus.
The risk with Microsoft's approach is that companies will think "our Windows app runs fine on Surface" and invest little on making their application work great on Surface because they form a small part of the market.
The risk with Apple's approach is that companies will think "it's too much work to make a custom UI for such a small market".
I guess time will tell who wins this. Possibly, things will go like they went with Mac OS and Windows: some companies decided to build applications for the Mac, thus forcing others out of the market, and making it easier for them to develop Windows versions. Another possibility is that the way larger market in 2015 vs 1985 and the existence of many existing iOS apps makes more companies decide that developing a custom UI for iPad Pro is worth the effort.
I think Apple will have a very hard time convincing companies to port / produce complex apps that come with a lifetime of free updates. Mac App store has failed pretty objectively at applying iOS conventions to serious software.
If those business apps [1] take off, IBM gains the solution and the customer, while Apple gains valuable beachhead front property in the war on Microsoft's soil.
The iPad Pro, Pencil, new connector, not to mention force-touch and split screen have a likelyhood of sealing the deal.
Maybe, but what surprises me every time I browse the App Store is the amount of expensive apps I encounter. There are many textbooks that have made the jump to iPad while keeping prices that are far above $10.
Maybe that is just a web site in an app with limited interactivity, but there definitely seems to be competition in that market. The disadvantage of free updates in such markets may be more than balanced by the advantage of very limited ability to resell apps (the easiest way I know to resell apps is to create separate iTunes accounts for each app, and let te buyer set a new password for that account. That becomes impractical soon, of you have tens of apps)
That 3D knee visualization, to me, seems a clear indication of that.
It's interesting to note that the Surface 3 diverges from the Surface 2 and RT in that it has an x86 processor. I think this may be a concession that bringing developers over to write WinRT applications is an uphill battle, and the device marketplace is not going to stand still and wait for that to happen.
"Our Windows app runs fine on Surface" is a better story than "Our Windows app doesn't run on Surface at all".
But the risk is that most Surface owners will attach a keyboard and a mouse to it, turning it into a nice laptop. That decreases demand for tablet apps, and from there to fewer tablet apps, more users who buy keyboards, etc.
File Systems is also a complexity that confuses a lot of non-technical people, which is why Apple tries to hide that one even exists on iOS - Where can I find the latest document I was working on? Just open the app you created it with, as a bonus you'll get transparent syncing across all your devices.
Syncing and Backup are tedial tasks most people wouldn't do if they needed to do it manually or configure an external program / service to do it.
It's one thing to have a persistent object store instead of a file system (as the Newton did). It's wholly another to have a file system at the core of your OS but just pretend it doesn't exist. That's a regressive obfuscation, not encapsulation.
Apple's primary focus is on UX simplicity and Customers couldn't care less how it's implemented behind the scenes, they just want to get stuff done, find the Word document they were working on or see the Photo or Video they just took.
The less Customers have to know about how technology works the happier they are, and the more successful Apple is.
You're right that as a matter of routine, having recent documents worked with in an app come up on opening it (and an easy visual list of all the files the app has touched) is a great interaction pattern.
That says nothing about whether or not there should be some kind of file browser, or other means for users to become aware and able to interact with files outside an app.
Particularly because at some point, single-app workflows hit their limits, and getting stuff done either becomes a matter of using multiple apps or waiting for an app to grow the new feature you need (the latter of which is not just getting stuff done).
And I'm not just talking about Power Users -- I've seen this happen with my mom (proverbial disinterested computer user), who generally is quite happy to be completely unaware of the file system, but still periodically runs into corner cases where she needs to do something no single app will let her do (usually audio-file related).
This all reminds me of the discussion around hiding URLs in browsers:
For decades, we had a system where people who didn't care to pay any attention to URL bars could ignore them, and people who were incidentally curious could learn useful things by paying attention, people who needed to discover them could, and people found them regularly useful had them at the ready.
Then somebody who got caught up in a shallow idea of simplicity that neglects utility and discoverability decided they'd make a UX change that was hostile to all of latter two groups. After all... the first group doesn't care, they just want to navigate the web and get stuff done.
The right principle here is to make the simple case easy and obvious, and the more complex case discoverably possible.
No the key part is what target audience and use-cases are they optimizing for with each device.
Do they want to create an experience that's so simple to use that they're enjoyed by both kids and non-technical grand parents, that's optimized for the most common everyday tasks, e.g browsing the web, shopping, reading news, books, taking photos, finding driving directions, writing emails, etc.
Or do they want to offer a full Desktop OS that's suitable for everyone including devs and power users lets them run server software, multiple windows, anti virus software, network filesystems, development IDE's that enables them to build iOS Apps, etc. For those users they offer OSX on macbooks and iMac's and choose not to complicate their UX on their most popular computing platform - that's quickly becoming most of their Customers primary computing platform.
It's Apple's felicitous focus on simplicity and Customer use-cases that's what's made them the most successful company in the world.
I like how "multiple windows" is suddenly considered an advanced feature.
You're confusing simplicity with ease of use. Adding a layer of indirection over the intrinsic file system is not simple, and even ease of use is debatable, since it creates an impedance mismatch by definition.
Nor is there any reason to consider this a zero-sum game. Having advanced features does not deprive the common user of their comfort, as they will simply not make use of them.
I'm of course not the target audience for iPads, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they're anything but a toy. It takes something much more serious for a new computer generation to usurp its predecessor, and if mobile device manufacturers continue in this fashion, they might win only a technicality - market share. As opposed to the usual test of whether a platform is able to bootstrap its own system software, which iOS and Android emphatically cannot.
> I'm of course not the target audience for iPads, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they're anything but a toy.
iPads have been getting a lot of productivity improvements lately, however many have decided they're just a toy and in doing so have been rather blind to their advance. To just name one, extensions allow inter-app handoff and are quite powerful at this point and well received by iOS devs and power users. Extensions solve the document transfer use case discussed in this subthread, and they don't invoke cognitive load around filesystems. I'm hoping we can use 3d Touch to trigger them from the share button to further improve their efficiency. But that's cool, lets all keep dragging files around with a mouse or typing in terminal and wait where did I save that file I was just working on again?
Another way to think about this is with iOS, Apple is going down the list from most common to least common use cases for end users, whereas over the last several decades with CLI and then WIMP interfaces, traditional PC devs have been going up the list of use cases from most dev-oriented to most end user. Nothing wrong with the results of the latter for development, but it turns out there's a lot more end users than there are devs, and an exposed filesystem is a sacred cow of that the latter approach that can be solved in more than one way for the end user.
> It takes something much more serious for a new computer generation to usurp its predecessor
Mainframe guys said the exact same thing about minicomputers.
But that's cool, lets all keep dragging files around with a mouse or typing in terminal and wait where did I save that file I was just working on again?
How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one.
Mainframe guys said the exact same thing about minicomputers.
And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting.
> How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one.
Not innate to having an hfs, just innate to using one. Of course you could drag files around with your finger, or tap into subfolders, or use the keyboard, but those are not taking advantage of strengths of the platform. Meanwhile share sheet extensions are well suited to the modern paradigm of touch, social, and cloud, where the target of a file may or may not be a local filesystem or even an app in its strictest sense. This interface represents an alternative to finding files in folders when working between apps, which is where my comparison was directed.
Maybe I misunderstood and you're arguing that iOS doesn't have a hierarchical file system, but thats opposite of what you were complaining about (obfuscated file systems) earlier in this thread. lmk.
> And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting.
Minicomputers were still considered 'less serious' than the mainframes long after they stopped being terminals, and they were capable of far less. Unless I misunderstood and you're arguing that iPads have not yet reached some modern equivalence to self-hosting... and that equivalence must involve an exposed file system... because it must be able to bootstrap its own operating system...? Genuinely confused by this rebuttal, but open to hearing your ideas.
No I'm not confusing simplicity with ease of use, I'm referring to the simplicity from the users perspective (i.e. what matters most) which is the conceptual and cognitive overhead required for them to know to accomplish what they want to do. In the same way a GUI Desktop is simpler and more comfortable to use for most people than DOS or a single Google search box or voice input are simple enough for anyone to use despite the complexity they encapsulate.
Apple starts from the user experience first and works their way back to the technology. Technology is just an obstacle in order for them to be able to accomplish their desired experiences, it's not something they put front-and-center or use it to limit or influence how and what features are implemented.
Kids can use an iPad without ever needing to know what a File System is, there is no impedance mismatch to them, they're not spending their time thinking about how their multi-layered video that just created is physically stored and synced. They just use an App for a while, switch to other apps, then re-open their app when they want to continue working on it.
Exposing internals like file-system layout means the OS is no longer managing the files, they need to cater for manipulations whilst still supporting transparent cloud backups and syncing, they need to design a completely different UI for power users with lots of features all working with multi-touch yet still have the features power users expect from a Desktop OS, e.g. downloads to be in a central "Downloads" folder instead of being grouped and isolated in the App that downloaded them.
You've at least acknowledged you're not the iPad's primary audience but labelling it as just a toy means you've still failed to realize its appeal. Smart Phones and tablets are becoming the primary computing platform because they empower users to be able to do more, Apps are optimized around use-cases and tasks making them much easier and more enjoyable to use than Desktop software.
I have a lot of anecdotal evidence on how the iPad is the only computing device my parents have ever enjoyed, how after so many years they still can't conceptualize how files and folders are structured, where their documents are saved, how full-screen windows and pop dialogs makes them think their PC is broken.
Even myself as a power user I find lots of apps that are much better on an iPad, inc. more advanced tasks like browsing and comparing real-estate is so much faster and effortless. There's also tasks that you just can't do on a PC or are frustrating enough that you wouldn't bother with, e.g. Making phone or video calls, taking and sending photos, Live Directions and Traffic, paying for coffee, even core tasks like browsing photos, Facebook or the Internet are generally more enjoyable on an iPad.
But ultimately anecdotal evidence is useless as everyone can provide their own to contradict them, the best indicator we have to go with is Sales and by this measure Apple's recent iOS strategy is a lot more fruitful then their decades old Desktop OS strategy - they have no reason to make iPad's more like OSX - they're reaching and empowering more people then they ever have, they're making the technology a transparent implementation detail so much so that iPads are often referred to as a magical pieces of glass.
Don't iOS require some additional software to copy over files. When the easiest and simplest way is just drag and drop which is available for Android users.
If you go by sales wouldn't then Android figures indicate that their approach was better?
> Don't iOS require some additional software to copy over files. When the easiest and simplest way is just drag and drop which is available for Android users.
Are your saying most android devices act like USB cards? I decided to test one of mine and it didn't show up so I don't quite know what you mean by that.
> If you go by sales wouldn't then Android figures indicate that their approach was better?
And if you go by profits it looks like Apple is better. Funny how that works out.
Yes most android devices act like that. I see my device as a drive in the system. Drag and Drop nothing is more simpler then that.
Op had mentioned "Apple starts from the user experience" which users prefer hence they have great sales. I questioned since Android has far better sales. I don't know what profits have to do with user experience. If users preferred Apple approach should it not then have more sales?
Android has more sales in the same way free apps have more sales than paid Apps. Apple only targets the high end which is why they reap a majority of the profits whilst most Android manufacturers can't even sell enough devices to cover costs, despite using a free OS they never had to sink R&D into.
As for UX I didn't think it could ever be argued that Android was even comparable to iOS, you can look at the sat ranking for how well iOS is received, or even browser market share where the majority of mobile web is still from iOS - which is a good indicator on how much devices are being used for non-phone features, despite having fewer devices in the wild.
So changing the parameters again? Apple has good sales in countries which have subsidies. If majority are buying at full price i would have agreed with you. But the subsidized prices equal to mid-budget mobiles where i live India(Buyers here actually pay the high end amount for Apple). If android was loss making those companies would have quit already.
In my opninion Material is way better then iOS.
" majority of mobile web " - statcounter, netshare already put chrome/android ahead!
Anyway the point was Apple UI is not always intuitive. I even didn't know that toolbar icons can be long pressed on my mac-pro for a long time!
And drag and drop is the simplest/intuitive way to copy files from medium to another which iOS totally messed it up.
> No the key part is what target audience and use-cases are they optimizing for with each device.
What if, as in the URL example I gave, there are multiple overlapping target audiences?
Of course you optimize the common case. The question is whether in the process you're going to decide to ignore or eliminate discoverability in less common cases. Don't use "audience" as an excuse to be lazy about them.
And both mobile and desktop are general computing devices with a wide range of abilities. Deciding mobile is the PlaySkool version is itself an oversimplification.
> Apple's felicitous focus on simplicity and Customer use-cases that's what's made them the most successful company in the world
One can learn a lot from their success. It hasn't them perfect. They still make some poor or even user-hostile decisions.
Their success does, however, seem to render some people less inclined to think critically about their choices.
You know, I've heard this argument on customers not caring about this or that oversimplification or about this or that restriction or about customizations or about poor grandmas and so forth.
But you know, numbers don't lie. iOS is not the dominant design. And guess what I have on my Android? A file manager, going hand in hand with uTorrent and VLC. And guess how I'm copying music on my phone? It's not through iTunes, thank god for that.
That said the iPad Pro is a device that intrigues me, since with the stylus and the keyboard if might actually be more useful than a paperstand.
And where are you getting the stat? Years ago maybe not these days. The newer $100 mobiles sometimes are way better then say 200-300 mobiles. And btw messaging would be a app. Nobody uses sms where i live. All are on whatsapp.
Remember - the discussion is about what platform is dominant. The fact that messaging is implemented an app doesn't change that. New developments occur on iOS first for a reason.
The numbers don't lie, but you are focusing on the wrong one. Loss making businesses by cannot be dominant. Samsung is the only profitable Android maker and it is collapsing while Apple continues to grow.
If its loss making then why are companies continuously releasing new Android mobiles. They should have shut shop. Samsung isn't even dominant where i live. There are many local brands releasing one Android mobile over another.
Anyway it seems useless continuing this. I suppose you would come back some other Apple this and that line. I just wanted to know where you got the stat. Since i am not getting any references i assume you made it up.
The functionality is available within the context of the feature you're using. If it's a Word document you open the document, click the share icon and click "Send Attachment". Apple's Pages also has a Share icon that even lets you easily convert to Word, PDF, or ePub format before sending.
For attaching whilst composing an email in Gmail (what I use) there's an "Attach" icon that lets you attach photos or files from Google Drive. Whilst Apple's Mail lets you click the cursor on where you want to add the Photo/Video.
This works great until it doesn't. Sometimes when you try using the "Share" or "Open In..." buttons, the medium you want to use is not an option. If that's the case, there is no way to manually change it. For example: we have guys who use iPads instead of PCs. When we were first implementing this, we discovered that even though they had Excel for iPad installed, you couldn't open an Excel document attached to an email in Excel. The Open In... dialogue didn't offer Excel as an option. I ended up just using Numbers instead, which brought its own problems (like not fully supporting the .xlsx format).
If the feature was considered important enough to complicate the UI there'd be an option or optimized App for the task, otherwise no-one thought it was important or cared enough to support it.
Right, Apple decided it wasn't important so that means it isn't important?
Being on an e-mail thread where someone says "hey, can you e-mail over that spreadsheet?" is hardly rare. Things like this are the reason why the iPad has not been a huge success as a productivity tool.
> Right, Apple decided it wasn't important so that means it isn't important?
I was referring to all Mail Apps, I don't even use Apple Mail, I use Gmail.
Yes Apple decides what's important in their App, Google decides what's important in theirs, Everyone else decides...
> Being on an e-mail thread where someone says "hey, can you e-mail over that spreadsheet?" is hardly rare.
You can still send spreadsheet attachments, open said Spread sheet, hit share attachment, Done. Go back to playing games.
> iPad has not been a huge success as a productivity tool.
So catering for a smaller class of enterprise and power users should be the holy metric Apple should be catering for?
Apple has OSX for power users, iOS for everyone else. That strategy seems to be working quite well for them.
In iOS9 you tap on a blank area of the message then select 'add attachment' to browse for the file. It supports iCloud Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, and presumably any other apps that support the cloud storage APIs introduced last year in iOS8. Alternatively you can use the traditional method of exporting a file from an app into Mail.
Even better - you're on a job website that wants your CV. How do you upload the file using the HTML forms interface?
On iPad it just DISAPPEARS. You can't upload a file.
That's why every job company has their own app harvesting your data, and it requires scores of bulky apps to get around the simple HTML form omission. Insane.
at the cost of interoperability. It's hard to impossible to transfer doc from app A to app B. You don't have a work flow or tool chain, you just have one mega app to do it all.
The whole OS file system yes. But for most non technical people the desktop would be the file system. They usually created folders after folders. Those are very easy to learn and understand.
Do you know what happens if you let people see their files? They try to edit them. Do you want people to be able to edit their files? Yeah... I thought so.
I know you're being sarcastic, but yes, some people do edit their files. They see that folder that says System32 and start re-organizing the files within, and then feel like computers are scary and difficult when things break.
This a million times. Apple is just slowly re-inventing the Desktop OS (hey look multi-tasking, a keyboard, etc) while MS went full into a hybrid OS over all its lines that can adapt to whatever hardware its installed on. For all the grief MS got for Windows 8, the move it made was ultimately the right one and builds the proper foundation they need for the future. As side note, lets recall about three or four years ago that we were reading, and agreeing with, articles predicting the death of the MS, at the very least, if not WIMP computing in general. Now we're sitting here with Windows 10, Surface, etc. MS did what it needed to do to stop its fall into irrelevancy.
I can't imagine shelling out near a $1,000+ for this thing (lets price in the keyboard and other accessories) when I can get a proper Macbook or Surface Pro, both which are much more capable. I imagine this will become the next hot executive toy (I need my twitter and my exchange mail up at the same time, nerds!). It'll sell in predictable low numbers and then one day mysteriously disappear from the Apple webpage with no fanfare.
I feel Apple has painted itself in a corner here. It never bonded OSX and iOS and carefully made them separate products. This probably made sense 5-6 years ago, but unified devices are now practical and affordable. I suspect Apple has a unified OS ready to go soon and is just buying time with this "Pro" to seem competitive. I can't imagine the status quo lasting. What exactly does a mobile OS get me, especially when it needs hardware and RAM on the level of a desktop OS not too long ago? Trying to "keep it simple" is what got Nokia and Blackberry killed. I fear that this industry is destined to just re-invent the desktop, but with sexier devices, in the end.
I'm not one to underestimate Apple, but the past couple years have been underwhelming. Even their much hyped watch is a fairly milquetoast design with a poor value proposition. Or the mobile game has simply matured and there are no more big ideas in this space. Are we at the "gimmicks and minor refinements" stage of this technology?
I agree with the fact the the windows10/surface idea is the best for my use and purposes but... I would not call it a success, at least not commercially. The surfaces aren't selling so well atm, even after already 3 iterations.
Pretty sure that was the parent's point. But the short-term results may not be what is relevant. Plenty of good decisions were lambasted in the short-term because consumers aren't always the best judge of what will happen down the line. People overrate what will happen in 1 year and underrate what will happen in 5.
Surface Pro 3 has a fan, this doesn't. That's a big difference that I would pay a bit more for (I actually went with a surface 3 just for this reason). The screen is also higher res, I'm guessing the unit is lighter also. Looks like it might be time for a surface pro 4 though, so let's see.
I must say I sat opposite someone on the train the other week and thought "what is that noise?". It turned out to be his Surface Pro. I'm not sure whether he was doing anything particularly intensive or just checking email, but the fact that it was audible above the typical noise of a train put me off ever wanting to buy one. Imagine trying to read or watch a movie in bed with that whirring going on!
I'm done with fans in tablets. Surface 3's Intel X is ok, though performance is just on par with the A8 (it falls behind in many benchmarks, but it's good enough for me).
I wonder if Apple will update the iPad air with 3d touch and stylus capabilities?
Out of the box, a Surface Pro 3 definitely does not spin up the fan just checking email, unless you're checking email with Chrome. Gmail on Chrome ended up being more resource intensive than Office or Visual Studio on my SP3.
Keep in mind that Microsoft spent 2 generations before converging on the current strategy: 'non-Pro' Surfaces 1 and 2 were ARM-powered Windows RT devices that could only run Windows Store apps (similar to iPad). When noone seemed to want that, Microsoft went out and made 'non-Pro' Surface 3 just a cheaper, slimmer, lower-powered device, running the same version of Windows as its bigger sibling; also non-Pro was released after the Pro and just after the newest Intel Atom chip: http://ark.intel.com/products/85475/Intel-Atom-x7-Z8700-Proc...
I actually expected the iPad Pro to support OS X apps; maybe via being powered by a new Apple Ax frankenchip that runs iOS ARM as well as x86 code (another payoff from the investment to custom chip design) and/or by requiring to recompile with the latest XCode for the App Store (a payoff from the long investment in LLVM).
None of that really matters though. It's all about the applications. If you need to run Windows software, buy a Windows machine. If the applications you depend on require iOS, buy an iPad.
Other non-software features (like battery life and weight) matter as well.
If you need to run Windows software, buy a Windows machine. If the applications you depend on require iOS, buy an iPad.
The Surface Pro and iPad Pro is where you'll see the whole "app gap" story inverted. The Surface will have "all the apps" (apps in this case meaning all existing Win32 applications and Enterprise software) and iOS trying to play catch up through partnerships like their one with IBM.
lol not going to happen. Did you see Microsoft on stage? MS can't really survive long term without iOS right now and they now it. Very soon iOS apps will match and/or exceed most desktop apps.
A surprising number of them actually. Depends on the industry but the medical industry in particular makes heavy use of iOS. I'm not saying Microsoft is going to disappear tomorrow but I think it's pretty clear that iOS is trending upwards will windows growth has flatlined and is shrinking in certain markets.
Also I'd actually argue that a ton of iOS apps are better than the desktop equivalents. Touch screen is a new paradigm that is taking us a while to truly master IMO. Also the app store has only been out 7 years so it hasn't been 10. It launched July 2008.
Ok. Easier to build for? In a business environment that's running all Windows servers and workstations? I don't know any small or medium sized businesses that employ iOS devs in-house...
You need Macs to build iOS software. Meanwhile, you can find Visual Studio already being employed in most business IT shops to build custom desktop and web software. I can't remember the last time I saw a job ad for an iOS developer that wasn't for a one-off gig or a mobile apps shop (or a marketing agency).
I've found that most servers in business environments are Linux-based, not Windows-based. It's significantly cheaper to spin up CentOS licenses for cost centers.
Business environment is not Windows servers and workstations anymore. It's web apps, services and APIs. If it all Windows & MS stack, you better be worried.
iPad also has the advantage of being sexy these days even to more old fashioned types. See the push to use them in 1:1 programs in high schools, even though the amount of writing/typing involved in most high school classes would seem to recommend something with a good keyboard...
If you're building your own software why pick one or the other when you can just build a web app and call it a day? When you're building a new app from scratch for your company why on earth would you go native unless you absolutely had to?
I had an insurance adjuster at my house to evaluate hail damage earlier this year and he did everything on an iPad. My doctor uses an iPad for Medscape (? not sure if that's right) and some other mobile point of care app. My mother in law is a real estate agent and her office uses iPads for everything.
There's a ton of them and it's a very hot area right now. It's a great time to be an iOS developer.
It's worth noting that some (probably most) of these aren't iOS exclusives; I've had Medscape on quite a few of my Android devices over the last couple years, for example.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro is basically the Android version of the new Apple device. I own one, albeit not for enterprise purposes, and it's not very well executed. I could never imagine using such a stripped down interface as my primary work device. People use Surfaces here all the time for whatever that's worth, it's a valid device choice option.
I have a Note 2014 edition and like you, I feel it is clunky by comparison.
I really wanted to love it but lame battery life in comparison to a three-year old iPad3 and the inability of S Note to ignore my hand motions and not do zooming when I move my hand irritates me. Coupled with worse performance than the iPad3, and I have the LTE edition of the Note. I can only imagine how stuttery and slow the non-LTE edition is (which uses an 8 core chip and got rubbish performance reviews).
Using Google Maps in 3D mode gives me framerates like viewing a compressed VNC session over an SSH link on a Raspberry Pi over a 2G GSM connection. Slow.
Yet at the end of the day, the CEO will overrule the IT's multiples productivity arguments and tell them to get him an iPad Pro because it's Apple, because his Golf buddy told him today's presentation was awesome and because he is very satisfied with his iPhone.
The announcements today just make me hang my head in chagrin. I love Apple products. Both my wife and I only use Macbooks, we have multiple iPads, iPods, and a second generation Apple TV.
I look at this iPad Pro though and I see a totally useless device. For a device at that size, weight, and cost you would be better served buying an Macbook Air. If you want a tablet form factor then you would be better served buying a Surface, since at least it runs a real operating system designed for "pro" use not the closed eco system that is iOS. I "upgraded" from an iPad to a iPad mini, because I didn't want to carry around such a large device that is just a glorified eReader that I can waste time on with games. Then I "upgraded" again to a Kindle Paperwhite since it's lighter still, the battery lasts forever, I can read it in bright sunlight, and I don't get distracted and waste my time on pointless things like Doodle Jump. Everything else can run on my phone anyway which now comes in tablet sizes if that is what you want.
Then the Apple TV. My current generation Apple TV is unplugged and gathering dust while I use the Smart TV, PS4, Xbox 360 (In that order) for my on demand streaming. More and more Apple TV becomes unnecessary as what it does it build into televisions. Why Apple didn't put iTunes on Smart TVs, Roku, game systems, etc... so I could rent/purchase my videos there is beyond me; but now I (along with many others) have moved on to competitors. Almost forgot to mention; this thing doesn't even support UHD?
This comment is exactly why HN won't never understand anything about Apple announcements.
Highly technical folks, unable to get out of their technical bias, reprimanding the extremely successful decision makers of a successful company because they pretend to know the matter, while completely ignoring the real world scenarios that actually drive Apple products sales.
It is not a "technical bias", it is more your bias towards Apple. Take the last year's iPhone 6 as an example: HN members complained about small screen sizes for a long time, and it took Steve Job's death to actually make that happen, but gues what? iPhone 6 is most succesfull iPhone ever.
Apple did some innovations few years ago (original iPhone, iPad), but since then most of new features in Apple products are taken from Android an WP devices. I personally would like to see Apple's response to Lenovo Yoga 3 (convertible tablet/ultrabook) and for some time I hoped that iPad Pro will be just that. Unfortunately it isn't so the chances of me buying it just fell around 0%.
They did a lot of background work getting the OS and UIKit and developers up to speed for supporting multiple device sizes - necessary for introducing bigger screens - and I would suggest that played a large part in making the 6 successful. People weren't getting a crappy scaled experience from the apps they already knew.
This is mostly a tongue-in-cheek comment, but the broader point is that of course Apple has "innovated" since the original iPhone, iPad, iWhatever. In some big ways, and in some small ways. But so have other players in the industry. Apple has borrowed some good ideas from them, just as they have borrowed good ideas from Apple.
However saying Apple hasn't innovated since those original announcements is so hilariously ludicrous.
There's a world of difference between a demo – and an 'very limited indeed' implementation, and a flagship feature supported at a deep level by the OS.
Force touch on Android will never get anywhere until it's specifically supported by Google (who unless I'm mistaken, haven't included it in M), and the install rate is high enough to make it worthwhile. I'm sure more OEMs will include it, but individually they won't have the clout to make it go anywhere.
It's a bit like the argument around NFC. My Nexus 6 has it, but until M is released with Google Pay, it's pretty much useless. Apple waited until they had a compelling use-case, and only then included it. I would not be surprised if the use of NFC is far higher on iOS than Android.
I have NFC (Galaxy S4) and never used it to pay, still would miss it. You can easily send links or photos, I did this a while back with a friend who has a SONY Z3 and it worked flawlessly. Also I can pair my wireless headset with my phone using NFC.
I can use Google Pay in the future with my over 2 years old device. Apple users have to buy a new iPhone for that.
Huawei's version is not Force Touch, as Apple has defined it. It's a pressure sensitive display, with no haptic. It's about as precise as MotionEvent.getPressure from what I've seen (which isn't really precise if you've used that API).
Basically, they saw the Apple Watch, and kinda cribbed together a rough copy of it, and jammed it into a phone.
Shocking, I know, as Android OEM hardware hacks are always done as cohesive, full-thought implementations.
3D Touch is just a gadget, not a feature that would help Apple raise their sales. Bigger screens were such selling point, so was NFC support, so was swipe keyboard in AppStore - and all those were added by Apple only after they became popular in Android phones. Of course Apple made some improvements when adopting them, but it seems that they are using Android phone owners as their beta testers :)
> It is not a "technical bias", it is more your bias towards Apple.
Preference or bias? No random person commenting on Hacker News is obligated to be unbiased. We're allowed to have preferences still right? My preferences might be different depending on different contexts. I rarely order cocktail sauce to put on my chocolate ice cream but I also rarely order whip cream to put on my shrimp. That doesn't make me bias against cocktail sauce or whip cream.
Even taking usability into account, an argument can be made that iPad Pro is neither here nor there. Consider a simple use case: let's say iPad Pro is the sole enterprise device handed out to employees at a company. AFAIK, even a simple thing like compressing multiple files (given irrational attachment size limits won't be going away any time soon) and sending them via email will be impossible given how closed and pared down iOS really is. How will you do file management? What about specific applications (e.g. Solidworks)? They will have to be re-done for iOS, which could be a pretty hard thing for small vendors. iPad Pro and the new iOS will have to be step change over iPad Air and current iOS to be appealing as a laptop replacement. The new iOS must be so near to OS X as for the difference to be immaterial.
On the other hand, a Surface Pro is truly a replacement for a laptop as it features a full blown Windows 8 (or 10, now).
Being a sole enterprise device is not a simple use case and it has nothing to do with general usability as far as most people are concerned. Your comment is an epitome of what the post you replied to was talking about.
On the contrary, there is perhaps only one use case where iPad Pro could be a boon for users: industrial, graphic, and sundry designers, visual artists, etc. As I see it today, iPad Pro is a niche product, not a mass-market pro tablet like the ones made by PC manufacturers. Everyone else can either just continue using iPads or use full featured laptops. Contrast this with the Surface Pro.
Ignoring reality in favor of emotionally satisfying opinions doesn't count as either pragmatic or cynical. Under Tim Cook's leadership, Apple continues to break records as it remains the most valuable company in the world. What wake-up call is needed here, exactly?
Apple has made a lot of flop products. Their successful products are real killers, but there's this weird confirmation-bias-field surrounding them that makes fans forget their numerous flops.
> For a device at that size, weight, and cost you would be better served buying an Macbook Air
For a device at that size, weight, and cost you would be better served buying a Macbook Air.
Apple has dozens of devices for dozens of use cases and types of buyers. I would never use the new MacBook (not good enough specs), and most of HN thinks it's a terrible idea. But my wife loves it. She doesn't need to run a virtual machine or plug in i/o devices or use 16GB of RAM, and it helps her do what she does better than ever.
If you look at Apple keynotes through the lens of, "Will this product change my life?" you'll likely be frequently disappointed - they're building products for a wide spectrum of users. But every now and then, they'll likely absolutely nail what you need.
If you buy a Macbook Pro when you need a laptop, it doesn't matter if the Macbook Air isn't for you. Apple still wins.
I see this attitude of "I don't like this product that was never meant for my use case, therefore nobody else will want it either" a lot among tech people, and HN is no exception. Just look at yesterday's comments on the Raspberry Pi touch screen [1]. Or really, the comments on almost any large consumer-oriented product launch.
Just as often I see this "among tech people" type of attitude thrown around as if we are somehow a totally different class of people who don't think about anything outside of compilers and caching optimizations.
We have lives outside of work that also helps informs our opinions on these things.
I do all of my graphic design work on Macbook Pro. For certain tasks the mouse is well suited, for others a Wacom tablet or Wacom screen works wonders.
The tablet form factor (with a larger screen) does offer a compelling use case for drawing and other art, but in general the tools available are inferior to software available for Mac OSX and Windows. This is where the Surface makes a lot of sense since I can draw/design on the go while having access to best in class software.
I'm not a Windows user, but it is for this very reason that I keep thinking of buying a Surface; it's gotten some great reviews from other artists/designers.
I also find it discouraging that Apple has introduced their "revolutionary" new Pencil at a $100 price point, but I can't find specs anywhere, and I know I can buy the Wacom Creative Stylus 2 for less money and it has 2048 pressure level sensitivity. Without published specifications it leaves me wondering if the Apple Pencil is less product for more money.
I'm pretty pleased with the specs on this, because it's perfect for my usecase:
I currently use an ipad 4, with its 10" screen, as a second screen for my mpb retina 13. I like this setup because it's thin and relatively light so slots easily into my bag along with my macbook, and doesn't require a power socket to run, just USB. I also use the ipad for reading and a few other tasks so carrying it around has intrinsic value in addition to being a second screen.
The ipad 4 does a reasonable job, but it's a bit on the small side. This new pro form factor is, however, perfect - 12.9" and higher res than my mbp retina screen means it really can be a true second screen, with roughly identical capabilities to my main screen. I'm pretty happy about this.
Won't be upgrading just yet on account of the price, but when it drops enough, replacing my current ipad with this will be a no-brainer.
It's a little quirky - the most annoying bugs are unpredictable disconnections and occasionally screen freezes, this seems to happen mostly when my macbook locks and reopens. But these things don't happen regularly enough that it causes a major problem for me. It's a bit annoying but I can deal with it.
One thing to note for anyone considering it - it performs really well at displaying text. Things like tailing logs, or displaying docs. However, anything involving typing and using the mouse is a bit painful compared to your main screen because the lag can be tedious and uncomfortable for fast interactions. In addition, I keep the refresh rate at 30Hz when on battery to save power, which compounds this issue.
I've seen those issues as well. I it Duet more as a second display more on my win8.1 laptop, and have very strange 'disconnects' - the iPad screen just randomly goes berserk and technicolor, and I have to quit the app and restart to get it picked up. This usually happens around the same times iTunes tells me there's an update, so guessing it's related.
"since at least it runs a real operating system designed for "pro" use not the closed eco system that is iOS."
So, if a big ipad like this is a "pro" device, where does a fully functional computing device, running UNIX, that you interact with on the command line fit in ?
I'm speaking of (for instance) my mac pro running OSX.
If what we see today is for "pros", then two questions come to mind:
1. What am I ? A wizard ? A demi-god ? A great elder ?
2. Can I reasonably expect Apple to make products for wizards ? Is there any money in that ?
It's 'pro' within the segment it's in, which is the tablet segment, not the laptop or desktop segment. Just like if they come out with an iPhone with power-user features for professional/enterprise usage, it's reasonably to call it a 'pro' line within the phone segment, without necessarily implying it's a more functional device than say a fully fledged desktop called a Mac Pro. I don't really see the issue but I get what you're saying.
And it does have some of that functionality, from a large screen, type cover keyboard, stylus to multi-tasking. That's not 'pro' in all industries (e.g. in software it's not), but if you're in marketing or say one-on-one tutoring or sales, I can imagine there are professional use cases reasonably enough to call it 'pro'.
Either way I'm not really convinced, still feels like a terribly niche item, not really useful to most professionals (who'd I'd think, prefer light laptops and/or small tablets in combination with a growing presence of now ~5 inch phones and smartwatches) either. Sure it's a nice device but is it going to turn around tablet sales for Apple? I'm not convinced. I just don't see a 13 inch screen beating say the MBAs or Surface 2s of the world.
Mostly I just feel like expensive tablets are a thing of the past. Tablets kind of filled this niche role in between phones and laptops, until phones became bigger (4 years ago the iPhone was 3.5 inches, then 4 inches, then 4.7 and now the biggest is 5.5), and laptops became not necessarily much smaller (although they did, 11 and 12 inch form factors are super popular, versus the more traditional 15 and 17, or the old 12' powerbooks with huge bezels that are bigger than 15 inch macbooks today), but much, much lighter and with solid battery life and SSD ubiquity. I just feel there's no real room anymore for expensive tablets, there's still room (1) very niche uses and (2) dirt cheap tablets, plenty of room for a random 'good enough' tablet for at home to read the news that don't cost $800. I mean hell the freaking keyboard is $170, the pencil $100 and the tablet $800, obviously you want cellular, too, as a pro user, that's $1080. So now we're at $1350 for an iPad pro with a keyboard and stylus that's still sub-par to other solutions. Anyway I don't have many doubts I'll be proven wrong, they don't just build random stuff without a ton of focus group data and conversations with business users, but I'm not really seeing it right now.
Apple is moving full steam towards enterprise. All these partnerships with IBM and the like are to push iOS tablets into the corporate world.
iPad Pro is at a perfect price point and feature set for businesses. Healthcare, retail and entertainment are industries that will embrace it fully.
You can already see it in action. Go to a Tesla showroom, a boutique clothier, a Square-enabled café, etc. They are all embracing the iPad as a multi-functional device. Oh, and those aren't usually even considered "enterprise" clients.
> For a device at that size, weight, and cost you would be better served buying an Macbook Air.
Unless of course you want a 12" screen with a digitizer, then that Air is useless to you without some very expensive 3rd party hardware.
> If you want a tablet form factor then you would be better served buying a Surface [...]
The iPad pro is a tablet.
> [...] since at least it runs a real operating system designed for "pro" use not the closed eco system that is iOS.
Yeah, there's the rub. The only thing is many people don't care. Do you know why businesses bought Macs in the early 90s? To run Photoshop or Quark Xpress or Pagemaker. The workers didn't need computers, they needed things that ran Photoshop.
What happened when Photoshop couldn't keep up on the Mac since Intel was racing ahead? Many companies bought PCs to run Photoshop.
Tons and tons of people don't care about the OS. In fact the simplicity of iOS may be a boon to them. They're probably using Adobe Creative Cloud anyway.
Tablet? Light? Runs software they care about? Works well? They'll buy it.
> My current generation Apple TV is unplugged and gathering dust while I use the Smart TV, PS4, Xbox 360 (In that order) for my on demand streaming.
That's because the current Apple TV sucks. It was fine once, but it's basically been unchanged for about 5 years. They're fixing that.
I don't know about you, but the "Smart TV" stuff built into my TV is terribly slow. And I don't want to boot a full console to stream a little video. Many people don't even own game consoles.
> Why Apple didn't put iTunes on Smart TVs
See previous paragraph about smart TVs sucking. Apple has learned it's lesson (see Motorola ROKR).
> Almost forgot to mention; this thing doesn't even support UHD?
And I'm sure the 1% of the population with 4k TVs and fast enough internet connections is really sad about that.
Of course iTunes doesn't even have 4k content, but surely their box should play it right? After all it will never be updated again.
They did the same thing with 1080p support. It will come when there is more demand.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. Apple devices and laptops, but we've moved on from iTunes to Amazon. Spent thousands in iTunes, still have a small home server running it for us to access it, but every new movie, tv show, or song is now purchased on Amazon. They're available everywhere on basically every device.
We've got Rokus on the small TVs and Xbox Ones on the big ones.
They will never make a device that appeals to everybody. Nor should they try.
That Macbook Air won't serve as a graphics tablet.
The Surface Pro 3 (I have one with the i7 and 256GB) is a clunky heavy difficult to hold thing with an less than great OS experience (with either 8.1 or 10). I'd be okay with the clunky part if the OS experience was great.
Clunky is the edges of the device. I find holding it to be uncomfortable due to the relatively pointy edges. Unless I put it in a case which I don't because I have the docking station.
One that suggests that, because you personally don't love the Apple-announced product, that Apple is shit and "needs a wake up call". It's not THAT hard to see that a lot of people will like these products, and Apple will sell a shit-ton of them.
That's not asymmetry. The lovers are also not really interested in discussion and are just as prone to pollute it with blind positivity as the haters are to do so with blind negativity.
If you do not think somebody can think something's a bad idea and still be interested in "the details", I question what sort of world you live in.
You would do well to consider removing the word "haters" from your vocabulary. It's used solely by the unempathic, the childish, and the criticism-sensitive, and doesn't in any situation help.
The other replies have summed up what I meant well, but I will add that a crucial component of a cynical Apple announcement day post is to preface it with a list of the number of Apple products one has bought in order to establish oneself as an unbiased authority on Apple products.
Look back at every single Apple announcement and you'll realize Apple just takes tech that's already out in the marketplace and refines it. They never do what you expected them to do today, and never will.
You mean strips it off it's usability and charge more?
Apple "dominance" is rather endemic, eventually there will be no reason to pay the 100% - 300% markup.
Sure, the apple stores look nice, until you see what you actually get for the price
You mean like with the watch gizmo? Or the tv gizmo?
This is just overpriced toy, inferior to it's counterparts, but sure, it will sell, thanks to it's swag factor. (Outside of US of A and UK you only see apple stuff on very particular kind of people, the ones that gleefully spend 10x the money on a LV bag, just to rub it in other's faces. Having apple stuff is hip, nothing to do with any sort of usability)
I live in New Zealand, so not USA or UK. I often coffee at the local university, and sitting there surrounded by poor (but cool) students it is shocking how many of them are using Macbooks. Seriously, you hardly ever see a laptop without a huge glowing apple logo.
My girlfriend have me have already decided to get one so we can watch Iplayer and YouTube in bed. We already use an iPad but our number one complaint is its too small!
And not everyone can conveniently hang one up (I live in an apartment). Plus, you get the option of portability too. For now my wife and I just use our MacBooks.
If all you want is something with a big screen to watch videos with, there are plenty of cheaper and bigger options out there than a $700 Surface knock-off.
It depends on one's use cases. I use an iPad Air for two main tasks: 1) to sketch and "paint" (using ArtRage); and 2) to make music in various apps. For these applications, screen size trumps portability (larger canvas for art, wider screen for audio timelines and more keys on keyboards).
I don't think I'm going to upgrade anytime soon, but when I am looking for a newer tablet, the iPad Pro will tempt me.
I think Apple is primarily trying to attract artists and other creative types with the Pro. A good friend of mine is planning on giving up his Wacom and moving to an iPad Pro instead.
> For a device at that size, weight, and cost you would be better served buying an Macbook Air.
Fortunately, the Macbook Air still exists, so you can buy that. I wouldn't personally really have a use for this thing either, but I'm sure some people would.
I agree, so much useless stuff here. Long gone are the days when Apple produced powerful and exciting new Macs. Now they are catching up and behind... I think my next computer will be a PC again.
What new features would you like though? I can't think of anything I am missing on modern OSes and devices. (Until someone releases something that I use every day of course...)
I would agree with the sibling comment here - the PC market isn't that great at the moment
> It’s right out of the Steve Jobs handbook: something you don’t offer is a
> terrible idea, until you offer it yourself, at which point you explain why your
> solution is the first to get it right.
If you think a feature is a terrible idea then you shouldn't offer it. And if the technology or context changes sufficiently for you to change your mind then you should start offering it. This is just good product design. But I guess if you word it that way then you cant heavily imply that Jobs was a liar.
I didn't post that to suggest that Apple is right or wrong.
There are all sorts of reasons not to offer a particular feature or product at time X, and then subsequently offer what appears to be that exact thing at time Y.
Not to mention that the feature or product at time Y might be significantly different or better than the compromise you might have cobbled together at time X.
The comment simply refers to the black-and-white way in which Steve used to frame these things. IIRC, he said many of the same things about Intel chips, keyboard shortcuts, expandable RAM, and so forth.
Case in point, self-driving cars. No one's offering that right now, because they all believe it sucks (at this point). But that doesn't mean that when they do offer it that it will be a bad idea.
The Surface Pro has been doing stylus input right, in combination with capacitive multi-touch, for 3 years. The problem with the "we don't want to do that, it's terrible ... let's do that, we figured out how to do it right" turnaround is that there's a period in the middle where there's an unreasonable almost religious resistance to doing that thing. Which just keeps progress in check. For example, the iPad mini, which pretty much waited until Jobs was in the ground before it could get on the market, due to his resistance to the idea. And perhaps also the stylus (by which I mean a pressure sensitive, high-precision stylus, not just a capacitive wand) which might have been on the iPad years ago were it not for that resistance.
There have been 3rd party pens and they were terrible and unnecessary. The multiple inputs, sensors, etc. will probably make this Apple stylus pretty useful. In this case, maybe Apple is the first to get it right.
In context Jobs was talking about a stylus as the only/primary input for the device, meaning you would be required to have a stylus to ever use the device. Of course that would be terrible.
This stylus is an optional accessory with a very specific use case. A fundamentally different thing.
This is exactly right, and I'm sure it was a shot at the original Microsoft Tablet PC which required a stylus for input. The Pencil they announced today is very clearly for drawing applications and not intended to be the primary means of interacting with the iPad.
"How are we going to communicate with this? We don't want to carry around a mouse, so what are we going to do?
Oh, a stylus, right? We're going to use a stylus? No.
Who wants a stylus? You have to get them, put them away, you lose them, yuck. So let's not use a stylus.
We're going to use the best pointing device in the world; a pointing device that we're all born with - we're born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch it with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch..."
By the way, I'm not saying they did, I'm just including the entire quote from Jobs.
The important part of the quote in this context is that Jobs was obviously referring to the stylus being the primary input device for the iPhone being unacceptable.
That is a direct quote from Jobs. "If you see a stylus, they blew it." You can say that Jobs' aversion to styluses was a little stronger than it should have been due to the devices he'd seen with styluses, but his stated opinion was not this moderate "Styluses shouldn't be mandatory" stance people are trying to ascribe to him here.
This is Apple definitely responding to high-end pressure from increasingly successful Surfaces in the same way the iPad mini was a response to pressure from the low-end by small Android tablets.
This is basically Apple saying "let's make a Surface with a bigger screen and do it the Apple way".
It's weird seeing Microsoft participate in it.
Other than size, there's not much that Android tablets need to respond to, there's already been large high-end Android tablets with great pen input (no angle detection, but they're all Watcom class).
What I think was most interesting here was the incessant pitch that this is a productivity device not a media consumption device.
For the full experience you're looking at:
$800 for the pad
$100 for the pencil
$170 for the keyboardcase
And we're in low-end laptop territory without necessarily cannibalizing their laptop business, but it fires shots across the bow of also increasingly popular Chromebooks which are around this price point.
Edit: for people confused, I meant a low-end Apple laptop not a Windows machine, which are much cheaper. This is priced to barely overlap with the bottom-end. The pricing ensures the two segments are partitioned.
For some context, I'd disagree with the "low-end laptop" characterization, though if you mean "low-end" in terms of, say, Thinkpads and MacBook Pros, then yeah you're right on.
My Chromebook cost about 20 percent more than the keyboardcase alone, and I'm writing this comment on an i7 laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and a GeForce video card, which cost less than the pad and case. I get that there's some appeal in entering the Apple ecosystem, but for my needs, I don't think it's a "shot across the bow" of very many actual, full-featured laptops that I'm allowed to actually install stuff on.
(edit: Aaaand while I was looking up my laptop's specs, everyone else made the same comment as I. Leaving here in case it helps.)
> but it fires shots across the bow of also increasingly popular Chromebooks which are around this price point.
The price point is more like (a little under) the at-release Surface Pro than popular Chromebooks (its a little cheaper than the Chromebook Pixel, but that's not really the big seller -- the popular models are at the low end.)
Both by form factor and price, this seems more to be competing more with the big "pro" tablets that the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 (slightly cheaper) and the Surface Pro (3 was slightly more expensive at release, 4 probably will be too, 3 is slightly less expensive right now) than Chromebooks.
While the Pro 3 was slightly more expensive, if you include the keyboard cover and pen, I'd argue this is much more expensive (included pen & $120 for the cover/keyboard, Vs. $99 + $170).
And the Pro 3's pen/drawing experience has received pretty good reviews after some early software jitters.
> Also the Surface stylus isn't in the same league. So you'd have to compare to something like the N-Trig stylus which is an extra $50.
The Surface Pro 3's pen is an N-Trig... Yeah, so not $50 more, included right in the box. And it has reviewed excellently by artists.
> Yes, though I'd say the Apple ones are better quality (especially looking at the keyboard cover).
You have absolutely no basis for claiming that the Apple pen and cover are superior. Literally nobody has reviewed them, you haven't used them, nobody you know has used them, and you didn't even know they existed two hours ago.
I've used the Surface Pro's cover - it's crap. Based on the dome switches (which I have used the previous generation of) the Apple one is already better.
So yes, I have a basis for claiming that - one based on the hardware used and direct experience with the competition.
> I've used the Surface Pro's cover - it's crap. Based on the dome switches
Nope, scissor-switch. It is mechanical.
They used to sell one called the Touch Cover which is likely what you're describing, they don't anymore (discontinued, years ago).
> the Apple one is already better.
Because, why? You haven't used the Surface Pro 3 (as evidence by your own posts), you haven't used this (as evidence by the fact that nobody outside of Apple has), and you keep making basic mistakes about how both work.
$1000 gets you a powerful high end laptop in terms of hardware. You might be sacrificing build quality at that price though, but you can get good specs for that.
Or, from the opposed perspective, you're paying Apple to do your sysadmin tasks for you.
(Really, you do have sysadmin access, if you care enough. My iPhone has a profile on it put there by my [big, enterprise-y] employer, which gives them the ability to do pretty much whatever they want—including side-loading applications. I'm surprised nobody has used the "corporate-owned device" method to build an App store yet.)
Business use a dev license, then deploy their own apps via side-loading. Standard practice by now. And "own" apps is becoming a very loose definition, 3rd party develops, then signs with corp key.
ThinkPad X series is about that much. (It used to be $2000 but they've come down in price.) Quality is far higher than a MacBook (doesn't burn my skin, has an acceptable keyboard, has buttons to click).
Oh please, a stylus worked better on my old 3.5 inch PDA than any stupid touch gestures do for my 4.7 inch Android phone. Arrows on the keyboard? What the fuck are arrows?
Marketing just pushed styli (?) and hardware keyboards out, the latter is something I really miss on my phone...
heh, I have a note 4, with an integrated stylus. I love the thing. I'm more accurate and faster typing on the keyboard with it then I am with my thumbs, and it's a toss when swype style stuff guesses right. If I have to reswype a word, I would've been faster using the stylus
He specifically refers to the iPad in the actual quote. Anyone claiming otherwise is simply wrong or a revisionist, though such sorts seep out of the woodwork whenever Apple cedes prior claims, rephrasing and adding unspoken criteria to somehow make it prescient and relevant, seen throughout this discussion.
Great. I love it when a company re-evaluates and introduces technology they previously said was a bad idea, but have reconsidered. More of this sort of thing!
The original stylus comment was for a 3.5" pocket phone. Previously, things like Palm Treo or Windows Mobile devices required a stylus to touch the resistive sensing screen. That is the baseline.
Anybody taking the quotes out of historical context is just trying to incite an argument and pretend they are better than Tim Cook. Nobody is better than Tim Cook.
Uh the treo didn't _REQUIRE_ a stylus, it worked when poked at with a fingernail. Which was fine for course operations with big buttons. The problems were things drawn as 4x4 pixel targets (or something equally insane). But that problem still exists to a certain extent. I have to be really careful with the iphone onscreen keyboard because my finger (above average hand size) easily covers multiple buttons. Unlike my wife, who's fingers apparently are the target audience. The cheap little iphone stylus can definitely help.
I just can't figure out why Jobs, and apparently lots of other people, are against adding an extra, more accurate method of interacting with a touchscreen, without removing any of its current capabilities. I'm not taking handwritten notes with my finger, get real. A stylus totally changes the range of interactions I can have with a device.
Jobs didn't like Modes -- something you see quite a bit in todays presentation.
He felt that Modes obscure the immediate discoverability of functions and they keep you from pushing your design to ensure you can use something without left clicking or pulling out a pen. It should just work.
The "no modes" approach is a good one. I do find with modern systems that the obscure hieroglyphics and no hints for buttons is just as bad though - who would have thought that a box with an arrow going into it was "share"? Or that I had to swipe left or right to show a delete option in a list? Or on Windows, that Win-U or hovering near the right showed charms?
IMHO these non-discoverable items are a barrier to use. Screens are big enough that buttons can be drawn on them, and even with text.
Because it adds complexity to the user experience. Most people don't need handwritten notes. How would a stylus help with their text messaging or photo taking? They're fine just pressing on the on-screen keyboard. Hell, they don't even teach cursive writing in school anymore. So, a stylus is STILL not a valid useful device for the average person.
You'll notice that they introduced this stylus for the iPad Pro, and not for the regular iPad. This stylus is for a specific pro user that actually needs a pen input.
Then people started buying 3rd party crappy stylus, because drawing with just your finger is hard. If there's demand, it would be stupid not offering a solution. The stylus is an optional, not included nor needed for the iPad Pro. People are under the impression that what Jobs said to sell his ideas at the time should be an unbreakable company law, but that would be idiotic.
Yeah, like the bigger iPhone screens. So many market demands to be fulfilled, so many times Apple and the Apple faithful said something was stupid and then rectified themselves.
While I do agree Jobs was saying that no one wants to use a stylus to use their devices, you have to admit this stylus is a pretty good idea. With the additional sensors you can actually do things you can't do with traditional styluses and you're not forced to use it with your device, it's just an add-on.
No. No one wants to be required to use a stylus to successfully use a device. This is true, and remains so. What has become apparent is that there is a need -- especially for artists -- for a tool more fine-grained than a finger if you want to do more complicated tasks.
Comedy "smartphone" attempts? I had a couple of smart phones before the iPhone came out and they offered several things it didn't. The fact that capacitive touchscreens and GPU acceleration weren't as good yet doesn't make them "comedy attempts". More like the incremental developments that provided the base which the iPhone was built upon.
Ignoring the fact that it's all moot now, I was doing GPS navigation, multitasking, audio streaming, and rudimentary video calling on some of those "comedy attempts" from 2005-2007 and I did a lot of it with my fingers as well. The iPhone improved on the touch aspect quite a bit but it's not as if it wasn't missing 10 other things that were common to smartphones of the time.
And that only makes sense. It's good business to focus on the things your competition isn't doing as it allows you to target different parts of the market.
And it's not a Wacom-like active digitizer, you need to actually charge this thing. I feel the stylus that came with Windows XP tablet edition in 2002 was probably better than this.
Wacom may well decide that the competitive advantage to them having better styluses than the ones Apple can make is worth more than any amount of money Apple could offer.
Beyond the issue of whether Wacom wants to license it in the first place, even if they did, it's probably a high per unit cost (Wacom is a premium-pricing sort of company), and it's in the tablet, not the pen. What percentage of purchasers will even want the pen? I'm guessing it'll be pretty low.
From what I remember when I had a wacom tablet in the 90s and 2000s, the tech was something like RFID where the active tablet would read the passive puck and stylus and get sub millimeter accuracy from triangulation. This included tilt and angle of the stylus.
The stylus pressure and buttons was a sensor on the stylus that was sensed by the tablet.
Nope. Surface Pro 1 (and 2?) used Wacom tech, had 10-point multitouch, and the stylus didn't need batteries or recharging. The induction stuff that Wacom does is pretty cool.
Wasn't he talking about the iPhone, not the iPad? At that time the dominant mobile platform was PDAs with styluses. I'm pretty sure that's the context in which he made those remarks.
Exactly. His point, I think, was trying to get rid of the need for people pulling out a stylus in a car sitting in traffic and scribbling notes and smiley faces. Not catering to artists and people sitting in meetings taking notes. The iPhone doesn't need a stylus. A tablet (especially at that size) acts more like a blank canvas and it makes perfect sense to get a drawing tool like a pencil on that big surface to encourage even more apps and creative outlets.
They did repeatedly mention that the main way of interacting with it was touch, and that the stylus and touch can be used together.
So it's an extra feature. This differs from earlier touchscreens that required a stylus and the strength of 10 mighty men to get that cheap touchscreen to register.
On a 3.5 inch screen? Yeah, the stylus was terrible for that. Touch screen interfaces were held back for years because everyone blindly used a stylus as the primary input device.
This is for a much larger screen, and it is an accessory and not the primary input device.
This quote is making the rounds on Twitter right now. The non-snarky response to which is "that's an ancient quote", the more snarky one is "It's been 7 years. The market changes. Deal with it."
Yeah thanks. He also told Tim Cook not to make decisions based on what Tim thought Steve would have done. Which nobody on twitter seems to remember when they post this quote.
Looks like the Surface Pro with type cover and Stylus. As long as the mobile OS and locked down ecosystem limits it, many will be better off buying the Surface.
Although the stylus too seems to be inferior - it has batteries. Both the Surface and Note ones don't - probably because Wacom? If that's the case this is classic NIH case - putting out inferior product just because they couldn't call it Apple Pencil.
Speaking as an artist who uses the Surface Pro 3 for all of my work, an iPad Pro will be useless without the right software. And as great as Procreate might be, it's not Photoshop and will never be Photoshop. Without the ability to run full desktop apps, this would never be much more than a toy for me.
I'd be curious who they brought in to test the iPad Pro out. I really enjoyed the fact Microsoft used Penny-Arcade for their Surface and even let them write about the experience. As a consumer, it made me feel like Microsoft cared a great deal about making sure that demographic was heard and they designed a product with that demo in mind.
Hard to see from the videos, but I don't really expect anything better than 10ms. At least, we can hope to see incremental improvements in the coming years.
You may be able to run two apps side by side on the iPad now, but you wont be able to instantly alt/cmd+tab between the fully capable PC versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Chrome running 50 tabs, 500 page Word document, while rendering something, while powering 2 or 3 external monitors if needs be. It's a completely different paradigm in terms of productivity for artists and so on.
I know this is petty, but every time I see an Apple demo and they are saying how many inches the screen is I think - wow that's a really uncool and old fashioned system of measures. If Apple can force standards - like Thunderbolt - how about using centimeters.
Edit: they can even say they invented the metric system - ok with me ;)
Apple is a US company and the keynote is in the US. Inches are not considered "uncool" nor "old fashioned" in the US. The US tried switching to metric many years ago, but it didn't work.
I'm sure their localized advertising for other countries lists the dimensions in metric units.
Nope. The UK and German stores give e.g. iPad Air 2 thickness in mm, weight in grams and screen size in inches.
They are sticking to inches deliberately for screen measurement. They even use the German 9,7" instead of the US/UK 9.7" so it's not that they forgot to translate.
Oddly enough, screen sizes are one of the things that are measures in imperial units all over the world. Another example would be engines, where horsepower is incredibly popular.
Maybe because it's really hard to visualize/understand the size of a device based on diagonal screen size? It's only useful to me as a number to compare to other devices. I need height and width, which they do localize.
This is because technology is US centric, and the U.S. uses inches, therefore they are the standard measure for diagonal screen size no matter where you are.
The iPad Pro is going to be available in November — 32GB for $799, 64GB for $949 and 128GB for $1,079. The $1,079 comes with Wi-Fi and cellular. The keyboard is going to cost $169 and the stylus is going to cost $99 — magic isn’t cheap.
Can someone explain this absurd pricing strategy to me?
Someone did a detailed comparison between the $19 Apple 500mW cube charger vs a no-name $4 lookalike. Short version: the former is an engineering marvel of efficiency, compactness, and safety ... while the latter is likely to kill someone.
You may not appreciate the "diminishing returns" of increased quality for increased price, but Apple's bottom line shows a great many do.
Oh come on, that's such a sweeping generalization. Just because someone compared Apple's cube charger with one of thousands of knockoffs and found that the Apple charger actually adhered with the safety regulations does not mean that Apple's accessories are appropriately priced due to their quality. It doesn't even mean the charger deserves the $19 price tag. How about the iPhone 6 docks, are they also a marvel of engineering? Are their prices justified?
"Simple price gouging" is also a sweeping generalization.
You pay for quality. Generally equivalent functionality can be had cheaper, and returns diminish as price rises, but as there are prolific options available "price gouging" hardly applies.
[sigh] This is a friendly chat board. I'm not inclined to provide encyclopedic peer-reviewed proofs to someone taking cheap shots.
He or she didn't claim they were 'appropriately priced' and since such a claim is subjective to begin with nobody is forcing you to pay for things you feel are too expensive. Buy whatever you want. His or her argument seems to be, and I would agree, that the quality is higher with an Apple charger. If you don't feel the price corresponds, that's totally fine with everyone involved.
Yeah, there's also a fairly healthy middle ground between engineering "marvels" and "what is the utterly cheapest piece of crap I can find on eBay".
(btw, there are a lot of complaints, including from me, about plenty of flaws with Apple chargers - I've had two sheathes come apart so they look like paper lanterns exposing bare wire beneath them)
My experience (and that of most people I know) with Apple chargers is that they break all the time despite the utmost care. I would hardly call that an engineering marvel.
Edit: I should be more specific - I wasn't referring to the chargers themselves, but rather their cables.
Mine is 3 years old and is OK other than a few cat chew marks. I can't understand what other people do with their hardware - it always look like they've played football with it or left their dog to chew it, sit on it, dribble on it or left it outside in the rain. Always very odd.
It doesn't cost $3. Not even an iPad charger costs are that low.
Of course, no brand chargers made in China could reach that price point but one just have to do a Hacker News search to figure out what they are sacrificing.
Yeah for a long time it was higher the version number the better and the rest was old, sold at refurbished. Now they have new with lower version numbers selling along side the other ones? There goes that simplicity. Maybe in the end this is better for the bottom line but it's just uncharacteristic.
It looks like it would be really awesome to have, but I have a feeling that it's going to be much more expensive than the current iPads. If that's the case, it almost makes more sense to buy a Surface Pro 3.
An increasingly number of desktop windows apps I use have touch controls. Most of the time being able to scroll and zoom with touch is all an app needs to be usable.
What do you mean by "Pro" apps? Photoshop? Illustrator? Premiere? After Effects? Autocad? 3DS Max? Eclipse? Netbeans? IntelliJ? Visual Studio?
AFAIK mobile OSes don't have "Pro" apps, just niche apps, and unless those niche apps use ARM assembly or something that an x86 wouldn't run at native speed, you should have no issues.
The discussion here is about the availability of software for Pro tablets - specifically the iPad Pro, and the Surface Pro 3. You have correctly established that the Surface Pro 3 can run Android apps very well.
I was curious about why it's valuable to run Android apps on a Pro tablet, or whether it's just a curiosity for running phone apps. If there was an important pro app that ran on android tablets that was made available to Windows users via emulation, that would seem to be a meaningful advantage.
The point about having an hybrid device is that you can use it in different ways, ex. as a laptop when you are doing productive work, or as a tablet when you just want to relax and check social networks or play some games. You don't need to purchase 2 different devices.
The fact that you are using a "pro" device doesn't mean you wouldn't want to use "non-pro" apps, and having a full-featured Android subsystem (which emulates ARM if needed) is a good advantage when you want to use apps that don't exist in the Windows market, or want to use your previous purchases in markets like Amazon or Google Play.
Remember that several companies just focus in releasing iOS and Android apps and fall back to the web version for desptop, which usually is not optimized with a touch-friendly workflow.
If your argument is that the ability to run android apps gives surface an advantage over iPad pro because of access to non-pro tablet apps, this makes no sense at all. The iPad has a better library of non-pro tablet apps by far.
The only question is which device is better for running tablet apps aimed at Pros. I think that is currently open to debate, but Android isn't even a player, so running Android apps is no advantage.
Windows RT, the OS that could only run "Metro" apps, is dead and gone. All the current Surface tablets run Windows 8.1/10. They're ordinary PCs, with your choice of Atom x7 (Surface 3) or Core i3/i5/i7 processor (Surface 3 Pro), in tablet form-factor.
For anyone that doesn't know this, you can connect USB keyboard to the iPad Camera Connection kit. It works with most keyboards, including mechanical ones.
I am continuously amused at how the startup tech crowd can't see how innovative Apple products are... and yet they inevitably chase the markets Apple creates a few years later.
For most of you, I would suggest that the innovation in the web and mobile spaces were the development of the platforms, and your web/mobile app does not constitute innovation. In other words, you have no idea what innovation looks like.
No, it shouldn't be. I didn't claim to innovate myself, but I can at least recognize the complexity of researching and crafting new interfaces the whole world can't figure out.
Having just done something new, I lost my temper. Which is crap behavior, I admit.
Wait... yes, it is a competition. Maybe not in this forum.
Edit: To clarify, seems like they shouldn't (maybe couldn't, but I don't see a TM on the 53 site) call it Pencil since there is already a device made specifically for iPad called Pencil.
Per the USPTO trademark database (on mobile so can't readily link), FiftyThree has a trademark on "Pencil by FiftyThree", not on "Pencil". Moreover the trademark they do have specifically disclaims exclusive rights to the word "pencil" by itself. (IANAL but typically USPTO will ask for these sorts of disclaimers if part of the trademark is deemed generic/descriptive.)
Similarly Apple's product is officially named "Apple Pencil".
The exact same thing will happen that happened with Facebook Paper. 53 will write an angry blog post, get some free publicity, and then Apple will say they aren't changing anything.
I said it then and I will repeat it now, if you want to avoid name collision you shouldn't give your product a simple one word name that relates directly to your product.
Audience gave Schiller the exact response he wanted (notice the silence and the delayed laughter). On paper it look like Apple is giving credit to Microsoft, but the subtext is: it's a joke, don't take the sentence too seriously, and Apple is still better at productivity.
I don't know - Microsoft is massive in businesses. You only see Macs at web development companies or design agencies, typically. And even then if they grow in size a Windows AD machine may be in a back room because SOHO is the only server system Apple targets. They are pretty productive and Office is widely considered a necessity. (I could be wrong, btw)
I thought it was quite a complimentary thing to say.
If it was a joke, then it's far more likely that the exact response he wanted was laughter, but he got awkward silence instead.
But I dont think it was meant as a joke at all. If he didnt want to praise Microsoft, he could have left out the line; there was no reason to resort to mockery disguised as praise. Microsoft could not have said, "we wont demo our products unless you say we are best at productivity". Apple holds all the cards.
I found it interesting that there was no mention of handwriting recognition for the pencil input - just not on the radar, it seems. Probably for the best, it's always been a disappointment on every device it's been used on.
Official support for an external keyboard for iPad is interesting - among the 'professional' kinds of applications that might now become possible to use on a device like this are development tools: code editors, command line interfaces... any chance that as they open up the scope of what's possible on the device, they'll liberalize the app store policies that currently prevent those kinds of things being created?
I know a lot of you will think this is ridiculous but I want one to read digital comics with. I find the 9.7" iPad screen too small for this but the iPad Pro might work.
Windows 8.1 is amazing on the Surface Pro. W10 is a major step back for me. It's also the perfect form factor for reading graphic novels, although it's easier holding an iPad Air for extended periods.
In fairness to Microsoft, they have been working on reducing the space Windows takes on the drive. IIRC, Windows 10 introduced some new features to combat this. Also, storage is expandable by its SD slot.
Well they went and did it, finally released the iPad that I've been looking for, now it will be interesting to see who, other than me, buys one. Since it is my #1 reading device these days. Only way to make it perfect would be to add an SD card and boost the battery life to 18hrs+. I'm really interested in how well the pen compares to the Surface 3 Pro's pen as well.
Of course it would be really interesting to see a "stripe" cover, which has a stripe reader rather than a keyboard in it :-).
Two years ago I tried really hard to use my iPad as my primary workstation (or at least primary outside of the office). It didn't work. No mouse support, no multi-tasking, and very mediocre keyboard support. What they released today doesn't fix any of the above.
After digging in a little more on the details, it doesn't look like Pencil will be compatible with any other device outside the iPad Pro. That is a little disappointing and there doesn't appear to be any specific hardware reason for it. I would welcome the opportunity to replace my paper notebook with a iPad Mini 4 and Pencil.
I don't understand the allure of a "pro" iPad. Wouldn't you just want a laptop then? The keyboard is (at least for me) the fastest accurate text input device ever invented. It's the main reason I type everything instead of write it by hand.
Most of the input they've been showing is drawing and using the stylus. It might not be ideal for programming or writing, but this is going to be ideal for artists, photographers and anyone who wanted a 13" Cintiq.
This is much more portable (since you don't have to attach it to a computer - you can carry it around like a paper notebook), has a significantly higher resolution display, and is not much more expensive (especially considering the difference in internals).
> I don't understand the allure of a "pro" iPad. Wouldn't you just want a laptop then?
A 12" class tablet with a keyboard case is, I find (I use a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2), a very good reading platform (better than a laptop, since you can use it like a tablet without the keyboard getting in the way) as well as a decent laptop substitute for lots of uses.
Its not as good as a laptop for all uses -- and I still do use a laptop -- but its pretty much the sweet spot for me for tablets.
I love my ipad for reading books and papers. But I find it too small to take notes with a stylus. Obviously there's a tight tradeoff between what's comfortable to hold on the couch/train/bed and is portable enough yet big enough, but I think I'd like to try the large ipad. It could be big enough to make note taking pleasant.
Also, I think apple has a problem in that they've essentially exhausted mass market products, ie products everyone wants. Does this ipad fill a hole in their lineup? I think so. But people get disappointed if apple doesn't sell a million of each widget a quarter. Even look at the ipad business as a whole; I think most companies not apple would be very happy to have such a lucrative product. It's just when you compare it to iphones, the most successful consumer product of the last 20 years, that it is lacking.
I've found LaTeX pretty practical. Not quite as easy as handwriting, but practical enough. Once I got enough practice I have access to the documents everywhere, don't have to worry about my horrible handwriting, and can copy-paste equations into Wolfram Alpha to check correctness. An editor with customizable key commands helps too. Took me about two months to get fast enough, but now I use LaTeX for basically all note taking and homework.
I'm fairly sure mice existed, as well as touch devices with pens. Given that the former is over 25 years old and the latter is at least fifteen years old.
People crying about Steve Job's views on a stylus:
1. Really, he said that for a phone. But considering the argument valid even on a tablet, well, to put it in scale, the iPad Pro is barely a tablet. It's nearly the average laptop screen(not considering those shitty huge ones that don't fit in bags).
2. Have you even looked at that thing. It's pretty slick. Imagine the utility to artists(the pencil from FiftyThree is an example of its utility).
3. They don't put a ass-like slot to shove it up. Period. That is, I suspect the biggest problem I've had with a stylus. They just do NOT make it compulsory for you to buy one, contrary to what Microsoft or Samsung would have(and are still) done.
I didn't see the entire demo, but can I write on it? I have a pencil, can I write words and have them come out as text? I'm happy to write in Palm's Graffitti. It works now for iDevices and my finger, but the new pencil would make that easier.
Looking for the ad that says: "I'm an enterprise business drone, I go to meetings, I need to take notes. I use my iPad Pro and my iPencil and by the time I walk out of the room the meeting notes are to my team."
Otherwise it's not something I can use. While my doodles make my co-workers laugh, not sure that my PHB wants to buy me one of these....
Exciting to see the Apple Pencil/Smart Keyboard - this appears to be very similar to the Surface Pro 3, leaving the ball in Microsoft's court for their Surface Pro 4.
You can't really compare them without talking about the software, though. The Surface runs a full desktop OS in addition to tablet-style apps while the iPad Pro can only run iOS apps... making the Surface better for media/content creation and the iPad Pro better for consumption. The Surface also has an active digitizer compared to the passive one in the iPad Pro for better sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy.... unless of course Apple's Pencil is miraculously better than the dozens of similar products already on the market including the one they stole the name from: http://www.fiftythree.com/pencil
Why am I always left yearning for more with these latest Apple keynotes? I feel like Apple's innovation has gone from "groundbreaking" to "safe". All of these products are just too predictable.
It used to be that after an Apple keynote you'd be talking about the products with friends, family and coworkers the following afternoon/day and waiting eagerly for them to hit the stores. No longer. The "I need to have this!" feeling has evolved into a "maybe one day I will consider that".
I see people's critiques of the iPad Pro being countered with, "But it's not for you!" ... Then who is it for, exactly? Apple didn't seem to imply or treat it like a niche product in their keynote. Tim Cook said something about it being the centrepiece of the iPad lineup.
I'm an avid Apple TV user but they aren't doing anything groundbreaking with it. Enough with the charade and actually give me something I can replace my cable package with. Despite the nightmare that is cable TV, Apple TV's available content doesn't compete, especially for new content. Fix that and charge me for it. People have been yearning for Apple to modernize TV like they've modernized music and aside from what appear to be basic agreements with distributors for pay-per-episode next-day TV shows and some movies that they've had in place for a while, they haven't brought much to the table.
no USB port to be able to easily copy files to/from seems a bit detrimental to pro usage, as well as no way to connect an external display for presentations.
This said there are plenty of use cases for a larger ipad with a stylus, I am sure it will be a very successful product.
Yep, you can find cheaper products with more ports. Go buy one and be happy. This one is the mindshare, design and profit leader, which is why we're talking about it.
You can use an external display with a dongle or wirelessly through AirPlay Mirroring (if you have an AppleTV on the other end). People have been using iPads to do presentations for a long time.
The Innovators Dilemma[1] is a great book for thinking about announcements like this. A "disruptive innovation" does something really well such that some people want it, but it is inferior in many ways to the market leaders. The market leaders can even laugh at the weak alternative and wonder why someone would want it.
Over time, though, the "inferior" solution gradually meets more and more of the needs that were previously served by the market leaders... and eventually it wins (if the stars align and all that... but the examples in the book show how companies can be blind to the disruptors).
Starting with the iPhone in 2007, on the surface Apple was disrupting phones/smartphones. But it was also music players. And then cameras. And, with the iPad, computers. When I first saw the iPad, I thought "someday, this will be the perfect computer for my mom". That time came when they added printing.
Really, what they started disrupting in 2007 was computing in general. With iOS, they're trying to make an interaction model that works better for today's use cases than what we had before. The iPad Pro is one more step along the line of replacing our computers.
Clearly, iOS devices are inferior to Macs for our (Hacker News readers) needs. Today.
All of that said, it's an interesting race to see which model "wins" between Microsoft's "blend the old and new worlds" and Apple's "clean break".
I wouldn't imagine a device like that to literally goes out without any decent content creation thought in mind. I'm sick of using my medium (now) screen iPad as a comment maker. I want to use it for development. I want my iPad to run WebStorm , SublimeText, GitHub.
I want a jailbreak iOS that is capable of running a desktop Apps on that new desktop-performance iPad.
This should've been the big news about the new big-size iPad.
Seems to me the iPad was always intended as a content consumption device. Seems like your use case is much, much better served by an iPad Air - which costs about the same as an iPad Pro but is way more developer friendly.
It's kind of like saying "man, they ought to sharpen these spoons up, I can't cut my food with them at all!" A little bit, anyway.
At any rate they're starting down this road so your use case won't be so rare or unaccommodated soon.
Curious to see how long until Atom is ported to iOS. It's all just HTML and a JS engine, right? If Facebook can build React Native, someone can build Atom for the iPad Pro.
Yeah, about that... It's actually a [pretty huge piece of software](https://github.com/atom/electron). That's not saying that porting it is impossible, it's that if it was easy, an ARM Android version would already exist.
Why Atom? There a countless good native text editors for iOS already. I really like Editorial (with Python macros!) but Coda and Textastic are both great.
Personally all I really want is a macbook air with retina.
I feel like apple has really been resting on its laurels the last few years. During the Jobsian era they'd come up with a new, category-defining product every few years. Now all we get is yearly updates of existing product lines.
well, here's hoping for a "one more thing" moment.
I don't think so, for one it's a major downgrade in terms of power. I thought the 12" macbook would be the entry level notebook, and there would be something in the macbook air form factor right above it.
I felt this way for a while, but I have a hard time arguing that my 15" Retina MacBook Pro is too large or heavy. You don't even get quad-core on anything smaller, so the performance jump between a 12" "New Macbook" and an 11" or 13" "Macbook air" is fairly marginal. I'd expect that gap to close in the next product cycle as well, since the 12" MacBook is the first run, has some heat issues, etc..
"Many"? Who? It won't work for web design, because it doesn't handle a file system. It's a more expensive option than a Cintiq or a Surface Pro and doesn't work with the existing install base of Adobe CC products (or the tons of third-party software that works with them), and any other art tools that come out will be in the exact same boat.
I own a Surface Pro 3 and I will be buying an iPad pro. The Surface Pro 3 for Visual Studio, and the iPad Pro for music production. The markets are completely different.
That's interesting to me. What does the iPad Pro give you for music production that a Mac with Logic (or your DAW of choice, whichever) doesn't do better? Even if you want touch controls, I've found a regular iPad to be plenty big enough for Logic Remote/TouchOSC/Lemur, and it talks to a much smarter, much more featureful system.
Exactly. Most "pros" will continue to prefer desktop OSes, where you get the full Office, the full Photoshop, the full AutoCAD, your IDE, your command line... Except very specialized markets with tailored apps I don't see many people switching to the iPad Pro for work.
Until now, Surface Pro had no competition in this specific niche, except some Android devices that are likely inferior in hardware and app support. Now it does. Every app for iPad is designed for touch from the start, including the Photoshop port etc., meaning the touch experience for artistry will be better; the question is whether the inability to switch to a trackpad afterward for more precise editing and more complex functionality will outweigh this.
As it is a mobile OS (iOS) rather than a desktop OS (e.g., OSX), it seems more comparable to the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 (Android) than the Surface Pro 3 (desktop Windows 8.1/10).
> Later edit. It's iOS for fuck sake. It's ridiculous to compare iOS with full Windows. A keyboard is not that useful in a TOUCH based OS.
I've found a keyboard really useful with my Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 (Android). I don't see why it wouldn't be with iOS.
Heck, I find the keyboard on my Windows (originally 8, then 8.1, now 10), touch-enabled laptop quite useful too. The fact that an OS -- and the screen you use with it -- supports touch interaction doesn't suddenly mean that the device can't be used with a keyboard for the kind of things where keyboard interaction is useful.
And the only Pro users are going to be developers/programmers, right?
How about my doctor while he visits patients, or my dentist to show me my X-rays easily, or the automative tech that plugs in an OBDII module and instantly sees information on the large screen...
Those people are professionals, and that is what this is geared towards, not just developers.
It'd be nice if they remembered us. We seem to be the only creative types not being targeted here. And yes, I'd actually consider it for a few purposes..
No, don't ship the SDK by default. Make it so that it only runs locally-compiled binaries. That's okay. But I'd like the ability to use this for real work that I do. Everybody else gets to work on it, after all.
This is flatly false. There are numerous programming environments available on iOS, and it has the JavaScript environment with the most advanced available JIT built in.
Wrong. https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/javascriptcore-example/ JavaScriptCore is what Apple uses for built in JS evaluation, and V8 can't be implemented due to lack of execution of code from user-writable memory. JSC most definitely does not have the "most advanced available JIT."
Right, it's competitive... But being competitive and "most advanced", to me, are two different things. Not knocking Safari's performance, the battery life you get from it kicks butt. Still, different.
I mean, there's definitely a good argument that V8 is most advanced, but, for example, JSC is the only one that has the LLVM 'fourth tier', and it shows on asm.js benchmarks, where it mostly beats V8 (loses to Firefox, but that has asm.js-specific code while the others don't):
So I think the question of "most advanced" is basically subjective.
Don't get me wrong! I would strongly prefer if iOS allowed any JIT to be used. I just think calling the one that can be used "most advanced" is not wrong per se.
You're going to need to work a bit more on your comments here, you can't just expect a full Anti-Apple thread to do well with zero sources or information.
> Later edit.
You completely re-write your comment and downvote me? Fantastic.
I still believe that in order for apple to get more iPads sold, Apple need to move towards enterprise which IMO means they need to loose the Sandbox requirements which is holding back a lot of innovation.
The iPad Pro is a beautiful machine but it's hardly going to change the issues that apple generally have with selling the iPad.
One solution could be to give Sandbox control to enterprises instead, so they could keep security high while still being offered some freedom to innovate on the platform. It's really holding a lot of interesting applications back IMO.
Until then I fear that it's not going to do much for the sales at least not quantity wise.
What sandbox restrictions exactly? Enterprise apps are signed and distribution is typically limited to members of the the organization, which is what you'd expect from an enterprise app program. Enterprise apps don't go through apple approvals so you could use private APIs if you wanted to.
Possibilities to properly innovate on the platform. There is a reason why iPad is not doing well and I don't believe it's solved by turning it into a sketchpad.
Sandboxing control could come with the enterprise license that way everyone is happy.
Not really apple's way it seems. But I'm not sure that the ipad is doing poorly... despite all its many restrictions, it's extremely popular with schools and companies. I still remember when iphones weren't allowed on corp networks but people kept on using them anyways till IT had to support it. Things have come a long way in 5 years
Heh, the fact that you can make a statement like that means I don't really want to argue with you over it. In reality there are many metrics to what "doing well" can mean, surely you could anticipate that I could bring one of those out, then you'd counter, then we'd discuss which metrics are important, we'd disagree, and nothing would change.
Mac got this product completely wrong. We needed a tablet that runs Mac OS that we can use for work not a bigger iOS form factor. One of the worst product decision I've seen Apple make.
This makes the iPad ("finally") a legitimate successor to the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 (from the 1990s), and incidentally the first iPad that I personally am excited about buying.
The stylus is not just some accessory. Real stylus support is a fundamental advance that revolutionizes the device. This is every bit as significant (for the iPad) as a keyboard-only computer finally supporting mouse input.
(To stretch that analogy a bit, the stylus products available for the iPad so far would be like wiring an Atari 2600 controller to the PC and being able to do rudimentary cursor movements with it.)
The stylus was a fundamental advance for humankind, too. The first stylus was invented about 30 seconds after the first caveperson discovered that flat surfaces are good for drawing on with your fingers. And humans have used them ever since.
Steve Jobs was right that "If you see a stylus [as a requirement for basic input and manipulation of the device], they blew it [if they meant their device to be a mainstream consumer product]."
There's a corollary, though: If a tablet meant to be directly manipulated doesn't support a stylus, it is going to be worse than a simple piece of paper and a pen for a wide variety of everyday tasks. (Meeting notes, class notes, sketches, etc.)
The iPad has sucked at all of those things, forever. (Despite the amazing (truly!) software enhancements that have made fingerpainting pretty expressive.)
I cannot think of a more fundamental advance Apple could have bestowed upon the iPad.
They are indeed playing catchup -- I have all the iPad generations at work and have never used them for much. I do use the Microsoft Surface Pro 3; it has a lot of shortcomings but is hugely, objectively superior to any iPad for taking notes (in just about any setting one would take free-form notes in). But it's heavy, fans, Windows, etc.
I am a refugee from the end of the Newton days. In college, I took all my notes on an MP2000 and it was amazing. It totally worked, for text and diagrams, on balance better than paper. And nothing since then has been both highly portable and as good at note taking. The iPad is better than the Newton at lots of things -- movies and media consumption come to mind (</troll>) -- but even almost two decades later, no iPad has never been even close to as good as the MP2100 is at taking notes.
So, $1050 for the new iPad Pro plus the stylus? Funny coincidence, that's exactly what I paid for my last Newton. Sign me the fuck up; I'll take a couple.
I know I'm taking the bate here but it seems to me that this is a product marketed towards artists and is clearly not a stylus for operating the device which was common practise before the iPhone was launched for the reason of mitigating the problems with resistive touch screens that were widely used at the time.
Calling this a stylus seems a bit like calling a paintbrush a chisel, and by that I don't mean that it's better than a chisel I mean that it's a completely different tool.
I would like to short APPL long term, say for 4-5 years. Is there a (simple) mechanism to short a stock long term, that is immune to local price fluctuations?
(second post different topic)
Work uses Two Factor Authentication using certificates. Presently they are on a USB smart card or a device with a smart card reader. So far it works well on Surface and Android tablets. Did anybody see the iOS9 section if they will support certificates? Living in a smartcard world, this is also a must. Apple hasn't cracked the Citrix world so far, they keep saying iOSx+1.
Not excited at all. Mobile OSes are crippled by design, especially iOS, so why would I spend this much when I can just get a real computer with a very similar form factor? Mobile OSes are fundamentally designed for quick, limited interaction use cases like ordering an Uber car or checking a web site, not for "real work."
I'm sure someone will buy it, but I don't predict it'll be very big.
Just like the top of line products from any company. They fill a niche, and they're more about gaining a competitive edge than they are about generating tons of profit. You see one in a coffee shop, go to the store (instead of a competitor's) and see the price, and walk out with an Air 2.
Good point about total coverage. Apple probably does not want any gaps in their lineup that might be filled by Microsoft or Google or any other vendor.
I would just by a small form factor ultraportable laptop, but yeah -- it's about brand penetration.
Very interesting to see the Microsoft demo on it and warm welcome during the keynote. Very different to the shouts of "NOOOO!" during the Apple event where they had Bill Gates call in, and IE was made the default browser.
I was kind of expecting them to sneakily pull a Microsoft surface out.
Pity there was no "it's road trip" fudged demo. Watching that makes me laugh every time.
Samsung Note Pro : 12.2" , 2560 x 1600
Apple iPad Pro : 12.9" , 2732 x 2048
So, about 15mm longer in the diagonal, and a higher resolution.
I have a Sammy Note Pro 12.2 - purchased with the vague intent of not needing to take a laptop with me on some work outings. Consequently I picked up an integrated keyboard / cover (the custom Logitech model). Combined they bring me very close to the weight of a laptop, but (just like the iPad will) it wins out on battery life and needing a USB charger rather than a power brick. And carrying a mouse is optional, though once you use a keyboard, a mouse also becomes a convenience.
Curiously enough I'd originally expected to not get much use from the stylus / digitiser, but it's become one of the more compelling features of the thing.
Nonetheless it's a heavy beast, and I usually end up carrying a laptop too. The Samsung (just like the innovation <sic> that Apple has only just announced) has been doing side-by-side and floating application windows for a while now - but even so, painful to do anything productive on it compared to working on a proper operating system.
Well, its bigger and has a somewhat higher resolution screen, but, yeah, its basically the iOS version of that.
Which for people already invested in the Apple ecosystem is probably a big deal, even though Android and Windows each already had something in this class (Windows option being a bit more expensive normal price, but with a full desktop OS.)
In any case what Jobs meant was that the companies that were putting out devices that required a stylus to operate correctly were doing it wrong, and that's been proven pretty extensively by the kind of touch interaction that the iPhone popularized.
Specifically: the new iPad Pro works just fine with touch, but you also have an option of an Apple-sourced stylus for more intricate work.
> In any case what Jobs meant was that the companies that were putting out devices that required a stylus to operate correctly were doing it wrong,
Perhaps in the original iPhone announcement, but Jobs kept repeating anti-stylus lines long after that, when the only current major products with stylus that they could have been referencing were multitouch devices with styluses included but not required.
Just like anything other than the original iPhone (or iPad!) size, everyone in the market doing it was wrong -- until Apple decided they needed to do it, too.
I think as we've seen on Surfaces and on many other tablets, styluses can be pretty useful for pro-sumers.
So why not allow Apple to eat their own words and create a well-designed easy to use, functional stylus? The only downside here is it's $50 too expensive.
On your second point, where do you see a task manager? You can only see apps when bringing up multitasking in iOS 9. There is no "task manager" where you have a list of running processes with CPU percentages and everything.
And since iOS 9 handles running apps by itself, users don't have to close out any apps so they really don't "ever have to think about it".
if it had I would think they'd have said something, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only for the pen for now, it might also not be possible to be as precise when it comes to finger pressure detection on a larger screen compared to a smartphone
Seems like its only 2 gig. They touted the ability to edit video on this in relation to its CPU/GPU prowess but fail to mention the all important ram.
This isn't editing anything but a 1 minutes HD video with 2 gigs of ram.
I just watched a Computer Chronicles episode about Windows 3.0 introduction and it was .. the same (Windows allowed you to have multiple programs right). Every decade platform change introduce a regression cycle and then you have talks about how you can do all the same things but on new infrastructure.
I'm hoping that was deliberate phrasing...because it would reflect the (correct, IMO) opinion that Apple's office suite isn't a replacement for MS Office, and that that opinion is agreed upon internally.
That said, it'd be fun to hear from a Apple employee...do they frequently use iWork for intraoffice documents?
iWork is strongly encouraged, but they'll equip you with Microsoft Office if it's essential for your job.
At least in my department, there was one piece of software you could never use: Powerpoint. You MUST use Keynote for any internal presentation. If you even say the word "Powerpoint" around the wrong person, you'll get some nasty looks.
Odd isn't it? In the June (?) keynote and El Capitan preview they highlight snapping windows side by side in full-screen mode as a wonderful new feature. Considering that non-fullscreen mode allows you to do this and fullscreen mode basically removes your ability to do proper window management, this seems odd to me. It seems they are reinventing all the window management features INSIDE fullscreen mode and calling them new features.... they could just remove window decorations like running X with no WM and call it a wonderful new "less distraction" mode?
I never use fullscreen mode - why would I with two screens or if I am writing code with documentation next to it? Videos perhaps.
What do you want the CLI to do? It's pretty fundamental to the iOS model (and the Android one) that apps are isolated from each other, so you certainly could have a CLI app that does stuff (ssh, git, vi?) within its own home directory, but can't interact with the rest of the system.
In fact there are Android apps that do this. It's harder on iOS because you don't get fork(), but if someone wanted to try super hard, you could make all the apps run as threads within the same process.
If you want a root shell without jailbreaking, that's almost contradictory.
busybox + filesystem access + a way to raise events for other applications (Android intents equivalent) + a way to install CLI tools with CLI-appropriate sandboxing (python, for example) would be incredibly useful. Done right it'd be the last thing needed to really obsolete pre-mobile OSes. You wouldn't have to abandon the security model.
Hearty +1 from me, then, but I'm pretty sure you can do this as a standalone app on the App Store without needing Apple to give you anything. You'd basically be running busybox on a bizarro version of a unikernel / rump kernel (or, alternatively, a bizarro version of User-Mode Linux).
I was disappointed that my MacBook didn't have a coffee machine built into it. In reality, it would have been a silly thing to ask for, or assert "I don't want a MacBook unless it has a coffee machine in it" as if they would bend their entire product range to suit me.
It's interesting that you would think difficulty is somehow related to this. Unless what you're really asking is "why is it so difficult to give me whatever I want" in which case the answer is not anything you're likely to want to hear.
It's not about "difficulty", it's about control. Approximately 0% of Apple's customers (who don't frequent Hacker News etc) care about that sort of thing.
+ the pencil @ $99 and the smart keyboard at $169. > $1k for the entry level model to be comparable with the Surface Pro 3 at ~$930 (which starts at 64GB, btw).
It seems more comparable to the Surface 3 ($499) than Surface Pro 3. The "Pro" moniker doesn't buy you a laptop replacement with Apple like it does with Microsoft.
If they do, they'll be being intellectually dishonest, given that 'Pro' has been part of Apple's naming scheme for a decade. 'Mac Pro', 'MacBook Pro', 'iPad Pro'.
Microsoft wasn't even making computers when Apple started using the name.
