There is a legendary story about how Steve Jobs, upon his return to Apple, drastically cut-down the number of models that they offer. How on earth have they forgotten that lesson? Trying to figure out the differences between the 9.7" iPad and iPad pro is not easy, and regardless, it makes it harder to buy.
I always thought that was the iDevice's strength. With Android, you have nothing actually made by Google but by OEMs, with different names and branding that don't give any real information.
Which phone is "the android"? My mom doesn't think she has an android phone, she thinks she has an LG and that Android is a different thing. People buy a low end Android phone and hate the entire ecosystem because the phone performs like crap. I have a friend who thinks the Galaxy S7 would be a crappy upgrade because they already have a "Galaxy Core Prime".
When there was just the iPhone, it was really easy. It was expensive compared to other options, but you knew it was the best iPhone, and the one with a higher number was better than one with a lower number. Yet an LG G5 is better than a Samsung Galaxy S6, they are somehow both "Android", and Marshmallow is better than Jelly Bean.
Now the iPhone isn't that bad, but it's not simple anymore. iPhone 7, iPhone 7Plus, iPhone 7S, iPhone 7S Plus, iPhone SE. Which is better?
I have a pixel. Before that, I had a nexus 6. Both say "Google" on them and both were purchased because they were the canonical versions of Android without any of the crapware other vendors add.
Only nerds can keep up with which is the "canonical" Android. All my non-tech friends have Samsung, LG, HTC, or Sony phones. The nerds have Nexus or Google phones.
which is just poor advertising and marketing from google. If they did the same amount and effort in marketing the nexus devices (or for god's sake, just call them google phones!), it will become a brand that can rival apple's.
Now, of course, google perhaps don't want that to happen, since the other big manufacturers will not like it, and that marketing isn't their core business.
I've never heard such a confusion when it comes to TV purchases.
Life is imperfect and changing products require a little research. You can't just go to the store and buy the best socks either; if you want the best you got to do research. Thems the breaks.
Well, thems WASN'T the breaks with Apple for a long time, and they did quite well.
The person you replied to was trying to make the argument that a vendor can sell more product if they make the hierarchy of quality more clear to the consumer. Saying 'things are imperfect, as a consumer you just have to deal with it' doesn't really address his argument.
It addresses it with counter examples that indicate that a "hierarchy of quality" is not something that really exists in consumer products. The fact that so many companies chose not to make the hierarchy clear is an indication that such a hierarchy isn't valuable to them.
Look at the luxury car sector. https://www.audiusa.com/models#sedans/ Can you tell the quality by its naming convention? I can't. I can sort of assume some quality hierarchy by the price though.
The fact that Apple has abandoned the "one phone, one tablet" model indicates to me that it hasn't been a valuable strategy for them.
Car companies (at least European ones) tend to be pretty transparent about this:
- Audi (example): letter (car/SUV/race car)+ number (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury)
- BMW: first number is a quality class, two numbers is the Engine size.
- Mercedes: first letter is a quality class, number is the engine.
Other luxury consumer goods use pretty similar schemes, e.g. Audio gear (e.g. bang + olufsen: the higher the number the better, with some number of meaningless zeroes added depending on fashion).
One observation might be that these companies all have halo products that are used to anchor/promote the volume offerings that drive revenue (e.g. The Audi r8 and the a3, the 90k speakers and the 1k set)
> Audi (example): letter (car/SUV/race car)+ number (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury) - BMW: first number is a quality class, two numbers is the Engine size. - Mercedes: first letter is a quality class, number is the engine.
You need to already know the brand to know this.
> (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury)
How high does it go? If they decide to turn it up to 11 tomorrow, is 8 still "luxury"?
I can't agree that this sort of versioning is any more transparent.
> (e.g. The Audi r8 and the a3, the 90k speakers and the 1k set)
This means nothing unless you already know the brand. There's going to be a minimum set of knowledge required to understand these versioning schemes.
To 95%+ of the consumer market, a TV is a dumb commodity. Dollars per inch is basically all that matters for the sale, and relative picture quality is forgotten about as soon as a consumer watches one show.
On the other hand, I think most Android users I know have told me a story about buying the "wrong" Android phone.
Phones are commodities too. We can debate at what stage of commoditization it currently is in, but clearly that's where it's headed, and the days of you being able to just grab one with minimal research the same way you can with TVs is coming.
Shit I just spent 20 minutes at the store the other day trying to figure out why one HP printer was $80, the next was $120, another was $150, and the most expensive was $200. Other than the size of the box, I had no idea what the difference was. One of them had a fax built in, but surprisingly that wasn't the most expensive model. The most expensive model didn't have the fax.
Pixel is mass market, Nexus is not. Only enthusiasts know that Nexus was a precursor to the Pixel so that comparison will probably never happen to the average consumer. Heck Google even avoids saying the Pixel runs Android
I agree Google has a terrible track record with naming products or services - although not as bad as Microsoft - but you're exagerrating a bit.
The step from Nexus 6 tot Pixel isn't that difficult to understand (and you even forgot the Nexus 6P, the successor of the Nexus 6!). Car manufactures launch new models all the time, without much problems. If someone gets confused by such thing, maybe that person is better of with a feature phone.
There's also the 3G, 3GS, 4S, 5S, 5C, 6S, 6 Plus, 6S Plus
Looking back, there were always non-descriptive names, and inconsistencies.
I'd argue that not knowing what 'Android' is actually demonstrates the technology has reached its goal of being universal. It's implicit instead of explicit. People buy it without needing to know what it is. Why would most consumers care about the name of an operating system? It's unimportant. It's not like I remember the exact model of my TV or car, the important thing is that I can watch one and drive the other.
I've actually been saying this since the 3G came out, so we sort of agree. I thought that was the start of the stupidest naming convention, and we're all just watching it get worse throughout the years. At least until the 6 they weren't releasing multiple phones at the same time.
I'm just waiting for "iPhone 10, iPhone 10 Plus, iPhone 10 Air, iPhone 10 Air Plus, iPhone 10 Pro, iPhone 10 Pro Plus, iPhone SE 3, iPhone SE 3G"
> It's not like I remember the exact model of my TV or car
I really hope you know the make, model and year of your car, you need that for basic repairs. My 2004 Corolla takes parts of a 2003-2007 Corolla for most repairs, and runs best with a certain type of oil. Why would you not know this for an expensive device requiring maintenance?
Your TV isn't the same. It doesn't matter if it's 720p, 1080p, or 4k, or what the color resolution is, if it has an HDMI cable that will work.
Your phone is more like a car in that comparison. Things change so frequently, new software, updates (lack of updates), new wireless or hardware standards... An iPhone 5 in 2012 is a very different experience than an iPhone 5 in 2017. But I'm still using the same cheap Dynex "HD" TV for a decade. I can plug in a disk player or streaming device that weren't even conceived of when my TV was sold.
I'm 36, and I didn't know this. I thought there was a universal scale of goodness for oil. I bought a new car last summer, and I couldn't tell you the exact model either. I think this is fairly common.
I do know the basic make, model and year (it's on the number plate in the UK). However, there are lots of extra letters and numbers that identify the exact model. It's all documented, so no need to actually remember it.
I agree that all of the sub-versions of the iPhone are slightly confusing, but at least they generally follow a pattern.
There's always a clear progression, a higher number is always better than a lower number, and adding an S is an incremental upgrade over the non-S version. The Plus is always a larger size than normal.
The G series and C series have complicated things, but generally speaking you just have to pick a number and then pick one of ~3 options at that level.
"iPhone 7, iPhone 7Plus, iPhone 7S, iPhone 7S Plus, iPhone SE. Which is better?"
Bigger numbers are still better. "Plus" means the big screen. S is off year version, incremental upgrade on the previous number. Agreed SE is the odd one out, but don't think it's too hard for consumers to figure out "its the cheap one".
Because new iPhone models are introduced only once a year to great global fanfare, I bet a lot of consumers actually know the meaning of the version conventions very well.
Agreed on iPad and Mac versions, though, those are a mess.
It's always a version number (ex., 7), the following version they add an 'S' (ex., 7S), then the following version they will increase the version number (ex., 8). "Plus" means bigger, and you can regognize it because it's bigger, "SE" means lower-end, you can recognize it because it costs a lot less.
I currently own a Huawei Y6II, which I read is a clone of the P9. No idea what it means, what the following version will be called, or what the previous version was called.
> "Plus" means bigger, and you can regognize it because it's bigger, "SE" means lower-end, you can recognize it because it costs a lot less.
It's also a smaller phone, just like how the Plus is larger and costs more, but isn't any faster. The name or price of SE doesn't imply lower end at all, they've even removed the number so you don't know which one it's comparable to.
You just look at the hardware and read reviews. There isn't really a sliding scale for PCs, that's the awesome thing about manufacturers that let you customize. Doing a lot of gaming or modelling? Better graphics card. Running shitloads of processes? Better ram. Better processor. Extra HDD, or SSD, or optical drive? Etc.
Nothing about driver compatibility :( it's a long and painful process to figure out if the computer you want will even work with the software you want to use.
Of course I'm sure it's better if you use the blessed OS and version pair, but I've never found a reason to use windows before....
Driver compatibility could be hell in windows as well if you're cursed with a "switchable" graphics option. My last lenovo could switch between on-board and dedicated graphics, but the latest video driver that lenovo provided was from the year before I even bought the laptop. If I used the card manufacturer's drivers, they'd usually work but killed the ability to switch to on-board graphics; but if I used Lenovo's drivers, games performed very badly due to how out of date they were.
Having one manufacturer and fewer models usually means longer and more consistent product support.
So, because they aren't sane enough to figure out a naming scheme that makes sense, I have to waste hours or days looking at reviews just to understand what the difference is between the models? From what I could understand it's possible that the X67L is a good laptop, the X67LX is a crappy low-cost plastic netbook. How dumb is that.
Also, why do they ask me if my laptop is for work or home? What if I use it for both (which I do)? It doesn't make any sense.
I bought the new MacBook Pro mostly because of macOS, but also because I couldn't figure out how PC name their products, nor why they have to have 50 different barely-different models.
>X67L is a good laptop, the X67LX is a crappy low-cost plastic netbook. How dumb is that. //
To me that's not half as frustrating as the companies that sell a, let's say 755cx and then create a new model a few years later and call that 755cx ... how bloody annoying [like hey, this review is from 7 years before the thing was made, and it's a completely different system]. Or worse still, not have a model number to refer to. I think the worst I had was trying to find parts for a Toshiba laptop, IIRC, there were about 5 different models in 10 years with the same designation, like lets just call all our new laptops the "Laptop New" what could possibly be wrong with that.
Coming from the PC universe, the process is different.
1. Define: You first decide what you actually want
2. Search: Your search is entirely based on value for money (you have defined value before)
3. Decide: You read reviews and decide which one to take
4. Buy: Find the cheapest offer
Not once should you have to care about the name of the product, it simply does not matter.
There should be more than enough databases that let you sort and filter the latest notebooks.
Well, to be honest, it sounds like you care about the "name" and thus the value the company trying to sell you a product wants you to believe that product is worth.
So apple could release the iPhone 8 with the same specs as the 3GS, and you'd get bamboozled because you can't be bothered to do your research before purchasing something.
You make this sound bizarrely difficult given a defined price range you could probably pick a decent laptop based on amazon reviews in 15 minutes and be pretty happy with it.
If you want to play real pc games get a desktop or a console unless you have a lot of money to spend.
How do you deal with the rest of the consumer universe? I'm betting you get along just fine.
So, since you care, doing research to get the right one doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me.
I put in a solid hour of research at least before buying a new pair of boots. It took me many hours over many days to choose a camera. Took me weeks to build my PC. Each of those products I put in an amount of research that's at least somehow correlated with the price I paid for them (boots -> 100$ -> camera 600$ -> PC $1300)
They are running a business. Presumably they want people to buy things. Making potential customers do research because the product line is opaque is just throwing away good leads.
Presumably they would want to sell you the lowest-cost-to-manufacture product for the highest price. So, the more you know about the product, the worse for them, because it removes an opportunity to obfuscate.
So, yea, research is a bit tricky, but that's good because the reason it's tricky is because you aren't depending on the company to tell you the real value of their product.
I like lenovo laptops and I agree that they have too many model lines, but apart from a couple of subtitles, most of them are descriptive of that particular line.
This.
Back when there was only one iPhone to buy, it made the decision for the customers really easy: either you buy it, or you don't. But now, you gotta consider different specs and models Apple is providing, and choose from a plethora of devices... When you have multiple options, choosing one gets much difficult.
Now, don't Apple Executives know this already? I guess they do, but what Tim Cook has done so far has been stabilizing the company and increasing the profit (by building various versions of the same product and targeting a broader range of people).
This came at a cost though: making the organization more and more bureaucratic leads to more efficiency, but less creativity and innovation. I think Apple's strategy has changed but in a few years, they're going to need a fresh air in the company or they'll get Nokia-ed.
Each year they bring out three different sized models. Big, medium and small. Or you can buy an old one.
Yes there are feature differences, if you are a techie or a gamer or into photography, but bigger always means better. It really isn't rocket science.
The iPad and Mac laptop lineups are a bit of a mess at the moment though. I think that's mainly because they're in various stages of technology transitions such as retina displays, wide colour gamut, touch bar and Apple Pencil support. They're pushing aggressively into new technologies and manufacturing processes and I think that's creating problems for them.
You don't have to consider different specs. Whether you buy an A8 powered iPhone SE, an A9 powered iPhone 6s, or an A10 powered iPhone 7, you get a very well performing phone that is probably going to run the latest OS for the next 3 - 5 years.
The only thing you have to consider is what size you prefer, the color, and the amount of memory.
The SE has an A9; its guts are basically those of a 6s, minus Force Touch and the second-gen fingerprint sensor. With yesterday's rev to storage, I guess its guts are basically now those of a 6s+.
I believe the cheaper, albeit slow performing Android phones are revolutionizing the developing countries. People who could never afford a shiny Apple phone and its ecosystem are thriving due to Android.
That's not really against the commenter's point, though. I think the argument is that Apple had a clearly defined and differentiated product with the iPhone, and model creep can be considered a threat to that clarity. (As good as Android has been for a wide range of users, it's tough to stand out as a device maker.)
Well, I am from Germany and am using a Mac but I dislike the new iPhones and Android (for example MIUI) is not worse than iOS, the only downside is the missing iCloud integration.
I had many iPhone devices in the past (ranging from the first to the 5, which was my last) and with the iPhone 6 it went downhill in my opinion. This is where I switched to Xiaomi and never looked back.
So it's not only in developing countries, for example I prefer my Xiaomi Mi5 Pro over any iPhone device that is out there.
They have their flagship every year and so it's pretty easy so know what to pick. The Tablet part is lacking but the MiPad 3 is in the works.
>and Android (for example MIUI) is not worse than iOS //
I prefer stock Android but my latest phone has MIUI. It's OK, but I don't want someone else's tailoring I want my own; why can't companies offer their own settings but leave devices open for those who want to change. Yes, "support" but just have a "support and warranty will be limited by changing this setting" with a tick box and an "are you sure?" nag and let me return my device to stock. Grrr. /rant
It's quite obvious the Pixel is the "flagship" Android Google phone. And Pixel C is the "flagship" Android tablet.
The pixel is advertised everywhere as a Google phone. Who makes it doesn't really come up in their product communication much.
And the 'flagship' label is literally in the title of the Pixel products on Amazon. And on the website it's called "Pixel, phone by Google".
> People buy a low end Android phone and hate the entire ecosystem because the phone performs like crap.
This seems like an antiquated view of Android. I don't think people see Apple as having a monopoly on luxury/quality devices anymore. And considering the heavy OS modifications made by different companies and the entire UX experience of dealing with a company (customer service, website, accessories, etc), I don't really see why it matters if your mom thinks she has a "Samsung" or an "LG". There's more to Android phones than the base OS.
For people on Hacker News, sure. But try asking your grandma what the flagship Android phone is and what the flagship Apple phone is. It is much more confusing for the average person than you'd think.
> I don't really see why it matters if your mom thinks she has a "Samsung" or an "LG".
Because when people ask if she has an Android she says "No."
> There's more to Android phones than the base OS.
I know, that's my complaint. It really adds nothing for the customer to have it be so fragmented.
And of course the answer changes depending on where you're from. Over here, you can't buy the Taurus, so I would probably say Ford Mondeo or Ford Edge.
It is also fairly obvious that the pixel will be abandoned in about 2 years max. Since it was previously obvious that the Nexus was their flagship.
It isn't as bad as it was 2 years ago, where the main google phone would get updates, but was nigh unusable with the latest operating system. I still fully expect my nexus 6 to be basically abandoned by them within a year or so now.
It's not obvious at all. It isn't even obvious if you spend 8 hours on research and are a techie.
What was the flagship before the Pixel? What was the flagship 2 years ago? The android market probably has a changing flagship every 6 months and even then it isn't obvious what it is.
Try typing "flagship android phone" into Google search. Pixel only comes up in 8-9 results out of 100.
"Android" is not a hardware manufacturer; each manufacturer has its own flagships, just like Apple does. That Apple is also their own (and only their own) OS vendor doesn't mean "flagships" apply per-OS.
The term 'flagship' is confusing for Android, as each manufacturer that ships an Android device typically has their own flagship phone as well.
However, I think most Android consumers don't care about whether a phone is flagship. I imagine most tend to be more interested in finding a comfortable balance between price and features.
You missed one, I just opened their home and this ad appeared "Buy iPhone 7 (PRODUCT)RED™ Special Edition" (4,7in , 5,5in), order starting at 8:01 a.m. PDT on 3.24.
> Every purchase contributes to the Global Fund to support HIV/AIDS programs and help deliver an AIDS-free generation.
I did not know, I'm not crazy about the color, but I love the concept ! ...
It is super nice to read that apple does something for those in need ( sorry Apple, the tax evasion techniques are not a good marketing strategy, instead this is great ).
My nephew bought an iPhone 6s Plus the other day at a Walmart, and the signage clearly showed the range of phones from 7 to SE, along with prices, so picking out the newer, high-end phone was a simple matter.
I see, when looking at http://www.apple.com/iphone/ on my phone that the product line is arrayed at the top, with the 7 labeled as "New".
I have a "crappy" $50 Android phone and I love it. Galaxy Express 3. It gets the job done, has expandable storage, and I don't feel bad when I inevitably drop it in water or lose it.
Its nice to give consumers choice, but it puts extereme pressure on Apple to commit to their things works across every apple product policy. Most of loyal [non dev] apple consumers count on this.
One of the reasons why he did that was because Apple was dying. They didn't have money and resources to support many models, and they needed to focus and do one thing right. So it was the right decision.
As much as I like simplicity, if you look around there are tons of cases like this around us, and that's not because these companies are idiots who don't understand simplicity but it's because their products have reached saturation point where making it simple won't get more users. They need to expand horizontally by building variations that appeal to a wider audience.
Sure it's kind of annoying, and you and I may not understand the benefits of the 9.7 inch iPad, but I am sure there are many people who understand exactly the benefits of 9.7 inch iPad vs iPad pro and will rush to buy them.
Wait, really? You and I being readers of Hacker News are probably in a better position than 90%+ of customers to understand the benefits of one iPad over another. If it's not clear to us... who is it clear to?
Products are segmented according to price, not features. There's a different market at each point and this determines what they will get -- not the reverse.
> They didn't have money and resources to support many models
They have money now, but do they have the resources? Apple's software quality has arguably taken a nosedive, and they've started missing deadlines even for hardware.
Assuming a kind time traveler gave 1997 Apple a few billion US$; could Apple simply have bought its way out of its problems?
> Under Jobs during the early days they never sold many products at once.
Depends on how early you go. The II+ was a straightforward upgrade to the ][ that replaced it, but the IIe was sold alongside the II+ for a long time. And then it refused to disappear while they sold the IIc and then IIgs. And don't forget the not-quite-part-of-the-family Apple III!
Up through the early 80's they had a clean lineup. After that there were as many as four different variants on the Apple II in the market at a time.
I've wondered that too... When Jobs came back, he drew four quadrants along two axes: pro/consumer and laptop/desktop. The product line was then reduced to an offering in each quadrant. It was easy to understand what you should look at when going to shop.
But there are a couple structural issues with this model that have made it hard to sustain.
The first is that it can represent money left on the table.... a sort of quantization error induced by the product line. Maybe there are worthwhile markets that don't spring for the professional line, but still want something more than the basic consumer line. This creates something of a temptation to try to address those markets.
The second structural issue is that the four quadrant model is based on saying no to ideas that might come from good people (or at least people entrenched in the corporate bureaucracy). Maybe doing this a few times is easy, but the more creative your organization, the more often you'll have ideas that will be difficult to fit into whatever product line strategy you've put together.
What? I had exactly the opposite reaction. Since this replaces the iPad Air, to me this is a return to sanity.
- iPad Pro
- iPad
- iPad Mini
This seems ideal.
If you are a "Pro" you surely don't mind spending a few minutes looking up the differences of the "Pro" model to see if it's something you need.
If you are not a "Pro" your choices are now, Do I want the regular one or the mini one?
Previously non-pros were faced with the conceptually bizarre choice of *Do I want the air one or the mini one?" which sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person.
Like... "Air" and "Mini"... what a weird choice. They both sound like super-portable models. OK. But... super-portable compared to... what, exactly? There were no "regular" models, only "variants." What were they varying from?
While that's true, Apple grew to have a wide variety of products during Jobs' tenure as well. In 2007 there was the iPod Nano, Touch, Shuffle, and Classic, for example.
So it may be that different times call for different strategies. Perhaps the lesson is that you should focus intensely in the beginning and ship varieties once the product has reached a certain level of maturity?
I'm not in a place to say, but sometimes I wonder if we could go back in time and replay "Apple with Steve Jobs" while believing Steve Jobs to dead how often we would say, "Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave."
That's 57 variants, clearly designed by a bean counter judging by the deliberate storage choices (i.e. no 64gb options across the whole line). 32GB seems totally pointless to me unless you are only using it for email & web browsing. Why is the mini 4 - a device that wouldn't appear to appeal to "power users" only available in 128gb? Why would anyone purchase a 12.9" iPad Pro with 32GB of storage?
The iPad line is all over the place - I had re-write the above as I got confused by what base options are available. What's even more baffling is that they all come with regular USB cables which means I can't plug any of them into my new Macbook Pro.
Sure, but he cut stuff like printers, cameras, and other crazy crap they used to make.
Even when he was still alive they had different-sized iPods, iPads, and more.
Computers have always come in different sizes: 13", 15", and 17". What is the difference between a 13" and a 15"? Does it make it harder to buy? Perhaps, but you wouldn't kill the 15" just so people don't get confused.
I think the point is that the difference between 13", 15" and 17" laptops is easily grasped by even the least knowledgeable customer. It takes no time to figure which product fits your needs best.
The difference between the 9.7" iPad and the 9.7" iPad pro is not intuitive, at least to me. If it is not obvious how different products serve different needs, then you aren't actually expanding the market your product appeals to, you are just confusing customers.
Do you need a better screen with the stylus? If yes, iPad Pro, else iPad.
I mean, this is kind of ridiculous. All beers, wines, sodas come from bottles that are exactly the same size, how do you know if you like Budweiser or Heineken.
I actually find that it's really hard to pick a beer when I'm confronted with all the options: it would be a lot easier if a store just carried a lager and IPA and a stout (provided that the said beers were actually good)
I think that's an instructive example of how different vendors cater to different markets.
A good restaurant or non beer-focused bar might have a curated selection of one or two examples of each style. Their customers just want something good to pair with their food.
But go to a good bottle shop or beer bar and you'll find sub-styles within sub-styles. Want an IPA? Will that be West Coast or New England? Double or single? Fruit adjuncts? OK, Which fruits? Beer geeks will seek out places with these choices.
I understand you. There was a time where there was one lineup for each need, and you knew what matched your situation. "Apple, give me a tablet", you pay 1 grand, you get the most awesome tablet. Now it's like in sport shops: "I need a sleeping bag to sleep outside" gets you a response like "What kind of 'sleep outside' do you mean?"...
There are several differences, which any given person might find more appealing.
Pro offers:
- Better processing power
- Better sound (more speakers)
- Better resolution cameras (about +4MP on both)
- Thinner (1.4 mm)
- Lighter (.04 lbs)
- Higher storage capacity
- Pencil & Keyboard (the ipad smart KB, bluetooth should work on both) support
And possibly the non-pro does not have P3 wide color gamut support?
If I was buying one for a family member I would buy the iPad, not the pro unless I specifically knew they needed one of these features—of which, the keyboard and pencil support seem most probable, cameras probably second.
Personally, I have the pro with the keyboard and pencil, and I love it for most day to day use. I have not yet tried to code on it, but I am dubious that I will ever be able to rely on it as my primary/only computing device. However, for meetings, classes or speaking engagements I find it highly versatile and fits a niche my laptop never would.
Multiple models are fine, so long as you have clear signaling. As you point out, it's not terribly hard for the consumer to tell the difference between 13", 15", etc.
Usually it's not that easy, and tech releases are shockingly hard to understand, and in my opinion most of the ambiguities are pure laziness. Since the topic at hand is Apple, let's pick out some examples from their small'ish product line:
* There's no way to know, without doing extra research, that the iPhone 'S' suffix means "better." 'S' could easily mean "small." The 'C' suffix is even more ambiguous.
* The iPhone SE is probably the most ambiguously named product they've released in years. Now it's even worse, because once you know that the SE stands for "Special Edition," releases like the iPhone 7 (RED) Special Edition make it even harder to understand where the SE fits in.
* Apple still sells MacBook Airs, except they made the MacBook do what the Air used to do and they've all but discontinued Airs.
* They're advertising the iPad 9.7", which is just the newest version of the iPad, except they already have an iPad Pro 9.7", so if you search for 9.7" on Google or look around Apple's store you mostly see mostly results for the Pro 9.7". In fact on the buy iPad 9.7" page doesn't even say 9.7" anywhere except when referencing the Pro.
Of course Apple isn't the only tech company that does this; they just used to be one of the better ones, and now they're slowly giving up that advantage. The more technical a company thinks its userbase is, the lazier it gets with naming. Computer components, for example, have names that are so useless you basically have to infer their positioning by their MSRP. (Spec sheets are only marginally helpful; your only real option is to search for benchmarks.) This is not a good thing; everyone benefits from clearer naming conventions. Many companies just don't think it's important, for some reason.
My theory is that this is because they didn't want to release the SE, and that they are only lately coming to grips with the fact that consumer preference is inexorably leading them to a product line charted on two axes, not just one --- price sensitivity and size sensitivity.
>> Sure, but he cut stuff like printers, cameras, and other crazy crap they used to make.
Dunno if there are other fogeys like me who remember the days going back to the Imagewriters, Stylewriters and Laserwriters -- those were fantastic printers in the pre-USB era where third party printer pickings were quite slim for Apple users.
In the late 80s, you could even get a third party scanner in the shape ink cartridge called a Thunderscan for the Imagewriter.
> In the late 80s, you could even get a third party scanner in the shape ink cartridge called a Thunderscan for the Imagewriter.
That was indeed very cool. The much lower complexity of the technology involved is what made these kind of feats possible tho- there's no way you could pull off something like that in this age of hyper miniaturized, specialized hardware components- that's why something like Project Ara was doomed from the start.
There's a picture of me as a teen on my outbound "laptop" struggling to get one hooked up somewhere. That roller-bar mouse thing though, that's what stands out :)
Except there are two iPad Pro sizes and one of them is the same size as the new basic iPad 9.7'. And the iPad Mini is now more expensive than a basic iPad 9.7' but are slower, but only come in a large storage option.
I love Apple. Read my other posts defending the iPad as a productivity device on this discussion, and defending the cleanness if the iPhone lineup, but the current iPad lineup is all over the place.
I think you're missing the rumours on the new 10.5" iPad Pro. Hold your judgement before that. What if the future product lines are only iPad and iPad Pro? With iPad at 7.9" and 9.7", iPad Pro at 10.5" and 12"? Many have said that the 10.5" iPad Pro would be the 12"'s resolution at 326 ppi, and I think thats reasonable.
If that were coming out any time soon, I'd have expected it to be launched alongside the other changes to the lineup. But adding my anityercscreen size option by itself does nothing to reduce the confusion in the current lineup.
The Pro is one line, there are just two screen sizes. The 9.7" Pro has the same processor as the larger pro and has compatibility with the pencil. The new 9.7" non-pro has the lower end chip and no pencil.
Yes it's one line, but it has two versions with big differences. I could be wrong but it's not just the screen size, it's also the screen resolution and camera resolution as well. They might as well be two different products. Everyone thought that the smaller iPad Pro was the successor to the iPad.
It has got a little confusing over the years but today doesn't add any further complexity and makes things a bit better, it just replaces the iPad Air which I think was badly named to begin with and should have just been called iPad like it was before. May be because the Macbook Air looks to be going away they are getting rid of the Air name, although they just released 'AirPods'.
They also dropped the iPad mini 2, which is a nice step towards simplifying the lineup a bit. It's still overly complicated, but it's been ridiculous for years now, and this is moving in the right direction.
AirPlay, AirPrint are still in use. The Air name for Macbook and iPad lines was all about thinness. When introduced, these products had thicker predecessors. It's irrelevant now for iPad, as everything is pretty much the same thickness across all models. For Macbook Air, it is no longer the thinnest product in the line-up. However, Apple can't quite get rid of it just yet - not until they offer a sub $999 Macbook.
I am utterly confused. There was the iPad, then the Mini, then the Air, then the Pro.. and now I look at this, and 9.7" sounds fairly large ("normal" iPad size?) but the price is surprisingly cheap? No idea. closes window
I've got about 6 tablets and never use any of them anyway. I hate the user experience. I see no case where I'd rather have a tablet than my phone or my 6 year old Macbook Air.
Always seems like a good idea? I've got an iPad2 that I really wanted to love, and used until it became so slow it was useless (a couple of years ago). It still sits on my kitchen counter as a plugged-in weather station, though the app crashes frequently.
I've got an HP Touchpad I bought during the fire sale for $50 or whatever the going rate was. I think its got Android on it. It was less of a fun project than I expected. Mostly I realized I don't like Android.
I've got a 7" Fire I bought at christmas for $30 but never use.
My wife's got a 7" Nexus she got as a gift but rarely used.
She's also got a Kindle she used to use occasionally.
Plus an iPad Air she uses quite a bit.
I'm pretty sure there's another tablet or two in there somewhere but nothing comes to mind.
After the 2nd or 3rd tablet one would think "seems like a good idea" would have become "seems like a bad idea". You also didn't even mention why you stopped using the 3 other tablets you bought after having bad experiences with your iPad2 and HP Touchpad.
Your iPad2 example sounds like a software problem? And regarding slowness, have you tried a factory reset? I have an old iPod Class gen5(?) from 2004ish which became very usable after a system update (6 months ago) and a factory reset. I use it now mostly for streaming radio from various websites, all of which load fast enough.
Surfing the Internet, reading ebooks and watching videos are all things an iPad would do much better, particularly anything that would benefit from a hiDPI screen.
I do miss the high DPI screen when using my old Air, that's a good point. Though I usually don't feel my internet surfing is enhanced by holding a heavy tablet.
Have you considered the plethora of cases and stands available for relatively low prices? For someone with 6+ tablets, it just sounds like you buy them because they were cheap... and so that you have something to complain about.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/ to compare current models. iPad Pro 9.7 has better processor, better screen, better camera, is slightly thinner and lighter and works with Apple Pencil and Keyboard accessories.
There are now just four options: big Pro, little Pro, iPad, and mini.
Four options, plus all the sub-options: with cellular data or without, 3 or so different amounts of space..
With the larger iPads do some people get smaller space, even though larger display probably means more resources/larger resolution media will need to be stored on the device.
Jobs also wanted one phone at one screen size based on some cargo-cult science about average thumb length. Apple was watching its lunch being eaten by people who would have had probably bought an iPhone but wanted the big screens Android has to offer. Thus the multiple iPhone models. He was also against the mini iPad size, which is the only iPad I'm willing to buy.
I think the limited product line is an artifact of the time and place Jobs and Apple were in the early 2000s. They had endless Mac models and a underwhelming value proposition. Cutting that down to a single colorful little Mac and a single pro product and their laptop equivalents made sense. Introducing the mobile revolution one simple product at a time also made sense.
Now they need to continue to make sales, so adding more products to address more niche markets is the only way forward. They've probably exhausted their "one size fits all" market at this point. Apple can't accept no or negative growth, so more niche products it is.
The story goes, according to my boss with her signed letter of appreciation for her 20 year service to the company, that when Steve came back to Apple the first thing he did was cut the research team.
The rationale being that Apple is not in a position to do the R in R&D and instead will focus just on the D to survive.
In turn he starts slashing the D that won't yield results, while focusing on the ones that will.
And being that he was now single handled in charge the most he can focus on is being in the center of four quadrants, hence putting everything on the table into just four buckets:
1 being the thing that Steve gets. 2 being the thing that Steve wants. 3 being what Apple does best and 4 being what adds value.
Now everything Apple does runs off this premise.
The premise worked well enough to pump out the iBook, iMac, iPhone, to then the MacBook and MacBook Pro, to the Mac Pro, Mac mini.
Then he died.
In his place he passed the legacy to an operator. Because the operator's goal is two folds: keep improving things and keep making things efficient.
Tim Cook delivered on the latter and he's working on the former.
The clones being the ones that can take the baton and run with it.
It'll be here soon enough. The next generation is starting to take shape. And there will be leaders that take the stage to lead each quadrant.
PS: Square aped this strategy, that's why Jack Corsey was a favorite of Steve's. Square sells you the hardware at cost and gives the software away free, they scale by latching on to the hack of reselling you points on a merchant account.
This is what happens when they don't have a "product" guy running the company anymore. Steve Jobs was brilliant at coming up with new products. Every since he left all we have gotten is the Apple Watch, which one can argue he probably had a hand in. Their only option now is to start creating variations of existing product lines to keep them "fresh".
> Steve Jobs was brilliant at coming up with new products
By my count, Jobs shepherded the following hit products (I'm giving the Apple ][ to Woz):
- Macintosh (1984)
- iPod (2001)
- iPhone (2007)
- iPad (2010)
I think you're exaggerating how often Apple rolled out new product lines under Jobs. You could even argue that the iPod and iPhone overshadow the other two substantially in terms of cultural impact.
> Their only option now is to start creating variations of existing product lines to keep them "fresh".
Isn't this kind of what you'd expect out of a business? Refreshing and supporting their existing product lines while occasionally trying to establish new ones? The iPhone is looking more and more like a once-in-a-lifetime home run product (Ben Thompson has done a lot of good writing on this), the likes of which Apple (or anybody else, for that matter) may never be able to top. This isn't to say that Apple doesn't miss having a visionary like Jobs at the helm or that their product lineup doesn't have glaring flaws. I just think the massive success of the iPhone set expectations way too high.
Maybe I'm misinformed, but those seem like the "definitive" Apple products to me. They're basically the foundation of their current business, and have only been diluted since his departure.
Why would Jobs not get credit for the Apple 2? It's not like he engineered any of the other items on your list. It was his marketing that made the Apple 2.
When Jobs came back to Apple he supposedly canned hundreds of different products and got them to focus again. While he was around, that's how things remained; each product had their own place. As time goes on since his departure, the clutter is starting to come back and the lines are starting to blur. Whats the difference between the new Macbook and the Macbook Air? The iPad 9.6 vs the iPad Pro 9.6? Apple Watch Gen 1 vs Gen 2 vs Series 1 vs Series 2?
Agreed. I thought the best way would be differentiate on features.
Pro should be:
- wifi+LTE
- more storage
- pen and/or cover keyboard included
- faster CPU
- multiscreen capability (connect to mouse and monitor with "desktop" interface) for truly replacing my desktop
Regular iPad should be wifi only, and not come with a pen.
There is a big difference. They were a $4 billion dollar company without the resources they have now and they were selling multiple computers with the same specs with different model numbers depending on the retailer.
He also said that a mistake they made with Macs was having a price umbrella that let others come in cheaper.
iPad is cheaper and doesn't support the pencil - good enough for most people - and the iPad Pro is more expensive and supports the stylus and has a faster processor.
Most people understand more expensive = better.
On a side note. I hate Apple stopped selling the 3rd Gen AppleTV for $59. It was "good enough" for people who mostly wanted AirPlay functionality and to stream videos using the included app. Now they have nothing that competes in the ChromeCast/Roku stick price range.
I think you mean, "It makes it harder to decide to buy." A hugely important distinction and the point of having few models. (limiting decision points/places to 2nd think do I really need a new ipad)
Steve's opinionated model was very elegant, but with that approach Apple was certainly not meeting everybody's demands.
Back then it was ok to leave bunch of customers to others, as Apple still managed to find quite nice growth by for example entering to new device categories. For couple of years this has not been the case. Apple has been forced to find the growth by selling more of same to the customer base that is not growing so rapidly.
I think the large number of models is simply a result of their attempt to maximize the money pouring with the current set of inventions they have at hand.
My favorite new tactic of theirs is in their new commercials, where an actor will ask if the "iPad" can do something, and the announcer will confirm that it can, on the "iPad Pro". The one that jumps to mind is the MS Office one, but I recall at least one other feature that they advertised using the same tactic.
It's pretty confusing if you don't catch the causally mentioned "Pro" bit at the very end, after they've gone through a segment on the "feature" that the "iPad" can do. I just hope it'll net them a lot of returned iPads from rightfully frustrated customers.
I think that's just because those are commercials promoting the Pro specifically, not that they are saying that those things cannot be done on non-pro models. At least, I'm not aware of any restrictions on what models of iPad's can run Office, for example, and if there were, they'd be ones imposted by app's authors, Microsoft in this case.
Unless you're talking about apps specifically requiring Pencil?
Maybe it's just the bait-and-switch tone of the commercials that throws me off. It does seem like Office would run on any iPad [0], and they could just be referring to the pencil. However, even the description there [0] is kind of weirdly worded to me. I just don't know enough about Apple devices I guess.
> * Word is ready for iPad Pro and looks amazing on the 12.9-inch screen. Read Word documents on iPad Pro for free. To create and edit docs, you need a qualifying Office 365 subscription. Try it for free for 30 days. *
The real Microsoft Word app designed for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
Been wondering the same thing. It's one of the my favorite stories from the Walter Isacson bio. After listening to all the product mgrs for like 3 days in all day meetings describe their 20+ hardware products, he draws a 2x2. Labels one axis "consumer/professional" the other "laptop/desktop" and says "you get four products". Clarity in product offerings means you know who you are; the inverse is also true.
I fondly remember seeing that product grid on Apple's website. And even though it isn't displayed as a grid I think the current iPad lineup fits the 2 axis concept pretty well. They still have the consumer/professional or consumption/creation axis. The Pro being the professional/creation end. And instead of laptop/desktop they have the size or portability axis. In the large professional there is the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, in the small professional there is the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. For the large consumer there is the iPad and finally the for the small consumer is the iPad mini.
I'd argue that the #1 or #2 key addition that "Pro" gets you (the Pencil being the other #1 or #2) is the "Smart Connector" for the integrated keyboard (http://www.apple.com/smart-keyboard/).
The ability to add the keyboard and the pencil illustrates the distinction Apple is trying to make between the Pro and the vanilla 9.7 -- creation vs. consumption.
After all these years, they are still persistently trying to position the iPad as a creation tool. Maybe it will work.
The list of things I absolutely can't do on an iPad is fairly small these days. (This is distinct from things that I would prefer to do on a Mac/PC, but there are things that I would prefer to do on the iPad, too.) I think Apple may need to do a better job of showing, well, more utilitarian tasks that can be done pretty easily on the iPad.
Having said that, I do wonder if one of the unspoken stumbling blocks is that even if an iPad is a great portable computer in many respects, it's only a portable computer. A lot of people "dock" their laptops to get work done. (Or to write comments on Hacker News when they should be getting work done.) I love traveling with my 9.7" iPad Pro and keyboard, but even if future releases of iOS address all the nitpicks I have with it, there are times I want to be sitting at a desk in front of a big monitor. I don't see that coming to iOS any time soon.
> I don't disagree with the lesson, but does it always apply? When Jobs came back Apple was in a different place than it is today.
Maybe, but on the other hand there is a lot of similarity between Apple v. Microsoft/PC-cloned on desktop and Apple v. Google/Android-devices on mobile.
And one similarity would seem to be that Apple is in no position to win on breadth and choice, but they may be in a position to win (at least, create a solid, profitable I market where they have little effective competition) by identifying key niches, and narrowly tailoring offerings to them.
In fact, I'd argue that their path in tablets and smartphones has been pretty similar as in PCs; they developed the market ahead of everyone else with fisrly narrow offerings, a competing platform emerged where the core software was separate from hardware manufacturers offering more choice, and drew them into trying to compete on the kind of choice offered by the competition.
Yes, exactly. The Apple Pencil is incredible, by the way. The experience is comparable in my mind to using the original iPhone for the first time. Apple should market the hell out of the 12.9" iPad Pro to artists.
The "iPad Pro" is the same iPad as it always was, the "Pro" is marketing.
A member of my family was hustled into buying an iPad "Pro" from a sales rep who convinced them it can do everything and more, yet they can't perform simple file management and related email tasks on it, so they still use a Windows PC that cost 1/2 the price of the $800 iPad Pro.
Also there was reason why Steve Jobs was against all tablet sizes except one. At the time Apple was going after revolutionizing the education market and the 9.7" iPad1/2 fit the bill for that purpose exactly. Then came the iPad mini whose sole purpose was to increase business bottom-line… and then a few more models based on other focuses or potential uses. Meh.
Moral of story: Do not destroy the initial momentum and the sense of denting the world. "To be a part of revolutionary change" is an important feeling to keep in tech industry.
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Edits:
Wish I could impress upon them about the urgency to kill all models except the iPad Air (9"). Anything else will only kill/subdue the category and lead the focus away from the initial promise that the tablets held -- i.e. disrupt education.
It really should just be iPad (9.7) or iPad Pro (12.9) should it not? Now the customer has to decide between two 9.7 models with not so obvious differences between the two? And now there are two (edit: three) different iPad pages on the sales website you have to go through.
This changes the immediate conversation visiting the site for the first time between why I should get the iPad... to what's the difference and available options AND why should I get an iPad?
The Macbook vs Macbook Pro distinction was more obvious because it was basically casual/school vs work. But I don't really see tablets having that work vs casual dichotomy. It's more high-end vs affordable. Which from a mental categorization perspective doesn't fit neatly into the current product line.
No? I have a 9.7 Pro. I have the Pro because it's one of the best tablet solutions on the market. I actively do not want a 12.9" tablet, and a non-Pro doesn't support the Apple Pencil.
I think what we're seeing here is not so complicated: it's that customers have strong size preferences, and that they're often orthogonal to their price sensitivities.
Reminds me of iPhone SE - make a product from older tech, where all manufacturing is cheap and smooth as ever and sell it as cheapest option (I imagine with still veeery big markup).
17 different prices and no clear indication of what use case each is for.
the 12.9 inch is the most expensive, but doesnt seem to have the best specs?
Do i need an A9x or will an A9 suffice?
Why does the 9.7 inch pro come in rose gold but not the 12 inch?
the two 9.7 inch tablets are different sizes, how will i know which case to buy or if this ipad will fit into my current case?
do i need a fully laminated display and antireflective coating? because the 9.7 inch ipad does not have these things but all other models do.
Which one will work with my existing data plan? I see that the 9.7 inch pro comes with an embedded sim, does that mean i cant replace it with my own sim? They also all seem to support different LTE bands, am i expected to know which LTE bands my provider uses before i purchase an ipad?
Just my thoughts after looking at this page for two minutes.
The main difference between the 10" models is that one works with the stylus, and the other doesn’t.
All the tech that goes into making the display stylus-compatible is quite complicated, so it makes some sense that there’s a price difference / that they leave those out for the budget model.
The 13" model is basically the same as the 10" “pro” model, except it came out a few months earlier, before some of the new features (a display with more colorful primaries, and better cameras). At the point that new “pro” models come out (later this year sometime), the next version of the 13" iPad will pick up those features.
For a luxury good, isn't it in their best interest to make the differences as opaque as possible?
The lower tier, same-sized items are basically "you couldn't afford an X" models that allow them to monetize a different market.
But the idea is to keep the mystique of the higher tier items as a status symbol. And exposing the specs and highlighting precise differences only leads to people deciding that maybe that feature isn't important to them...
This. So Much. There needs to be a rationalization initiative at Apple to streamline things. If you want to command high end profits, you cant release commodity grade products. Is there even anything new here with this ipad?
What I find kind of funny is Windows has gone through this exact issue with their Windows Phone platform.
The Lumia lineup started out okay with a flagship device (920) and mid to high range device (820) a mid-range device (620) and a low end device (520) and a nice photographer device (1020). Things started getting really blurry with things like 925, 930, 635, 730 (can't remember them all) and suddenly a lower number device actually had better spec or almost similar to a higher number device, or the specs were so close together that it looked really confusing. Not to mention people begging for certain models to be upgraded and it never happening meant angry customers.
To me, it looks like Apple is slowly making the same mistake albeit a lot slower. You would have thought they were paying attention and wouldn't go down this route.
As stupid as it looks, using the big iPads for photography makes sense to a lot of people. It's a decent camera and having what is essentially a giant view finder is a nice way to work, especially for shooting video.
It is hard to see Apple keeping the mini around for much longer. I assume they are simply running down stock and will remove it soon, before end of the year.
The mini makes a great point-of-sale terminal. It's large enough to display the order and sign on, but small enough that you don't have to clear the counter in order to be able to swivel it around.
If the cheap mini goes away will there be some Android OEM that steps into that market? Or will business owners just suck it up and buy the 128GB version?
I doubt it. The Mini is a great tablet for little kids. It's just the right size for toddlers and they can still hold it even when you put an Otterbox Defender on it.
Does anyone know is there is a hardware reason that the normal iPad can't use the Pencil or is purely a software thing to make people buy the more expensive iPad Pro.
I'm not super knowledgeable about this so take this with a grain of salt. Some of this might be wrong.
Good modern touch screens, like the iPhone/iPad/Macbook trackpad are capacitive touch screens. An array of sensors emit a changing electric field which is affected by the dielectric constant of nearby materials, and fingers have a different dielectric constant from air. Capacitive sensors cannot detect pressure (although you can fake it a little).
Good modern digital pens, like the Wacom or Pencil, use radio waves. An array of antennas emits radio waves which are picked up by an antenna in the stylus. A microcontroller in the stylus computes the position and angle of the stylus, reads the pressure from another sensor in the stylus tip, and transmits the data back to the tablet over radio.
So you can see that they really are completely different technologies.
You can make a capacitive stylus, and those exist, you can even buy them at the store. However I've never seen a capacitive stylus that can detect pressure or angle at all, and capacitive sensors can't tell the difference between a stylus and your hand, so you can forget about resting your hand on the screen when you draw. The main reason I'd use a capacitive stylus is because I want to use an iPhone or iPad while I'm wearing gloves.
The Pro screen is a little different too. The iPad Pro doubles the motion detection to 240hz when there is any kind of touching going on, which reduces the latency when drawing. My understanding is that this significantly adds to the cost of the hardware, and is why we don't have Pencil support across the entire line.
I thought that the Pencil does not use a radio a la the Wacom, and is purely Bluetooth, but I can't find any source to back that up so I could be mistaken.
Wacom technology powers the pen through induction, other vendors don't do this. The Apple Pencil and whatever Microsoft calls the pen that the Surface Pro uses require a battery.
I had a Surface Pro for a couple months last year and I don't recall it really having a Name. It was just "the stylus" or "the pen" or "this goddamn NTrig piece of shit that doesn't talk to Illustrator properly".
I also have a Surface Pro and never had any trouble with the pen. I "upgraded" to a Cintiq Pro, and have to say that it's a downgrade in many ways. The screen resolution is worse, the parallax is worse. The pen is better, but honestly neither of them feel that great.
There are software issues with Illustrator losing the first half second of stylus strokes on the SP4. Very frustrating if that's the program you do most of your work in.
It requires hardware built into the display. I'm guessing that it's not very expensive though and the reason they don't incorporate it across the whole line-up is to retain their high margins on the Pro.
There is a lot of hardware going into the pencil working as well as it does. For one thing, they increase the update frequency of the display while using the pencil to make the drawing appear more responsive.
Sure it will. I once successfully replaced the shattered touchscreen on iPad 2 after just watching 1 YouTube video instruction, and it was pretty cheap since I only had to replace the touchscreen, keeping the same display. With laminated displays, you have to replace the whole package, or employ sophisticated techniques to re-laminate new glass on top of display. It's possible, but requires skills, more specialized tools, and exact amount of special optically clear glue.
I've gotten a lot of use out of my iPad 3 and, up until it stopped getting updates and the touch screen started breaking down in the past few months, found no reason to upgrade or replace it. I use it nearly daily but mostly for reading textbooks and novels, reviewing language cards, and occasionally watching YouTube videos. It's been extremely useful for taking to the gym and allowing me to study while on the elliptical.
But I got it in a different time. There weren't many tablets available at the time and a retina screen was critical for small text. As I've looked around recently, it's become very hard to justify getting a new iPad over something like the surface.
How do people justify the purchase in 2017? Seriously asking as I am looking to replace my iPad with something in the next few weeks.
I also have an old iPad 3. It certainly shows it's age and is significantly slower than my iPhone 7 Plus. However, the iPad 3 has worked well for FIVE years! I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, it has never been affected by malware, spyware, or some buggy crap software which wasted hours of my time. It has not disappointed me once in those 5 years.
Why would I stray away from a product that has not let me down for so long? Is the surface kickstand and pen input worth:
- having to learn a new OS
- not having facetime
- not having imessage (90% of my friends and family are on iOS devices)
- risking time lost due to malware, bloatware, blue screen, etc
Sure there are tablets out there that are thinner, faster, cheaper and have more features. I just don't care! I rather pay $200-300 more for a device that I will use almost every day for the next 1000-1500 days. Once iPads, iPhones, iMacs start wasting my time with random problems then I will shop around. Until then there is absolutely nothing that would make me switch brands.
Or maybe it sees little usage inside of your own country? Even when most people use other messaging platforms, I see it used as the family/iphone-possessing-close-friends channel of choice, since it transparently replaces SMS.
Substitute "your own country" with "most countries outside the US" and you're about right. iOS prevalence simply isn't there.
While SMS fallback is handled brilliantly by iMessage, as soon as people are using it as more than a glorified sms client (group chat, file transfer...) and/or are really concerned about end-to-end encryption, the limitations of SMS/MMS start to become a dealbreaker.
iMessage makes it impractical to have a conversation with anybody on prepaid Android. Sure you can send MMSs and SMSs to them, but are they going to send more than a couple back? Nope.
I came very close to replacing my Mac Air with a Surface Pro 4 this past year, mostly didn't because of compatibility issues with Adobe Illustrator, my favorite drawing app.
MS claims 4h battery life at best, which I did find was true... after you dig deep into legacy control panels that look like it's still 1995. Out of the box the Pro 4 loves to wake up in your bag, look for wifi, then stay awake for a while doing absolutely nothing but burning through power, and you maybe get like 1h of actual use when you get to wherever you were going. I'm currently using a Wacom Mobile Studio^1, which also gets 4h. I'm constantly AWARE of and WORRIED ABOUT the thing's power levels in a way I'm not on the iPads. (Or the Mac Air for that matter.)
Apple lists like 9-10h for all current iPad models.
I may have my experience colored by mostly running a couple of desktop apps on my Win10 tablets, but I really find that Windows is not a very good tablet OS. Even in "tablet mode", which I keep it in pretty much all the time. It's just clunky and weird and maybe some of that's because this is the first Windows machine I've ever owned in my life, I dunno.
In general I don't think I'd recommend getting a Win10 tablet to replace an iPad. Get one if you have a Windows app you want to run, if you just wanna read stuff then buy a new iPad and don't worry about finding new apps to do the same stuff.
1: heavy, expensive, no kickstand, doesn't fit in most 13" bags. But it's stylus talks to Adobe Illustrator and that's my medium of choice.
To be fair, they're hit or miss. Due to circumstances I've used three extensively. The asus t100 and chi t300, which were both excellent in their price segment, and the lenovo miix 310, which was terrible (but that mostly seems to be due to w10 which took a vehement dislike to the 32 gb emmc storage).
I've also used ipads extensively and can say that windows devices are not ipad replacements or vice versa. An ipad can't do what a windows tablet can, but the reverse is equally true. Windows doesn't have the rich touch-friendly app ecosystem of iOS. I use both types of devices for the things they're good at, but neither can replace the other.
Even as a pretty big Windows fan, and someone who would personally choose a surface pro over an iPad, I find it impossible to recommend Windows tablets to people considering an iPad. The apps and user experience just isn't there when it comes to doing the sort of things people do on an iPad.
I just bought a Surface 3 recently. The kickstand is nice, the weight is tolerable, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is really why I bought it. Everything else about it sucks, from a tablet user perspective.
Every once in a while when you reboot, you'll have to wait for Windows to install its updates. Sleep/hibernate are more finicky than an iPad, which sips so little power in idle that it never has to hibernate. Desktop mode is absolutely terrible to use with fingers. Tablet mode has missing functionality so you'll have to switch to desktop mode periodically. Battery life is worse, even though Windows makes use of hibernate. There's bugs that plague the Surface line that don't get addressed for a long time. I had to manually disable wake from sleep using keyboard/mouse on my SP1 otherwise it would stay in a powered mode and never properly hibernate. A normal user can't do that.
Lack of apps is a real thing. There's no official YouTube app. You can use the desktop site, but every time you try to pull up the controls, the player interprets it as a touch and plays/pauses the video. On the Netflix app, if you try to drag the slider, there's no feedback from the slider so you can't see if you've actually dragged it or not until you let go. Makes for some very imprecise scrubbing.
I could go on and on, but an iPad is simply better for media consumption if you don't need a specific Windows tool.
Surface Pro 4 still has a range of issues that makes for a frustrating use in the tablet mode. The major one being on-screen keyboard randomly not showing up a lot of times when you focus on an input field in a browser or some other application, and with no easy way to summon it manually. The fact that these issues happen with a MS OS running on a MS device - and not some OEM's - does not inspire trust in other Windows tablets either.
I pretty much see iPads as family devices these days. Sure, that's not to say they can't be fun to have as personal "I will be the only person using this" devices, but since the original iPad:
(1) phones have gotten a lot better (and optionally bigger);
(2) laptops have gotten a lot more portable.
If I had kids, I could easily justify a family iPad. But I don't, so the device just feels like an expensive, mostly redundant luxury item.
Another thing worth mentioning is that we now live in a world where a company like Nintendo is making a serious gaming-oriented tablet with proper controls. This is something I've been wanting Apple to embrace for years, and they never did. If the Switch takes off (and it seems like there's a good chance of that), it makes a lot more sense for me to invest in that than an iPad.
Music production/performance. The iPad does few things objectively better than Android and touch responsiveness when it comes to playing music apps is one of them. There's a 100-400ms delay with Android for some reason. I had heard they'd gotten better recently but it's not as good as the iPad.
The iPad has a lot of great emulations of older synths and exciting new apps that aren't available anywhere else. Some big names have also made apps, like Korg, Propellerheads, and Native Instruments. Check out iPolysix, iProphet, Animoog, DM1, Auria, E.L.S.A., Beatsurfing, Impaktor, BIAS Amp, Audiobus, Swoopster, Sparkle, Galileo, Thumbjam, Steel Guitar, Arpeggionome, Orphion, Xynthesizr, Glitchbreaks, Loopy, and Gadget.
Still have an iPad 2, which works fine except for Safari on a heavy site, runs out of memory I think. Very happy from that angle.
But, I've moved to a Nexus 10 for movie watching, for the screen and because it is so much easier to copy a freaking file to it! I need to copy movies ripped from DVD often, or the occasional download. Apple goes out of their way to prevent that, and why I can't really recommend purchasing another. A shame really, talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
No, I use Linux on my laptop, hasn't worked with Apple devices for three years or so. But even if I didn't, I would not use that 100mb monstrosity to copy a file.
I do stream with Netflix, works fine on Android. Many of the files are from torrents as well, DVD is not the issue in itself.
There is no advantage for iPad for a movie-watching tablet, and why I switched for that use case.
I don't use my iPad much these days, but when I did, I used nPlayer: a media playing app which got around many of the iOS restrictions. Plays many different formats, has its own integrated file manager, and provides ways to copy files directly including Windows file shares or streaming files
The iPad stylus is amazing. Very noticeably lower latency and better accuracy than other tablets I tried.
If you want to use your device for taking notes, proofreading documents, writing in margins of PDFs, doodling, illustration, etc., then the “pro” iPad models are lovely.
Have an iPad 3, I find a lot of apps to be close to unusable at this point. Safari is a huge offender and it's full of ui ticks when I open the app or webpage. It seems all my apps are struggling.
It's very hard for me to justify a new iPad. I really feel apple could've gone with the OS X on an iPad approach and really taken the whole market. Instead they are slowly adding iOS to Mac OS.
I've found the frosted glass blur slows safari down significantly. There is an option to disable the frosted glass look in settings > general > accessibility > increase contrast > reduce transparency. My iPad Mini 2 runs much faster with this enabled.
Edit:
This only applies to the 4th generation iPad and up. Apparently the frosted glass look was never enabled for the third gen iPad.
I'm on an iPad 2 and most all of the music programs I use on the regular are without issue. Garage Band. Figure. Some synths. Safari works great too, only the occasional hiccup.
Functionally it's still fine, I just fear the day when it will be put out to pasture by Apple in spite of my TLC and enjoyment.
I've never felt compelled to visit one of the nearby shops on Harry Hines by the Korean Community to jailbreak an Apple device, but I think in this case I'll be tempted.
I also still have an iPad 2 which is going strong. Is slow but does everything I use it for (movies, magazines, browsing). Is hard to justify upgrading something that works fine. And I bought a Kindle Fire 8 HD on Black Friday for $60, so in a sense I have already upgraded.
Hah. Haven't even connected any with Mail.app nowadays since it was always such a resource hog with even only two accounts (especially in the earlier iOS days).
But, no offense, don't measures like these feel rather ridiculous? They are tantamount to "just don't use your Ipad (much) and it works great!"
iPad is relatively cheap and quite powerful. Compared to Android tablets it has more software and usually it is better adapted to tablet factor. It is way cheaper than surface and iOS is better than windows if you want it for "couch use", e.g.: reading/browsing/casual gaming etc. Also it has more battery life.
I jumped ship from iPads once I bought an 11" MB AIR. This ended me getting an email on the iPad, reading it, then deciding I wanted a keyboard to respond.
I do miss the simplicity for watching videos on flights, though.
I have had an iPad Pro 9.7" for half a year, and had also used the 12.9" for a month. My experience and impressions so far:
• Perfect for using in bed, or outdoors when you don't need the power of a laptop/desktop OS. A phone is too small, cannot have a physical keyboard, and even the thinnest+lightest laptop is too bulky in comparison.
• The Apple Pencil beats every other stylus out there in just about everything. [1]
• With the Smart Keyboard, split-view multitasking, iCloud Drive, desktop-quality games, and many iPad-exclusive apps like Procreate [2], the iPad and iOS easily fulfills 50% of my computing needs, and I'm sure it can do 90% of what most people need to do on a desktop or laptop. The iCloud Drive file picker is really bad for a large number of files though, but it should hopefully improve in iOS 11.
• Nothing beats reading books on an iPad. The E Ink display on a Kindle may be better on the eyes for text, but the ability to multitask and listen to my music or watch a video while reading a book puts the iPad ahead.
• I can use the iPad as a secondary display and even a drawing tablet for native macOS/Windows apps with [3] and [4].
• The wide color screen is amazing and True Tone makes it easier on the eyes over long periods of usage.
• Thanks to the true multitouch and split-view you can actually control two apps at once, unlike on a desktop OS where there's only mouse pointer and single-window focus (even in Windows on a touchscreen, the last time I check you couldn't put a finger on different apps and interact with their controls at the same time. Has this changed in the latest Windows 10 update?)
• The 12.9" was great to use indoors but awkward in public, and doesn't have a wide color screen or a good camera yet. Especially gorgeous games like Samorost 3 [5] were even more amazing on the bigger screen.
I'm happy with the performance, but I'll be getting the next iPad Pro this year if it has a sleeker form, like significantly reduced bezels.
Oh and 3D/Force Touch and "Taptic" feedback too, is what would make me buy the next iPad Pro.
As for desktop-quality games I mean stuff like FTL, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, XCOM, Inner World, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island (sadly no longer available), Banner Saga, Machinarium and many other faithful ports, some of which are actually more convenient to play on a tablet. Even among all the microtransaction-plagued crap there are a few mobile-only games with quality or depth comparable to desktop titles.
I know kids and grandparents that use tablets all the time but not really anyone outside of those age groups. Is anyone else finding that to be the case? I know I personally haven't used the ipad in months if not years at this point.
Nothing compares to an iPad as a PDF reading device. If you work in fields like electronics engineering, which require quickly going through lots of datasheets (some hundreds of pages long), it is simply the best device for the job.
(BTW, I recommend Readdle Documents for reading PDF because of its unbelievable speed, which matters a lot when your documents are 1200 pages long)
I'm right in the middle of those groups and I use it heavily every day. As a media consumption device it works perfectly. I don't want to use my heavy laptop nor my tiny phone. It's the sweet spot for me.
I'm 31 and I use my iPad Air 2 constantly. Great for reading textbooks/papers, as a second screen for TV shows, or for streaming (whether at home or on trips).
It is very much a consumption device, though -- the most I "create" with it are short emails and blog post drafts.
Same here, I use it as a consumption device to stream video and read RSS mainly. If I need to create something I have a laptop, so I see the iPad as different use case that I have no intention of merging (such as with the Surface)
All day long, i have several tablets actually, but my main tablet is a custom rom android tab s2 on tmobile.
I have tmuxinator, tasker, tasker ssh, automagic, web alert xp, csploit, hackers keyboard, (linode,aws,google) service mgmt apps, openconnect, ms rdp, hackers keyboard, AIDA ide, pagerduty, and so much more
I regularly manage linux/windows systems from anywhere on my tablet.
I approve code changes and make code changes
My tasker and automagic tasks are around server alerts, and issues, and automatically connect to servers with issues by grabbing hostname from pagerduty alert with automagic, logging in and running checks or if its a known server its calling about.
I found that with my original iPad. I sold it after a while as it wasn't getting much use.
Just last year though I got an iPad Pro 9.7 with the Pencil. That's been pretty game-changing for me as far as making these devices actually useful. Now it's like a journal/lab-book, with extra features, that I carry with me everywhere and make extensive notes in. It doesn't replace my laptop, it replaces my written notes.
I still use the laptop extensively for my work that involves programming. However a lot of my work involves sketching diagrams and solving problems, work that I used to do on paper but now can do digitally.
The pencil is an unexpected game-changer. I have the Penultimate app open next to me on a big Pro all day, it's crazy how much more effective than paper I find it.
Not really. I have the big iPad Pro that I often use around the house but admittedly not daily. (It is essentially my control panel for YouTube and Netflix casting to my TV though.) ADDED: Since I got a couple of Chromebooks, I find I often grab one of them if I'm going to be doing a lot of typing--e.g. for searches.
But an old iPad 3 is my go to device for planes. Video, games, reading (because I don't want to carry a Kindle in addition to a tablet.) I actually got one of the cheap Kindle Fires to checkout for travel but I ended up going back to the iPad because I like it better.
Musicians get a lot out of the touch interface which can be programmed to be any set of controls and parameters with something like TouchOSC or similar apps.
The iPad has a lot of great emulations of older synths and exciting new apps that aren't available anywhere else. Some big names have also made apps, like Korg, Propellerheads, and Native Instruments. Check out iPolysix, iProphet, Animoog, DM1, Auria, E.L.S.A., Beatsurfing, Impaktor, BIAS Amp, Audiobus, Swoopster, Sparkle, Galileo, Thumbjam, Steel Guitar, Arpeggionome, Orphion, Xynthesizr, Glitchbreaks, Loopy, and Gadget.
I use my iPad pro about as frequently as I use my Macbook Pro now.
As I've gotten further away from R&D and into business development and then a management-like role, most of my time is consumed reading and writing emails, using our internal messaging platform, and going to meetings.
The iPad keyboard works fine for writing short emails, it's much lighter to lug around between meetings than my laptop, and I feel less awkward using it in the back of an Uber to read/write emails when going to said meetings than I do my laptop.
We have one at home because we decided to ditch out smartphones. So we use it to periodically check emails and do some light browsing / home admin stuff. My laptop is for work and I really dislike being connected and switched-on all the time so it's a great setup for us. Edit: We're late twenties.
My mom uses her's constantly (mostly as a Kindle). I use mine about once ever 2 months. I keep thinking I should give it away or sell it but I keep it around just in case there's some app I have to check out. I also wonder if I'd actually use it more if it was a pro with the pen but I doubt it.
My wife wanted one for bedtime reading, but decided she didn't like it. Now she uses it to display web-based recipes and knitting patterns. I think my son uses it more to listen to audio books and play games - entertainment for car trips.
I'm not a kid or a grandparent, and I love my iPad for reading and taking notes -- it's also great when traveling. A number of the artists at work who used to be cintiq freaks are now using iPads with Apple pencils and seem to love it.
Exact same situation I observe, though I know a lot of parents who are instead opting for a Kindle Fire for their kids since it's much cheaper to replace and it's mostly used for videos and simple games anyway.
I don't have an ipad but an android tablet. I use it daily. Sit on the couch watching tv, play candy crush or something, and I do almost all my leisure reading on it.
It's because their naming conventions have gone out the window.
When it was iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5S you knew where on the product timeline your phone was. Now it's iPad Air, Air 2, 9.7 Pro, 9.7, 12.9 Pro, mini 4. It's all over the place.
When Jobs came back to Apple, there was a similar chaos regarding the Macintosh models. Lots of numbers, letters, and qualifiers, and the purpose of a new model was seldom clear.
The phone is a little unique in that sense. iPads or Macs not disclosing their specific version number is not new. When you got an iPad 3, it just said "iPad".
I'm afraid I must agree. They must be working on a bunch of new things or one huge new thing, trying to find their next big hit, because nothing seems to actually be advancing anymore.
(What's new here, apparently: they dropped the price by $70 and bumped the processor.)
They're consolidating their lineup and dropping the price. The iPad Air is no more. Now there's just an iPad in one size, and an iPad Pro in two sizes. I think the iPad mini is still around but I don't imagine for much longer.
I use my iPad 2 every day. I bought it in 2011, so it's basically 6 years old and battery is still in great quality. I disabled a few animations/transitions and such, and I run iOS 10. It's not as fast as it used to be (newer iOS not being optimized for slower iPads) but it's still perfectly usable for reading books on the Kindle app, some surfing etc. When I am not using it, I tend to put it in Airplane mode.
Or, in my case, a YouTube player comfortable enough to use in bed. I had such plans - a laptop replacement, a smart drawing and writing tablet, a conveniently portable development tool...none of which came to fruition, because the technology wasn't yet there.
I'm a little tempted, now, by the iPad Pro and the Pencil. It sure would be more comfortable and convenient to retouch photos that way than with a mouse or a trackpad in Photoshop. But I can hardly justify dropping most of a grand just for that, and the other use cases I no longer have - especially with a 13" rMBP in my satchel, there's really not enough point.
"Or, in my case, a YouTube player comfortable enough to use in bed."
In my case Youtube, Netflix, Twitch, as well as web browsing.
And also "everywhere I move about in the house", not only in bed.
I have zero use for it as a "productive" tool, but it's the best media consumption device I ever had, it has replaced my laptop for every use aside from creative/office work and gaming.
It doesn't do everything, but for what it does it's a great device.
I can see the problem for Apple though: if not for a cracked screen, I would have no reason to upgrade my 2+ years old iPad Air 2, since it is still more than good enough for all of the above.
Lie on your side and use the hand on the arm that's under your pillow to hold the iPad vertically on the bed. When you doze off, your grip will fail, but then the iPad just falls over on its face, which shouldn't be close enough to hit you in yours unless you're a lot more nearsighted than I am. (It might fall off the bed, though. Not a problem I have because I sleep alone on a queen-size, but I can see how other configurations might cause that issue.)
If you prefer to lie on your back, an articulated arm mounted to the headboard might work; I have one of those, but ended up not actually using it - by the time I'm actually dropping off, I don't want a screen glowing in my face.
The pencil is what will probably push me into buying my first iPad. I've only played with it in the store, but Apple has done something pretty amazing with respect to palm rejection.
I haven't really looked yet, but if there's an art class app that guides you through drawing exercises, I think I would take the leap.
That looks exactly like what I want. I never really researched it before because the last thing in the world that I need is another thing to dedicate time to.
I swear if I could afford to be retired today, I could keep myself busy for the rest of my life with stuff like this. My Dad retired a couple of years ago and I think he's bored much of the time. It drives me crazy.
Call it a historical irony: those in the generation which can afford to retire have generally built their lives so closely around their work that, without it, they can find nothing to do; meanwhile, those of us who have plenty of ideas for how we'd spend such a vast amount of economically secure free time will mostly never be able to afford it.
When the lotto jackpot reaches around $500 million, I'll spend $5 on tickets (it happens maybe once a year). It's easily worth it for the few days I get to dream about setting up the ultimate workshop or being able to travel to find the greatest teachers.
I use mine every day. It's turned my 2 hour train commute each day into wonderfully valuable time. I've written many thousands of words on it and thousands of lines of code. When I was job hunting last year I did several coding exercises on it in Pythonista. It's one of the most productive computers I've ever owned.
Although Sid Meier's Starships is sucking away a bit of my time lately.
Using an iPad (with external keyboard) to even type a simple document is an exercise in masochism. Fair play if you enjoyed it, but something like a Surface makes far more sense for these types of uses.
Trying to use a Surface keyboard on my lap on a train sounds awkward, the trains I use don't have tables. I even find laptops ungainly and sometimes I don't get a seat, but I can still do pretty much anything on an iPad.
I think my error rate is a bit higher than when using a real keyboard, but the alternative would be not being productive during that time at all. I'm an old duffer though, I remember using CPM machines, 5.25" floppy drives, line editors and dot matrix printers. An iPad is fresh air and clear blue skies compared to stuff I've had to work with back in the day.
> Trying to use a Surface keyboard on my lap on a train sounds awkward, the trains I use don't have tables
It's actually not that bad at all, believe it or not. I use the Pro 4 on my lap all the time. The Surface Book does not work in your lap based on what I have seen, but the Pro does fine.
I do not own one myself, by I have seen people type on Surface keyboards on trains, with the Surface resting on their laps. It did not look awkward or uncomfortable.
This was a few years ago, so it may no longer apply, but my biggest frustration was that none of my keyboard shortcuts worked. I like to toggle between the browser and my code editor while I code, and the only way I could do that was to physically swipe the screen with my hand. There was a workaround to enable certain shortcuts by turning on accessibility mode, but it was a huge hack and didn't work that well.
As the other reply said...non-working shortcuts and also no mouse cursor. You have to continually lift your hand to the screen to swipe or press, or click/double click the home button (hopefully you have the iPad positioned securely or you'll have another frustration on your hands).
When I needed it there was also no splitscreen, which I acknowledge would make things easier. The situation might be better now, but my sour experience forced me to move completely away from Apple at the time.
>As the other reply said...non-working shortcuts and also no mouse cursor. You have to continually lift your hand to the screen to swipe or press, or click/double click the home button (hopefully you have the iPad positioned securely or you'll have another frustration on your hands).
Well, I don't normally use the mouse when I'm writing a document. I even prefer full screen, full focus mode in writing apps like iA Writer and Ulysses (also on the Mac).
This is why I've been evangelizing Chromebooks recently; they run android apps now, so if you get a small flip-folding one, it's basically a tablet with a hinged keyboard built in.
And a linux chroot that can surface X windows to chrome browser tabs, if you're willing to turn on developer mode.
I'm a big fan of the Asus Flip (and will likely either upgrade to the new model or to the Samsung). It's increasingly my go-to travel machine. But I find it awkward as a tablet. I usually carry my old iPad with me even when I bring the Chromebook.
Pythonista. It has a syntax-highlighting code editor, integrated visual UI builder, a slew of third party Python modules baked in and a thriving community. There is also now a Python 3 compatible version. You can even use the share sheet from another app to send files to Pythonista and select a script to process the file.
I would say almost my entire family bought numerous iPad Minis just for the Facetime ability. We have non English speaking 90 year olds who loved how easy it is to Facetime great grandkids and it really is worth it (used to be only $300). It really did make it super easy to keep in touch over 4 different continents around the world.
Mine's not a children's toy, but it's almost useless now. Once they stop updating iOS for a device, it's pretty much game over. Many apps have stopped working due to the developers making mistakes and publishing incompatible updates. Just about the only app I can still use is NetFlix.
>> developers making mistakes and publishing incompatible updates
If Apple thinks your device is old enough to end support (and Apple's pretty good at pushing updates for old devices for quite a while) why would devs keep trying to support you (when the app probably only cost $1-2 and 5 years have passed).
Why are the only two options devs supporting them or their app breaking? I have software that is close to 20 years old that is both unsupported and still works.
If you don't update the app and don't update the OS there's no reason it shouldn't continue working. You update the OS and you run the risk of deprecated API's getting called.
Considering that the app store allows device and os specific versions to coexist, there's no reason that requires a dev to break an old game. When it happens, it's typically because the dev made an error and added a feature but incorrectly claimed it was compatible with older ios or device versions.
I don't know the implementation specifics. But I can go out to the app store on my old iPad and download older versions of my apps. The problem is when the older version was updated incorrectly and is incompatible with my device/iOS version.
I taped my now updateless and painfully slow iPad 3 to my kitchen wall facing the counter. It's got a web browser for recipes, can play YouTube, and can play music via Bluetooth to my stereo.
It's pretty great for that use. I regret not having thought of it before.
I have a first generation iPad. I rediscovered it about four months ago after I moved. I reset it and could download and use older versions of Netflix, Hulu, Plex, and a few other video streaming devices. I even used a version of Google Drive to read PDFs.
The battery lasts about 5-6 hours for video playback. Apple lets you redoenload older compatible versions.
My dad still uses my iPad 1 that I gave him. Best present (for me) ever :-) My dad and computers never got along. To my way of thinking, it's pretty pokey but he uses it all the time still.
The 1st generation iPad was released April 2010. The last version of iOS for that hardware was iOS 5.1.1, released May 2012. That's just barely 2 years later, not 5.
iPads are absolutely fantastic for children, not even kidding...
Between Guided Access and Restrictions, I can hand an iPad to my two year old and not have to worry. Plus then throw on high quality children's apps (most of which are educational) and YouTube Kids, and you have a wonderful platform for children.
Parents could do much worse than to hand their kids an iPad. Certainly can be more engaging than throwing them in front of a TV for the same period (not that either TV or an iPad is a substitute for one on one play time, but sometimes adults need a break too).
And with a $329 price-point it's pretty easy to justify, especially if a $30 case can do a decent job at protecting it from drops. There's a ton of quality educational games on mobile platforms, my daughter loves playing stuff with the PBS Kids characters on her Fire HD but I get really tired dealing with all the arbitrary restrictions that get added by FreeTime (absolutely NO in-app purchases, even if an adult would authorize them - she has a few games with ads that I simply cannot remove because of this).
I've been wanting to get an iPad for her instead for a while, but if I'm spending more than the $140 it cost for the Fire I'd like to get a "full-sized" tablet anyway - so the new iPad hits a sweet spot for me personally.
I bought an ipad Mini 2 for testing (insert sweary rant about mobile safari here) and expected to not get on with it.
It's become a small but important part of my digital life, My ISP rolled out city wide WiFi so I can use it comfortably at the coffee stall in the market, it's great for research, reading, PDF's, screen is large enough to be useable and the battery life is great.
My iPad mini I use for watching videos and video tutorials and reading PDF documents and of course surfing the web . I play games on it but it's definetly not a toy for me.
I don't like working on laptops and mobile devices , I am more than happy working on an iMac with a gorgeous 27 monitor , a real keyboard , mouse and Wacom.
My iPad Pro (9.7) has been mostly a media consumption device, as was all other tablets I've owned, but now that my company has moved so much to a SaaS infrastructure (Office 365 and VSTS) the need to not VPN in to work network has made actual productivity with it possible. I think the tide will slowly turn.
I teach that the meal is the moment when fun can be had through social interaction. I entirely ban communication and entertainment device at the meal table. But then I'm French, so I don't know what the custom generally is in the USA - from my experience there I understand that the daily family meals are not considered such a sacred ritual but I only have anecdotal samples.
Lots of sibling comments are defending their iPad use cases, but how many of them could be replaced by cheaper tablets? I'm quite happy with my Linx 7" Windows 8 tablet that cost £50. Real Windows, runs Steam, plays Flash and so on; micro-HDMI out, headphone jack and single USB port just like the really expensive Macs. It's made of plastic and has near-zero durability, so probably only a toy for careful children.
>I'm sure even the proletariat you sneer at appreciate their iPads.
Who said otherwise?
I wrote that for some people's use cases they are capable to be used and appreciated as tools -- which is what the parent contested.
They can be totally fine and appreciated web browsing machines for the average person, but that's a different thing that being tools (with the "productive"/"pro" element inherent in the term).
This might get me back into iPads. I had a 4th gen, and it broke right around when I transitioned into the Plus sized iPhones. Spending $500 on a new iPad didn't seem like it was all that necessary considering my phone now did an OK job replacing it.
Can anyone see what changed with the iPhone SE? They seem to have updated it as the store now says "place your order starting 3/24", but all the specs look identical to me.
And patents. People always forget the patent fees you have to pay for cellular service.
Now granted it is still a huge profit margin, and if it was just a standard feature they could likely do it for under $20 across the line, but there's likely more money in acting like it is a premium thing.
I meant mapping in general, not specifically Apple Maps.
Apple Maps, will cache a little bit, like if you are connected, get directions and start a route, then lose connection, it will still work, but if you get turned around(off course), then it may or may not work, depending on if it's cached locally(in my experience it usually won't).
Maps.me is my goto offline map solution, it uses Open Street Maps.
Yes, for that I usually use maps.me which is based on OSM. But most people don't know about these or find it too cumbersome to have to download the maps upfront, etc. Google's offline routing is also a lot better and faster.
The scrolljacking on that page is painful. Maybe it's just the massive images they're loading that's causing the chug on my machine (Macbook Pro), but it's really off-putting.
Looks like they tried as much as possible to make a low-cost full sized iPad. Would've been a good opportunity for Apple to have P3 wide color displays on all their lines.
Even more surprised it doesn't have laminated display, possible reason why it's thinker and heavier than the 9.7" Pro.
For me the choice is easy: do I need a 7" tablet for every day use, a 9.7" tablet for reading and watching movies, or a big iPad 12.9" with a Pencil for graphics?
If the choice is storage space and LTE, I go with what I need or want. If any of this seems confusing, I recommend stopping by an Apple Store, they can clarify features and benefits.
You probably shouldn't have been buying the iPad Mini 2 in the first place, and Apple really shouldn't have been selling it for as long as they did. I'm all for keeping entry-level devices, but the Mini 2 had underwhelming performance to begin with.
It sure feels like Apple is getting desperate. Not sure what's going on. I know this is a single data point but just a few days we went to our local Apple store. It wasn't quite empty but it was nowhere near as busy as it was, say, a year ago. No buzz.
At my personal level, we have not updated our iPads and iPods for a number of years. Don't plan to.
I still have a 4S. I have disliked everything Apple has done since then and so did not upgrade. The device is getting slow over time. This, by itself, is enough to bother me. It used to work fine. Software updates have made it sluggish. This is wrong. I know I will have to upgrade at one point yet I am not looking forward to upgrading to another iPhone. Apple probably has one shot at convincing people like me with iPhone 8. Hint: I am sick and tired of "thinner". I could not care less. "Thinner" ceased to be a benefit a very long time ago. They need to solve real problems. Beyond that, you can only say "beautiful" so many times before it becomes a joke. Beautiful, beyond a basic aesthetic, isn't a solution to any real problem. At least none I have.
Past that, we have pulled our last app from the app store. Actually, Apple required an upgrade and I decided not to invest the time and money to do it. Why? Because the app store is useless unless you get lucky, throw money at it or both.
App discoverability is impossible. The other thing that is also impossible is to create relationships with your users. Business is about relationships and this walled garden prevents you from creating such relationships. In a way I equate this to groups on Facebook. FB has made it so that you have to pay to reach an audience you worked hard to create. You can have a million person group and only reach a couple thousand or less people per post. If you want to reach more you have to pay. In other words, you don't "own" your audience the same way you would through an opt-in email list.
And so, it is goodbye to the App store, it isn't worth our time, money and effort.
All of the above leads me to conclude that the Apple era is in jeopardy if they can't come up with enough of a pivot to provide value and get people exited again.
You're complaining about an almost 6 year old smartphone being sluggish with iOS updates. And then complaining because Apple is requiring you to update your app. Ironically, the reason that discoverability in the App Store is so bad is because it's filled with abandonware apps where the devs don't update to fit with the newer versions of iOS. I think that's what my dad used to call chutzpah.
And you are failing to recognize that virtually nothing of value has occurred in the segment during those six years. There's absolutely nothing, zip, nada of real value between an iPhone 4S and the latest greatest.
Thinner? Please.
Resolution? C'mon.
Faster? OK, but to browse Facebook (which is what most people do with them) the prior phones were good enough.
Larger? OK, sure.
Battery life? I've never had a problem with this.
Games? OK, sure, we have more CPU power so a greater segment of our society can waste their lives clicking things on a screen. If you don't have kids you won't have the experience of attending family events and parties where a bunch of kids are completely removed from the social gathering while they have their faces in those screens. Believe me when I tell you it's a terrible thing. We were making educational apps for kids. At least we tried.
Storage? Meh
Photos? The resolution arms race is a joke. Anyone who knows anything about imaging knows increasing sensor resolution isn't enough to actually capture higher resolution images.
Look, most people use these things for photos, SMS, email, GPS and Facebook. Web browsing is a painful experience, even on an iPad. I have serious doubts --based on our analytics from various businesses-- that people are using phones to shop online. When we run AdWords campaigns we EXCLUDE mobile devices because we have proven to ourselves that they don't convert at all. Desktops do.
I had great SMS and email going back to Blackberry devices. They also had rudimentary web browsing (not good).
A stand-alone GPS or an in-vehicle nav system has always been better than using an iPhone. They are impossible to operate while driving. It's almost like the integrated printer + scanner + fax machines where none of the three are any good.
Smart phones were hot many years ago. People were grabbing-up apps and filling their screens with icons. Go as anyone just how many apps they use and how many new apps they look for on a monthly basis. Most people I know haven't installed a new app in years.
The interesting Jedi trick Apple benefited from for many years was the mindless frenzy to constantly upgrade for no good reason. I know people who have burned thousands of dollars in upgrades and ended-up with nothing to really show for it.
There are those who need to chase after shiny things and those who do not.
What's interesting here is that on the computer side of the world nobody would think twice about using a four to six year old computer. Up until very recently my main workstation on my desk was a 2009 machine running Windows Vista 64 bit. Three monitors, lots of memory, half a dozen drives. Ran Solidworks and other engineering software just fine. We upgraded to newer hardware and software because some software vendors started to drop Vista support. Other than that, no issues whatsoever.
Why is it that one can't expect a $600 phone to last six or more years? Apple has ruined a previously perfectly good iPhone 4S thought every-more-taxing updates that deliver virtually no additional benefits. In other words, they are breaking their older devices through updates in order to force people to upgrade.
As far as our educational apps for kids. There was and there isn't anything whatsoever wrong with them. Not a thing. In fact, our analytics show that kids are still using the apps every day all over the world. Imagine if Microsoft invalidated apps this way, people would go insane. How is it that this is OK on iPhones? Not sure I see it.
Why do we have to be forced to upgrade apps when users are happy and there are no problems at all? And, what's the benefit of upgrading anyway? The work to upgrade a dozen apps is non-trivial. In exchange you get no improvement in visibility or discoverability. We are back to the same place: You have to burn more cash than the other guy to become visible. Worst yet, depending on the niche you get to burn $3.00 to make $2.95. The motivation to devote time, money and effort to upgrade evaporates very quickly when that happens. It stops being a business and it becomes a liability.
But, wait, I forgot, all corporations are evil except for Apple.
> App Store is so bad is because it's filled with abandonware apps
No, the App Store is bad because the App Store is bad. It has been a disaster for years. It only serves Apple. The most fundamental issue is that of ownership. If you think you own your users and actually have a "business" in the App Store just wait until Apple decides to remove your apps from the App Store. An App Store business can be a flash in the pan and you have no way of knowing if you are going to wake up next Monday and still have a business. That has nothing whatsoever to do with abandonware.
I guess we have to agree to disagree about how smartphones and specifically the iPhone have advanced over the last 6 years. I think the market disagrees with you fundamentally, and not because of any Jedi Mind tricks, Reality Distortion Field or marketing. Today's mobile devices are far better than what was available 6 years ago. The changes may not fit your needs/desires, but again, the market disagrees.
The changes you cavalierly dismiss are important; people want lighter, more powerful mobile devices. They don't care about your desktops. You also throw in a huge amount of judgement about how people use mobile devices, while ignoring the good use cases. Mobile is no different than any other technology, it can be used for good or abused.
An in-vehicle nav system is horrible; the displays are terrible, the maps rarely updated, and if updates are available, expensive.
The reason people don't upgrade their desktops as frequently is because desktops are a mature field.
And I think you're way off base in dismissing sales via mobile devices; perhaps your ad campaigns fail because your customers aren't on mobile? This article is a bit out of date, but 70% of Amazon's holiday sales were done through mobile devices. [1]
And your last paragraph is telling. You don't "own" your customers. The App Store has huge flaws, but in no business do you "own" your customers. Try selling merchandise on Amazon, or via Walmart. See how much you "own" them there. See how the business relationship is tilted towards those creating the storefront. Apple isn't much different. Doesn't mean that they shouldn't improve, but when Walmart tells Vlasic to create a $1 gallon sized jar of pickles, Vlasic jumps. If you don't want to update your apps (you didn't say what Apple expected), then that's tough luck for you.
Seriously; everyone is talking about jumping ship from Apple's products, all doom and gloom, but I'm coming from the opposite direction. I do not like or use Apple products unless my work strenuously requires me to.
But the dearth of offerings in high-quality laptops under 13.3" is astonishing. While I personally prefer the 10.1" form factor, I think that Apple is onto something with pushing a 12" 'daily driver' model for people who want a power/portability compromise between a Chromebook and a 13-15" workhorse.
So if Apple came out with something like that which had more than a single port, I'd probably jump on board with it. If they don't, I think that Chromebooks may take the market within a few years. Right now you need to do a bit of tinkering to turn them into fully-fledged computers, but Google's been adding some really cool features, both official and unofficial.
I agree. I am still longing for the new Apple MacBooks and love the tech they are putting out.
I was highly hoping for a 12" revamp so I could finally get one. The first model was nice but didn't convince me just yet, but what they put into the recent MacBook pros like the new keyboard and tb3 put my hopes high for a 12" that could make me pull the trigger.
Anyone actually uses an iPad excessively? I owned 2 (non retina then retina mini) and it has been the least used Apple product over the last 25 years for me.
- Looks great in marketing/ads
- Want to read? Naaah too uncomfortable to hold
- Want to work? Naaah working on a touch-device is no fun
- Want to play? Naaah got a gaming-console for that
Why wait for Apple? There are dozens of development environments and coding tools already available, several of which can be used to build App Store Apps right on your phone or iPad, although you'll need to export them to XCode to build the app package. Check out Codea, Pythonista and the Kodiak Javascript and PHP apps for starters.
But yes, official support for development on the device would be very welcome and given the examples above is completely doable.
Working Copy + Textastic, Koder, Coda, Prompt ... once you get into some of these in the iOS App Store you can poke around and find other things people use.
You can also use web IDEs like Code Envy / Eclipse Che.
Lisping is great but it stopped receiving updates a long time ago. I kind of wish it would be open sourced so someone could add more features to that amazing editor it has.
This feels like the release of the "the new iPad" which was after the iPad two, but housed a Retina display, internals were the same if I recall correctly.
So they killed the Mini 2 which was cheaper than the new entry-level iPad. But the 128 GB mini 4 costs what the 32 GB mini 4 cost before today, so that value got quite a bit better.
Immediately googled "9.7 inch in cm" because it's hard to imagine size in proprietary units used in only one country. But then encountered "1 lb., 7.5 mm" on the website. That's unit trolling. They should've used megahartleys per decimal second for LTE speed.
There is nothing proprietary about the inch. It's 2.54 cm. We don't have a secret "reference inch" kept under lock and key that everyone else has to ape with reverse engineering or anything. And it's used with great success in more countries than just the U.S.
Why not just use centimeters directly like the rest of the world? I've started to get used to measurements here in the US, except for Fahrenheit. My trick is to mentally approximate using: 32+2*C.
I live in a metric country and screen sizes are in inches, the other measures have their metric size in parenthesis, I would googled the 9.4 inches high, but not the 9.7 screen.
Apple describe the screen size in inches and the thickness in millimetres. Those are both lengths. It's understandable, because inches don't really work for small sizes, but it's quite a good illustration of why metric is preferable.
> it's quite a good illustration of why metric is preferable
How so? You'd use cm for one and mm for the other, and there's no actual reason to convert between screen size and thickness so it doesn't matter if the conversion factor is 10 or 25.4
it doesn't matter if the conversion factor is 10 or 25.4
Most people can't easily multiply by 25.4 in their head. A lot of people can't even estimate to that level (which is a shame, because it's a useful skill, but still). Converting from centimetres to millimetres is much easier.
I'm extremely put off by Apple line up getting frustratingly confusing. The devil is in the details here. There was a time, where you could simply trust that an Apple product is built like a tank, that a technology once introduced (like, say, glass screens, or force touch) will always at least be default in the upcoming models.
But it is frustrating that Apple started removing fundamental features in a random fashion, even from flagship products with no intimation of them. Retina Macbook Pro does not have a glass screen. Users did not realize that until the staingate issue cropped up. It feels even blowing air on the screen will pull off coating. In this iPad, they conveniently removed the lamination.
I cannot even imagine Apple doing that back in the day. Imagine a version of iPhone, let's call it 4E, which does not have 3G.
It feels like I have to do a spec comparison about everything before deciding which Apple product to buy. Because there is no knowing what they silently removed.
Wait, what? What's "Staingate"? My screen isn't glass? I'm confused.
I took a (1 generation older) rMBP to the Apple Store a few months back to get a keyboard replaced. I had a stuck pixel or two (I'd dropped it about 30-40 times) and the guy at the store told me there was a screen coating issue (he pointed to the black side of the screen) and said I could get a free screen replacement if I wanted it. Is that "Staingate"?
If you have a 2015 rMBP, we have the same model. There is no additional glass on top of the LCD, which every unibody model always had. One can argue LCD itself is made of glass substrate, but that's about it and that's not what Apple meant by glass screen on unibody macs.
Poke your screen lightly and poke screen of any other macbook. You'll see by distortion on the screen that you directly poked the LCD.
I've had every MBP (or equivalent) Apple has made going back to the Titanium Powerbook. I was worried after all the noise about the 2016-2017 rMBP (the new thin one). I bought the non-Touchbar version; it's the best Macbook I've ever owned. But then, I've said that about basically every Apple laptop I've bought.
I do not doubt "staingate" is a real thing. What I doubt is that it's a harbinger of declining quality. There have always been things like this on every Apple product. The first generation of Intel Macbooks had (frankly: gross) case discoloration problems so bad an aftermarket sprang up for products to cover the parts of the case your hands rest on.
I'd almost hoped they would have released a refreshed Macbook Pro range. I realise they are unlikely to recognise the joy and immense pleasure working on a MBP has brought me over the years, with the previous MBP being the pinnacle.
Sadly I see the current MBP as something I will not be buying and will more than likely move back to a high end windows laptop.
I have the 15" with touch bar and absolutely love it - everything from the shallow keyboard to the brightness to the massive touchpad. Just perfect. The touch bar was admittedly next to useless until I ran across an app ("BetterTouchTool") that lets me customize it freely with my own shortcuts and widgets - now I actually use the touch bar multiple times a day as opposed to never.
So I wouldn't completely give up on the Touch Bar versions, especially since the 15" has a good performance bump over the 13".
Who does serious video editing on a laptop? The difference between editing on a laptop and a high end desktop is night and day and can't even imagine working more then a few hours on a laptop for editing.
I'm a dev and I enjoy it. Though it kinda sucks when I can't connect to an external monitor at home, have yet to buy any dongles for that. I'm kinda curious who finds themselves needing more memory, and for what purpose. No doubt more can be helpful, but having 16 hasn't really ever felt slow to me. Even when running multiple virtual machines.
You run multiple virtual machines simultaneously and 16GB of RAM doesn't feel slow to you? They must have seriously optimized the hardware to the point that the RAM goes farther. Running multiple VMs on my 2015 MBP with 16GB RAM is a nonstarter. How much memory are you devoting to each VM, and how much do you allocate for overhead on the host system?
I'm spoiled though - these days I spend most of my time on a machine with 128GB RAM and an i7-6900K :). I can barely recall what it's like for a machine to hang.
As someone who has a similar desktop (128gb RAM w/ 12 core 3.3ghz Xeon Mac Pro) and the aforementioned late 2016 MBP w/ touchbar, I can definitively state you're being hyperbolic.
Last week I noticed I had Android Studio, Xcode 8.3b4, Xcode, IntelliJ, VMWare w/ Windows 7 Enterprise running Simplicity Studio and IAR Embedded Workbench, and Adobe Photoshop all at once. I was happily running along just fine without realizing I hadn't closed anything while switching tasks until Google Docs started consuming 6gb of RAM in a single browser tab.
2016 w/ touchbar. I've done similarly heavy workloads on a 2015 MBP with same RAM and it was "ok", but certainly noticeable. I think the biggest contributing factor is likely SSD speed, but that's just a guess.
The SSD is crazy fast, and can make up for a lack of RAM in many circumstances. Swapping isn't as painful when your disk can read and write at 1.5-2 GB/sec.
Yours is the first note I've seen that palms are causing problems on the trackpad. The reviews, and folks I know who have one, seem to give the "palm rejection" high praise.
I ordered my first ever MBP last week (it should arrive this Friday) but I'm really worried about these palm rejection issues I've been hearing about. Is the touch pad ok even though you disabled tap to click? It just seems very unergonomical to select text, drag, etc, but maybe force touch makes it better?
I've always had issues with the palm rejection on my current computer (ASUS/Ubuntu), and only managed to live with it by disabling the touch pad and using an external mouse. If the palm rejection turns out to be a problem on the new MBP I'll return it. No way I'm paying that much for a computer I can't properly use to write code.
Not sure what other computer I should buy in that case though, if I want something running MacOS. I really, really want the MBP to be a great computer.
I was disappointed with the MBP 2016 announcement especially because I was looking to replace my 2008 Macbook and was eager to buy, but then I thought about it and the disappointment was only related to the pricing and the touch bar. The touch bar annoyed me both in theory and in actual use for about 30 mins at the Apple store.
The one without touchbar has a worse processor but the benchmarks show the difference is not significant, it's also a more efficient processor, combined with a bigger battery and my dislike of the touch bar it became a no-brainer so I ordered one configured with 16 GB recently and I receive it next week. I am so excited, I'm changing from 2008 tech to 2016, the display is amazing, I have never had a retina display before. Happy to hear you think its the best laptop you have ever used. I upgraded my old Macbook several types from 2 GB to 4 GB to 8 GB , HDD to SDD, battery, but clearly no models allow that anymore so I had no choice in that respect.
If you're charging, it has one available USB port. It looks like a perfectly good and well priced machine otherwise, but I don't really want a hub constantly dangling off the side.
Not OP but I went from a 15" to a 13" a few years ago. 90% of the time it doesn't bother me at all. I do think I'll switch back to 15" next time I upgrade. The main reason I switched was size/weight but by the time I'm due an upgrade again in a couple of years I have a feeling the 15" will be comparable to my current 13" in size/weight.
The 2016 MBP is absolutely amazing. Just give it a shot. You won't regret it! Just takes a little getting used since there are many new design changes.
I have been using the 12" MacBook now as my primary computer for about five months, and the build quality of the keyboard is so poor I am completely shocked. What I wanted was an 11" Air with a retina screen, but they just had to make the thing so #!%@&=+ thin that it is now just a piece of $%#@. Is the MacBook Pro's also-stupidly-thin keyboard much better? They claimed the MacBook's keyboard was somehow a step up from before, but it is actually just "as good as they could make it while optimizing for thin above any sane design constraint" and it really really really sucks; it has actually driven me to stop using my computer as often due to the combination of the keyboard itself falling apart and the damage to my hands and wrists from typing on it: I seriously have started sitting at a desk so I can use a real keyboard again, which is not something I ever felt the need to do with any of Apple's previous keyboards; and at that point there is absolutely no reason to get an Apple computer in the first place as I could use anything else and I wouldn't notice the difference :/... I mean, I may as well just use a desktop computer (and I actually have essentially been doing just that, slowly transitioning to a Windows desktop I had built for VR work, even if only because it is better designed to handle all of the desktop accessories and is much faster, with a top-of-the-like graphics card).
The keyboard in the Pro is much better. I prefer its feel to the now-spongey-feel of the older chicklet-style keyboards.
I'm in the same boat, though; just wanted an 11" Air with Retina display, and I'd be happy. The 12" is not that at all, so I finally jumped ship to the 13" Pro. Not as happy as the air in terms of portability, but it's a solid laptop (non-TB).
It took me a while to get used to the thin MacBook keyboard, but I find it OK now. I probably will buy AppleCare for my MacBook because it doesn't seem robust.
That said, coupled with the LG ultradef monitor, which is also a USB-c hub, I find the MacBook to be just fine for software development.
This. My wife's MacBook Air is slowly dying and we've been hoping for a 13" MacBook Air with Retina display but it never happened. We went and tried the new MacBook Pro with the touch pad and the 12" MacBook, but she just doesn't like the feel of the new keyboard. This truly disappointed her as she really liked how light her MB Air was and the battery life, but she just couldn't get around the feel of the new MacBook Pros' keyboard. When her laptop finally stops to function, we'll have to choose between a 2015 MacBook Pro 13" or a Windows laptop.
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but typing on it for 2mins in a store isn't going to convince you. I did that too and hated it. I later ended up getting one for work a year ago and in under a week I could barely type on my older personal MBP. The key travel is awesomely shallow and further reduces any wrist stress for me. My only complaint is when I'm typing very fast / forceful, it can be a bit clacky (I prefer my keyboard dead silent). I've since switched to a late 2016 MBP and think it's keyboard is even better, but it's only a mild difference compared to the big leap before.
It's not so easy on Windows side either. If you are really after a powerful machine that is convenient to carry with you (that means quad-core, 32GB), the choices are quite limited.
These the Dell stuff of course, but for example on Lenovo you would need to go with P50 or T470p. The latter is just a refresh of an old model and lacks for example USB-C and also the PCIe NVMe is only 2x. Kind of acceptable for now, but not so future proof. Also the displays are not really on par with Apple. To get a nice display you would go for X1, but there you are stuck with dual core and 16GB. Then we you start looking at the laptops in detail, you find out things like thermal throttling under load, displays getting dimmer and CPUs slower when running on battery etc. There's much more to the laptops than just the CPU and max memory capacity. Also lets not forget that Lenovo announced the new lineup already last year and still they are not shipping all the promised features. That's like over 3 months between promise and delivery.
I switched, and it's incredible. I have 64GB of ram and a xenon processor. It's incredible. It's not as sleep as the mac, but I spend so much less time waiting.
I never have to think about "should I close down this VM/android emulator" etc. I have more RAM then I had hard drive space on my laptop in 2010.
The P50 is pretty impressive, especially compared to my older W540 which is a brick. We just ordered one for a new-hire on my team, and we'll probably end up replacing the W540/W541's over the next 18 months as everyone becomes due for a hardware refresh.
My gut feeling is that this will be coming pretty soon – probably when the appropriate Intel chipset is available. I understand and share the skepticism about purchasing one at the moment, but I'm holding off on thinking about a platform switch until it's clearer where the high-end Apple line is going.
I'm with you there. The newest MBP's are probably good but the price is way too high. I'm going to be buying a windows machine for the first time in 10 years.
I felt the same as you, when I bought my first Macbook after weeks using I remember my feelings and my thoughts "what a good laptop, what ergonomic machine, great pleasure to have it and work with".
I don't think we'll get a new MBP until Intel release the new chipset with support for more than 16 GB of low profile RAM, so probably not before the autumn.
Well going from iPad to iPad Air back to iPad is a bit disappointing. They should have pushed to hit the 299 dollar mark for the physiological impact. Did notice the Mini is a 128g device where the larger iPad is a 32g. The iPad market is just to fragmented.
The oddity is why is it as thick as the previous generation and where did the laminated screen go? Is that no longer needed or cost cutting?
> The oddity is why is it as thick as the previous generation and where did the laminated screen go? Is that no longer needed or cost cutting?
Yes, it's cost cutting. They just made a 9.7" tablet available for just over $300, right in the iPad Mini's price segment.
Honestly, Apple is probably feeling some pressure from the Android market - lots of vendors have "good enough" tablets available in this price segment (Amazon, in particular) and I've been seeing the app selection slowly getting better over the past couple years. By putting the iPad with a full-size retina display just $55 above the 32GB Fire HD 10 they can likely get a decent chunk of people looking for a cheaper "big" tablet to justify the cost difference and go with the Apple device.
> Did notice the Mini is a 128g device where the larger iPad is a 32g. The iPad market is just to fragmented.
Either Apple wants to kill the Mini with this change or make it a premium-ish product where you pay more to get the smaller form factor. Either way, it's likely to be less popular now that there's a 9.7" device right in its price point so simplifying the device down to one SKU makes supply chain management a lot cleaner.
The most comedic thing about Apple is that my raspberry pi3 with chromium has support for webmidi and webrtc but not even the iPad pro can do webrtc chat with mobile Safari. Sure I know they're not fans of the web but it has to be hurting them at this point when a $35 system has more browser capabilities than a $1000 device.
