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iPad 9.7‑inch

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Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#501

Post by mschaef »

JohnnyConatus wrote: post #89

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'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.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#502

Post by alaskamiller »

JohnnyConatus wrote: post #89

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.

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. Consumer 2. Professionals 3. Hardware 4. Software

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.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#503

Post by freehunter »

jimbokun wrote: post #415
Touche wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would be very surprised if many people are not confused about their high end TV purchase, and trying to figure out which ones are better and why.

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.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#504

Post by pklausler »

wil421 wrote: post #192
Larrikin wrote: post #187

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 ellipt…

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.

Unless the UI is plagued with actual blood-sucking parasites, s/ticks/tics/.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#505

Post by komali2 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #489
davnn wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it doesn't matter, they should pick easier ones. They lost at least myself as a customer. I doubt I'm the only one on the planet who didn't buy a PC because he couldn't figure out the offer.

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.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#506

Post by komali2 »

srssays wrote: post #461
komali2 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $13…

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.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#507

Post by djrogers »

Lockyy wrote: post #410
austenallred wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sometim…

The thing with the various iPods was that they were at least different. The three iPad lines are all fundamentally the same device with differing screen sizes.

To most people the iPods differed by size. The iPod was biggest, the mini was smaller, and the nano was tiny.

The iPad is prett much the same - you need a plain iPad? Ok, mini or 9.7"? You need a pro iPad? Ok, 9.7 or 12.9 inch?

Fundamentally this new 9.7 doesn't hangs anything - the iPad Air 2 is replaced by it in the non-pro, less expensive iPad lineup.

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#508

Post by Razengan »

Larrikin wrote: post #187

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 ellipt…

> How do people justify the purchase in 2017?

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMA25CqKcn8

[2] http://procreate.si

[3] https://www.duetdisplay.com

[4] http://astropad.com

[5] http://samorost3.net/

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#509

Post by djrogers »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #270
Larrikin wrote: post #187

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 ellipt…

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…

> Apple goes out of their way to prevent that

Hardly... drag ripped movie into iTunes, sync movie to iPad, done. Or just give up on DVDs and buy/stream digital movies :-)

Re: iPad 9.7‑inch

#510

Post by [deleted] »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #270
Larrikin wrote: post #187

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 ellipt…

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…

[deleted]
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