511–520 of 805 posts
To me, the shift to USB-C signifies a fundamental change in how Apple is approaching the iPad and computing going forward. Those stupid "what's a computer" ads make a little more sense. With USB-C, developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals we all bought for our laptops/desktops will now begin to work with iOS too. This feature alone g…
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Dell doesn't call it edge-to-edge or all-screen in their marketing. Anyway looking at the dimensions of the iPad Pro 12.9" model it's 11.04 inches wide with a 12.9" 4:3 screen. The screen itself is going to be 10.32" wide as a result, putting the bezel at .36" or around 9mm. By comparison the XPS 13's bezel is 5.2mm.
They call it an InfintyEdge display...
Also, whenever journalists and commentators write about Dell screens as being edge to edge, years before Apple, they're not lies, they're metaphors.
It only becomes a literal statement that is obviously a lie, when Apple uses it.
/s
To everyone downvoting me above, you can disagree with the idea 'edge to edge' it's a proper metaphor to use for an iPad display with a 9mm bezel. I agree with you in full. You'd want something like 2-3mm bezels for that, at most.
But to say it's not a metaphor is silly. It would mean that you think Apple, journalists and consumers, all or some of them, consider the edge-to-edge marketing statement to be a literal one, that must be taken literally, and is obviously a lie, rather than a statement which must be taken metaphorically.
If you go to the CEO of Apple right now and ask him in an interview, do you mean literally edge to edge, or metaphorically, what do you think the answer would be? (apart from dodging the question)
After that you could tell him it's a crappy metaphor to use. But telling him he's lying because Apple means it literally is just silly.
I just wish Apple would put the internals of the iPad Pro into the Apple TV and bundle it with a decent controller. The gaming potential is massive, and they even compared it to the Xbox One during the keynote. They are squandering a massive market opportunity - I just can't work out why.
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Am I the only one who actually like to have an edge on my devices so they dont break by looking at them? At least if there is a metal edge it can take some of the force and you have a chance of not breaking the screen. I dont understand why metal is bad and glass is somehow good? Also, I need to grab my ipad, move it around, spin it, grab it with the other hand etc. I see the edges / bezel's as very useful in these c…
I hate the bezelless trend. And quite frankly I hate the trend of making devices thin. Now I just need to add depth so I can hold it and use it comfortably without worries about dropping the damn thing.
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Not to take away from the larger concern, but in your mother's case, perhaps a case with a significant border would help. I suppose if there is not a ready-made one that suits, making /hacking one, the old-fashioned way or through 3D printing, would be an option. One reason I put a case on every one of my cell phones, is to give me something more substantial to hold on to. The thin bodies and edges start to become a…
Thank you for your suggestion. My mother has declined adding a case because she carries the ipad mini in her purse when she is out. She doesn't want the additional bulk. She knows she is "not holding it properly" and moves her thumb if it's not responding to her.
https://www.amazon.com/TFY-Security-Holder-Finger-Tablet/dp/...
Cheers
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In the same fashion that microsoft and ibm thrives: its lost its dominance in the consumer market “headspace”, printing money but no longer being a company worth knowing. Its just another BigCo at this point, with all the benefits and dullness associated with it. (Eg it’s difficult to be excited for apple product announcements; they have a money-printing operation and their only intent is to maintain it as-is; natura…
You concluded all this from horizontal scrolling?
Just because a conversation starts with a topic doesn’t mean it stays there.
To me, the shift to USB-C signifies a fundamental change in how Apple is approaching the iPad and computing going forward. Those stupid "what's a computer" ads make a little more sense. With USB-C, developers will support whatever I/O standards they need to in iOS, and the ecosystem of monitors, keyboards, and peripherals we all bought for our laptops/desktops will now begin to work with iOS too. This feature alone g…
A shift from lightning to usb c is apple losing because they didnt donate their port to the spec. They could have "invented" usb c. I understand why they didnt, but I still prefer lightning to usbc. They are doing this before the EU makes them do it. What apple did do was force the market to adapt to a plug that can go in both directions. And they thinned out the plug quite nicely, it never needed to be so thick.
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It's the touchpad version of whether joystick-down means nose-down, or nose-up, in video games. Endless debates can be had!
Joystick down means nose up because it's simulating the yoke of your airplane in which you pull back (joystick down) in order to "pull up" the nose of the plane. The recent fad of reversing the touchpad scrolling direction is an attempt to simulate how we use our phones in which we tap the content on screen and drag it around to pull other content into view. Because the touchpad was invented to replace a mouse, I exp…
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration
One of the patented (but probably expired by now) aspects of the Trackpoint is that it has a very highly refined pressure=>cursor speed transfer function, that has a couple of plateaus in it that map a wide range of pressures to one slow or fast but constant speed. The slow speed notch is good for precise predictable fine positioning, and the fast speed notch is tuned to be just below eye tracking speed, so you don't lose sight of the cursor. But you can push even harder than the fast plateau to go above the eye tracking plateau and flick the cursor really fast if you want, or push even lighter than the slow plateau, for super fine positioning. (The TrackPoint sensor is outrageously more sensitive than it needs to be, so it can sense very soft touches, or even your breath blowing on it.)
Here's a description of Ted Selker's work and all the refinement that went into the TrackPoint, that he developed at IBM Almaden Research Lab:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461
Highlights:
In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. `
He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product.
He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from.
IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks.
The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem.
The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop.
He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area.
So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved.
The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen.
Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!
The person who decided to make this scroll sideways instead of down when you scroll down, and not to scroll sideways when you scroll sideways should be put in stocks in the town square.
I think it's kind of cool. /dissenting-opinion
My laptop is presently docked to the right of my monitor on my desk. When docked I use a keyboard and mouse with the actual laptop being slightly to the right using its touchpad is somewhat awkward but do-able.
Space bar to go down doesn't work, page down/up doesn't work home end doesn't work arrow keys don't work. Try clicking on the little arrow that doesn't work. Try dragging the screen that direction with the mouse doesn't work. Grab scrollbar manually and pull it down doesn't work. I literally skipped that section because I couldn't figure out how to read it. Note I didn't realize you could grab the scroll bar manually do scroll horizontally because I have never had to do that.
After reading this thread I tried reaching over awkwardly to use the 2 finger scroll mode on the touchpad keeping in mind the normal sensitivity is such that one full swipe top to bottom about 2 inches is 2 pages of text. So about 1 inch per page of text.
Swiping through the first section the "overview" took 62 awkward swipes left to right about 2.5 inches each. About 155 inches of travel almost 13 feet for the last few it actually went down while I scrolled sideways which made me pause for a moment.
Scrolling through pages of content is so basic that going through the massive work of making a beautiful device and all the software required to run it and making reading about it that painful is remarkable.
Its like launching a new high end clothing store and making the entrance a dance dance revolution pad where one must complete a hip hop number to enter.
It isn't merely subjectively terrible.
Edit: On my phone also running firefox in vertical orientation it scrolls normally but cuts off a bit on the right hand side, in landscape orientation it scrolls normally AND looks correct.
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This was either a sharp prod for intel, or some serious signaling.
MacBooks _will_ transition to Apple's own chips at some point. My guess is that the A14 or A15 generation will be fast and powerful enough to make the leap. This will be big especially if they can get major price or power usage advantages.
I can well imagine Apple expecting people to plug in a keyboard and monitor to their iPad Pro, while it gets thinner and thinner.