Was hoping Apple would lead the way for the industry with 120hz screens. I know it takes a ton of power, but damn, iPad pro is a sweet experience.
New iPad Air and iPad Mini
211–220 of 395 posts
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starting to feel like Ballmer era Microsoft. Unforced errors like this seem to be occurring more and more often. Seemingly minor pragmatic issues that will prevent many users from upgrading or leaving the ecosystem altogether, that could easily be avoided.
The 1st generation iPad was woefully lacking RAM (256MB) even though the iPhone 4 that came out 3 months later with the same SOC had 512Mb. That led to the iPad being unusable with iOS 5 that came out 2 years later and unsupported after that. The iPhone of the same generation was supported through iOS 7. The 3rd generation iPad was heavy, slow, and had horrible battery life and was discontinued six months later as th…
> The 3rd generation iPad was heavy, slow, and had horrible battery life and was discontinued six months later as they transistionef to a better processor and lightning.
The 3rd generation iPad was also the first iPad with a high res screen. I used it happily for many years, because I loved that screen.
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#213Not gonna buy devices without usb-c phones/ipdas/notebooks
The times when Apple had sane lineup of products is gone :(
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starting to feel like Ballmer era Microsoft. Unforced errors like this seem to be occurring more and more often. Seemingly minor pragmatic issues that will prevent many users from upgrading or leaving the ecosystem altogether, that could easily be avoided.
The 1st generation iPad was woefully lacking RAM (256MB) even though the iPhone 4 that came out 3 months later with the same SOC had 512Mb. That led to the iPad being unusable with iOS 5 that came out 2 years later and unsupported after that. The iPhone of the same generation was supported through iOS 7. The 3rd generation iPad was heavy, slow, and had horrible battery life and was discontinued six months later as th…
All of the great tablets available that run full Windows.
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I welcome your take! And thanks for adding it here so people can contrast them. One thing I think it’s important to remember is that Apple today isn’t the same small, quirky company it was in 2007 when the iPhone came out. It’s now one of the largest companies on the planet with a global customer base of over a billion people in hundreds of countries. They need to run a different strategy and they need to have more p…
I certainly agree that a larger company requires different decisions, but I think that they fail to even state their case correctly. Perhaps they have a reached a size where a hyper-simplified product line would be leaving an unacceptable amount of money on the table as they successfully saturate their normal customer base. Even in that world, it doesn't mean that the product line has to be so fundamentally confusing…
I think I agree with you on both points. More-so the former point than the latter.
On the former, I do think they’ve lost the product/customer narrative in the last couple years and I think it’ll take another WWDC and another iOS update for them to find their way. They’re just now re-focusing on both iPad hardware AND software. For a few years (mid 2010s?) they doled out a few hardware updates that moved the needle moderately but the software didn’t (and you can argue still doesn’t to the fullest extent) take advantage of iPad to provide the functionality leaps it needs to have a compelling narrative. We’re just now in the past year or two starting to see the narrative develop with iPad Pro, Pencil, and iOS 11/12. A similar strong narrative probably needs to develop for the lower end iPads though I’m sure they’ll continue to sell simply because everyone else in the market is either asleep or incapable.
On the latter point, I agree with the spirit and I love how you phrased it. However, I’m not actually sure how much it matters in this case. I’m not completely convinced it matters to the extent you seem to think it does. I think the supply chain optimization is fine and the whole point is that it’s not crazy different from last-year’s iPad but it’s a lower price point and meaningfully more capable (think schools buying in bulk, etc). It would be nice if they FOCUSED on the lower end but that has never been Apple’s style and they are very very deliberate about what things they choose to focus on. It’s both the greatest strength of the company and one of the weaknesses - two sides of the same coin as things tend to be.
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 26 and the iPad Air and iPad mini do not appeal to me but I own an iPad Pro and I am enamored with it. I use the iPad Pro at my full-time job as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I get a lot of mileage by taking notes on it in OneNote and preparing/reading documents from the other Office apps. I also use the iPad to listen to music with Spotify (my headphones have trouble connecting to my work PC). Outside of the…
As a Surface Pro user it tickles me that Microsoft people are using iPads for the stuff the Surface was designed to excel at (no pun intended).
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Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 26 and the iPad Air and iPad mini do not appeal to me but I own an iPad Pro and I am enamored with it. I use the iPad Pro at my full-time job as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I get a lot of mileage by taking notes on it in OneNote and preparing/reading documents from the other Office apps. I also use the iPad to listen to music with Spotify (my headphones have trouble connecting to my work PC). Outside of the…
I was very pleased to discover that Visual Studio Code has been ported to ARM64 Chromebooks, and runs just fine on my cheap little Samsung I bought a couple years ago. Along with the unix shell they've recently added to Chromebooks (without needing to go into developer mode), it's not a bad development platform for a lot of things.
How much RAM is in that thing? 4 GiB? I hope you turned swap on...
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#218I'm 24 years old, work in software. Neither I nor any of my friends uses a tablet for work or pleasure. I guess I know a couple of people who have Surface Pro's, but that's about it. I'm wondering if the appeal of these begins when you get older? Seems like a lot of the market for these is people who are 50+, but I'd like to know if any people under 25 are interested in them.
One use case I haven't seen mentioned is note-taking. Apple Pencil is a truly amazing device. I use it at work all the time, especially in meetings. It's quieter than typing and because I don't have my laptop open, I'm much less likely to get distracted by slack, email, HN, etc. It's also slower typing, but that may be a good thing because it forces me to mentally organize/consolidate whatever I'm writing.
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#219[deleted]
Re: New iPad Air and iPad Mini
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a supply chain optimization and also the reason they can keep the costs low for these products. Cost is important here and the whole reason this product line exists. It’s a mirror of their iPhone strategy where they sell last years model for cheaper. They’re using old components and designs where they think it makes sense, but are being uncompromising about the compute power (e.g. A12 Bionic, AR capabilities)…
Edit: inlining the comment here instead since this turned into a conversation These products just feel like “component pipeline optimization” instead of working backwards from customer needs. There should be 3 iPads, all with the same form factor, same connectors (can’t believe I even have to specify this): small medium large, and they should be called iPad mini, iPad, and iPad Pro. The iPad should serve the vast maj…
How does reducing customer choice follow from working backwards from the customers’ needs? Doesn’t the variety in product imply a variety in customer needs? There is not one kind of pro, not one kind of consumer. Shouldn’t Apple be able to offer a wide choice of options and rely on marketing and the 100 blueshirts in every store to guide the customer?
It was confusing to have so many options when tablets and smartphones were new, or when a person could say “I don’t really do computers” and have a successful career. None of those are true now; babies can and do use tablets, middle schools have carts of iPads or Chromebooks. My grandma has an iPad. She calls it her “Facebook,” but she has one.
Simplicity has its appeal, but I trust the market analysts at Apple have a plan for market differentiation with a wide lineup.