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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

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Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#351

Post by mortenjorck »

davedx wrote: post #152
Maakuth wrote: post #14

> How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it? I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM,…

> struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business You'll love this one: to undo (don't think it works for everything, but it does for typing), shake your device rapidly from side to side.

This was replaced in iOS 13 by a less comical, yet equally undiscoverable three-finger tap gesture.

Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#352

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Balanceinfinity wrote: post #350
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I can see many people (including myself) struggling. So we have been forced into a "compromise" with all the downside, but none of the upside. I wholly disagree, at least at the beginning. When the original iPad was released, I remember seeing multiple viral videos of two-year-olds being given iPad…

I have to disagree - the ipad shouldn't be simpler than the iPhone - it should be binary: simpler for the grandparents, powerful enough to compete against a surface. When I travel, I'm only taking 1 big screen. The ipad should replace my laptop for trips where I don't have to work a bunch.

> simpler for the grandparents, powerful enough to compete against a surface.

The UI of a 2010 iPad could replace your laptop on trips. If you just need a device to occasionally keep tabs on email and review photos and bring up websites, the iPad has always been great for that.

If you need to do anything more intense, the one device you bring really should be a laptop, especially as we become able to engineer laptops that are increasingly small and light.

I don't think it's possible to develop a UI that is both as capable as a traditional computer and as simple and intuitive as early versions of iOS. The more actions you add, the harder any action is to discover.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#353

Post by fulldecent2 »

cactus2093 wrote: post #126

Good points in the article. I also find the model names weirdly confusing, how did the iPad become the smaller, less powerful variant when the Air still exists? They did this with MacBooks too, though I think the tiny one may be discontinued now. And why is the iPad peripheral system such a mess? The released the pencil 2 which is a significant usability improvement and had every indication of replacing the pencil 1,…

The main design theory of Apple is simple: come up with a great usability feature and deploy it on one model. Then spend the next 5 to 10 years spreading this out to their other models. When people stop buying, just swap in a higher specced component from Intel and talk about how it is 2x faster.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#354

Post by mrweasel »

scarface74 wrote: post #185
mrweasel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think companies are (mostly) wasting their money porting desktop software to iPads. There's going to be niches where it makes perfect sense, but Office for the iPad is going to be a waste of money. Home users don't need it, business have laptops and desktop for those things, and Word is a poor note taking app of field work. To be fair I believe that the iPad is a poor note taking platform in general. For s…

So you think you know better than Microsoft and Adobe? Have you thought that they may know their customer base better than you do?

Unless we can see the numbers we don’t know if Microsoft profits from Office for the iPad. So I could be right for all you know.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#355

Post by wool_gather »

kbutler wrote: post #265
Someone wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”but that was years ago and they keep releasing new pencil 1 only devices” Apple doesn’t really release new budget devices; the case may change, but once technology has advanced enough to release an improved top-end device and parts prices for the existing product have fallen enough, they package the parts of the former top-end device in a new lower-priced device.

That turns out not to be true. The newer low-end models have various changes from the previous high-end models, including case changes, but also other hardware. The original low-end iPhone SE had the plastic case with the hardware of the 5-something - but a smaller display. The iPad mini had the guts of an iPad 2, except it was a smaller device, requiring a new motherboard and display, and it had a better camera, too…

> The original low-end iPhone SE had the plastic case

You're thinking of the iPhone 5c, which came out at the same time as the 5s -- well before the SE, which, slightly confusingly, was released after the 6. The SE has always had a metal body.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#356

Post by mediaman »

Terretta wrote: post #332
0xCMP wrote: post #322

As someone who uses his iPad Pro regularly, I love all the multi tasking of the iPad. I know many have written that they have issues with multiple windows on the iPad, but for me it's never been better or easier. My main gripe is keyboard behavior which is very buggy, but not related to how easy/hard it is to make and move apps around the screen. The fact is that the iPad is only useful because of its software. In my…

Fully agree. I think Gruber’s dead wrong, and folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps. Aside from being able to turn his complaint off: To turn Multitasking features on or off, go to Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking then turn off Allow Multiple Apps if you don't want to use Slide Over or…

What do you use for text input? A case with integrated keyboard, or separate bluetooth keyboard, or something else?

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#357

Post by gehsty »

Slartie wrote: post #321
gehsty wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can really say that the iPad has failed as a general computing device, and that it is propped up by the situations below. What do you think generates $20B in sales? That's a lot of tills flight aids. I think the iPad has succeeded as a general purpose computation device for normal people who use computers for email / music / Facetime / photos etc. Always seems like its the 'power users' who don't se…

That is not what I would consider "general computing device", more like "media consumption device", and yes, it is fairly good at that. I would require a device to be regularly used for content creation as well in order for it to qualify as "general computing device". But pretty much the only "content creation" that I see happening on iPads in normal peoples' households is writing emails. By that account, our smartph…

If by computer programming or media creation (videos etc) then I would say what you want is a specialist computing device - most people do not use their computers to do this, nor need them to be able to.

With an iPad you can write all the emails you want, edit and share photos, create word docs and basic spreadsheets, which is enough for the vast majority of people. I agree that phones are also general purpose computers, most people can get away with just having a phone now.

Maybe we dont agree on ‘general’ as a term, I mean what most people need or want, I think you maybe mean can do lots of different things?

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#358

Post by scalio »

kbutler wrote: post #308
JackFr wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's not get crazy on "mediocre" sales If I've got a product whose sales were falling 5 out of the past 6 years, and whose current sales are 30%+ down from a peak of 6 years ago, I'm pretty worried about it.

Is growth required for success? I expect the iPad, lacking any new revolutionary functionality, to reach a steady state of (new customer + replacement rate) sales that is some percentage of its peak, pre-saturation sales. If replacement rate is every 4-5 years, this may be below 30% of peak. This won't mean it isn't successful, just recognizing that existing users don't need to upgrade every year.

Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.

/rant over

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#359

Post by tasogare »

Terretta wrote: post #332
0xCMP wrote: post #322

As someone who uses his iPad Pro regularly, I love all the multi tasking of the iPad. I know many have written that they have issues with multiple windows on the iPad, but for me it's never been better or easier. My main gripe is keyboard behavior which is very buggy, but not related to how easy/hard it is to make and move apps around the screen. The fact is that the iPad is only useful because of its software. In my…

Fully agree. I think Gruber’s dead wrong, and folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps. Aside from being able to turn his complaint off: To turn Multitasking features on or off, go to Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking then turn off Allow Multiple Apps if you don't want to use Slide Over or…

> folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps.

Hell no. The iPad is a nice PDF reading machine with its retina display and the pencil is a joy to use but the device is barely usable for any text entry and don't support any real programming workflow.

However some shortcomings can also be positive, in particular I find the limited multi-tasking really helpful to concentrate on the reading of a paper, which is way way harder on a desktop computer with three screens, dozens of tabs opened and multiple running applications.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#360

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

sp332 wrote: post #337
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi…

Swiping is not discoverable, but no one noticed at first because the iPhone TV ad campaigns all showed how to use it. So most people who got an iPhone already had that bit of knowledge in their brains and thought it was intuitive.

Touch interfaces have an inherent disadvantage here — there's no equivalent of 'hovering' a 'cursor' over something to see if it changes visually, triggers a tooltip, etc. Their interfaces actually need more help to be discoverable, not less.

Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).

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