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Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

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Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#471

Post by cag_ii »

vacri wrote: post #409
camillomiller wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is exactly why HN won't never understand anything about Apple announcements. Highly technical folks, unable to get out of their technical bias, reprimanding the extremely successful decision makers of a successful company because they pretend to know the matter, while completely ignoring the real world scenarios that actually drive Apple products sales.

Apple has made a lot of flop products. Their successful products are real killers, but there's this weird confirmation-bias-field surrounding them that makes fans forget their numerous flops.

If you really wanted to be objective, you could replace "Apple" in your comment with the name of just about any leading tech. company.

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#472

Post by tyrust »

mbreese wrote: post #457
bjacobel wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really galling part is the total refusal to admit they're not doing anything innovative. "There has never been another product like the iPad Pro before" was a real quote from today's presentation, and is a complete falsehood.

There has never been a product like it before. No one else has ever made an iOS tablet like it. :) It's an admittedly nuanced statement, but not an outright falsehood. I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro. Just like they were inspired by the original iPad, which was inspired by... which was inspired by... etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Lying_by_omission

>I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro.

Perhaps that's true for a room of tech experts and media. As for the thousands of common consumers watching at home, they may not draw the same conclusions.

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#473

Post by brwnll »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #432
incepted wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason why they are growing is because they have a much smaller market share. Which is why Tim Cook only revealed relative numbers: Apple is falling behind a bit more every year in absolute numbers.

That doesn't even make sense; the only way they could be growing in relative market share but shrinking in absolute numbers is if the market is shrinking, and I'm pretty sure it's not.

I think they simply worded that poorly. Apple could be growing at higher Y/y %, but still be loosing ground in terms of actual units being sold depending on overall market growth.

For example, below appears to be the report Cook used for his "+14% vs -0.4%" slide, which at best, is very misleading.

"In the worldwide mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), vendors shipped 464.6 million units, down -0.4% from the 466.3 million units shipped 2Q14.[1]"

Truth is, the smartphone market actually GREW by 11.6% (Q2 2014:302.1m => Q2 2015:337.2m).

1. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25804315

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#474

Post by IkmoIkmo »

bjacobel wrote: post #440
austenallred wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't give a shit who is copying who. It's technology; we're all building on the backs of inventions created by other people. The important thing to me is who does it the best, not who does it first. The iPod was nowhere near the first mp3 player, it was just the best one. The iPad wasn't close to the first tablet. Will it be the best tablet? I don't know, but whether or not the Surface had a keyboard first…

The really galling part is the total refusal to admit they're not doing anything innovative. "There has never been another product like the iPad Pro before" was a real quote from today's presentation, and is a complete falsehood.

It's not a complete falsehood but it's a totally empty statement.

Virtually any device you put out that's not exactly, spec-by-spec the same, you can say 'never been a product like this before'. It's true and empty.

They do a lot of those, they're true, hyperbolic, and totally devoid of any significance.

For example they'll say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone ... EVER'. As if it's significant. But that's completely unexpected and it's not news, either. I'll happily take a 10 trillion dollar bet that the iPhone 7 will sell even better. And that the new Galaxy S 6 sells better than the 5, and the 7 will sell better than the 6, too.

Or they'll say the iPhone 6S is the most advanced iPhone ... EVER. As if, again, that's news. As if we think they built a 6S that's worse than the 6.

It's a truthful, hyperbolic, totally insignificant statement. It's different from a falsehood.

Calling a 3 second video, a photo, in the sense that it's a bunch of photo frames, that's more of a direct falsehood to me. We use the word photo to denote a still image, and video for multiple frames of photos. But that's a marketing gimmick that's more ridiculous than it is disingenuous.

As for innovation, I mostly agree. The ability to execute extremely well and polish your work isn't innovation. It can be driven by innovations of course but it's not the kind of innovation we talk about when we refer to Apple's history. Since the iPhone 4 I've mostly felt a ton of polish but no real breakthroughs on the phone department for example, tablet wise... mostly just solid iterations like everyone else, nothing fundamentally innovative about the iPad 4 or Air or mini, really. Pro feels like more of the same, split screen we've seen before, styluses we've seen before. Again, executed well and polished.

I mean of course there's innovation, but it's not what sets them apart. Look at Force Touch for example, now 3D touch. People probably missed the fact Huawei demo'd force touch last week on their android phone. And that's a feature we'd think of as their innovation. Others, like a large tablet, split screen, type covers, wireless charging, a stylus, 3-second videos (called live photos) etc are all seen before.

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#475

Post by robotresearcher »

smitherfield wrote: post #434
robotresearcher wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. The UK and German stores give e.g. iPad Air 2 thickness in mm, weight in grams and screen size in inches. They are sticking to inches deliberately for screen measurement. They even use the German 9,7" instead of the US/UK 9.7" so it's not that they forgot to translate.

You know they use inches in the UK too.

I do. Which is why I looked up Germany too. Even in the UK using mm and inches for different dimensions of the same box is weird.

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#476

Post by asdtgy »

robotresearcher wrote: post #369
asdtgy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"let's make everything a dongle"... that is to be expected from Apple ... or being completely unavailable... and stick to proprietary ports...

"let's not make everyone carry around the cost and size of the ports they won't use."

USB should always be available ... for emergencies and other purposes

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#477

Post by icebraining »

geofft wrote: post #97
zxcvcxz wrote: post #5

I don't want it unless it has an exposed CLI without jail breaking.

What do you want the CLI to do? It's pretty fundamental to the iOS model (and the Android one) that apps are isolated from each other, so you certainly could have a CLI app that does stuff (ssh, git, vi?) within its own home directory, but can't interact with the rest of the system. In fact there are Android apps that do this. It's harder on iOS because you don't get fork(), but if someone wanted to try super hard, y…

Android apps have shared access to the "memory card" (often simulated, e.g. on Nexus devices), so they can interact through that.

Hell, in Android you can even run Debian without rooting: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#478

Post by MagnumOpus »

justizin wrote: post #258
austenallred wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How are we going to communicate with this? We don't want to carry around a mouse, so what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We're going to use a stylus? No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get them, put them away, you lose them, yuck. So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world; a pointing device that we're all born with - we're born with ten of them. We're going to use…

apple did not invent multi touch.

Of course they didn't. That never prevented Steve from claiming they did...

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#479

Post by thaumasiotes »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #432
incepted wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason why they are growing is because they have a much smaller market share. Which is why Tim Cook only revealed relative numbers: Apple is falling behind a bit more every year in absolute numbers.

That doesn't even make sense; the only way they could be growing in relative market share but shrinking in absolute numbers is if the market is shrinking, and I'm pretty sure it's not.

Depends on your interpretation of "behind in absolute numbers". A toy example:

1980: Apple has 10% of a 100,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 90,000,000.

1981: Apple has 15% of a 200,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 170,000,000. What happened was that while Apple's market share grew, it grew much slower than the market itself.

I guess you might want to look at the world that way; for example, if you wanted to know how difficult it would be to convince the entire market to switch to your product. But I tend to agree that market share would seem to be more useful for most purposes.

Re: Apple Unveils the iPad Pro

#480

Post by giovannibajo1 »

bduerst wrote: post #416
kailuowang wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the copying that worries people, it's the lack of not-coping, i.e. innovations. iPod is not the first mp3 player, iPhone is not the first smart phone, but they were packed with innovative ideas that stood them out. We see less and less such ideas from Apple. Their execution/quality control is still top notch though, but other companies are catching up.

I dunno - Apple kind of killed NFC adoption by waiting so long to finally include it. They should have had it back in 2012.

That's because they are not a OEM that throws hardware together trying to differentiate, no matter what the software using it will be like. Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type, and that makes them make money but without charging more neither the users neither the merchant, and is interoperable with existing credit cards and banks (including the per-bank customized provisioning process).

Putting everything together is several order of magnitude harder than adding a part number to a BOM years before the ecosystem is ready to use it appropriately. They had to get there feature by feature, one at a time. Touch ID was a stepping stone for instance, and that's a whole engineering and design task by itself. It's a multi-year evolution to get to the point of adding a service that incidentally happens to use NFC as one of the many involved technologies. So, no, they did not "add NFC" without Apple Pay.

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