I hear people junk talk the iPad all the time but I love mine. I rarely open a computer at home because of the iPad. A lot of times I don't even turn on my TV and just use it as my mini TV. It's basically a laptop in a truer sense of the word IMHO.
The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
511–520 of 617 posts
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#512As someone who worked on the iPad v1, I can tell you, it was a product built in search of a problem. It was going to compete against the, then, growing Netbook market. Steve Jobs thought Windows was going to win that market and hastily threw a team together to answer for it. However, during several all-hands, no one except SJ seemed even remotely excited about the product. "These things will probably sell in the educ…
From Gruber you get that "this thing will never flourish outside of the niche markets its found itself in"? That's far from what he was trying to say.
From his concluding paragraph: "[G]reat though it is in so many ways, overall [the iPad] has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one. To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced. . . "
How you get "never flourish outside of niche markets" from that, I have no idea.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#513I do digital painting on the side, as a hobby. In that field, the iPad Pro, specifically the Procreate app, has been revolutionary -- every single famous digital illustrator, concept artist, and comics artist I follow on Instagram has one, and they post gorgeous work done on them regularly. It's the only tool that comes remotely close to challenging the gold standard workflow of Wacom tablet + Photoshop, and Wacom an…
I'm curious why iPad Pro and not Surface, which from my (admittedly limited) use has always had digitizer responsiveness and functionality at the same level, with the benefit of also being a computer with all the normal software workflow and hotkeys.
Surface Pro as of few years ago has a horrible jitter and much larger latency than iPad or Wacom tablets (search for Surface Pro jitter should yield plenty of examples). It has gotten better in the past few generations and with better stablization in software updates, but many artists I know still avoid N-Trig pen.
Wacom has MobileStudio that runs Windows, but it also come with heating issues.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#514As someone who worked on the iPad v1, I can tell you, it was a product built in search of a problem. It was going to compete against the, then, growing Netbook market. Steve Jobs thought Windows was going to win that market and hastily threw a team together to answer for it. However, during several all-hands, no one except SJ seemed even remotely excited about the product. "These things will probably sell in the educ…
I still remember people saying that the iPad was just going to be a big iPhone and what is the point? I NEVER understood this. I was one of those people that was immediately excited about the iPad. Being able to lay back in bed and casually browse the web, read magazines, watch movies, play games? On something with a decently large screen, decent battery life and something that wasn't bulky? PLEASE TAKE MY MONEY!!!!…
I use an old shitty netbook for this. I prefer that to my Nexus ... 7? tablet for three primary reasons.
The screen naturally holds itself at whatever angle I set it. If I'm just casually watching a video in bed, I can put my hands back under the covers where it's warm.
It has a keyboard. So the other half of the time, when I'm interacting with the machine in a meaningful way, input is way easier.
There's an entire other world of stuff to do with a full fledged OS. Programming, Steam games, the works, it's all there.
I haven't bought another tablet. It's not really better at anything than my phone.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's the best tool (period) for reading datasheets (or any large PDF documents) Sounds intriguing. How would I go about copying the PDFs that are currently on my Linux PC onto it, though?
I love that all the proposed solutions here totally suck. If the iPad would just work as a USB flash drive, all these convoluted transfer methods wouldn't be necessary.
"Suck" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Between "plug the iPad into the computer and drag files from your computer onto a folder that's on the iPad's drive" and "drag files from your computer onto a folder that automatically syncs to the iPad," I count one less step in the second approach, but I guess YMMV.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Zune was launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2012. Why did that product last 6 years? I’m not saying Office for iPad is pointless (I use it regularly, so quite the opposite!), but I do think it’s foolish to think an organisation the size of Microsoft’s doesn’t necessarily do things for obvious reasons. Individual incentives do not always lend themselves to data driven objectives.
Apple created the iPod in nine months by cobbling together third party components. The Zune wasn’t exactly a billion dollar investment.
I think it's unlikely that Office for iPad is a billion dollar investment either. It doesn't change that it might not actually generate any direct returns for them.
Loss-making strategies can ultimately be profitable in a broader sense (if it increases the stickiness of the product on it's primary platforms, keeping away competitors, a strategic moat).
I don't think there's any evidence either way to be able to make any assumptions about the level of interest of the product, and whether or not that justifies it's existence.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
My single biggest problem on the iPad is the way Safari just randomly kills your background tabs. Filling out a web form? You'd better hope that their half-baked tab state saving worked! (Spoiler alert: it probably didn't) It's particularly annoying because of the headline features of iPadOS was that you could finally use Google Docs in Safari! It's actually amazing how well it works...until you switch tabs or apps a…
This aggressive killing of background tabs/apps is due to the iPad’s notoriously low amount of RAM. They put less than the equivalent iPhone models for a device that is supposed to be for multitasking.
That applies to the cheapie iPads (not so much the Pros) but even then, there are times I’d rather deal with slowdowns and memory paging than actually losing my data.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#518As someone who worked on the iPad v1, I can tell you, it was a product built in search of a problem. It was going to compete against the, then, growing Netbook market. Steve Jobs thought Windows was going to win that market and hastily threw a team together to answer for it. However, during several all-hands, no one except SJ seemed even remotely excited about the product. "These things will probably sell in the educ…
I still remember people saying that the iPad was just going to be a big iPhone and what is the point? I NEVER understood this. I was one of those people that was immediately excited about the iPad. Being able to lay back in bed and casually browse the web, read magazines, watch movies, play games? On something with a decently large screen, decent battery life and something that wasn't bulky? PLEASE TAKE MY MONEY!!!!…
I completely agree with you. A really good drawing surface with Pencil, handwritten notes + handwriting recogniser, a distraction-free writing environment with a keyboard cover, comic book reader, ebook reader* and light as heck? Also, a display of that quality for that price? Oh yes.
*Reading O’Reilly Safari books only works well on the iPad, I’ve found. Ever since they killed Kindle downloads. In any case, most technical books look better on the iPad anyway.
The apps are still a bit limiting. Eg some bank apps still assume you’re using a phone, but iPadOS’s desktop-like browser does help. What’s more irritating is that some apps, like Gmail, still don’t allow attaching documents from Files. But I suspect they’ll catch up.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#519As someone who worked on the iPad v1, I can tell you, it was a product built in search of a problem. It was going to compete against the, then, growing Netbook market. Steve Jobs thought Windows was going to win that market and hastily threw a team together to answer for it. However, during several all-hands, no one except SJ seemed even remotely excited about the product. "These things will probably sell in the educ…
> “Developers will always surprise us, they will come up with use cases for us." Well, they did. iPads are now replacing POS registers and kiosks. Although a part of me dies when I see iPad Pros being used for this, because it’s so powerful and capable yet being used as a big touch monitor.
I'm sure taking on Windows CE was exactly what was meant by that quote :p
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
This aggressive killing of background tabs/apps is due to the iPad’s notoriously low amount of RAM. They put less than the equivalent iPhone models for a device that is supposed to be for multitasking.
That applies to the cheapie iPads (not so much the Pros) but even then, there are times I’d rather deal with slowdowns and memory paging than actually losing my data.
The iPad Airs aren’t the cheap lineup, and they have less RAM too.