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New iPad Air, powered by M4

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611–620 of 693 posts

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#611
My iPad wins by a large margin the lowest bang for bucks of any competing device I ever purchased A locked down device with no multitasking, even the browser download is interrupted if I switch away.

The true embodiment of paternalism, it protects you from all the scam in the world, except the noble ones who are willing to pay the 30% share.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has historically never been good at multiple users at the same machine. Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it. IMO incentives are not aligned here, they want everyone purchasing their own iPad, so i suspect that their strategy is to not invest too much into profile management as it risks cannibalizing their hardware sales.

Like 20 years ago OS X server had pretty great support for it. I worked a university lab and had an account on the lab server. I could walk up to any computer in the lab and login and get the exact same desktop experience with all my files and settings. The computing power was all on the local machine, but it basically mounted my user folder from the server. That was the only time I worked anywhere with that setup on…

20 years ago, I would still have bought a Mac, nowadays they don't sell any hardware that I would pay for.

I don't pay extra for have less options than on PC hardware, my desktop and laptops can be upgraded at will and without gunpoint prices (forgetting about the whole AI stuff that affects everyone anyway), thus all my use of Apple hardware is project specific and taken from the company's hardware pool.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#613
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember sitting on my friend's couch drinking beer when they announced the iPad and debating if it was ever going to be popular. Time marches on.

I remember the total uproar about the name! Everyone said it was too close to a Feminine hygiene product, or too close to iPod. Nobody's complaining any more.

It is too close to iPod imo, but they killed that line around the same time.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Cook's fear of people not buying a full set of Apple devices for each person is the driving force behind not just the lack of multiuser support, but also the overall nerfing of iPadOS. For the past 5+ years it's been, "This will be the year of real work on the iPad," but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.

I don't understand how a trillion dollar company can't at this point say "you know what, I think we're good on the profit front, let's convert some of that into improving UX"

Its not in their DNA, the don't get that large by making that kind of decisions.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#616

The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff. Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.

The stupid thing is that iPad does have this feature natively, but you need to use an MDM (or apple configurator profile) to access it. I'm still of the opinion that there's a market, albeit a small one, for a "consumer" MDM product for use cases like this, better parental controls, etc. but almost all are for business and come with some kind of minimum device purchase like 30+ devices.

https://techlockdown.com is the better parental controls (even capable of self-control) that uses Apple MDM. (not affiliated, just a user)

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#618
post #19

My current iPad is the iPad Air 3 (the one with the backlight issue that's never been acknowledged, to my understanding.) Can someone explain to me why an iPad at all, let alone an iPad Air, needs as powerful a processor as a M4? That's stronger than my laptop (a M2) where I run multiple VMs and more.

I have an iPad for the purpose of 3D modeling in Nomad Sculpt and Shapr3D. It’s an M2 Air, it’s still way overkill, and I’m regularly frustrated at how limited every piece of iPadOS software is compared to the hardware. The dichotomy of prioritizing iPad hardware but iPadOS being arguably their worst actively developed software is baffling. Maybe there are people out there doing 8k video editing on their Pros, but I’…

[flagged]

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#619

The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff. Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.

If you are married to Apple Ecosystem then yeah but Samsung Tablets have this feature. Plus better S-OLED screens for content consumption.

Re: New iPad Air, powered by M4

#620
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it. I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people

You’re forgetting just how convenient a tablet is and how little average people care about the latest and greatest triple-A games.

I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.
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