The reviews for the Apple Surface are coming in. There’s two reviews at The Verge, one at the Wall Street Journal, and John Gruber’s got early access from Apple as well.
The general gist? If you’ve ever read a Surface Pro review, you’ve read all the iPad Pro reviews. Well, mostly – the complaints leveled at the Surface Pro are being tip-toed around a bit now that they apply to an Apple product, of course, and suddenly, the magic argument “but it will get better in the future” is now completely valid, while the same argument is never considered valid for the Surface Pro (or something like the Priv and its early bugs).
That being said, all reviews dive into just how uncomfortable the iPad Pro is to use as a laptop – and the problem, of course, is iOS itself. iOS is a mobile, touch-first operating system that Apple is now trying to shoehorn into a laptop role. iOS provides no support for mice or trackpads, and the keyboard and iOS lack most basic shortcut keys, so in order to do anything other than typing, you’ll need to lift your arm and reach for the screen to use touch. This is something Apple has mocked for years as the reason not to include touch on laptops, and now they release a device which requires it 100%.
This is what happens when you run out of ideas and try to shoehorn your cashcow – iOS – into a role it was never intended to fulfill, without being gutsy enough to make the changes it requires. The iPad Pro is clearly screaming for a touchpad (and proper keyboard shortcuts), but it doesn’t have any, and according to John Gruber, it never will (a comment I filed away for later when Apple inevitably adds mouse support to iOS).
Microsoft’s Surface may not be perfect, but its problems stem almost exclusively not from a lack in hardware capability or a faulty concept, but from Microsoft’s Metro environment being utterly shit. The concept of having a tablet and a laptop in the same device, seamlessly switching between a tablet UI and a desktop UI, is sound – the only problem is that Microsoft doesn’t have a working tablet UI and applications. Meanwhile, trying to shoehorn a mobile, touch-first UI into a laptop form factor is just as silly and idiotic as trying to shoehorn a desktop UI into a mobile, touch-first form factor – and Apple should know better.
Or should they? Paul Thurrott, earlier this week:
While the iPad Pro was in many ways inevitable, it also points to a crisis of original thought at Apple, which has been coasting on the iPhone’s coattails for perhaps too long. At Apple, the solution to every problem is another iPhone. And the iPad Pro, like the new Apple TV and the Apple Watch, is really just another attempt to duplicate that singular success in other markets.
Thurrott really hits the nail on the head. The iPhone became a success because Apple sought – and succeeded in – designing an interface and interaction model that was specifically designed for the iPhone’s input methods – the multitouch display, the home button. Ever since that major big hit, they’ve been trying to shoehorn that exact same interface and interaction model into every major new product – the Apple Watch, the new Apple TV, and now the iPad Pro. However, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from Palm OS (pen-first, mobile-first) and iOS (multitouch-first, mobile-first), it’s that every form factor needs a tailored interaction model – not a shoehorned one.
When you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – which sums up Apple’s new major product lines ever since the release of the iPhone, and the iPad Pro seems no different. It will do great as an iPad+, but beyond that? It’s not going to make a single, meaningful dent, without considerable restructuring of iOS’ UI and interaction models – and lots and lots of crow.
The only thing I got out of this is that the OSAlert author has a new favorite word: shoehorn.
They always have, First the Mac, then the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad.
They made these markets for themselves, dominated them then rehash until the next big thing comes along and leave them to stagnate. Obviously they fail a few times (pippin, newton, etc). Expect every last penny to be wrung out of the iPad concept. If you want to see the future of the iPad, look at the iPod.
That’s why Apple is now inventing electric cars, and next, it will invent the Oculus Rift. Who knows what it will invent next? Payload delivery spacecraft to the International Space Station? Or maybe it will just invent the International Space Station because it will never have existed.
Edited 2015-11-11 16:08 UTC
You understand Tesla didn’t invent electric cars and Oculus didn’t invent VR right?
You understand that’s not the joke, right?
It wasn’t funny though.
Don’t worry, Apple will invent you a sense of humour. Who knows, it may become their first actual invention.
Like “our next product will be sold with a reasonable margin” or “we will care about our abroad workers’ health and revenue”.
Oh my God, I almost died laughing.
It will do great as an iPad+
I think that is all it needs to do. There are plenty of tablets just lying around on a table which would profit from a bigger screen and aren’t used in a way which is hurt by its size anyway.
But as laptop replacement – no fucking way.
We have some customers, at our small PC business (no Apple sales) that love Apple and have the money to be able to buy anything Apple sells at whatever price they sell it at. It’s unlikely that people outside the core group of Apple lovers will buy one of these. Most people buy what they need. An iPad Pro, to me, is one of the least desirable tech items on the market today, with its built in limits of use.
We ordered a couple of these to verify the implementation of a number of our websites and applications. They are good devices but I have to agree with the bulk of the reviews that they make a poor laptop replacement.
The lack of a pointing devices is especially painful – and in that sense worse then the Surface. There are actually shortcuts ( some of the reviews are wrong about that ) but for a person who navigates the screen using a trackpad like I do having to constantly pick up your finger and tap stuff is incredibly irritating.
The worse thing about this is that it’s entirely unnecessary. A pointer works perfectly well ( if you jailbreak and install Cydia ). Apple just thinks it ‘knows better’ but in this case it’s just placing needless restrictions on the user and hampering the adoption of their device.
I remember trying to fix an old Mac computer from my cousin, when trying to use the mouse is all pain I’ve got. i don’t know.
And it appears with the release of iPad Pro, with the sole focus of replacing a laptop, Apple is trying to let users of laptop experience the pain of navigating this fake laptop(iPad Pro).
Edited 2015-11-12 00:22 UTC
Gruber highlights something pretty laughable in face of your comments, Thom: that the “pro” in iPad pro actually now stands for “professional” instead of “deluxe”, and it should appeal to professionals. The Verge goes down the line saying that iPad Pro should appeal to “big business”.
See… the problem with iOS goes deeper than his awkward UI (with keyboards), it fundamentally lacks near everything that makes a OS usable for professionals working inside a big team with a defined workflow and big business.
It lacks a true printing subsystem (don’t dare to say “AirPrint”), it lacks any real file sharing/network drive features, it’s not multi-user (so, not surprising, it lacks things like roaming profiles, group policies, login/logoff script execution, etc.), it lacks out-of-box screen sharing capabilities, actually it lacks any kind of remote deployment/control capabilities outside App Store itself, no remote monitoring capabilities, no admin-side update services control, remote configuration management (“fleet control”), firewall control, standard system log application (it do have a syslog in the form of ASL)… for hell! you cannot even install custom enterprise application without enrolling into Apple Developer Enterprise Program!
Sure, iOS devices works great as information terminals on production lines, and as a access terminals for web services in the hands of sales people (and correlates) on field (that was iPad usage scenarios on big corps thus far, and iPad pro will not change that). But as a daily enterprise workstation? No.
But one thing we all must have in mind: all this is software related. If Apple truly wants, they can deliver a true enterprise product.
Edited 2015-11-11 16:01 UTC
Apple and Enterprise…just doesn’t work. In Enterprise there are so many machines that it is simply to expensive to make them all “Pro” devices. Apple also always pushes for latest=greatest without thinking about backwards compatibility which is fine for home but not enterprise. They have given up on Enterprise and Pro a while ago when they dropped Server and didn’t meaningfully develop the MacPro or the MacBookPro anymore.
Apple has moved entirely into the consumer/prosumer market and is doing extremely well there. Selling more and more products with higher and higher prices and incredible margins.
iPad is a “dying” business. Apple would love for it to be a laptop replacement but it is a laptop addition without a meaningful replacement cycle. Once you got one (as a gift is actually extremely common) you will not replace it because you wouldn’t do anything with the new one that you wouldn’t do with the old one. Even this hyper-expensive iPad Pro is just a bigger and faster iPad without any Pro features. They would normally have called it the Plus….but they want it to be more than it is.
If the world is truly moving away from laptops and into tablets, then how do you explain MacBook sales going up and iPad sales going down the last few years?
I don’t think anybody seriously claims that the world is moving towards tablets any more.
Both PC and tablet sales have been declining for years, and will eventually end up as a niche for the small number of use cases where their respective form factors are optimal.
Tim Cook seems to seriously claim that the world is moving from pc’s to tablets:
“Now, Tim Cook thinks the iPad Pro could hammer the corporate PC the same way that the original iPad cannibalized mainstream PC sales. In an interview with The Telegraph, Cook states that he thinks the iPad Pro obviates any need to own a corporate PC at all, saying ^aEURoeNo, really, why would you buy one?^aEUR He continues: ^aEURoeYes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else”
Tablet sales haven’t been declining, iPad sales have been declining. PC sales have not been declining because they aren’t used anymore, they have been declining because upgrade cycles have changed from 2-3 years to 5-10 years. And all of this is a matter of qualification anyway. Should a Microsoft Surface count as a Tablet? Should an Android tablet that is only used to play media/browse without any sold apps be compared with an iPad Pro?
There is no meaningful progression, nothing new in iPad land. They still get 10 hours of battery life, can play great games but are only used for CandyCrush and Crossy Road, are excellent coffee-table browsers, but they still don’t have multiple usersaccounts, ports, more sensors or any Enterprise Killer App
Wait, iPad is not great for gaming unless you play games on the iPad thinking they are great. For a gamer, there is no Android, iPad that can replace a desktop computer.
Sorry, but most people play there games on mobile now. Those games are great because they provide short relieve, excitement and entertainment wherever you are and whenever you want. They are enjoyed by enormous amounts of people and sometimes generate huge piles of cash.
Gaming and gamers are still in a different league, but that doesn’t mean that the other side doesn’t have great games. I still think Super Mario Bros is a great game and I don’t see myself playing “Doors” on a desktop
Tablet sales haven’t been declining, iPad sales have been declining.
People just buy cheap Android models to keep their toddlers amused.
PC sales have not been declining because they aren’t used anymore, they have been declining because upgrade cycles have changed from 2-3 years to 5-10 years.
My brother is a surveyor. Back in the early 80s they had a 6-12 month upgrade cycle for their work CAD PCs. Now they run until they die.
Edited 2015-11-12 02:10 UTC
There are a number of enterprise iOS apps already. Neither will threaten the PC (so no “killer app”), but they demonstrate that the iPad can be used in the enterprise, successfully.
(for brevity I will not quote anything)
I don’t know where the 270 dollar amount comes from. IBM’s official talk about this is “we cannot put a dollar amount on it yet but we feel it is costing us less in support”. And of course that is true for new machines with a new rollout mechanism.
Tablets are great because “once you have them you don’t replace them”. The Apple support cycle for iPads is 5 years. 5 year old iPads cannot run the newest apps mostly because they cannot run the newest OS. In the pc world we have reached maturity where a new version of the OS runs faster than the old version. iOS hasn’t reached that level yet so you need newer hardware to run the newer OS to run old apps. The newer OS is also needed to keep your devices secure (most people at home don’t care, but business does). No Enterprise is going to upgrade all their devices to any new Operating System that, for whatever reason, doesn’t suite them. What if iOS 9 has encryption, but iOS 10 would remove that? Enterprise would stay with iOS9 but they cannot because of security patches. Also, in Enterprise it works like this: does it run EVERYTHING that I run now? What? Only 8 out of 10 things that I want to do? Then we will not even consider it. (Even though the other 2 can be done in another way and the 8 would be greatly improved). It works the same on mobile apparently. If 1 app that you like now isn’t available that means there is a No-Go.
Whenever two giants, like IBM and Apple, announce a cooperation that is potentially extremely interesting. This IBM/Apple Apple thing and the iPad Pro seem to be the way that Apple is trying to get into the Enterprise. It doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. I found it telling that IBM is issueing macBooks, not iPads. There is a lot of potential here, but it doesn’t feel like the push is working. This is just like I think there is a lot of potential in Windows Universal Apps but the push here might also not be strong enough. That doesn’t stop me from enjoying Windows 10 and Windows Mobile, but when I see hardly anybody around me (or at Microsoft) use apps that is telling to me as well. Another two giants that I am going to look very closely at are Android/ChromeOS.
PC upgrade cycles have been increasing because there is nothing new that people do with pc’s in recent years and because most software doesn’t require more powerful hardware. This is exactly the reason that people aren’t replacing tablets.
It is so easy for IBM to do that. Apple’s devices be it tablet/laptop/desktop are for terminals used for display and input. At the backend, IBM servers serve Apple devices. It will work for some enterprises this way.
But for big businesses with custom applications in house built for the desktop(Windows/Linux), it will never work.
Big businesses and “custom in house applications built for the desktop” are not compatible terms. Not even in the 90s!! haha
In the big enterprise world all the important stuff run server side (ERP, CRM, whatever)… and the trend is moving it to the cloud if possible.
The only “big desktop applications” used today are niche technical apps like CAD, development, medical or scientific software, ecc… not big business apps at all.
That’s a fact not an opinion… and in that big business world iPad Pro makes A LOT OF SENSE, not for the technical people like us, but for managers and other decision making people (because they _consume_ data and iPad Pro is the best device ever created to show shiny pretty graphical data and share it with your secretary). iPad Pro could be a killer product in that market.
And please stop with all that stupid Apple-hating stuff… you are smart guys… don’t be so short sighted!!
Important stuff is not RUN on the server side, it is STORED on the server side. It is often unlocked with “custom in house applications built for the desktop”. There has of course been a trend to move/add browser version of these applications, but often those are trimmed down versions of the desktop application and often the really important applications are just too complicated/powerful/integrated with other applications to be reprogrammed. And now the mobile-app versions are often trimmed down versions of the webapplications.
iPad Pro is in no way the best device to show that data. Here is a word for you: BEAMER. iPad and sharing…..hahahaha, that is not even easy when you are entirely locked into the Apple Ecosystem. iPad Pro is just a bigger iPad. iPads are meant for private consumption. Bigger iPads don’t just become work machines, they just become heavier and more expensive.
Where do you see Apple-hating stuff? We are indeed smart guys that actually analyse a product. If Samsung would have put a high res bigger tablet on the market you wouldn’t have thought that it makes A LOT OF SENSE and will be a killer product in that market. It seems clear that you are the short sighted one here. Apple is marketing this device for creation, not for consumption and people here are simply pointing out that it isn’t a great creation device.
the iPad Pro is a beautiful device, very fast, lots of potential. But business doesn’t buy a device because it has potential, they buy it because it gets work done. And for that, there are going to have to be a whole lot of improvements. Of course Apple has the cash and knowledge to make those improvements on the hardware and OS, but the ecosystem is going to have to adjust as well and that takes time IF it will hapen at all
Here are some examples that would greatly improve the iPad Pro:
* Use Touch ID to easily allow different people to log on, changing it from a private device to a multi-user device. (I would love this on a regular iPad as well so my child only sees a few games and cannot delete any of my mails. Of Course this happened yet because Apple just wants me to buy a second iPad)
* Get a whole lot of great productivity software running on it.
* Be cross platform, meaning that I can receive/share/exchange data and files with people on other OS and hardware easily
* Make the pen something that you won’t loose (stored inside the device or attached to it)
* Forget about selling that keyboard for that amount of money. Either leave it up to 3rd parties or make something much better and much more adjustable
Simple solution for Apple to make this product viable. ALLOW bluetooth pointing devices on ios.
Personally I would stick with my air 2, but I know people would would use this as their daily driver if they could do decent VDI with it. I am in the same camp, but the pro is simply too large of a device for me to carry around.
It’s simple, and yet Apple doesn’t seem to bother. The first iPad was released in 2010, and warping 5 years to the present, we still have iPad in the same place that Jobs left it: as a content consumption device, not a production machine.
Simple stretching his screen and gluing a keyboard on it is not enough. Not even by a long shot.
an iPad running filemaker go and custom business software, along with dropbox, email, and basic web products is all most people need to “work” these days.
i have several clients employing thousands of people that can do nearly all of their daily computing tasks on an iPad.
most people just add/edit/view data when needed, they don’t actually have to develop.
*nearly* is the key, and the reason apple continues to enhance iOS and it’s hardware options.
Edited 2015-11-11 21:00 UTC
I got your point.
The problem that i’m pointing out doesn’t lie on what the user does when working (and you are quite underestimating what a user actually do in his work). It lies on how to properly manage a network composed of dozens of thousands of iOS devices.
The thing is, very large corporations and federal-level governments (the ones that makes large hardware purchases and keep companies like Dell and Microsoft afloat) usually has understaffed IT departments that has to handle massive numbers of machines simultaneously at global level. These are corporate issued machines, not a “bring your own device” thing.
In these corporations, hundreds of people are hired and fired everyday, so hundreds of users enter and get deactivated on the directory services every day. And every single user has his own set of application, group policies depending on his department and position, and file permissions. And new permission requests are made by the thousands every day at global level.
Everything has to standardized because when a IT team ends his shift on West, a new day just rise on East side of the planet, with a different IT team taking over the management and keep the wheels turning. For every machine they has to keep software inventories, handle requests to purchase new software, and deploy these software on machines that could be on the other side of the planet.
Not to mention solve user problems reported by the dreaded help-desk, and the constant change of the network topology made by new network services coming online and offline everyday, and new hardware being plunged in on data centers and offices everywhere. All that must be reflect on the clients in the form of new set of permission, new network mappings, new printers, new software deployments…
There is also the mobile guys, with VPNs…
My point is: iOS don’t have the internals to make itself usable on these scale. Sure, you could glue a dozen of thirty party apps to make it barely usable on small scale. Or could integrate it on your workforce to handle simple tasks. But this is a “Windows 3.11” thing (that God have mercy on these poor souls back then), where you had to deal with OS shortcomings with usually substandard software to give the functionality that you needed.
I generally agree, but I’ve never worked for a company that large my entire life. Most of my colleagues jump around companies from 1-100 employees, and BYOD is the name of the game, or at least lots of virtualization, web services, and roll your own stuff. Also in my field macs are well over 50% of the developer population and depending on the segment the client is in, about 35% mac to windows. since you can run windows fine from a mac for the last 10 years or so developers are left to buy the hardware they like best.
I’ve worked for some companies that won’t buy you a PC because of the maintenance and IT structure needed, but they’ll by you a mac and say “good luck, don’t bother the IT guys too much.”
I thought education would force apple to give iOS user accounts but they’ve resisted and iPads in schools are still basically public devices until you log in through an app.
Apple doesn’t really want iPads being shared privately with locked down user accounts, I think they see it as a little more democratic, a little more public and shared and they are a hardware company. If you want your own, buy your own! Apple would rather your household have 3 iPads than 1 with 3 accounts.
Edited 2015-11-12 16:50 UTC
I was doing some work for a huge school district in the US the other week and needed to get a VPN tunnel from OSX. The lady says “you’ll have to ask IT, but I’m pretty sure they don’t do MAC”
The all caps MAC is the giveaway. It’s never good. They literally don’t even know how to type it’s name. It was like 1994 all over again.
The IT guy called me and tried to get it going but said “sorry our VPN doesn’t have a mac client, are you sure you don’t have a windows machine around?”. I laughed and launched windows, told him I hadn’t had an actual windows machine on my desk in about 12 years.
He said “sorry, our VPN client requires a real windows machine, not one running in virtualization.” I asked him how the client knew this and he had no answer.
I said “30k employees and you don’t have any macs at all?”
“Well about 10% of our users are using apple.”
“How do they connect?”
No answer. “Sorry, you’ll have to get a windows machine”.
I guess there’s 3000 angry mac users in that district.
I’m left to screen share a zombie machine to get any work done because they purchased from the wrong VPN vendor.
Edited 2015-11-12 17:03 UTC
ezraz,
That’s about right, many environments don’t have OSX and they expect you to use what they use instead. I get the same reaction using Linux. It means that I require windows to do my work because many/most clients use proprietary windows software.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I prefer standardized protocols, however the choice isn’t mine to make and if anything I’m actually seeing a move away from “open” technology like IPSEC and towards proprietary solutions.
Interestingly this scenario is slightly reversed on the mobile side, where clients expect you to have an IOS device by default.
Ben Bajarin at the Daily Techpinion has an article musing on the iPad Pro after using one for a week
https://techpinions.com/the-ipad-pro-the-start-of-something-new/4233…
A couple of interesting points from his article. One is where he talks about the power of the Apple designed ARM chip in the iPad Pro which allowed him to edit multiple 4K video streams very fast. And second when he talked about how much more accomplished his 12 year daughter was using the device – why? – because all young people are growing up using touch devices as their main computing devices and unlike older folks more used to WIMPS GUIs (i.e. including everyone who actually knows what that acronym means) they can exploit the new touch based computing paradigm to its fullest potential. This produced an echo for me (because I am that old) of how easy it was for my young daughter (now all grown up) to use my early Mac while older techie people I knew who were more used to the command line interface found using a mouse award and limiting.
Benedict Evans also has an interesting article on the broader context entitled “Mobile, ecosystems and the death of PCs” here
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosystems-and-…
The entire article is worth read (his stuff always is) but for the impatient here are his conclusions:
The “death of PCs” is a really tiresome argument.
I disagree with points 1 and 2.
1. “it enables far more people to use these things.”
BUT it does discourage people from understanding how things work, and it increasingly promotes the idea that a computing device is a magic box which converts input into output in some mysterious ways noone but its creators should be concerned with. I think that is ultimately an impoverishment for our minds.
2. I’m having a hard time trying to follow the chain of Saxon genitives up to the starting point, but oh-it-involves-children, so that the argument can’t be answered back without looking like cynical bastards. I see this trend as trading freedom for a false sense of security. Hardly the first time we’re doing so anyway.
As for point 4, that’s stating the obvious. But for how many years is the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem going to keep this pace? I think we’re progressing towards saturation. And then? I wish those Sybils would try to dive into less obvious things.
I love PCs because they are imperfect, run into hiccups, but let you do almost everything you want. I grew up with this openness in mind (e.g. installing GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD on everything I had on hand, including a PowerBook G4 and a Sun Ultra 5, just for the sake of it – nothing special, but nice!), and I’m not prepared to give it up “because mobile”.
“Mobile” as a tightly controlled environment where software and hardware are inextricably bound and the boundaries of what you can do have been defined from the start by the vendor has nothing to do with empowering people and everything to do with giving back control to corporations.
I am frankly fed up with analysts pushing this “new world” as the best thing ever happened to computing.
Yeah, anyway, all I care about is Apple keeping OS X alive without turning it into a kindergarten-ready iOS clone – or some high-end CAD and archviz software being ported to Linux, but that’s less likely, alas. I wonder what software is used to create the graphics in those nice Andreessen Horowitz slides. Excel+Powerpoint on an iPad? Aligning stuff with fingers?
Edited 2015-11-11 18:29 UTC
Not for those 99% of humanity which never cared to know how a computer works.
I share the same feelings to a degree. As a developer who grew up during 80s it is hard not to. That said though, I believe that this viewpoint is just plain wrong and should be avoided.
Why? Because it isn’t realistic.
Yes, mobile devices (particularly iOS) are simply not like the PCs we grew up with. They offer extremely regimented environments in which to run applications, and tinkering with it in an effort to “discover” how it all works is pretty much futile. As a conduit to further one’s knowledge of how computers work, they are useless and a step backward – no argument. They are, as you said, magic boxes to most users.
But… There is a place in the world for magic boxes. Most of us have a TV. Few of us know how to actually build one, or much care how they work. We don’t need to in order to use one. If you really, really, want to learn how to build one it is possible to do so – but unless you plan on designing TVs for a living there is little practical reason to. TVs have become a transparent tool to such a degree that you can actually make TV Shows without needing to understand how they work… This exact same logic applies to lots of things in our everyday lives – cars, microwaves, washing machines, etc., etc.
Why should computers be different? I get the sense of loss, really I do, but our fond memories of the good ole days are really immaterial to the vast majority of people. What we see as backwards and limiting they see as a tool they can finally use without needing to understand how it works.
That is what I think most people miss in the equation. Conventional PCs cannot be used without a fair bit of knowledge as to how they work. Even if you do understand them they tend to break horribly – things go wrong all the time (bad drivers, botched software updates, unexpected incompatibilities, viruses, malware, etc. etc.)
To use one, you will need to deal with these things at least every once in a while. Sure, it has gotten a lot better over the years, but even now if you don’t know how to fix them, and don’t have access to someone who does, getting through even a single year without any loss of productivity is probably nearly impossible (and the less you know about them the more likely things will go wrong). They are just too brittle and it is too easy to shoot yourself in your own foot.
All the things that make iOS and Android “bad” to us are the very things that “fix” this. Severely restricted software distribution, complex security, dumbed down interaction models, a heavy reliance on cloud computing resources, limited hardware resources, application signing requirements, etc. – those are the very things that make it possible for a complete novice to buy and use one of these things for years without any help from anyone. They just work. Like TVs.
That isn’t impoverishing people’s minds, it is giving them access to something genuinely useful that they simply did not have access to before, not without a whole lot of mental investment. Independence like this is very powerful – it is not something we (as developers) should be flippant about. The price for that is unfortunately turning computers into magic boxes, because there really isn’t any other sane way to do it.
I certainly don’t think that PCs are going to go away any time soon, and lots of people that start with tablets will hit the capabilities wall and graduate to real computers. I think there is a place for both kinds of devices. I just don’t think it is fair to fixate on what was lost without considering what was gained. There are two sides to the story.
Technological advancement depends on an increasing number of increasingly complex things being treated as black boxes, with only the inputs and output being important for the vast majority.
I drive a fuel injected, turbo, something, something car. I couldn’t fix it if my life depended on it. Heck, I can’t even change the tire. I understand how to drive the thing but I’ve really no ideal how it works.
Nevertheless I am quite a good driver on the road and on the track.
You don’t have to understand a thing to be able to use it well and be very productive with it. Indeed, if we had to understand all the things we use we’d still be stuck in caves trying to puzzle out fire.
If you can’t change the tire, you’re handicapped. Seriously.
but thats the problem with touch-devices
with a mous there are only a few cases whre you have to fall back to the cli
but with touch-devices simple tasks like selecting a bit of text are a chore
Apples and oranges. All those sold phones are not going to replace the desktop no matter how many of them you sell. And the iPads stopped selling now that we’re at it.
The argument is more like “Many techies continue to not understand they’re an infinitesimal fraction of a market which is now commoditized at large.”
Without whom, the market collapses. I agree not everyone needs a multi-core stupendous-memory machine running VirtualBox, multiple desktops and an impressive array of network tools and command line windows…
But there are people who require that sort of thing to do their jobs, and pretending they don’t exist is just as disingenuous.
Thanks for proving my point.
I think you may have that inverted. What’s so striking about mobile devices is how much more they can do than PCs can not do.
Once computers shrank so that they could fit in a pocket and had batteries that lasted all day, and had a built in array of very powerful sensors (GPS, Gyros, compasses, motion sensors,) and built in video and still cameras, sound play back and recording, telephony and bluetooth, they became way, way more powerful than desktop PCs.
Sure editing a spreadsheet on a smart phone is bit more fiddly than on a PC but can you use any PC do this: stumble out of the pub late at night pull out your phone to check the football score, use the map to check the nearest metro, discover you just missed the last train, use Uber to call a cab, while you wait post the funny photo you took in the pub on Instagram and then in the cab call your wife to say you will be home soon and then settle back and listen to some music whilst browsing though your photos from the day. Try that with a laptop
PCs are the best for a few things but mobile computing devices are much more powerful for many more things. And the things that mobile devices are good at are actually the things that make up the fabric of most of our days and lives.
I quite liked this cheeky video from Horace Dediu called “The Desktop Computer”
http://www.asymco.com/2015/11/11/desktop-computer/
I don’t have to as I’m not the one stating that the phone is dead. On the other hand I could list an equally long list of things that a touch device absolutely sucks for (including typing this reply, as I tend to grab my MacBook rather than my iPad).
I get that this particular use case actually becomes slightly less annoying on iPad Pro and Surface devices. Unfortunately for the iPad Pro it also sucks pretty badly for most of the things you listed. I certainly won’t be carrying such a huge device around when heading home drunk from the pub.
The point I was making is that for most young people their primary and dominant experience of computing is using mobile touch based devices, overwhelmingly phones. So for them the idea of using a bigger form factor tablet as a desktop computer rather than a traditional mouse based PC system (such as OSX and Windows) is far less novel or challenging.
Personally I am not like that. I have been using mouse based desktop systems since getting a Mac II in the mid 1980s and I find using a traditional PC setup much more comfortable and familiar to do anything of substance. Additionally as I age I need a big screen (eyesight) and I spend less time out and about so being tied to desk is less of a big deal.
But watching my kids generation using their devices its clear they are truly a new generation of computer users, with an entirely different culture and experience. In the next ten years touch based computing will seep into every nook and cranny of computing, both personal and professional. Already traditional PCs are a minority niche of computing.
Try that with a laptop
I’m sure I could do all those things with my laptop if I installed Bluestacks and Skype and bought a 3G dongle. It would be a silly idea though. Likewise using a phone or tablet as a laptop is pretty silly.
Totally agree and was going to post the same,
When i chat to staff at work who are under 25 touch devices are their computing devices. Plenty of them only own phones and tablets, a lot their phone does everything they need.
I believe it is a future paradigm of computer interaction.
Personally i love my Desktop and Laptop, it’s what im used to and work well with it, in the environment i am locked into.
However through a lot of meetings i use my iPad, i can take mindmaps and enter notes into onenote at the same time (Air2). When i am at home, where i might have had a laptop next to me i use my iPad for surfing the net, emails etc..
I recently had a wake up or realization. I am changing jobs and as such i will be handing back my company issued iPhone. I brought a new personal phone (iPhone6S+, amazing phone!!
. As my company iphone backups also contained all of their profiles and settings i decided to start my new iPhone as a new device (i.e. not import anything), then download apps, wallpapers, get my settings right etc..
It was then it hit me, this is my primary computing platform, 10 years ago i would be going through the same motions on my desktop, format Windows/Mac, install apps, setup wallpaper settings etc.. Now my PC is pretty quick to reinstall as i primarily use it for games, so reinstall, download steam, job done, it’s no longer as personal, it’s more an appliance for games.
All my time and effort goes into my phone which i carry with me everywhere, where i purchase items through amazon, do my banking, check my social stuff etc.. It was a little shocking as to me it kind of snuck up and replaced my desktop without me really noticing.
Well Said!
I was at a financial presentation last week in the Heart of the City of London. None of the attendees were under 50 years old. (Well, it was to do with Pensions). The woman sitting next to me had her life on her iPhone. This included access to her pension plan. One of the speakers asked for a show of hands for thos who had the Pension Co App on their modile devices. Around 40% of the 80-100 people put their hands up.
These are not people who have grown up with touch devices like smart phones. Many of them were like me and started with ASR-33 Teletypes and acoustic couplers. Yet this modern tech has been adopted by my generation. Many of them with gusto. Most were not in IT but it has empowered them enourmously.
My move to a touch only environment is very sloth like compared to many at that meeting.
Oh, and most were using iPhones. Hardly hipsters more like aging hippies but for them it does what it said on the tin.
For one, I fully expect that despite all the shortcomings, the iPad Pro will sell numbers that Microsoft (Surface Pro) or Samsung (Galaxy TabPRO 12.2) can only dream of. Yes, even in the face of otherwise declining iPad sales.
Secondly, I don’t think that Apple came up with the idea on their own. It seems very likely to me that the through the enterprise cooperation with IBM they realized that use cases for a bigger iPad with digitizer pen and keyboard existed.
iPad in the enterprise depends on specially written apps, which means that these apps can and will be adapted to the input situation. The iPad Pro is not a device which is particularly useful for existing use cases, and most of the reviews seem to focus mainly on those which makes their conclusion moot.
the watch has all kinds of new interface tech, hardware and software.
stuff never done before plus stuff never done that small before.
the iPad pro is just the apple III, trying to get iOS everywhere, even places it’s not perfectly suited for.
i bet iOS 10 offers more screen-sharing, multitasking, and pro-level work features. why would they ship them before the hardware even supports it?
you know apple always rolls out features over the life of the product.
i don’t think they’ve stopped innovating, i think they’re busy swimming in money right now so it’s hard to tell them they are doing anything wrong.
Well, isn’t this a bit exaggerated? As far as I know, the performance of Metro apps has improved (still not enough, but!) in the transition from 8.1 to 10, and the form-factor independence philosophy has been implemented more pervasively (i.e. UI elements are the same between all screen sizes, no need to code two or more per-device UI layers for a single app engine, as in 8.1). Add to this the ability to run old desktop apps, and the Surface scenario differs a lot more than that of iPad Pro…
Basically a Swiss army knife – it does most things badly and nothing well.
Come on, Apple!!!
A 12 inch screen and the icon grid is still the same as a 4 inch iPhone?! Still no widgets on main screen?!
That’s some of the reasons I haven’t had any will to buy an iPad…
Yeah I totally agree with that.
Apple makes one media player product with a variety of screen sizes and different names.
iOS has this “welcoming” feel the first time you open it. When you open Windows, even on a crapware-free Surface, you are bombarded with a ton of Updates which aren’t even installed on one go.
People hate them when their own OS trolls them. “Oh Windows, why can’t you install all Updates in one go”. Why u so slow in Updating?
Then there is the problem that the Surface is supposed to be a tablet-first device (laptop second) but it’s most usefull apps are trackpad-centric, small buttons and everything. Instead, the iPad Pro is a tablet-first product with touch-centric apps.
Wow, the Apple bias really shines through on this site. LOL
Why isn’t Microsoft’s foray into making themselves like Apple considered unoriginal? And Apple’s business model has always been about making product categories that may have already existed either better, or easier for the average person to use.
So, the bashing is fine, since you feel that way, but this idea that Apple is somehow moribund because they are iterating is a little stupid when you consider that everyone is trying to copy their success in much the same way, and yes, often well, as in the Surface line, but let’s stop pretending that iPads, whatever size they are, are copies of Surface tablets, because they are really very different beasts aiming at somewhat different markets.
There are still many features that are either simply missing or extremely lacking in iOS. I’m not sure why this hasn’t been a problem for most but the ability to choose my own default apps is extremely important to me. I don’t have a single use for any of Apples included apps, except maybe for iPhoto but even than I prefer using Fickr for all of my photo needs. Opera and now FireFox for my browser as I use multiple platforms I need cross platformed apps to access all of my info. I’ve tried using an iPad in the past as a laptop replacement but it was down right aggravating, so I dumped the idea and bought a Dell Venue 10000 instead, it has been an absolutely fantastic convertible Android/Laptop device. I can with the utmost confidence say that a truckload or mouse is an absolute must have. Especially if your going to be using productivity apps like MS Office. The iPad Pro is again, just another iPAd, meant for content consumption, not creation, editing maybe but creation, it just fails. I’m sure there are those who will beg to differ and state how fantastic the iPad is for every conceivable computer task but you’re just lying to yourseleves, forcing something that would just be much better on a different device. My next machine will definitely be a Pixel C as I already Own the Pixel v2 and I want to get involved with Google’s migration program. As A Chromium contributer I have already been contacted by Google. The Pixel C will be the platform that we will be using as the test bed, hence the reason of it’s resistance. Same as why the Pixel was released. Google sells them to the public to help alleviate production and design costs. That’s why I thinks it comical as to how people are predicting doom and gloom for it as it was never intended to compete with anything, let alone the iPad Pro or Surface. First order of business though will be to install Chrome OS, easy enough with a Google device, especially one that already has all of the drivers available for Chrome OS, even the latest X1 ones.
Surface is s**t – iPad and iPad pro leave a lot to be desired.
I’m writing this on an iPad (3rd Gen – not Pro). I’m a Systems Analyst. I support multiple OSs at work and multiple brands of hardware. Nobody swears at devices more than they swear –at– Surfaces. Still the org that I work in keeps buying them and people keep bringing in their personal mobile devices and only pretend to use the Surfaces. They are down more than they are up. They have Microsoft camping here and they can’t keep them working for more than a month. It’s time to give up on them for a couple of generations and try again.
The same goes for iPads. They are at least a couple of generations away from being the computer for the rest of us or the computer for all of us.
Both definitely have plans though, to make their devices the standard devices. We’ll see what happens.
Apple –is– making plans for making iOS the OS for not only creative artists but creative programmers. There are a lot of rumors that Apple has Swift coding including compiling running on an iPad Pro. Too many leaks to be wrong. However, it is Alpha at best and probably years ago, maybe 3 or 4, from seeing the light of day.
Off hours (from work) I’m a writer (under a pen name) and yes I have Apple devices that I work on. I try to write on the iPad but it is painfully slow and yes the lack of keyboard shortcuts and yes having to touch the screen for things drives me nutts. So as much as I can I don’t write on the iPad. Plus I am impatiently waiting for Scrivener to be allowed to release an iOS version which I think will be a lot better than Pages.
I’ve tried Word on my iPad. It’s worse than Pages but I find Word about the 20th best out of 20th “word processors” that I’ve used in the last two months.
Writers are like people addicted to buying shoes or cars or whatever it is that you can’t stop buying if you can afford it. We keep buying different writing tools to play with and write with when we get mental blocks and need to have a little bit of fun checking out something new. So I buy programs I can write with. I’m published by the way, and I have over 100 different word processing/writer/script writing programs and will buy more. Like I said, we love to play with new things.
Note that my editor isn’t reading this and editing it and making me changes this up.
I’ll buy an iPad Pro but for the foreseeable future it won’t be for writing and that is my craft that I love. Maybe one day Apple will see it as a tool for writers and get serious with the OS as much as the hardware.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Both Microsoft and Apple, well and Google and Corel and … well I could keep going. They all have been rather blind in their own way for about forever.
While a lot of things, like being able to cooperatively work together a lot more now than under Steve Jobs, at least, the very imperfect person that he was, would have forced them to focus on what is different about each device instead of what is the same.
Jony Ive is too focused on Design and “Complications” and not enough on function. Steve Cook is too wrapped up in making the machine more and more efficient without getting into Jony’s way.
They need someone at the top (like the rest of the companies) with a laser focus that can sometimes burn people but it is necessary so that they don’t get lost like they are now.
The iPad for the Writers of us? Bad grammer but you get when I’m taking that from. It isn’t here yet.