Because the older pros don't have a way to charge it.

Which is to me another one of those ingenious but now obvious design choices, I know the sGNote series has "wireless" charging for their stylus, but it needs to go into the device to be charged, this is so much cooler because it doesn't require that. I wish that Microsoft had thought of this for the surface pen.

I'm kind of glad they didn't. A pen magnetically attached will likely pop off when you put the tablet in your bag. It's a nice place to dock the pen when you're using the tablet, but poor place to store it in a bag.

People report up to a year of life with the Surface Pen battery. Swapping it out when it dies seems simpler than remembering to charge it regularly.

I've had a Surface Pro 3 since release and have had to replace the stylus battery twice, so I'm getting ~1.5 years per battery. I would much prefer the old hidey-hole stylus dock to Apple or MS's current stylus docking.

I fully agree about the pen falling off when bumped. I can't imaging Apple solved that since it seems like a fundamental side effect of the design.

The surface pen already magnetically attaches to the surface, this would just give that attachment another purpose.

> Swapping it out when it dies seems simpler than remembering to charge it regularly.

You don't have to remember anything, you just "redock" the stylus when you're done using it and it will charge.

I'm aware. But it's not "just another purpose". It's a different design. A battery that needs charging is a fundamentally different design choice than a battery that needs replacing. I'd rather a disposable battery that lasts for a year than a rechargeable battery that lasts a week.

> You don't have to remember anything, you just "redock" the stylus when you're done using it and it will charge.

And then you shove your tablet in your bag and the pen falls off. The pen languishes in the bottom of the bag until the next time you want to use it, when it may or may not still be holding a usable charge.

A pen that needs to be stuck to the side of your device regularly is fine for a device that sits on a desk all the time. It's less clearly beneficial for a device that gets handled constantly and goes into and out of bags.

The science isn't quite there yet with those uranium batteries

Out here in the free world, every time you want to use a library, you have to choose between 12 different options, all suck in one way or another, and you really have no way of making an informed choice. So you pick something by gut feel. Half the time you are wrong, and all of the time you worry that you have made the wrong choice.

But if you buy into Apple's cathedral, they tell you what to use, and you use it. End of story. It's always behind the times, and it won't run outside of Apple's stuff, but it works (for now, at least), it's well documented, and you don't have to spend days finding and comparing solutions. You can get back to writing code, which is the fun part.

Is it good business? Good for the world? Maybe not. But it's certainly attractive.

As a user, I don't miss having to search the general web to find something for my computer, only to be misled by poor results in the search engine, malware download sites, software that would be the perfect solution but doesn't run on my OS, ads everywhere, etc. Now I have one place to go and everything on it works with my system. Sure it's not perfect, and discovery could be improved, but there's no malware that I've ever run into, and everything I actually need is there.

Also, it's a false dichotomy between PC OSes and iOS. Both macOS and Windows have app stores that their users use.

Along with a million other apps.

I don't know about that; one of Apple's hallmarks is that they aren't afraid to compete with their own products. Some companies would have said "We can't make the tablet into a powerful computer, it would cut into notebook sales.

Especially with the USB-C change, these iPads are a serious competitor to Apple's laptops for pretty much anyone except developers. In a lot of ways they're better. Just not for programming because the software is still too sandboxed.

Here's hoping that Xcode shows up.

I feel we are insanely close to this reality though. We have large enough displays now (even on the small one), external display support, external keyboard support and USB-C so we can actually plug in an iPhone into the iPad itself (Though this could have been skirted with the advent of wireless debugging support in Xcode. I'd still rather have the wire though.) Only thing I really want is some kind of trackpad or trackpad replacement. Or even just mouse support and I'll drop one in my bag.

Selecting/moving text with a finger is more annoying.

Apple themselves does not publish an 'official' gaming controller, no, instead they offer a number of third-party controllers at a quite nice build quality at prices that are comparable to buying a new PS4/XBOX controller:

https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all-accessories/toys-...

These iPads are more powerful than any nintendo switch, but nintendo has them beat because they have a dedicated gaming hardware ecosystem. I wish I could use my iPhone like I would a switch, but I can't because there isn't any serious games or first party hardware.

As a result, serious game devs target mobile last, if they do at all. I bought Transistor for my apple TV for example and asked for the first refund of an iOS app ever because it was an crashy mess. I played it on my PC instead.

Among their requirements they could list: Apple TV with Controller support (allowing devs to ditch the useless support for the Remote), some online features (some rebranded version of Game Center), Mac support (for Macs that support the latest iterations of Metal).

It's the little things.

So really Nintendo isn't quite doing it yet. Said as an absolute lover of the switch.

If Apple had a snap on controller like the one we're seeing Microsoft leaking, it would be game over. A great controller with great support on a refreshed Apple iPad mini would clobber everything on the market and it wouldn't even be close.

Isn't that a good thing? For example, wouldn't it be great if all web apps were optimized for specs lower than the machines we use?

* Lightroom CC on iPhone/iPad: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/how-to/lightroom-mobile...

* Just recently announced Premier Rush: https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere-rush.html

Planned/Announced: * Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photoshop-ecosystem.html * Project Gemini (for drawing/painting/illustrating): https://theblog.adobe.com/introducing-project-gemini/

When it comes to software that’s not games and stuff like video editing it seems to me like the most of what happens is “It takes time for new software/updates to show up that once again are able to waste the full extent of my newly acquired processing power”.

I know we get more robust games now, I know we render 4K videos instead of 460p, I know we display UI on higher resolution screens but there’s really no excuse for a software with similar feature scope to take the same resources percentage of modern top of the line hardware as mid-tier 18 years old machine.

Bummer ;(