Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by asdff on Friday November 02, 2018 @03:25PM (#18365943)

I still don't think the iPad is enough even for most consumers. The competition for the iPad pro is the surface, which has more I/O that people would actually use (see that nice USB-A port and headphone jack?) but importantly comes with a full featured OS that everyone has been using for decades. I could see people moving to a surface type device over a laptop because it has a full featured OS, but iOS is just too limiting. Look at how ridiculous the 1 foot iPad looks with two fingers worth of space between every icon; its just too rigid of an OS to support all the different workflows people might have in their jobs.

I think people have used iOS long enough to see that it's pretty limited as far as file management goes. The great multitasking of the iPad is still limited to split screening just two apps, a big step down in productivity from even classic MacOS of the 90s.

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Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by askafriend on Friday November 02, 2018 @03:39PM (#18366060)

I think Surface is part of the future too. I think Surface and iPad will dominate traditional laptop sales in the next decade.

They each represent 2 different opinionated views of productivity/creative-focused computing (just like the 2 different opinions of Android vs iOS in mobile computing). I think you're right that today the Surface does far better in the IO department and IO is a dealbreaker for a lot of people. But again, the world isn't standing still, and Apple just released an iPad Pro with USB-C....that's definitely signaling something.

We don't have to make this a conversation about Apple. I think the whole industry is moving in that direction.

Interestingly, I don't have the same belief in ChromeOS. I don't think it'll ever be truly competitive with the Surface or iPad lineup partly because Microsoft still has a stranglehold on the desktop/laptop market. It'll be easy and tempting to move to a Surface device that can do so much more than ChromeOS without changing your existing workflow from Windows.

Android? Well, Android tablets have languished for a very long time - it's basically a dead market walking. The problem isn't so much the hardware languishing as much as it's the software ecosystem that languishes as a result. Even if the Android ecosystem catches up hardware-wise, it'll be a while before the app ecosystem gets kickstarted again.

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Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by 2muchcoffeeman on Friday November 02, 2018 @07:42PM (#18367650)

I think the Surface turned out to be a better product.

I used to think phones and tablets would be defined by lower performance but extremely energy efficient. And any learning from these low power designs would leak to desktops and laptops, but with more power to play with, they would be faster.

But now we’ve got these very powerful iPads and iPhones, but they exist in a limited ecosystem.

The Surface may not have the fancy A12 SoC but the entire line up seems to have intel cpus and run Windows. And their product lineup seems to be a single platform with increasing capabilities. Tablet, better tablet, laptop, better laptop. But you can run all the same stuff.

I’d love Mac OS in an iPad right now that can use the same binaries.

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