The original iPhone was rather underpowered even at the time for what it tried to do, but it was so crazy focused and the vision of what it would allow you to do so exciting, that you were willing to look past it. It didn’t matter that it didn’t have 3G or the best camera. Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Best chip, best camera, best number to write on the back of the box. Boring.
As an aside, I am increasingly certain that the sad truth of the iPad today is that a majority of sales are probably the cheaper models used as Envoy terminals, POS devices, and conference room check-ins. If I count iPad’s I see day to day, it’s incredibly lopsided to these uses. What a waste.
With Steve, you could draw a straight line from the original Mac to the iPad. You could see one relentless mission to tame unusable hardware into a friendly machine through software. You could imagine Steve wanting something like an iPad even with the original Mac.
What’s the narrative of the hodge-podge of devices we have now? Vague speeches about “health” and “AR”, always troublingly highly reliant on the hope others will make use of these technologies. Apple used to lead by example, the first party software set the bar for what others should do. Nowadays there’s just the hope that Adobe bringing Photoshop to the iPad will breathe new life into it. Meanwhile, Apple has not released a new flagship app for the iPad since its original release with iWork and Garageband. It’s been 8 years! Apple can’t figure out a single new app that can take our breath away? If they’ve run out of ideas of how this thing can be used, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
Are there even reports that iPad pros aren’t selling well? I think they are the best computers ever made.
Seoarately, I think many people cannot afford a device that starts at $800 just for Twitter, YouTube, and Hacker News.
The sales peak you refer to predates the ipad pro.
[0] https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/03/my-ipad-pro-experiment/
Instead of curating the store and promoting quality apps and games Apple is actively promoting the 'evil' apps. Apple should be working with apps and games publishers on other platforms to port their successful titles to iOS- instead Apple is only interested in taking their 'cut'.
There is a purpose to every device that Apple makes and I would dare say that they are doing it more successfully than any other business when you define “success” by profitability:
- the iPhone - no other manufacturer is making significant money on mobile phones except for Samsung and estimates are that even they make around a fifth of what Apple makes. The “vision” of the iPhone hasn’t changed. It’s a pocket computer and a good camera.
- iPad: the high end Android tablet market is dead. The PC 2n1 market is doing okay when it comes to volume but profitable it’s not. The non Pro iPad is a consumption device mostly, but the two largest software companies - Microsoft and Adobe are taking the iPhone very seriously and just because it isn’t great for developing, it’s becoming a lot better for other Pro users.
- the Apple Watch - I don’t need it but it’s better in execution than any other smart watch and it’s allowing people to leave their phone at home and of course health and fitness.
- AppleTV: Unlike the Roku (and I have three Roku TVs), they make money the old fashion way - I give Apple money and they give me a box with much better performance than any other settop box without trying to monetize me with ads and without a remote with buttons that go to the highest bidder - unlike one of Roku remotes that have a hard coded button to RDio.
- Mac: a well built computer that I can open up without it looking like a NASCAR car with stickers and crap wars.
HomePod: I got nothing....
Well yeah, they were both imagined (and the Mac, more than imagined - most of the parts invented/built) in the early 70s at Xerox PARC, Jobs heard about/saw them there. Sorry, maybe you know that, but it didn't sound like it.
After the iPhone 4 or 5 it's been going no where vision wise.
Jobs just wanted the software engineers to blow up the iPhone interface for the iPad. The fact that the original iPad had any affordances for the larger screen was because of engineers’ push back.
Unfortunately, the only sources I have are interviews from Nitin Ganatra, who was over some of the iPad apps at the time, from the Debug podcast.
Apple has not released a new flagship app for the iPad since its original release with iWork and Garageband.
In its whole 40 year existence, Apple has usually just made barely passable apps and let third parties produce the high end apps.
The exceptions were the original Apple // version of AppleWorks, ClarisWorks and maybe FileMaker.
Edit:
Corrected spelling.
Its Nitin Ganatra
Right, it's all iterative. Where's the next $100Bn product?
The only genuinely new product that Cook has brought to market is the iwatch (although they seem to have been working on self driving cars)
Wrong. We know exactly what we want to do with these devices.
However, Apple won't allow us to do those things.
A friend of mine bought an iPad Pro before going on vacation so that he wouldn't need to bring his laptop.
He wanted to upload/download his photos from his camera, share them to other people, do some light photo editing, hunt down tourist sites, book train tickets, etc.
He had nothing but problems. My 2015 Macbook Pro? No issues at all.
The iPad Pro went back and now he's back on his laptop.
But for the past decade, they haven’t really made any interesting software. iOS is great for iPhones, it’s not great for a laptop replacement. I think OS/x would be a much better fit for the iPad Pro, but perhaps something completely new would be even better? I think the surface book shows us just why that is by the way. If I didn’t personally find windows so terrible, I would leave Apple for one of those in a heartbeat.
It's not so different from other companies (e.g. on Android, Google used the Linux kernel, but replaced all other userspace components of the traditional GNU/Linux distro by non-copyleft versions, including developing their own libc).
I do this because I myself primarily buy Apple products for their software. It’s anecdotal of course, but I own a MacBook Pro because I like OS/X more than Linux, and, certainly more than Windows, not because it has a touchbar. Similarly I primarily own an iPhone because I much prefer iOS to Android. I also prefer iCloud services and iMessage to all their similar options. In fact my biggest grief with the iPhone isn’t the missing headphone jack or the ludicrous price tag, it’s that Siri is so much worse than the other voice assistants.
Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect I’m not alone, and that’s why I think their core problem is software rather than hardware.
Rather think of a regular consumer, of which there are a lot more. Just doing a bit of browsing on the sofa, writing a few emails, reading news, watching Netflix in bed or playing some game.
Personally, I read a lot of papers and ebooks I get via university on it. It's great for that. Not once did I want to use SSH on it, with or without an external keyboard. I use a proper laptop or computer for stuff like that.
And like another commenter said, not every "Pro" user is a developer. I for one just take the Pro as meaning, better/faster.
And if someone wants to Shell out 800+ for such a device that's fine with me. But just because it costs a lot doesn't mean I can do anything with it. I also don't expect a good SSH experience from a Garmin 5X Plus.
Apple advertises it as such.
Many artists praise the Apple pencil and we musn’t Forget that creative industry is probably what kept Apple afloat during it’s dark age of the 1990’s so I’d say fair enought!
I have literally no use of an Apple Watch or an iPad. But does it bother me than Apple sell them and make big margin on them? Why on earth?
But I do have to agree with the sentiment that it’s software is a major problem. I think a lot of creative pros make things using several files, and organise their work by projects. iOS’s app-based organisation philosophy is consistently painful. So annoying, in fact, that I would probably never try to do anything remotely complicated on this iPad, even though it’s the fasted computer I’ve ever owned.
On the hardware front, a 13” screen is no where near big enough for most creative work. I really think Apple needs to be way faster in scaling this thing up to 20+ inches.
The hardware will come, but I worry that the whole philosophy of iOS is simply wrong for complex work, and it would take a lot of vision and courage from Apple to fix that.
Steve made Apple great but it's an illusion to think a company will grow forever.
Steve was also lucky to have Apple in a time where a lot new stuff was developed. He didn't develop it, he applied it the right way. Things like touch screen and tablets were really new back then.
But today there is not a lot that is new. VR is from the eighties, so is AI.
So I think even today Steve would have troubles to keep Apple growing.
A portable second display is also a great use for it. I tried to use it for coding, but I really hate the material the smart keyboard's made of (I own the first gen one so this might've changed since then), I just can't type on it because touching it freaks me out. I hate that the chose that material to cover the keys with.
So with coding out of the way, recreational drawing, reading ebooks and watching movies is mostly what I use mine for. Unfortunately that's not anything close to the original promise of its capabilities.
I love it and I use it daily but the problem is when I bought it, I expected to see some support for professional use for it, too. The strength of the Apple ecosystem used to be their app support by external developers --- so, let's say for example, when you bought a Samsung (or even Surface) device with a bunch of new features compared to vanilla Android (or a touch/pen-based Windows), you could be sure that nobody will ever enable you to use those efficiently so they were a waste of time even to consider as a reason to get the device, on the other hand, going with Apple meant the opposite.
Frankly, it doesn't feel exactly true nowadays. Tim Cook's leadership gives me terrible flashbacks to the Microsoft Steve Ballmer-era.
As far as I can see they are meant to compliment not replace. She does the majority of the work in Adobe Draw on the iPad Pro and then sends it to her Adobe Cloud account to finish in Illustrator. Before the iPad Pro she essentially couldn't do digital work. She is a trained fine artist with deep knowledge of oil and lately water painting. Most of her paid originals work was doing murals or selling oil paintings previously. The iPad Pro opened up a whole new market for her.
Imagine a set of tools that rival Illustrator but with an interface that's inspired by Draw.
That would be my dream come true!
I used to have a Surface Pro 2 and ended up selling it because the native version of Photoshop is so unoptimised for a tablet screen that it ended up being even more of a hassle than using a regular computer.
And I love it for doing architecture diagrams and also making changes to building plans for my home renovation. The 11inch model is also a great portable diary/productivity machine. I also have teachers in my family who use it for drawing and projecting mathematical formulas on a screen for their kids which they then email straight after the class.
They are selling well for a reason because people use them for different things.
Doable yes, amazing not really.
I completely disagree about video editing and audio production. Sure it's doable for small family videos, but absolutely not for anything remotely pro.
Apple is slowly declining (a percent per year) their market share (they are no longer number two - oppo/oneplus has that position now), next year they won't be number three (Huawei). What happens when they go below 10%? Will developer still deliver applications for OSX? Is there a possibility for the same scenario as it was in the Mac vs PC?
Reality is that modern Android mobile phones are good enough for most. Unless you're really into the status symbol part of the Apple, they really don't have something special. Plus there is no need to upgrade a phone anymore. I bought my Galaxy S8+ a year after lunch (much cheaper) and would replace it only because of consumerism - to get a new phone. Arguably there is nothing that really warrants an upgrade today.
Headphones, while a great move, won't help them in a long run - not enough margins and good competition. The silver lining with Apple is the that they have a growing services business. Too bad Netflix is kicking their ass in video content wars. Siri is also mostly mediocre. Homekit - who knows, what happens if your market share is falling.
Reality is that Android won 3 years back. We'll see if Apple can turn around thanks to their endless coffers of cash. It's not over yet, but they need to do something and not just upgrade what they have.
It's true but kind of irrelevant because this is not what Apple was ever after (otherwise they would have pursued a very different strategy, with 3rd party licensing, etc.).
Does it really matter if Apple's market share is declining as long as they keep capturing >80% of all profits from said market?
As long as they keep their target demography on board (both on the consumer and developper side) they'll do just fine.
Steady decline would mean that might cease to be the case soon.
The overall mobile market is growing. And it's growing into emerging markets like India and China which are very price sensitive i.e. less margins for OEMs. So quite likely that Apple will see declining market share but growth in revenue and profits.
Betterer: device + platform (*e.g. App Store fees, Apple Music, iCloud) revenues. Even betterer: device + platform profits. This is what Cook is now focusing on, in light of the world’s most profitable consumers buying phones less often but still religiously spending on them.
My last attempt at an android was a Samsung Note3 on Verizon.
Pretty much every app had 3 versions - google/android version - samsung version - verizon version
Locked bootloader so couldnt' really remove the duplicates.
Critical Security update released by a google? Well first has to be approved by Samsung ... that takes a month at least , then approved by Verizon.
Realistically if you saw the security update w/in 3 months that was pretty fast.
So a zero day exploit ... 3 months waiting for patch.
Android really won.
But that aside from duplicate apps, my 2nd more important point was SECURITY. An iphone user w/ phone from 2013 can still feel confident that his phone is secure , an android user from 2013 is laughably insecure.
If you use your phone for any work related sensitive data , and android phone is a huge gamble.
https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/siri-101-use-hey-siri-han...
The only time thst I need to be able to activate Siri hands free is when I am driving. Even my cheap car has Bluetooth with a button on the steering wheel that activates it. It’s much more reliable than Hey Siri for me.
And yes, you use Siri hands free so rarely because it doesn't work (as you acknowledged). That's not the case with Google Assistant which works really great for most people - and I use it extensively (almost all day) - both with my phone and Google Home.
- the Galaxy S8 plus was $785 new in 2017 (https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-how-much-the-galaxy-s8-and-s...). The iPhone about the same price as the iPhone 7 Plus when it was introduced, it wasn’t “much cheaper”. If you bought the iPhone 7 Plus a year after launch, it would have also been cheaper. How long will your S8 be supported with updates by Samsung? The 5s from 2013 is still getting updates.
- Netflix’s profit hovers around $300 million (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-is-growing-even-fa...). Comparing Netflix to Apple is laughable. The Mac makes more Netflix’s entire business.
- Android “won” by what measure? Android phone makers are barely profitable besides Samsung and Samsung makes most of its money from selling parts for other phones. It came out in the Oracle lawsuit that even Google only made $31 billion from Android over the first 8 years total - half of what Apple is projected to make this quarter.
Androids market share is meaningless if it doesn’t lead to profits and is seen to be made up of poor people who don’t spend money.
2) I can put any of the hundreds of versions of Android on the S8, and it'll be supported for over a decade. Hell, I don't even have google's android version on my pixel2. How's that 5s running on the latest updates? Does the answer button draw itself in time to pick up the phone? My Galaxy S (original) still runs fine, with the latest security updates.
2) "Services Business" - he is not comparing the entire apple to the entire netflix. He is talking about apple's failed venture into streaming shows and movies. You are being purposely dense here, not sure why. By your logic Windows Phone is a success because MS makes a lot of money from Azure.
3) Android won by the measure of what wins. Almost all phones are Android. Things that don't lead to profits are meaningless in terms of who won? To us, consumers, who most all use Android, it has won. Who cares what money the producers make? Now I'll leave this to your for a though exercise. Take all the slim profits from all the Android phones, tablets, cash register terminals, cameras, light switches, conference booking pads on the walls, etc. Add all those, for every device running Android. It won by your fake measure too.
2. Yes most users are going to put one of a “hundreds” (exaggerate much?) of versions of Android on their phone and not be able to run apps that requires Google Play services.
3. Apple made two shows - Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke. No one expected those two shows to be a hit. Apple’s Services Business is still 5 times larger than Netflix.
4. Yes for profit seeking businesses, a success is by definition what makes money. As far as users winning they have a privacy invasive operating system on a phone that doesn’t see updates more than 18 months - if they are lucky.
I had the international Galaxy S for 2 years (2012-2014) and it was really great... Then again, I was into flashing ROMs every week or so, so perhaps the original TouchWiz performance was that bad?
I think I fixed the GPS by following an instruction in XDA.... I don't remember, its been 5 years already? God I feel old
As a counter-point I’ve completely quit Netflix because 1. The selection is trash and we never find the movie we’re looking for and 2. I can’t get any movies my kids would want to see dubbed to my (and my kids’) native language.
As a result I buy all the films for my kids on iTunes, because 1. It has better selection, and most importantly 2. it has an audio-track my kids will actually understand.
Of all the online video streaming-services/stores, I’ve only found iTunes which is good enough on these 2 points.
Yes, the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, but that was never meant to be a computer; it was merely "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device" rolled into one. The original iPad shipped without multi-tasking (pseudo or otherwise), but it was primarily competing with netbooks, which couldn't competently multitask anyway.
I cannot recall any Apple products in the "modern Jobs era" that were quite as much of a solution in search of a problem as the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a $1,000+ product aimed at professional artists and content creators who by definition spend their days working on various assets aka files. But the iPad Pro doesn't have a file manager, just a bunch of kludgey workarounds.
I can quite easily take files from cloud storage like Dropbox or S3, copy them to my local device, make changes and push it back to cloud. Or I can edit directly from cloud storage.
And if the iPad was such a hopeless device for content creators you wouldn't see Adobe bringing their full Photoshop product to it would you ?
Apple's official solution for software like Photoshop? There's a Siri shortcut that will import a photo into Photoshop and delete it from the Photos library. This is what I consider a kludgy workaround.
It is absolutely possible to make the iPad Pro functional for these workflows. But iOS is going to fight you where it should be trying to help.
I haven’t felt that way in a while. There’s nothing really new that apple is doing at the moment. Thinner devices that’s im going to wrap in a case are great. A higher resolution is nice. Deeper blacks and face recognition instead of passwords? Okay cool. Certainly not worth $1000 to me.
Don’t get me started about the MacBook Pro. Some how apple managed to take a very fine machine and in 2016 decided, “You know what? Let’s just take a massive dump on this thing and add a Touch Bar.”
Plenty of real innovation going on.
HomePod isn’t a great device, at least the last generation that we bought. I use Samsung Pay and have no need for Apple Pay. I don’t wear a watch because I have a phone that tells me the time among other things.
Again, I’m not crapping on the engineers who worked these things, but these tiny products are nothing compared to the paradigm shifts of iTunes, the iPhone, etc.
No, but was apple watch less an achievement than iTunes? No.
Face ID? i like the idea of my hands controlling something. Face ID with Touch ID should have been a no brainer. different usecases! Face ID doesn't work when the phone is on my desk and i just want to quickly fire off an action like changing music- i HAVE to show the phone my face - which quickly changes the dynamics of how i feel about my device(goes from boss-employee to the other way around)
sorry but i guess i'm in the small percentage of people that apple designers just flat out ignore coz they can
I have a small intertragic knotch [1]. It’s the part of the ear AirPods (and iPod headphones) latch onto. These products—physically—don’t work for me.
That doesn’t mean I can’t recognise their brilliance. (Nor why my market segment is reasonably ignored.)
Face ID is really good. From the way you describe it, I don't think you've actually used it, because the issues you cite don't really exist.
Look, Jobs called Goolge's Vic to tell him that the color of Google's second 'o' in the logo was wrong and hence looked bad on the iPhone. Do you think Cook would ever do this, do you think Cook uses any of his products seriously? When did Cook write the last contract himself? Does he code? This guy just write emails, something a Blackberry could do better than an iPad or iPhone, 15 years ago.
I’d argue that Apple’s focus on thinness, lightness, the look and feel at the expense of shipping usable products has been its undoing in recent years. No one would argue the iPad Pro is bad to look at, its problem is that it’s fundamentally unsuited to the use case of its target audience.
…so does Tim Cook?
> Does he code?
Did Steve Jobs? He knew how computers worked, but I don't think he ever sat down and wrote some Objective-C.
The world is full of people who can code. Very few of them think strategically or understand that code is irrelevant unless it has some really, really good reasons to exist and do what it does.
He is a different human being, with his own set of skills (and flaws) and that's OK.
He certainly does not "just write emails".
Now Steve Jobs is gone, Tim Cook still knew how to make products into real stuff that can be shipped to customers but there is noone to give him a vision.
I'd even argue that as a CEO, he probably doesn't even interact with a laptop all that much at work as I imagine he relies heavily on a team of personal assistants.
In that context, he might be an avid user of the iPad. As the result, the iPad might be the perfect device for all sorts of high ranking tech executives. Turns out you and I are just not the target market :)
With that said, there are plenty of improvements needed. File handling is certainly one of them. How to get my RAWs into LR for example is a pain.
> Steve thought all features to the end.
This is simply not true. If you were lucky enough to have your use case match Steves exactly, then maybe.
Reduce this down to as low as possible, and you will see a huge renaissance. 12% (like Epic) seems reasonable. Apps should cost $500 to launch and $100 yearly to maintain on the store, to ensure quality.
Taking advice from the same audience who said in 2001 “less space than the Nomad, no wireless, lame” hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy....
Honestly, none of my friends care how latest is my iPad, and neither do I. There’s no use case the newer version has that makes me think, “Wow, I need this in my life.” Speaking of which, combine all this with the ridiculous pricing of the new iPads, it just doesn’t make financial sense to throw away money.
They're nice devices for visual creatives and for music, albeit in a rather limited way. (Kraftwerk play live with iPads now.)
But they're not a substitute for the full desktop experience. So you get a clash between Cook's smaller-lighter-thinner aesthetic and the real-world demands of professional content creation.
The result is a very expensive toy you can do serious work on sometimes, but definitely not all the time.
I would expect that the iPad will become more macOS-like over time, especially with the addition of USB-C. I think that means waiting and seeing what iOS 13 brings to it.
Your point on sharing files via the cloud would also apply to laptops on Wifi as much as to iPads. Yes you can tether with a Cat-5 on a laptop, but most people don't bother and do pro work just fine.
I was worried the iPad would get neglected since Android for tablets is practically abandonware at this point so it has no credible competition at the high end, but instead they're doubling down on the hardware and the software. iOS 12 for iPad was a huge upgrade and the larger screen sizes make running multiple apps side by side a lot easier. sales may have flattened, but they're consistently selling twice as many iPads as laptops.
Jobs didn't want the iPhone to have apps at all. The original vision was for all third party software to run inside Safari. This is the same man who didn't want slots in the Macintosh, and killed the floppy drive as soon as he returned to Apple.
Jobs would have loved the iPad Pro.
It's not Apple's fault Intel/AMD has been producing pile of trash CPU's for years.
Not to mention charging money for mediocre services.
Today was the first time, I saw the new iPad Pro in action in a shopping mall nearby. It was a lazy Tuesday evening and I was in shopping mood. The first thing I did was running Sun Spider in Safari. Not an up-to-date benchmark but still a good indicator for performance. This thing reached insane 119ms. Without having any noisy fans and a battery that runs for days. Then, there is a buttersmooth 120hz screen, also the first time I saw a hi-fps screen live and it's so nice. All packed in some slick enclosure, thinner and lighter than any Surface Microsoft ever made.
I would have bought this device without thinking (this is what malls are for after all) and I really don't care if it's 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 bucks.
But tell me--what should I do with an iPad Pro? The OS is not just crippled but utterly useless for any real use case. You don't have to be a pro.
I could work via SSH on a remote server, nah I can't test properly without the major browser being installed or at least Safari's dev tool. Maybe some mockups with Affinity Designer? It has the most responsive digitizer, so c'mon. Nope, the files are so big and exchange to my desktop goes always through a slow cloud, this feels like going back in time and juggling floppy disks. Maybe some Word? No, I prefer full-fledged Word. Contracts are too important to fiddle them together on a subpar Word, I don't open Word for fun, I make or lose money with contracts. If I used this device the entire day I would also eventually get RSI from moving my hand up and down all the time (there is no Vimium for Safari).
This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Let me not start with Macbooks, non-existing Mac Pros or odd, LG-branded screens. Steve thought all features to the end. Tim doesn't and ships one half-baken product after another.