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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

The iPad clearly isn't for your use cases. The vast majority of people only want to browse, look at photos, read emails and occasionally write some text. For them it's a cheap ($280 for the cheapest iPad) and easy solution.

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Even those tasks are irritating on an iPad - outside of the limited multitasking, viewing multiple things at once is impossible. I can't look at an email and reference a website linked in it. I can't look at a few websites while composing an email. Comparing multiple travel booking sites side-by-side? Nope. If I try switching back and forth, the iPad has probably unloaded one of the tabs in the meantime due to memory pressure - why can't their state be archived to disk and loaded from that, at least?

It's interesting because for a very long time Apple said "maximizing is usually a waste of space" with the zoom button's behavior.

Modern iPads have something called “Split View”, where you can have two apps open and active at the same time. Only two, though, but it mostly solves this problem.

That is the "limited multitasking". You're limited to two, your ability to view information is arbitrarily limited by the application displaying that information.

Want to view two emails side-by-side? Use two emails apps, I guess.

Seems cumbersome. And do you get that on that 280$ version?

This is anecdotal, but my mother has an iPad and she vastly prefers using it to the computer for everything from email to images to web browsing.

I bought her a brand new iMac and it's basically been unused.

This isn't remotely true and rhetoric like this is why the linux desktop failed. Yes, people want to browse and look at photos and that's 80% of their use, but you're not covering that other 20% and that other 20% is mandatory. Playing a PC only game, using a PC only productivity suite, continue to use their beloved software, use real software suites not dumbed down mobile equivalents, etc.

Taking away a PC and giving someone a locked down tablet is fairly ridiculous. That'll be just as successful as the "Linux Mandrake replaces Windows XP" rhetoric older geeks remember. You guys were wrong then and wrong today.

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