Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

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The split view of 'producer' vs 'consumer' often seems like a good yardstick for this kinda stuff, rather than high/low end.

For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity.

That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.

Why is that a useful framework, though?

I've never met people that fall squarely into "producer" or "consumer", everyone you talk to has a creative hobby or three, and might be either a "producer" or a "consumer" at different times of day, or different moods, or as inspiration strikes.

It's a wide, diverse spectrum turned into a strange false dichotomy that leaves us with weird pseudo-categories like "prosumer" (and "conducer"?) middle grounds.

Maybe there is something about enforcing that dichotomy in leaving them to different contexts, different devices it forces you to switch hats in a physical visceral sense. Certainly studies say that such a forced context switch can be good for the brain to know it's time to X where X is produce or consume (or "prosume"?). Yet that seems a strange reason to force that on users. Is it anything more than an equivalent to "It's good for you, you must eat your vegetables before dessert?"

I naturally flow between consumption and production use cases, so why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

It's an interesting philosophical split, but I'm curious how useful it is in the real world. Microsoft's "everyone can be a creator, everyone should be a creator, your devices should support you whatever you decide to do on the creation/consumption spectrum" reaction marketing seems the better approach to me, philosophically. I'm not defined by a "consumer" or "producer" 'gender', and I don't see why I should be.

How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

>Why is that a useful framework, though?

>why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

Mostly because, in my opinion, every attempt to create a device that does that has resulted in failure, and those failures are due to fundamental opposing priorities with each 'mode'.

I may of course be wrong, in which case you're right this framework should be junked. But so far nobody's cracked both use cases well with a single setup, and the model holds. IMO.

>How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

For a brand that's betting so heavily on the walled garden, ecosystem-based sales and marketing methods, having an 'answer' to every consumer need is essential to is to not have an answer for one of your customer's needs, ecause that opens the door for that customer to adopt something outside your ecosystem. Keep them within the curated suite of products you offer, and keep them happy, or you'll see attrition. Note all of the noise about the latest MBP devices and how they're no longer meeting the needs of many content creators, to see how tricky this can be.

As a coder I don't want to sacrifice usability, price, and / or power to get a flexible device like this. I have an iPad specifically for the chill out and consume experience. It has great battery life, lower power consumption, some simple games, and less distractions.

I don't need my car to make me toast either (not intended with snark, just an extreme example).

Apple sees (and hopefully continues to) an actual divide even if the edges are a bit blurred. So the question here is whether or not the tablet needs to exist as a category... and I think it does, at least for me.

A counter argument against this view, would be the heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.

Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture...

> Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture.

I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful.

> heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.

You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies.

A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard.

We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...

Infantalizing "non-technical users" just means you avoid creating new "technical users", does it not? If "we" all sit in our high and mighty many-core bastions, and leave the masses to shiny, locked down "consumption only devices" outside our gates while we look down upon them, we create a nice closed walled garden, certainly. But is that really the sort of class system we need?

I don't want to infantilize users either, but I do want to give them the right tool for the job. Some people are core users and want powerful tools. Some are ring[1] users and want simple tools to quickly and easily do simple things without having to develop a core competency.

[1] Ring User is a Jared Spool term for non-core users--they are in a ring around the core. The Core/Ring more useful model than Expert/Novice, because expert conflates expertise in the tool with expertise in the domain area. https://articles.uie.com/multiple_personalities/

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