All of your complaints were true under Jobs as well.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
…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".
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 :)
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 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.