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Comment by mondoshawan | Hacker News Reader

Usually I root for the underdog, but in this case, it was almost inevitable. I have both Astropad and a iPad Pro, and I have to say that they priced themselves out of the market straight out of the gate by using a high cost subscription (~$20/mo) plus ~$20 for the hardware dongle. At these prices, professionally it's actually cheaper to just go buy an Intuos because it will perform better in every way and doesn't cost you over time.

TBH, I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner -- it's the obvious solution to a lagging Adobe Photoshop and pro tools that immediately give the iPad strong value and staying power.

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Their pricing model is besides the point. Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel. These are the types of rotten actions that make people more generally cynical and disappointed about large corporations and the valley.

What would have been a better outcome? Continuing to make customers pay for the feature?

Buying the company? If so, what about the competing companies that offer this functionality? Apple obviously felt it would be easier/cheaper to build than buy.

Buying the company (or a competitor) would have been fair: it would have felt like “the market has spoken” and a winner was picked. Building anew after playing it cool feels very “Pirates of Silicon Valley”.

This said, single-platform feature apps like this are always at risk from this sort of thing.

And before Steve Jobs came back, Apple would buy third-party utilities to incorporate into MacOS (System 7.5 WindowShade, MenuClock, Hierarchical Apple Menu were all third-party acquisitions)

Apple still buys companies all the time. Perhaps not always well-known app developers, but certainly a lot of them. (Shazam is one from recent memory, as was Siri.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Note that nearly all of these occurred after Steve Jobs’ return and continued apace after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

This makes me believe that if Apple is building their own rather than buying, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of innovation that the app developer created that wasn’t trivially replaceable.

They still acquire when they need the talent, but the utilities I listed were absolutely trivial (printing the time in the menu bar?) and Apple could have easily just replicated them

Whenever someone mentions how much better/different it was under Steve Jobs reign it's always a sign that the comment is 100% wrong.

Especially since all of the Apple senior leadership team were still there making the same decisions as when Jobs was CEO.

I think the commenter is actually stating that Apple was better on this front in the era when Steve Jobs wasn't able kind. As in, the Gil Amelio and the like era.

Can't seem to be able to edit but "able kind" was meant as "around".

They could have bought the company if necessary. Frankly it just wasn't worth buying. That is the market speaking. The market said it was better to develop the thing in house.

> [...] Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel.

No it isn't.

That is capitalism and cut-throat business. These guys were foolish for getting so close to Apple when Apple could literally destroy their entire business by adding a single feature.

Protip: If your business is defined by a single feature, your strategy sucks.

You are missing my point. As you noted, it is in fact capitalism and it is in fact cut throat. Yet it is simultaneously cruel and misguided. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that says it must be cruel and cut-tnroat. The more it is used in a cruel way, however, the more people will distrust it and the more we are at risk of losing it.

It's not cruel, but it is cut-throat? Isn't cut-throat cruel? You're using a different word to say the same thing.

This is just basic business sense -- you don't go showing off your crown jewels to any company without lots and lots of NDAs and binding agreements in place first, unless you have some kind of hook in there to keep it rooted with you. And even then, just don't do it! This was the lesson learned by US chip manufacturers back in the 70s and 80s when competing against Japan -- it's no different with software. In fact, it's worse for software because there are less protections available.

Right. The problem is, when you're dealing with Apple, the NDAs and agreements are all theirs and you have no leverage. I agree with you. Don't.

Every meeting is a negotiation, and NDAs must be bidirectionally signed. You do have leverage: it's your IP.

Maybe this is also the obvious outcome of Apple refusing to put a touchscreen on the laptops, fearing cross-cutting of iPad sales.

It’s a surprise though that Apple is making some moves that appear to cater to pro users, since the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that Apple has completely abandoned the pro market. I loved my mac laptop, but it’s becoming very clear I can’t stay on the platform. I work with a lot of CG film companies and everyone I know feels the same way, that Apple no longer has any interest in customers doing high end design. I suddenly don’t know anybody who’s not migrating away from macOS.

You believe this, despite them just announcing a tower Mac Pro. I'd say the very fact that they are even producing it precludes that they have 'abandoned' the pro market and customers doing high end design. If they had truly abandoned the segment they wouldn't bother.

I've talked to multiple audio / graphics studios and they are actively planning/executing their Apple exit strategy. Phasing out over several years. Started about 2-3 years go for most of them. Apple don't care about them because they can't even see them on their bottom line.

I'd also give pretty good odds that we're seeing the beginnings of a convergence between Apple's tablets and laptops/desktops which is probably (mostly) not good for pro users given--probably including a shift away from x86.

Likely. Macs running only ARM is a definite possibility. I doubt anyone would doubt Apple could make 100% ARM based Mac Pro given a reasonable timeframe. Just a matter of time.

Only need higher performance ARM cores. And this isn't in the "impossible" or "silly pie-in-the-sky" bucket either.

I am someone who dabbles in audio and video production. I was set on buying Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro for my use.

But in the current environment we are in, I am seriously considering using cross-platform software like Ableton Live and DaVinci Resolve. This is due to the fear of being locked-in hardware wise.

Having a computer named “pro” is marketing, that doesn’t mean they cater to actual pro users. Go ahead and Google “has apple abandoned pro market” and see for yourself whether anyone else thinks so, and why. The hardware isn’t the main problem, the software is, as @mondoshawan pointed out up-thread. Apple’s made lots of moves that frustrate pro users in recent years. Canceling Shake was a big one in the pro film industry. Apple preventing use of nvidia GPUs is an ongoing issue a lot of people I know care about. Personally, as a programmer who moved to macOS for it’s unix environment and needs some ability to maintain cross-platform compatibility, I am not able to continue because Apple has moved strongly toward Apple-only development, and the unix environment is frozen with decade-old licenses that will never resolve.

> Having a computer named “pro” is marketing, that doesn’t mean they cater to actual pro users.

The new Mac Pro caters almost exclusively to pro users. Normal people (at this time) have little use for a computer and monitor that cost 5 figures with the specs on offer. The “pros” I know that benefit from this level of power are chomping at the bit to get the new Mac Pros and the monitors. Just the capabilities of Logic and Final Cut with the Mac Pro are astounding.

Totally fair point. Apple is catering to some pro users.

Does anyone actually use touchscreens on laptops? They've always seemed pretty awkward to me. OTOH, being able to use a tablet as an extension to a desktop seems as if it would let you have effectively a couple different interaction mechanisms. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

My GF and I both have ThinkPad X1 Yogas. I rarely use the touchscreen, but I do like the digitizer pen for sketching out design ideas and such.

OTOH, she uses the touchscreen all the time. Even when something would be easier with the keyboard, like filling in a form field and just hitting Enter, she finishes typing and reaches up to touch the button on the screen. If anything can be done by touching the screen, that's how she does it.

It seems a bit strange to me, but she loves the touchscreen!

I can definitely see the digitizer pen. That's mostly why I like the idea of being able to use an iPad Pro as a secondary display. Sketching something with a mouse or trackpad makes my barely legible chicken scratch that much worse. I usually end up doing it on paper and taking a picture.

But different folks, different strokes. I have a ChromeBook with a touch screen that I never use. But I have a friend who, if I hand over the ChromeBook to look at something, their natural reaction is to swipe the screen to scroll, which is something I almost never do.

The boss likes his Surface Pro as much as it’s possible for a Unix guy to like Windows. Flipping to touch mode on the plane and churning through emails — mostly read & delete — is a favourite.

I’m in the ‘get your fingers off my screen’ camp but there are undeniable benefits.

My issue is mostly with using tablets as laptop replacements. Not so much because of capabilities (I often travel with a ChromeBook) but because nothing out there is great for just grabbing and typing on my lap--which I admit I do a lot even at home or in the office.

IMO, there needs to be a detachable keyboard with trackpad that really locks to a tablet so the screen doesn't need to be propped up in some manner. Some things out there get close but not quite.

Surface Book?

It’s certainly the idea although I’m not in the Microsoft ecosystem any longer. But yeah, that’s probably the closest thing to what I have in mind these days.

Also pretty heavy and pricey.

I'm not adjacent to that at all, so I'm completely in the dark. What are the migrating to?

Windows and Linux. Mac is becoming less attractive.

I evaluated Astropad for my iPad Pro some time ago and I couldn't rationalise paying the subscription fee since I would only use it every now and again to play around. I'm not an artist, I just like to dabble a bit. I would have happily paid a $50 one time fee for that, but not a recurring subscription.

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