The Tragic iPad | Hacker News Reader

The Tragic iPad

stratechery.com

48 pointsi_am_not_elon13 comments

Prior relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166421

Generally speaking, there is a lack of vision at Apple that has slowly deflated since Jobs has passed.

Jony Ive's departure to start a private design firm is confirmation of such, despite Apple being his 'primary' client.

One has to wonder what Apple would be like if Forstall was still there. People should remember it was his team that won the internal contest for the iPhone interface. And it was Jobs' willingness to create internal competition that brought the best out in his employees and the company.

Tim's runs Apple with the same kind of unchallenged vision that allowed George Lucas to produce Episodes 1, 2 and 3 without any kind of creative push-back.

It will stagnate until new hands take control.

It's a cycle. All life is.

How soon Apple's cycle turns upwards towards innovation remains to be seen.

The market disagrees

This conversation is about the iPad, as of yesterday iPad sales are down 11% YOY https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/01/28/aapl-q1-2020

This "consumption device" meme might reflect how a lot of people use it, but it's the opposite of my use case.

I find iPad to be the best device to use for train/coach commutes (and flights), or occasionally if I'm a long (15+ min) Uber or taxi ride.

I can do code reviews, emails, bug tracking, calendar-related things like setting up meetings, as well as reading debug logs (on our log search page, but can also SSH into specific machines).

I don't use the fancy multitasking split-screen features either (just copy and paste).

In fact, for many of these tasks, I find it smoother to use an iPad than a computer. YMMV but a lot of people use iPad for specific workflows.

The blame here is squarely on Apple. After Jobs they treated the iPad as if it is just a big iPhone. It is a device of incredible potential but developers can't make an economic model work with iPad centric software which really takes maximum advantage of it. Apple should have developed killer apps in-house specifically for the iPad to seed the ecosystem but they didn't.

It is crazy that ten years after the iPad came out the only real way to keep large numbers of documents in sync and organized between it and my computer is Evernote.

iPad will always remain stuck between being a consumption and a creation device (a "creasumption" device?). Anyone who seriously attempts creation on the iPad will eventually want to move to more specialized hardware.

Garageband on iPad is nice, but if you're serious about music, you will want Logic Pro. Doodling on the iPad is great too, but if you're a serious designer, you'll buy a Wacom tablet and Illustrator.

Which is perfect. Creators need their gateway drug, and the iPad fills that role perfectly

> Garageband on iPad is nice, but if you're serious about music, you will want Logic Pro

Nothing against Logic (or Garageband, which is great) but there are so many incredible instruments/synths/AUs available for iOS, as well as a number of highly capable DAWs, including Auria Pro, Cubasis, FL Studio Mobile, Korg Gadget, Beatmaker, etc.. Several of them also work well with respective desktop versions. Ideally I'd say you want an iPad and a Mac running Logic (or your favorite desktop DAW) but a high quality all-iOS workflow has been doable since early versions of NanoStudio, BeatMaker, Multitrack DAW, and AudioBus. Multitouch is also nice for mixing (and you can use an iPad to control Logic.)

> Doodling on the iPad is great too, but if you're a serious designer, you'll buy a Wacom tablet and Illustrator.

For vector graphics, Affinity Designer goes a long way. For digital painting and drawing the combination of iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + Procreate is hard to beat.

At present, the iPad is simply not powerful enough for pro quality music production. Serious, ready-to-release songs usually have 40-50+ tracks. That really stretches powerful processors on desktops.

I produce some music as a hobby and while I've seen some iPads being used during live gigs as a second screen, the studio is strictly Macbook Pro/desktop territory.

It would be nice if the serious players in professional creative software would start making apps on iPad, though. In the example you give, the user moves on from the iPad mainly because the tools they need to use aren't available there.

If I could do my work on an iPad (with, when at my desk, an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard), I would do it in a heartbeat.

It’s a perfectly capable drawing device with sidecar even more. A lot of professional artists switched from Wacom to the iPad and now with sidecar they forced Wacom to make a device for just 499$ which is about 500 cheaper than before. There is a market and a use case it is just not yours.

The iPad is there for mass consumption as primarily a consumption tool (pun intended). Power users following the aptly named power law already know the tricks to use it as a production tool like split screen and multitasking etc... the masses will not invest the time to learn those tricks because they don’t need it and their willful ignorance is bliss.

The good thing that the article points out is that Apple’s historical business model (4.99 price cap) limited productivity tools by capping the prices that could be charged through the app store. Fair point there. Apple can still breathe life going forward for developers by rebooting the developer ecosystem. 10 years on the tablet has just arrived for productivity. That is still a fraction of iPad consumers. Prosumers are a minority and the only ones demanding landscape view and split screen apps.

I work for an IAM consultancy and the password manager we recommend to our clients and that I use is SAASPASS and one of the reasons is that it supports multitasking, landscape view and split screen. Split screen is great for Authenticator codes and password management. But the masses probably don’t care at all for these features. Although AutoFill has solved some of these UX issues with most apps and websites.

If anyone is interested in an iPad friendly Authenticator and Password Manager see here:

https://saaspass.com/

You seem to mention/link saaspass (almost always in all uppercase) quite a lot (while claiming you don't work for them), and have been accused of working for them in the past (5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746919 ).

Any response?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com