I remember history a bit differently.
I recall lots of people dismissing the iPad as "just a big iPod Touch".
> Since the iPad's initial introduction back in January, many of us still wonder why we should drop hundreds of dollars for what is termed as a large iPod.
An episode of the hit sitcom Modern Family was centred entirely around a character's obssession with buying the iPad on Day 1.
"Game Changer, Season 1, Episode 19, aired March 31, 2010"
I bought one day 1 and pretty much everyone thought I was nuts and just an Apple zealot. However, as I took it places and used it, people saw it and became much more interested and took it more seriously as a product.
My dad on the other hand, who is one of the people who bought and iPad after seeing mine, uses it all the time. He actually has 2 of them, a 10” and a 12.9”, and he uses both of them regularly enough that he feels they are both justified for his use cases. He still does use his Mac as well, but his iPads get a ton of use for reading the news, email, photography related things, and maybe some other stuff. He’s retired now, so that might be part of it.
Maybe if didn’t work in IT and simply consumed whatever the apps allowed me to consume, I could get by with an iPad as my computer, but I want to do stuff an iPad can’t do. I also pretty much always want a keyboard and mouse, and when that’s always bolted on to an iPad, it might as well be a MacBook. I never found the appeal of touch screen laptops.
I'm not personally producing intricate illustrations, but I know a tiny number of people who do, and I don't think it's occures to them they'd need anything but that and their phone.
When I release my apps, I only do so as iOS, and that runs on iPadOS.
In the code, I check for the environment, in some cases, and do things differently, if it's an iPad.
But lots of apps can just treat it as a big phone.
The interesting point here is that Apple’s competitors at the time didn’t even have a product that could come close to the iPod touch, and yet Apple was already taking the product into a completely new direction.
The iPod touch doesn’t exist anymore. Turns out the paper-like size combined with the simple UI made all the difference. And nobody scaling down from $2k Windows tablets could have figured that out. That’s how Apple created a beautifully designed tablet for only $499 and everybody else was left scrambling.
With the Vision Pro, Apple doesn’t seem to have that kind of advantage. But I’d be very happy if it exceeds my expectations and is also successful in the market. I’ve been waiting for VR all my life. The Quest has come tantalizingly close but still misses the applications that would make it a part of my daily routine.
edit: so yeah, I agree with you
The iPad 2 teardown showed an SoC which seemed a lot more custom designed for the iPad, and the "big iPod" criticism died around that point.
It was more of a shock than the M1 was in recent times.
Not defending Apple here: I do believe the Vision Pro will be a resounding "meh".