Our house is chocked full of Apple gear, but the idea of spending a cool $1000 on a neutered consumption device gets less appealing with each generation.
The creator communities at ecstatic about this. The HN community seems to have difficult seeing uses outside their own niches.
There are tons of types of “Pros”. The entire event was art focused. It’s not a toy for the artistic crowd.
In my book that makes it a toy today too.
My Mom who's a teacher is still using a 2017 iPad Air as a daily driver for most usecases (eg. Google Classroom, Netflix, Textbooks).
Okay, Jan.
But when Apple support does end, it's game over. I picked up an iPad 2 (from 2011), it's perfectly capable hardware, although a bit slow, but it's only usable for browsing HN and viewing PDFs because one can't upgrade the goddam browser or install an alternative one. Updates ended in 2015, mostly.
I could upgrade a One Plus X released in 2015 to Android 7 (Lineage 14.1). An old version, but everything is perfectly usable. Browsers are at their latest versions. Before this, the phone was on stock Android 6, the latest Firefox ran on it. Still bad, because there's no security upgrade, but unofficial builds for the latest versions of Lineage exist on this phone (they will never be official because the goddam kernel can't be upgraded, and newer versions are necessary to support features mandatory for being official, including the way disk encryption is managed).
Anyway, phones and tablets are in a sad state overall. They become e-waste way too soon. Android and iOS both have horrible support time. Not more than a few years of updates (with FairPhone probably being the best here, but still a few years). And anything else is pretty much unusable, at least for phones. In comparison, PCs can be upgraded pretty much forever, at least on Linux. Phone constructors are doing this to themselves through lack of standardization and vendor lock in, but I guess they are happy enough with the situation.
How available are Lineage OSes to Android tablets from 2011?
That's a particularly good situation, I don't really know how was Android back then, but in any case Android still allowed installing alternative browsers, allowing devices to be useful long after updates stopped. Firefox was still installable on android 4.4 recently enough. So there's that.
But again, that's still just bad either way, I expect better from hardware. 4 years is awfully short and I don't quite care if Android was better or worse. Apple controls everything, how come it was only capable of 4 years of updates? It's unacceptable, and the usual two or three years of updates on stock Android too, of course.
You easily get 5-6 years of full OS updates, not just security patches, on all iOS/iPadOS devices.
You comment basically proves the point of this thread! Everyone lives in their own echo chamber.
I will not start arguing about NFTs, it is enough to say that the technology is useful in one place and not in another and help people to transact internationally.
But even in these niches there has been a gradual move away from the iPad to more powerful devices where it works out well enough. For instance music creation/management benefited a lot from the new macbooks, especially as they got more ports and top notch software support. Photography/cinematography as well.
Other pro tablets also gained more presence in these drawing/designing circles, the Surface Pro is one and Wacom even entered the market with its own dedicated standalone table, while non standalone peripheral also flourished.
All in all, Apple created a gap and pro users looked at more fitting devices when they didn't want to bend over backwards to use an iPad.
Honestly, Apple kind of dropped the "pro" crowd some time ago topping out with the trash can MacPro. That thing was such a joke. It took years for them to admit it, which they ultimately did, shockingly. After that, they then went full Apple again in the revised MacPro that still missed the mark of what people actually wanted. It wasn't until the Apple Silicon where Apple's vision could really shine with a near silent "pro" box sitting on a desk. The modern "creator" crowd doesn't have data rooms where big noisy boxes live, so they finally found their audience so their refusal to make a data center friendly box pays off for them. Finally.
Prosumers (where I equate "creators") cheered triumphantly /s
Regardless of our personal professional affinities the only reason iPadOS stays locked down is that it's simply more profitable to sell a customer two devices instead of just one. I would love to have an iPad Pro as my only home computer, but it's just not doable due to its OS limitations. The artistic angle is just Apple's way to make the platform believable.
Why would an artist care if I can also compile code on an iPad?
I can only assume that macOS must be offensive to some due to its "openness". The truth is that macOS allows me to be both an artist and a developer, and I don't have a single doubt that Apple could pull off an interface that allows a similar experience on iPadOS. It's just that doing so will lose them money.
For the brief stint I had the Vision Pro, I was so confused Apple made sharing it so hard(and it really isn’t shared - it’s just there for the free taste because it is timelimit locked). But after a little thought it clicked:
Apple only loves the idea of the VisionPro if it means you never share.
Apple has always been a walled garden, so when the iPhone imposed it nobody blinked(there are/were tradeoffs, ok). But ever since the iPod, Apple has been all about the personal device. No more multiuser anything:
- iPod - iWatch - iPhone - iPad
It becomes super obvious what the “i” really stands for when you realize it was for a single person.
and now spatial computing, this new era where actual business is supposed to happen
- VisionPro
Even though the “i” isn’t there, it really should be. The power of cohesion between these devices is one of wonder. But the cohesion could still exist with standards. What we have with Apple is bad for the customer and any innovation outside apples limited interests.
I wish Britain would have went for the head and after the innovation stifling instead of the stupid port forcing. Also an innovation stifler.
Not only do they want to sell you an iPad and a separate computer, but they would ideally like to sell your family multiple iPads, which is why you can't have more than one user account on an iPad (unless you have a business or educational account with Apple [1]).
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
Imagine how much more they could be if the community of people who like to hack on open devices to create cool software for that community could do so.
What would Blender look like on a device like this?
How would the creator community feel if the hacker community was able to get side car sharing multiple screens so they could use 2 big ipad pros as screens on either side of their macbook pro and another ipad mini with an apple pencil as an input device?
Imagine a scenario where things like nextcloud had better system wide integration into the iOS and macOS ecosystem. I bet creative types would love the money they could save in cloud hosting from that.
The iPad audio scene is lukewarm, Procreate is generally considered exciting but I'd sum those as a fraction of a percent of the overall digital creator community. There's also a bit of lukewarm interest in iPads as on set (movie/photo) devices.
I would love to hear specifically who you're talking about and what they are staying.
And I think this is the target demographic of the iPad - either creative types (eg. designers or musicians) or executives (eg. Consultants, PMs, etc) who are not code driven but still need a workbook style environment. From a security standpoint it is best for these users to be locked down (Least Privilege is a good security model to follow for non-technical users).
P.S. I do have my own ancient Macbook that I installed Ubuntu on for my own light hacking, but most of my personal tinkering dev is now on Cloud GPU instances so all I need is a dumb terminal for SSH.
Which of those things requires an expensive, top-of-the-line tablet?
A Windows workbook or a Chromebook sucks from a UX standpoint due to either performance issues or driver inoperatbility.
Pricing is comparable to a MS Surface or Chromebook Pro.
Subjective, but sure, valid. Both of those systems have more flexibility.
>Pricing is comparable to a MS Surface or Chromebook Pro.
Yes, and I wouldn't be buying one of those for light reading or taking notes in Notion, either.
I'm using it for work, so I am either getting it reimbursed or provided by my employer (in my case), or if I'm running a solo business/self employed (as plenty of creators are) you can get tax credits and a partial reimbursement as it's being used for work as well.
Like I mentioned before, the target demographic is Creators or Executives, but also (increasingly) schools.
> Both of those systems have more flexibility
Absolutely, but that flexibility is a security vector for most non-technical users.
There's a reason companies spend 7-8 figures on XDRs like CRWD/S1/Cortex, or are looking to Secure Browsers like Surf, Talon, or Arc.
And honestly, I can't think of alternatives other than maybe less powered iPad SKUs.
If you aren't technically minded, Least Privileged Access to your computing platform is for the best, because remediating security incidents is hard.
Consultancies (MBB) tend to cheap out and give Thinkbooks and Product teams tend to get a bottom spec MacBook at work.
It's not for you and that's okay. They sell big boy computers and if you don't like any of them, there are plenty of others. For me, Good Notes and Procreate are killer apps that justify the device.
My current iPad is six or seven years old. If I spent $1500 this time around and it lasts me six years, that works out to something like $0.65 per day.
Neutered because you can't side-load apps or use it as a dev machine? That's a pretty limited use-case overall.
I have an M1 iPad Pro and it's great for moderate photo editing (Photomator or Adobe) and basic "office" stuff.
As it stands today even first gen iPad Pro 11 is more than powerful enough given software limitations.
Probably my next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Wacom Movink 13 or second gen. Wacom One 13 --- hopefully it will work as well as the rPi 4 and Wacom One (gen 1) did when I tested them:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wacom/comments/16215v6/wacom_one_ge...
[1]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/06/about-ipads-and-developers.h...
There’s a lot of issues with that, like it would be weird if you were doing something in Terminal in “Mac Mode” but then couldn’t go back to to the Terminal window once you take it off your docking station. But that seems pretty solvable.
Apple seemingly was recognizing that their userbase wanted more a few years back, and it feels like they're disorganized in this regard still.
Apple has also become more conscious of keeping their older hardware in production for longer. Old Apple Watch SoCs become the new HomePod SoC and Apple TV SoC. If they have more of their stuff on the latest and greatest, all their production will have less time to amortise itself, and they would need to either have a greater peak of production output for each product or stockpile and delay releases which is not free when you have such valuable inventory.