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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.