Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs' vision for iPad
victorwynne.com
victorwynne.com
My problem is we're not all talking about the same thing when we talk about "The iPad". Right now, on sale today, there are four iPads to choose from. No, not different colours, or memory sizes - you need to make a choice between the Mini, the Air, the Pro and the regular iPad.
Want a desktop? Cool, you've got the iMac, the Mini, the Studio, and the Pro. Within each of those you have choices on processor, memory, storage and more.
Or maybe you just want a phone. Cool. Want the 16, the 16e, the 16 Pro, or the 15? They're all on the Apple store right now.
None of these have anything on the Watch (Series 10, Ultra 2, SE, Nike or Hermes).
I think it can hard to work out where each device sits in your life, but then there are spectrums and overlaps between them, and this is confusing for the consumer. Should I buy a high-end phone and spend a little less on an iPad and see it as just a bigger screen? Or should I get the last generation phone, splurge on an iPad Pro, and then maybe I don't need as much in the way of a Mac?
When you're selling a lifestyle, you need to be coherent. It used to be the case that Apple was coherent, but this choice is making customers confused.
I'd love to see a paired back offering and have more clarity and delineation. Do that, and this "is an iPad a laptop replacement?" becomes a more redundant question, and this idea of "betrayal" can go away.
I have a 2018 iPad Pro which I use for Lightroom amongst other things. I'd like to replace it with something new as I need OS support long term and it'll be a fine device to use with our bike trainer. The current iPad Air blows it out of the water, except for the screen downgrade.
Do I suck it up and save some money, or go with the latest iPad Pro? There is a lot more thinking involved than there used to be. It's much more challenging for regular consumers because the iPad pricing ceiling has been pushed higher on top of accessory considerations. This pattern repeats across the lines because it's known to generate more revenue.
Like how much extra market capture really gets from having 4/5 different versions of the same basic segment?
Like I can see a reason to create several different versions based on screen size and upcharge for memory because that is a rather minor change. But otherwise why make them different at all?
Like if they really wanted to make different screen sizes just iPad 16'', iPad 14'', etc. Why make such a fuss with extra design changes besides that.
Like you said, Apple was the one company that didn't (over)do this, but not anymore.
Enough, at Apple's scale. The harmonic seems to be upstarts target a niche with a specialised offering and then scale until they can target other niches, perhaps one bigger than the one they initially went after, but all of which muddles the product focus until a paradigm shifts and someone simplifies again.
Maybe the 16e sounds good at $599. But, it might be a bit underpowered, so maybe you should just upgrade to the 15 at $699. Then it is only $100 more to just go for the 16 (or 15 Plus), so might as well right? But maybe you want a bigger screen or twice the storage, which are both another $100. Then for another $100, you can get the nicer materials or the extra camera, etc for the 16 Pro...
This is a marketing strategy you see in a lot of the phone market, and has proven to be successful at pushing customers into the higher-margin devices.
There is a lot of consumer research that suggests the opposite: analysis paralysis delays a purchase past the point where impulsivity might have pushed a customer over the line.
I believe your assumption is bunk, but for sake of argument, let’s assume Apple is solely a fashion brand. Are you really claiming luxury fashion doesn’t revolve around impulse purchases?
I would argue that this is due to a lack of intention, and that the endless upgrade possibilities actually exhaust potential buyers into opting for cheaper options. I have no way to prove it, but it's quite obvious to me that part of Apple's market power is due to their historically simple and intuitive product lineup, and they were able to get away with being the most expensive, high margin products on the market. The more options they give, the more it starts to feel like a commodity product.
It's far easier to accumulate a wide range of products, without much thought, than it is to accumulate that mess with intention!
How is it consumer-hostile to offer upgrades at an increased cost?
And that's it. Literally no 3rd party apps on his phone.
Once his 11 finally goes, I'm getting him an E.
That phone isn't “for” any customer, it's for Apple to be able to real-world test their homegrown C1 cellular modem on a non-flagship product.
It seems mostly an exercise in price discrimination. You always have a slightly higher price point, and some extra functionality to justify it, and the customer will likely push themselves up to the maximum they are willing to spend instead of settling on the cheapest option that meets their needs.
Isn’t this 2 x 2 x 2?
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iBook | PowerBook
- PDF reader: Preview would be a nice addition to the set of default app, but you have to choose between the very basic viewer tied to Files.app and various viewers with many schemes to get into your wallet.
- Files: I know a lot of apps rely on databases, but we still have to use files every now and then. The Files.app is very clunky for what I consider a solved problem.
- The weird stage manager: Even on a 13" screen, it's hard to manage more than two apps side by side. Why not introduce a simple workspace manager a la GNOME if they user want to save a particular set of windows.
- Profiles: Even browsers are adding them these days as they recognize that people have a faceted life. Instead we have custom notification settings. The ipad is not that personal of a device. It's closer to the Apple TV than my laptop in terms of privacy.
Saddest is the removal of slideover, ultimately that’s the only multi-tasking feature I really used in the old iPadOS and it was really quite nice.
The Files app itself works just the same to manage files as Windows and Macs assuming you didn’t have multiple windows to work with.
The Files app as method to open and save files with in an app, works like any other file picker with more granular permissions.
The idea that any file storage service is a first class citizen (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) is definitely a win.
Amusingly, Linux solved that with flatpack.
Applications are installed in their own sandboxed containers and you decide which files they can and can’t access.
The Linux desktop has some very interesting pieces of technology.
Apple could do the same on macOS but that would pierce the veil that their user hostile policies are actually motivated by greed and not security.
But something like the After Effects plugin ecosystem I don't think could ever be sandboxed. So it makes sense to have sandboxing conditional based on certain criteria, e.g., the Mac App Store. But even there I'm not sure it makes sense, I suspect we'll never see a Mac-first tier 1 new creative application like Sketch (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_(software)), purely because it's to detrimental to the priorities of that kind of app.
And the apps themselves are shipped in isolated bundles containing all their resources, which may include other binaries/libraries etc.
There is nothing stopping a popular video conferencing app that you install from the web from surreptitiously installing a web server on your computer leading to a security vulnerability.
But what do sandboxes have to do with greed?
> But once an app has free reign to read and write anywhere on a shared folder, it defeats the purpose as opposed to being able to read and write to the apps own folder and the user can choose a file from another folder explicitly.
Not sure I'm following this statement, isn't just being able to read/write to a shared folder a large improvement over an app being able to write to the entire file system (user-permissions allowing, granted)? I.e., "it defeats the purpose" seems like an odd phrase to use there? (For the record, I wish all this sandboxing/entitlement-based security stuff didn't exist on desktop computers [my priorities are clearer from my linked to comment], so I'm probably wrong person to ask anyway, but I was missing what you meant there.)
It’s actually the concept of an old XKCD
(Also, Apple's sandboxing supports access to a single files, reference https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/accessing... so not sure if any of this is important anyway.)
Admitting their sandbox could be turned on by default and give the same protection without having to go through their vetting system and giving them their cut would be counterproductive. How would they justify it makes sense on the phones and iPads then?
1. Any app can be sandboxed, not just Mac App Store apps (the only link is that Mac App Store apps require sandboxing).
2. Enforcing sandboxing on macOS would hinder industries Mac users value, per my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952088 Apple would love to enforce sandboxing by default, because it would serve their long-term strategic goals (moving computing towards devices that benefit from integrated software/hardware), but it hurts their short-term goals (maintaining Apple's [somewhat tenuous these days] penetration across a variety of particularly creative industries) too much to do so.
An app on iOS can only read and write to its own folder in your iCloud Drive by default. You can specifically choose a file in another folder or from another storage provider.
I've started to see this as a generational challenge. I am Gen X, I used to run FreeBSD and Linux, I don't mind the complexity and upkeep of a Windows laptop with all the trimmings (I do mind the complexity of the unixes, sorry). But what about Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?
My guess is that where Microsoft is going with the new Office apps which are just web apps with thicker clients. Simplify, simplify until we can all work with iPads, Windows/ARM or whatever. Makes sense to be honest, although I'll probably keep a Thinkpad around the way old mechanics keep a set of tools in the garage although they will probably never use them again.
I disagree with the premise. The modern UIs are rife with more special cases, hidden gestures and non-transferable knowledge than the old “one mouse button is enough” or even early windows’ ugly but constant model. Gen Z has harder UI, over a superficial simplicity that is really just a constrained interaction space.
The problem for zoomers is now when they use a deep interaction model, the new complexity of UI becomes a frustration multiplier rather than fixed cost.
- Requirement to use ONLY the Apple web renderer (WebKit)
- Why does my iPad Pro take minutes to refresh my email boxes and show new messages, when it's not doing anything else at all? Email on all my other devices is snappy.
- Little or no support for emulation of other platforms.
- No way to turn off participation in the "Find My" BLE mesh network. I'd rather have a choice about whether or not I want to use my battery/network to support their mesh network.
With Apple's announcement about incorporating AI into all their future products, I'm not certain that I will not be buying anything else from them.
There is a setting to disable participation in the "Find My network" under "Settings > [your name] > Find My > Find My iPhone/iPad > Find My network"
One is "Find My iPhone/iPad" which just turns off the functionality.
The second one is "Find My network" which opts out of the mesh network. This one has a description that starts with "Participating in the Find My network..." since turning it off means you are no longer participating in the mesh network.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/find-my/
> "When your device participates in the Find My network, it can both be located by the network and anonymously help locate other missing devices. You can choose to have your iOS or iPadOS device not participate in the Find My network by going to Settings[...]"
Tech sites and bloggers talked about how Apple cared too much about the user experience to just release a big keyboard, and how we were about to see a revolutionary new keyboard design. There was speculation about split keyboards, radial keyboards, and more. People weren't sure how Apple was going to fix the keyboard issue, but it was going to be magical.
Finally the actual iPad reveal came, and it was just literally a giant iphone keyboard. Jobs showed how to type on it by balancing the ipad on his knees, and hover hand typing onto it.
Honestly that was the point where my opinion of Apple started to decline, it honestly wasn't even that big of a deal, but it changed them in my eyes from a revolutionary tech company into one that just wanted to appear revolutionary. I've never quite been able to separate that initial disappointment from the iPads, and that disappointment is still the first thing that comes to mind whenever I see one or read an article about them.
I liked how Windows 8 did it on one of my laptops / touch devices, the keyboard would split in half and be on each edge of the screen, so if you truly wanted to type with your thumb, you could.
A lot of people did not like Windows 8, but I had fun with it on devices designed for it.
I do prefer whenever I find my Apple Pen (I have a knock off one from Logitech) that I can just write text over a text field, and the iPad will happily fill it in for me.
But I think I've heard the iPad Pro doesn't have it for some reason?
It seems kinda neglected as a feature anyway cause I've found it frequently covers the input field you're typing in, even in Apple's own apps.
The Pro is Apple's Answer to the Microsoft Surface is how I always saw it.
Doesn't your story imply the opposite? The blown-up keyboard works. It's not revolutionary. But it's also not performatively different in the way those bloggers' keyboard proposals were.
> Honestly that was the point where my opinion of Apple started to decline, it honestly wasn't even that big of a deal, but it changed them in my eyes from a revolutionary tech company into one that just wanted to appear revolutionary.
Would a company that merely wanted to appear revolutionary have released some novel (but probably pointless) keyboard design?
I don’t really get what the iPad is for either, but you should at least consider that Apple decided that “big keyboard” was the best option.
Well it's 15 years later, their rules have only ever voluntarily-changed to carve out more fees for themselves and the software you're not allowed to use appears to be banned "forever".
His vision was a closed ecosystem with massive fees and no competition, even changes to the laws around the world haven't really disrupted this:
> One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.”
Getting rid of the phone completely though is a whole other issue and we're nowhere near being able to ship anything with enough computing power and battery capacity into a form factor as light as standard glasses.
The whole chunky VR headset thing - no, that's not taking off as a thing people will wear all day.
For me, the Apple Watch is primarily a fitness device. That's almost the only reason I have it. I don't want to wear a watch. I don't load any music, podcasts, or almost any apps on it. I use it to track my activity and compare my daily health with past trends. That's like 95% of what I use it for. I even keep theater mode turned on 24x7 because I almost never look at it to check the time.
I also use it to tell Siri "set a timer" and "turn of the bedroom light... turn off the BEDROOM LIGHT... TURN OFF THE BEDROOM LIGHT."
Calling the Vision Pro a "toy" is a generosity for something that isn't fun or seriously intended for use by children. The Quest is a toy, the Vision Pro is a black eye for moneyed adults that lack responsible impulse control when they're marketed something shiny.
Even Apple can’t get around that. The Mac sticks around for this very reason: as a dev platform
https://screenrant.com/publish-ios-apps-ipad-swift-playgroun...
To me it feels like a waiting game - most people under 20 have lived their entire lives within "walled gardens" aka "what's a computer". The EU has already failed to break this cycle, if the DOJ can't do better and Apple can derail smaller countries efforts then this restrictive model will become entrenched as normal over the next two decades.
Obviously that goal was achieved but the direction the iPad went in was different than its minimalist and cheap original trajectory.
Adding a stylus and all the ‘Pro’ stuff confused what the iPad originally was, and now it’s more closely aligned with a new form-factor MacBook with a limited OS.
Maybe Steve would have gone a different way, but perhaps all computing devices are destined for the same convergent evolution … a kind of carcinization of form factors and purposes.
If Apple would make an iPhone which supported the Apple Pencil, I'd be inclined to replace my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and the pair of an iPad Pro and MacBook w/ an Apple Pencil controlling Sidecar seems workable enough to replace my Wacom One, and presumably the iPad would be portable enough to replace my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- but that still leaves my Kindle Scribe....
Steve Jobs promised that killing the Newton would result in devices which would justify that, but I'm still not seeing a Newton replacement from Apple, and the Scribe is about as close as I've gotten (and I wish Amazon would add a smaller model, or better still, engineer a phone case which included an e-ink screen, Kindle functionality, and had a Wacom EMR stylus and which would extend/replace a phone screen (replacing allowing for usage in direct/bright sunlight)).
The idea of a stylus for drawing on the iPad must have been there from the start because Wacom was already financially successful and a popular Mac accessory. Their Cintiq monitor/drawing tablet predated the iPad by about a decade. Apple’s leadership must have been aware of it.
https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2025/06/With-...
I don't think even Steve would expect that after he was gone anyone would do exactly what he wanted many years ago.
As it is, they're in a weird space. It's better to buy an air than the ipad pro + pro keyboard, the price of which is eye-watering. My ipad is now a very expensive screen for watching Tv in bed, and playing the odd bit of roblox to keep endgaged with my kids. I'm not going to bother typing anything on it... it's an absolute chore compared to my phone because of worse ergonomics due to it's size.
As a gateway device for AI... something maybe there's an interesting use case to be discovered but I'm not bullish on the value proposition of them going forward.
I think you're right—but for whatever reason, they decided not to go there.
There is no vision other than making money, and I don't mean that as a rail against capitalism, it's just simply how it is. Steve Jobs didn't even let his own kids use iPads, I don't think Steve Jobs felt the iPad had any value other than monetary.
I like the iPad as a device, but there is no "vision" there, there is no overriding view of the future of computing or anything like that. It's a product. A nice product, but there is no vision, from Jobs or anybody else.