As much I'd like one (I have a Wacom too), the reason is because that's a market around 1/10000 the size of the overall iPad market.
MS offers that because it tries whatever it can as a differentiator, but it's not working very well for them.
If Apple added proper pen support with palm rejection software APIs to an iPad, you'll bet that people will still buy iPads. Mums will use pens to annotate their extension plans for their new house, maps to the park for child birthdays. Kids will use the pen to become better illustrators which will help them be better communicators later in life. Uni students will use pens to jot down notes quickly and draw math equations with ease.
The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.
Touch unlock, however, is already in use by someone's grandpa... it's clean, it's easy. It's not multitasking. It's making the current norm safer and faster.
Exactly. Drawing includes illustration and annotation. Two things that make communicating faster and easier. As the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words.
Only, as my current saying says, not many users paint any pictures or care to.
He means it would try to be two things at the same time (a painting surface and a regular tablet), a "jack of all trades, master of none" thing.
The iPhone 5, 4s, 4 etc has sold out too, despite not having one. So I'm not sure it's the fingerprint scanner that's the differentiator here.
And the analogy is not apt for other reasons too. Apple didn't put a "fingerprint reader" because there was a market for it. They did it because it enables some things like easy mobile payments and better security.
Whereas with something like a wacom-like tablet capability, there IS a market, but it's tiny. And the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc). There will be an improvement for handwritten notes and annotations, but that's not the major selling point of the iPad. If it was, Surface would have faired better too.
Still, they might add it at some point, if a dual-technology screen becomes cheaper and mature.
>The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.
Well, judging by unit sales, it very much is.
The iPhone 4 added a gyroscope, the 4s added a better microphones and associated audio chipset to improve speech recognition. The iPhone 5 added support for Airdrop. Following your logic then Apple really has no excuse not to add features like a digitiser because they will sell out anyway.
> They did it because it enables some things
Yes, and a pen digitiser and palm rejection enables reliable note taking, annotation and illustration.
> the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc) That's like saying that only journalists and novel writers need a keyboard, only photographers need a camera. The success of the iPad over traditional laptops has come from a natural way to interact with things directly like they do in real life. In real life people use pens everyday to jot things down.
> If it was, Surface would have faired better too. What? The Surface does not have a pen. Only the Surface pro which is $400 more expensive than an iPad and doesn't run iOS.
which serves Apple as a great "field test" in case someone at Apple had actually thought about this. We all know how "well" MS does with their tablet. And if that proposed market would be significant, MS would have sold more of their product as they offer just that which Apple does not.
So, Apple does not just stipulate that this niche is not big enough for them to cater to, they have real life data that devices with this feature don't sell.
But, to be frank, that of course has other reasons besides this small niche not buying the product.
Gabe's requirements are quite niche, though if tool suits you there's nothing wrong with that. Though why bother to fork out $700 for a tablet when you can get a second hand tablet on ebay for less than $100?
Apple in my mind is now a consumer products business (has been for years I guess) not a computer business as I used to "feel".
Perhaps I'll be more open to other hardware for my next dev machine.
And really, what more could you want as a dev (at least in a laptop)?
My wife is a visual designer who has an external waccom tablet. She said the primary problem with integrated solutions to her is occlusion: she would still prefer a separate tablet. Gabe obviously has a different feeling about this, though I think he is using Illustrator also.
"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.
This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable."
"A sport utility vehicle (SUV) is a vehicle similar to a station wagon or estate car, usually equipped with four-wheel drive for on- or off-road ability. Some SUVs include the towing capacity of a pickup truck with the passenger-carrying space of a minivan or large sedan.
Since SUVs are considered light trucks in North America, and often share the same platform with pick-up trucks, at one time, they were regulated less strictly than passenger cars under the two laws in the United States"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_utility_vehicle
People do not want trucks OR cars they do want BOTH.
Imagine if you wanted to use your toaster to do Folding@Home while not doing toast and you get two years in jail.
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
Another more dangerous side is that is a real risk of someone misusing these computers in ways that make it hard to distinguish hacking something for use from abuse.
The issue is the same on Android. Android devices are so cutthroat that an extra 25$ cost to include the pen and screen sensor will sink your product and not including the pen just makes it into an accessory no one has. And even then you won't beat Google's whitebox or Amazon's loss leader hardware pricing.
Samsung is really the only successful Android device maker with a built-in pen, and they already pour ridiculous amounts of money into things no one else but Apple can, like marketing, so it isn't surprising. Although an infrasound pen works with any Android, just not as well again.
To my mind, that would be Apple cannibalising Mac sales - an iPad that big would be aiming squarely at Macbook Air territory (especially coupled with the A7 and future processors).
But if they did release one, they really should give it a decent digitiser - that, plus the bigger surface (sheesh) area, would be perfect for drawing on.
[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/24/apple-may-be-working-wit...