I'm starting to worry that Apple is slowly destroying the iPad, or at least the iPad as presented by Steve Jobs while lounging on a couch holding a magical portal into an information, entertainment, and self enrichment universe. What made the iPad so special was that it wasn't just another personal computer dragging along all the baggage and claptrap that personal computers cannot seem to distance themselves from. It was just a slab-o-glass, no keyboard, no mouse, no separate monitor, no external paraphernalia to drag around or to clutter up your life.
You'd never see anyone selling "iPad Desks," "iPad Hutch," much less designating a chunk or real estate in their homes as the "iPad Room." The iPad was just something you cozied up with on the couch, or on a deck chair, in the passenger seat of a plane or train, like you would with a good book or sketch pad. You could throw it in your backpack or overnight bag to bring along as a personal companion or to keep up with your journal when you were away from your home or office. Nobody really cared about what was under the hood as long as it kept serving your personal needs. If you needed more than what the iPad delivered, you still had your trusty old personal computer, probably sitting on a special computer desk in the corner of the family room with a rat's nest of wires and peripherals dangling from it.
Look where the iPad is today. There must have been some engineers at Apple who felt personally diminished when they were accused of building a "content consumption device" as if doing that, even when done better than anyone else in the history of personal computing had ever done it so elegantly and effectively for couch dwellers, was actually a bad thing. Real men produce, real men generate content, real men type on keyboards and move cursors using mice and trackpads. Real men have fully preemptive multitasking overlapping window based operating systems on all of their real computing devices.
The claptrap of personal computers from days gone by has caught up and surrounded the iPad. The iPad needs a desk, keyboard, and pointing device to fulfill its manly "content production" tasks. We now do care about what's under the hood and have to worry about whether the iPad we buy is up to the tasks that we are asking of it. Worse yet, we see all of the horsepower the newest iPad has and wonder why not enough developers are developing OS versions or apps to seriously challenge all of those horses. I paid for all that power and I expect it to used. Not sure how or why, but just throw in some complexity until the little bugger begs for mercy.
Yes, I'm being dramatic, but I do sincerely believe that Apple has reached a point where they don't really know where to go with the iPad. They have shown us that their hardware designers can do amazing things in tiny spaces. They have created a gap between the iPad and its nearest competitor that causes the competition to simply throw up their arms and say "I give up." But they they've also moved the iPad further and further away from its "Steve on the Couch" origins and the raw vision of the iPad as the ultimate personal portal into the universe of consumable content and media.
Perhaps it time that the base iPad and iPad mini be seen as the only "True iPads" in the sense of the iPad that Steve Jobs presented to the world. All other iPads, or iPad Pros, or ProPads, really should really be seen as hybrid computing devices that exist somewhere in the personal computing spectrum between the true iPads and MacBook Pros, you know, in the same vicinity as Microsoft's Surface hybrid, but done much better and as only Apple can do best. I simply hope that the True iPad vision does not die.
Respect the couch.
You’re forgetting that Apple need to somehow convince people that they need to buy the same product again, every few years. Feature creep & numbers to compare are all a part of pushing people to buy the same product again next year or the year after that. If adding features that a certain segment of the population believe should be there will provide this function, then they do it.
That said, typing on screen is absolutely abysmal on an iPad Pro. It implies that you can type like as on a physical keyboard, which is absolutely false. It sucks. Using a physical keyboard makes my iPad Pro way more useful than without.
Also, the “vision” of simplicity and ease of use died with iOS 7 in 2013, and every followup since. The removal of physical buttons from the hardware, the piles of not-discoverable and sometimes conflicting gestures, the arbitrary addition & removal of features/functions (3D touch), the loss of distinction between controls & labels...
The Apple of Steve Jobs went away long ago. Today’s Apple is the apple of Wall Street. That they’re not quite as horrible as the rest of the industry is what keeps me hanging on.
You guys are nuts - iPads famously don’t get replaced on a short cadence because they last so damn long. Your planned obsolescence doesn’t jive with reality — Apple gear has a longer useful life span than normal CE crap, and we know this because they get used for years and retain good resale value.
You are not required to upgrade every year. Normals don’t. Enthusiasts and phone nerds do. Do what feels right for you. I know lots of people with older iPhones, iMacs, Watches and definitely iPads.
Iterative product development is how Apple rolls, and they don’t expect you to upgrade every year. But when you do, likely after several iterations, you’ll get a much more capable device. That’s how it works.
To further prove your point, last fall I purchased the new iPad Air to replace an original iPad Mini which was like 7-8 years old. While obviously not as fast as the current models, it still functioned perfectly fine as a consumption device. Plus, Apple gave me $60 in trade for it, which I definitely wasn’t expecting. I could have upgraded it earlier, but I was waiting for something full-screen, and the Pro models were just a little too powerful for what I needed. The Air felt like the right time for me.
So, I agree with everything you have said, but mostly with the point that normal users don’t need every shiny new iPad that comes along.
Also, the “vision” of simplicity and ease of use died with iOS 7 in 2013, and every followup since. The removal of physical buttons from the hardware, the piles of not-discoverable and sometimes conflicting gestures, the arbitrary addition & removal of features/functions (3D touch), the loss of distinction between controls & labels...
Imagine complaining about anything for eight fucking years.
iPads will get a lot heavier and dropping them will make them a lot more expensive to repair, all this for so called "wireless charging"?
Yeah, that’s my thought. The battery sizes used for iPads are also quite large, so ‘wireless’ charging would need to improve by an order of magnitude to make it viable. Then there’s all the wasted energy….
I still can’t understand what’s wrong with just plugging it in.
Wireless charging is already an "order of magnitude" beyond what Apple makes available to customers. Has been for a pretty good while now. Multiple vendors offer higher watt fast charging. Wireless charging is available to charge at a rate up to 65W. Is it not refined enough for Apple's satisfaction? I don't know. Regardless of their reasoning for not including it thus far, the fast charging tech is already available. Could be as simple as Apple wanting to ensure high-watt fast charging wouldn't cause any heretofore unforeseen issues with their devices. Again, Idk but the technical capability is here. https://www.engadget.com/oppo-125w-flash-charge-65w-airvooc-50w-mini-supervooc-110w-073056359.html
What's wrong with just plugging it in? Absolutely nothing. Plugging it in is a perfectly viable option. Wireless charging is also a perfectly viable option. Option being the key word. Wired and wireless charging aren't binary decisions. Both can and do exist simultaneously.
Apple is more concerned about the early failure of batteries that have been fast charged. There are no phone batteries that are made to withstand the heat and chemical changes that fast charging requires as a matter of the inefficiency. That’s o e reason so many Android users find battery life poor after just one year.
Apple's reasoning doesn't really matter as it relates to MplsP's claim that wireless charging would need to improve by an order of magnitude to make charging the iPads larger battery a viable option. Wireless charging technology is already more than capable of charging an iPad. ←That was the point of my post; not why Apple doesn't use fast charging. Battery chemistry is the bottleneck, not wireless charging tech as claimed by MplsP.
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