sabon

I spend more than seven hours a day WORKING on my iPad. Meaning I do work that people pay me for and I don’t watch cat videos on YouTube. When I take breaks I go to sties like this and read funny stories about how Apple has killed yet another product which is selling 10s of not hundreds of millions of units. 

Yes, we are all sorry about how poorly iPhones and iPads are selling. Microsoft would LOVE to have the problem of having to figure out how to produce that many Surfaces as Apple does iPads.

I use a 12.9” iPad Pro all day long. Both at my desk and remotely. I’m still trying to decide if I want to buy the new one or not. In the meantime the Apple Smart Keyboard that I have drives me nuts when it is time to pick up my iPad and move to another location. 

if I always stayed in one place I would get another iMac. As it is I have a mostly maxed out two year old iMac as it is. But it doesn’t travel well. And I have problems with my shoulders so I try to keep weight down as much as possible. Which is where my 12.9” iPad Pro comes in. The smaller ones don’t have enough screen real estate and the keyboards are not full size and I type ALL DAY LONG. 

Yes I like the thinness of the original iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard. I don’t add the added thickness of the new one and ultimately with the new Smart Keyboard the new 12.9” iPad Pro ends up weighing the same amount.

I used to use Apple bluetooth keyboard with my iPad. But it is bulky, heavier, and just impossible to work with when all you have is your lap. 

Apple has not killed anything. Have they made it any better? That remains to be seen. So far my currently 12.9” iPad Pro is doing everything that I need/want it to as far as what I need it to do. I’ll always want it to do more no matter how much more it can do things.

I started out programming on a main frame. Now I use VPN to remote into my iMac from anywhere in the world and through encryption I’m not worried about anything getting stolen and I don’t have to carry around the weight of a laptop that doesn’t have the horsepower I need in the first place. And for technical/meeting papers that I have to write up, my iPad has everything that I need for that with.

Chicken Little. The sky is not falling.

I —-TOTALLY—- get why people are bitching. They wanted both a $499 Mac Mini and a Pro version of a small upgradable machine. Those are two different things and Apple seems to have tried to make something for both when it doesn’t fit either that well. Pro machines NEED 16 GB of RAM. So I would have expected it to start with 16 GB for this price.

Mac Minis are NOT gaming machines without at LEAST 16 GB of RAM. 16GB of RAM is NOT $200. I go to company X and I can buy TWO 8 GB of RAM for this computer for less than $100 when they want us to pay $200? That’s ***BLEEP***. Start it with 16 GB of RAM for $799. Then for gamers let them buy an eGPU and a better video card.

As for consumers, they don’t need desktop or laptop computers. Consumers need iPads and Apple should start making it clear that this that people who don’t need to game and don’t need to program they expect them to buy iPads. And iPads start with the iPad Mini at $399 and goes up from there. IPads are the only product that takes people anywhere from very entry level use all the way up to Pro.

PS: WHERE IS THE iPad for PROGRAMMERS???? Some of us want a machine that has lots of power and is very portable and doesn’t cost $5000. That is the iPad Pro. Except that there is no way, other than Swift Playgrounds, for people to program on an iPad without doing it remotely. I do that now but I would rather be able to do it all on the iPad. Think I’m nuts? That’s what people told me when “real programmers” only programmed on mainframes. They lost their jobs because they couldn’t change and adapt. I’ve always been ahead of the bleeding edge waiting for technology to catch up for 35 years now. 

My boss got mad at me when he found out I was using my iPad Pro to VPN into work for administrative and programming work. I asked him why and he basically disrespected the iPad. I asked him why he was so afraid of iPads when it does —everything— that I need to do to VPN into work and he just stammered. It’s the only time I’ve ever seem him speechless.

Fast forward a year and a half and he broke his collarbone skiing. He struggled for several days to try to lug his laptop. Then I saw that he purchased a Surface Pro which wasn’t much lighter than his laptop. Then I saw him carrying a bag that absolutely was too small for either his laptop or his Surface. 

What’s in the bag? I asked him and he told me had a meeting and couldn’t talk and hurried off. Later that day I “caught” him with a 12.9” iPad Pro. I laughed and said he had gone to the dark side. He tried to tell me that updates to iOS had “finally” made iPads worth using. “Bullshit”, I told him and brought in my iPad 3 which I hadn’t updated since I bought my 12.9” iPad Pro when it came out. I then showed him that I could do everything he could do on his “new” 12.9” iPad Pro (which was exactly the same as mine) except that it had a smaller screen. 

Well it has a larger screen, he said. It has the same screen as my iPad Pro and used an older version of iOS when I first got it and VPN’d into work when I needed to. So no recent updates changed anything for VPN. He got mad at me, because I was right, and told me to go away because he had work to do. I just smiled and went back to my desk when I use my personal MacPro laptop to do most of my work (Office 2016 - ugh!!!) and VPN into my work Windows computers when I can’t avoid it.

retrogusto said:

As someone who admittedly does not fully understand how the industrial design process works in a large company, it seems funny that they need a whole team of full-time people to design a small range of products, most of which barely change in their appearance from year to year. I’d be interested to know where all of the work goes. Even the Watch Ultra and the Mac Studio are essentially evolutions of existing designs, and the other products are nearly identical in outward appearance from year to year, with big changes occurring only rarely (with the Siri Remote redesign a notable exception). But maybe the trick is in maintaining the look as the technology inside develops. 

Just because the outside doesn't appear to have changed much, that doesn't mean that there haven't been a lot more changes inside than you think.

Going from Bluetooth 5.0 to 5.2 doesn't mean just dropping in a new module. Almost always the shape and size on parts change from generation to generation and the designers have to take that into account. They also have to make sure that there is no interference with any new generation of wifi or bluetooth. The size of the system on a chip changes from model to model. ALL of the parts have the possibility of changing size and shape from year to year.

And that's if you "just" want to upgrade to the newest standard. But there are other new technologies that come along. You don't just take everything and plug them in. You have to ask yourself "what exactly does this give us"? Now if you are using all off the shelf parts like most computer hardware designers do for Windows computers it really doesn't matter since all of the computers are basically the same except maybe build quality and manufacturer of your 3rd party parts.

But Apple isn't just another PC Builder. They want and NEED to be different than anyone else. Otherwise why buy an Apple computer vs HP or Dell or whoever? The lead designer has to work with upper management Tim Cook and the top and many other levels of engineers to make sure that the right choices are made with new technologies. Again, you don't just plug in something. You talk to key top people in Apple and find out what is possible and how much power it takes to run it and is it worth it, what does it get you that other companies can't or won't do or will try to copy.

Why bother adding something that is easy to copy. That is why Apple designs their own chips as much as possible. They want to make it as easy as possible for themselves for the lowest price while making it as hard as possible and expensive as possible to replicate in Windows or Android.

Certain groups of people are always clamoring for more ports or more this or more that. If you have no taste (Bill Gates) then you would end up with an ugly looking product and Apple prides itself in having lots of taste to often as possible make things look beautiful and if possible, "magical", it not in hardware than software.

And software is where it ultimately always ends up. The lead designer isn't just thinking about how it looks, how much energy it takes to run but also in what ways can Apple's systems be and look unique compared to Windows or Android but with taste instead of putting lipstick on a pig.

99.9999999% of people are earth would not be the right people for this position in Apple. I'm probably short quite a few 9s there. Neither you nor I understand more than 5% of what it takes to be a lead designer in Apple. Yes, it is like herding cats. Everyone has an opinion and your companies profit margins and reputation are at stake with every product shipped and if you "f" it up, there goes the entire history of your company. I wouldn't want that position.