petri

Really the “why” is pretty obvious - the EU ruling about a common charging standard.  It means Apple have to adopt USB-C *unless* there’s another common charging standard they can apply.  Enter QI2, a common charging standard that’s effectively already built into all their iPhones.

dutchlord said:

And what about Apple Car. Burning $10bn with zero results and no heads rolling is also a failure of big proportion.

Apple car was never announced or promised to anyone.  It was an R&D project, an inherently expensive one, and the result was an internal decision not to proceed any further with it; for a company of Apple’s scale that’s ok.  Better that then launching it to the public for fear of “wasting money” and then having to admit it’s a poor product, doesn’t work, or worse - isn’t safe.

I absolutely love the iPad.  I started out with the first generation Air, which was a great consumption device but did at times just feel like a giant (and slightly underpowered) phone.  But then six years ago I got the 2017 iPad Pro, and picked up the keyboard and pencil to go with it, and I’m still using it to this day - it’s just an awesome device and everything I need for computing at home.

Contrary to what some are saying, I think the iPad and iPadOS have come a long way.  The introduction of a file system, smart accessories and increasingly in depth apps have made it far more productive, while still allowing the iPad to continue being that simple, lightweight screen in your hand when you just want to surf or watch a video.  No it doesn’t entirely replace my work laptop, but I don’t particularly want it to, since that would inevitably make it bigger and more cumbersome.  It *does* replace it on work trips to conferences and similar, when the smaller form factor is super useful and I can still happily bash out emails take notes etc, and just as easily watch a movie with it on the train, all on something the size of a paperback and with a battery that lasts all day.

Apple didn’t create the smartphone, or the smartwatch, or the home computer.  But I think there’s an argument to be made for the iPad - not the tablet as it was known before that, but the iPad - to be truly the one category that Apple did carve out for itself by scratch.  It’s so entirely different, both physically and conceptually, not to mention commercially, from anything Microsoft or others had floated and failed with beforehand.  The iPad really stands on its own.