radarthekat

iPad has always been about how the tools we use for doing work change according to the work we need to do, and that in turn changes the work we do, to take advantage of the tools available.  

In 1960, it took a roomful of people with mechanical calculators on their desks to do the work that later generations could easily perform with a spreadsheet.  But when spreadsheets and other business applications came along, the work they made possible was wholly different from the problem they were initially designed to solve.

iPads, and specifically the iPad Pro, is not designed to do the same work that a PC traditionally did.  Those who are suggesting the iPad Pro is a poor replacement for a PC are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  The tablet form factor has its own destiny, which will take on many, but not all the tasks of a PC, while enabling new forms of work and productivity that PCs cannot accommodate.

---

A good example is the document scanner and annotations capability.  You aren't going to use a PC to scan a document and then annotate it. But this task is perfect for a tablet.  So the work (annotating or signing, and then distributing a document) is done differently, and more conveniently, on this new tool, the tablet.  It does what a Traditional PC would require a separate peripheral (a scanner) to accomplish.  

Actually, the same can be said in a generic way about all interactions on a tablet; it does, with your finger, what was done in the past with a separate peripheral; the mouse.  Looking back, it can be said the touchpad on PCs was an evolutionary step away from the mouse and toward direct human interaction with content.  Something a tablet provides far better than even a touch screen PC, due to the angle of the screen relative to the user. 

 Apple pencil support is yet another way in which a tablet does work that has never been done by a PC.  The traditional PC required a peripheral for pen input, in the form of a Wacom slate sitting off to the side.  Newer PCs, like the Surface Pro, attempt to bridge a gap already negotiated by the iPad Pro, by supporting pen input on the touch sensitive screen.  But who would use a pen to do art or architectural drawing on a Surface screen while it's angled in the traditional PC clamshell orientation?  Nobody.  And so those touch screen PCs are forced to accommodate the compromise they make by also being 2-in-1s, allowing use in a tablet orientation, with the keyboard either detached or hinged back behind the device.  A rough and bulky tablet experience is what results, and why Apple doesn't go there.  Better to create an optimized tablet (iPad) and support occasional use as a PC for mundane tasks like text entry via an attachable keyboard.  This is not the iPad trying to be a 2-in-1 device; it's simply an accommodation of a legacy task better accomplished by the PC clamshell form factor. 

Folio said:

[Of course for AAPL stockholders, a larger portion of high margin services of means a multiple much higher than 14 x or so of hardware companies. And might inaugurate era of less sweat on quarterly iPhone numbers.]

freeper said:

lkrupp said:

AppleInsider said:

People shopping for a smartphone in July, for instance, might consider holding off if a significant iPhone update is predicted for September. Hints of a modest update can prompt people to wait even longer, or simply buy an Android phone.

I seriously doubt the people would “buy an Android phone” because they didn’t want to wait for Apple. That’s strictly a nerd sort of mentality.

Except that surveys and polls have shown that people do exactly that. Or a very recent example of the reverse behavior: during the Note 7 debacle, lots of people who wanted to buy the Galaxy Note 7 bought iPhones instead, and lots of THOSE are either buying the Samsung Galaxy 8+ or are waiting on the Galaxy Note 8. Two things that you are overlooking: 1) Carriers make it VERY EASY for their longtime customers to switch/upgrade devices. The reason is that it prevents the competition (carriers I mean) from using the lure of a new device to get people to switch. 2) 90% of the population doesn't care about the fanboy platform wars. Most people switch back and forth between the platforms. The vast majority of iPhone owners have owned an Android phone in the past and vice versa. The media only reports the number of people who switch from Android to iPhone each quarter ... while ignoring that an equal number of people switch from iPhone to Android, and that a huge number of people own BOTH iPhones and Androids with one being their daily driver and the other a spare, or one being for professional use and the other for personal use. That is why I always take the "I once owned a Samsung and LG phone and it was so horrible ... the stutter, the lag, the crashing apps ... it was a total nightmare but when I switched to an iPhone it was like a new lease on life!" comments on Apple blogs with a grain of salt (because anonymous unverifiable Internet comments that can be made with no repercussions are exactly that). It does not come close to matching actual market statistics and patterns. If it did you WOULD NOT see AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile treat iPhones and major Android phones nearly equally. (This was not always the case by the way ... I remember when Android phones were a distinct stepchildren to the iPhone and Nokia phones to carriers, and also when carriers were quite antagonistic to Google.) So as the average consumer hasn't been a loyal Apple fan who has only bought Apple products for the past 20 years but is instead someone who owned an Android phone 3 years ago before buying an iPhone 2 years ago - or vice versa - getting a Samsung Galaxy to use for 6 months or so until they can switch to an iPhone at the cost of only like $50 - $100 bucks (or even for free) from their carrier is not exactly a nausea-inducing thought, but rather is a routine business transaction for your very friends and neighbors.

Or schedule recurring transportation, such as to take the kids to soccer practice and back.  In this case the transportation technology system might suggest a shared van service, that knows the schedules for local after school sports practice and offers up and constructs pick-up and drop-off routes based upon participation; a regular route to gather up the kids and deliver them.  Accommodation for security will be considered when children are being transported without accompanying parents, such as real-time tracking and a constant open line of communication, both audio and video streaming from the vehicle to parent's smartphones. 

The specific vehicle that arrives can be determined by number of passengers, whether you'll be transporting something large or just yourself, etc.  The notion of owning, maintaining, accommodating parking requirements of, insuring, etc, a personal vehicle, for many people, has already begun to feel like 'the old paridigm.'  

To create this infrastructure, you need route optimization software, that incorporates the real-time whereabouts of all vehicles in a local fleet. You need scheduling software.  You need to deal with remaining charge/range of each vehicle out in service to know when a vehicle can accommodate an additional requested or scheduled route without running out of juice.  You need to accommodate stand-by, where the vehicle drops someone off at a location and is requested to stand-by for an indeterminate time while the person goes into a store or bank to run an errand.  In short, you need a very sophisticated set of interacting technologies to accommodate smooth operation of a transportation network that provides near immediate responsiveness to a population's constantly fluctuating needs.

If I were Tim Cook, this is exactly the way I'd envision the future, and this is what I'd set out to create.  It's not so much about constructing vehicles yourself, but about getting sign-in from all vehicle manufacturers such that their vehicles can work within the envisioned transportation network.  And that means that people who do own vehicles could lend them into their local autonomous transportation fleet in order to earn money (this has already been suggested by Musk and makes sense for a maker of vehicles to accommodate, as it helps him sell more Teslas direct to consumers).  It means that new rental fleets will simply be staged in large metro areas, with one or more depots that the vehicles come back to for recharging, maintenance, cleaning, etc.  And that means that there's a path forward for the rental companies, because they already have staging areas for their existing fleets.  The big picture can be accommodated during a transition phase from the world we have today to a world where almost all transportation is shared and autonomous.  

Extend this to trucking, inter-city bussing, etc, and the whole thing becomes a future that Apple could play a major role in developing.  Without ever producing, on their own, a single vehicle.

Also key to this is that everything Apple needs to do to revolutionize transportation does not require Apple to do any work on autonomous driving, nor does Apple need to build a single vehicle model.  Nope, Apple will want to own the end user interaction used to summon and schedule transportation, and it'll want to own the route optimization algorithms and server side scheduling and dispatch.  And take a cut of every ride.  

There will need to be some tech in each car to pick up the user interaction that began on a rider's smartphone or Watch, once the car arrives to pick up the rider.  The car will need a voice interface to interact with the rider.  The car will need to constantly ping its whereabouts to the dispatch and scheduling servers, along with its charge level, so that the dispatch system can determine its next pick up and determine when it needs to exit the active fleet and return to a nearby depot for recharging or maintenance.  The car will need to contain sensors, like internal cameras, to monitor for left-behind packages, spilled coffee, etc, and report appropriately to riders or to dispatch.  The car will need streaming audio/video capabilities to stream to parents when children are riding without adult accompaniment.  All of this can be designed as a set of interfaces that automakers can implement in order to be compatible with Apple's dispatch and routing servers, and the vehicles might also be required to utilize Apple's mapping infrastructure.  

Once verified as able to serve a ride request, the car is handed details on the location of the rider, and the rider's destination, and it can then utilize its own autonomous driving capabilities to serve the request.  And all of this can integrate both driverless and human driven vehicles into the same service.  So as vehicles are developed that are licensed for autonomous operation, these can be added to an existing Uber-like fleet of human driven vehicles, both serving together to form a centrally requested and directed/dispatched swarm serving a metrolitan area.  Eventually, the human driven vehicles would all be replaced with autonomous vehicles, and the future will have arrived