firelock

auxio said:

djames4242 said:

auxio said:

Ironic that, on one hand they question why someone would want to FaceTime with up to 32 people, but on the other, don't question why someone would want to go through the pain of trying to write/draw anything significant on a phone-sized device.

...annnnnnd this is exactly what I came here to say. You beat me to it I have a side gig in a retail-type environment where we have a pen we can use for out iPad-based POS system. I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried it, and I can count on zero fingers the number of times it's been useful and/or not-painful.

I have an Apple Pencil and an iPad Pro, and it's definitely useful for sketches, drawing, and adding signatures/markup to documents. I just can't imagine doing those things on a phone-sized screen. You'd constantly need to be zooming in and panning around to do it, which is just painful.

I also have an Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, and love the combination. However I disagree that the Pencil wouldn’t be useful in conjunction with an iPhone. I used to carry around a Moleskin notebook and it would be nice to be able to take notes on a phone in a similar fashion.

Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.

Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.

I didn’t read every comment but as a parent what I want is an end to physical text books and notebooks. The amount of textbooks and notebooks my kids have had to haul around is ridiculous considering their weight and bulk. I really can’t believe how bulky and heavy my daughter’s backpack was she used to carry to middle school. Couple that with security restrictions that get more stringent every year. For example, even before the most recent incidents at public schools, in my son’s middle school they aren’t allowed to carry backpacks (or bags) going from class to class. I understand the reasons but it really is ridiculous because they haven’t provided a good solution on how the kids supposed to cart all of their books around a large campus. Having all of their text and note books on an iPad would be a great solution and pretty much eliminate the need for a backpack.

I bought a Nimbus controller to use with my ATV when Skyforce Reloaded came out. That is a great game with excellent graphics and there is no doubt that the best way to play it is on ATV with a controller. Skyforce on ATV with a controller beats the heck out of playing it on an iPad with your finger. Also no IAP on ATV which makes it a better user experience in general! After I got played out on that game I tried a few other ATV games, but the quality of 99% of them are terrible, and most don’t support controllers. Those that do often the controller support seems like an afterthought. So for the last year or so my Nimbus has sat gathering dust. Gaming on ATV is very much a missed opportunity. I suppose for those few who don’t own a gaming console but do own an ATV, it is better than nothing; but I have little to no reason to ever pick my ATV to play a game over my Xbox One.

In regards to mobile, I think it is a mistake to say that iPhone/iPad are only good for casual games. There are may great titles that I play on my iPad that have great strategic depth and excellent graphics. But I also think it is disingenuous to claim that iOS devices are somehow the equivalent of modern consoles. They are not. But frankly if I want to play a top-tier shooter like Titanfall 2, that is going to be a much better experience on a console, 55” TV, and a controller than it will be on my iPad even if the graphics were equivalent. Personally I don’t think mobile gaming and consoles are in direct competition with each other, so the argument about whether the graphics are equivalent is largely moot. They are both successful and growing. There is room for both.

My iPhone 6 was getting pretty long in the tooth and I finally got an X last month. By far the best phone I’ve ever owned. Camera upgrade alone made it worth it. I will probably keep it for three years like my last phone so I don’t consider the price to be outrageously high, but it is high particularly after you factor in the cost of AppleCare.