petri

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.

entropys said:

Seems pretty miraculous outcome for “an error”. 

Someone must have built it.

Was thinking the same.  It’s not something that would happen by accident, clearly the app’s been coded to support integration but some exec has put a stop to it.  All very silly and I agree with others that it’s basically killing my interest in Netflix when shows from all my other integrated services are so much easier to find.

Massiveattack87 said:

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.

It was obvious to make a car, but Apple failed.
I can confirm it as I am in the automotive industry and a lot of HW engineers were hired incl. chassis manager, antenna, quality engineer from automotive, car designers etc. 
One of them confirmed that Apple intended to make a car.  

I don’t doubt for one second that they were working on a car.  But it was an internal project - again, it wasn’t announced to anybody and nobody was promised it.  It has nothing to do with WWDC since it was never mentioned there.  It was a set of ideas they were working on, and then (as far as we can tell) that research led to them realising it wasn’t the right product and not the thing to be spending time on.  I think that was almost certainly the right decision for Apple and quite a brave one really.

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.

Hmm.  Some of this list just reads like “stuff the author doesn’t like/use” rather than failures as such.  Ping is the only thing on the list we can all agree didn’t meet the mark and was quickly abandoned, some other things like Maps had a poor start, but crucially they kept at it and now most people use it daily.  Same with Siri, same with HealthKit, same with iOS (of which v11 was just one of various slight QC dips along the way).

Memoji are a particularly odd inclusion here - sure they might have gone a bit out of fashion by this point but they were fun and pretty popular at the time.  I still have plenty of contacts using them as a profile pic to this day.  Again, not being to the author’s taste does not make them a failure.