Mike Wuerthele

Rogue01 said:

This article is a joke, right?   Sounds like the author isn't old enough to know how the PowerPC to Intel transition progressed.  Apple completed the entire hardware transition to Intel in just over 200 days.  Yet they continued to provide Rosetta for five and a half years after the introduction of the first Intel Macs, Jan 2006 to Mid-2011.  Why?  Because there were literally millions of PowerPC Macs in operation for years after the switch.  Same is true now.  There are probably over a hundred million Intel Macs in operation, both privately and in enterprise.  Developers go where the money is, and currently it is still with Intel Macs.  There is only a very small percentage of Apple Silicon Macs in operation now compared to the number of Intel Macs.  Apple is also still selling Intel Macs, and will do so well into 2022.  The Apple Silicon transition is going very slow because it took Apple 11 months to come out with new models after the first batch, and their flagship Macs, the 27-inch iMac and Mac Pro are still Intel.  The pandemic, is the author aware there is still a pandemic going on, has played a huge part along with the world-wide chip shortage in causing major delays with everything.

So telling people to jump ship after 11 months is ridiculous.  Rosetta will be around for at least 5 years to support Intel apps running on Apple Silicon, and Intel Macs will continue to be used by people for years to come.  Remember, the Apple Silicon Macs aren't great for everything, many people take advantage of virtual machines, something the Apple Silicon Macs do not do well.  Intel Mac can run Windows natively, and can also run older versions of Mac OS X in Parallels for older software compatibility, something Apple Silicon Macs will never do (maybe someday Microsoft will be on board with running the ARM version of Windows natively).  More people will still be using Intel Macs for years to come, much more than people using Apple Silicon Macs.  And it took Apple a year and a half after announcing Apple Silicon to finally come out with Apple Silicon Macs that are worth buying.  The M1 Macs were nice low end models, but the lack of memory and features held a lot of people back.  People wanted faster Macs with more features, not faster Macs with features cut.  Apple has finally fixed that mistake.

cia said:

Apple was not first on the CD ROM train.  They were one of the first to drop it, but they started adding it into their computers around the same time everyone else did.

If anything, Apple was first to use the 3.5" floppy, and most certainly was the first computer company to have the "courage" (lol Shiller) to drop it.

They also were basically first on the USB-A train.  So early in-fact that (as anyone who bought the OG iMac remembers) trying to get peripherals, printers..ANYTHING in USB form was a hunt for the first few months.  
15 years later they repeated history, and started killing of USB-A.  Again it became a hunt to find ANY pure USB-C peripherals again.  Thankfully docks and adaptors came quickly this time around though.

OctoMonkey said:

henrybay said:

Best of all, it still has a Home Button! Which for many people, makes the iPad so much easier to use. 

The home button is one of just a couple reasons I purchased an iPad mini (5th gen) for my wife the day they announced the 6th gen.  A quick upgrade to 14.8 and a firewall block to prevent further i-device OS upgrades and we are golden!

s.metcalf said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

s.metcalf said:

To sum up, the headline should have better reflected the article: that this is an excellent and very capable device for the budget conscious, not that it’s best for “nearly everyone” because that’s an extremely blanket claim that is not true or justified by even the author’s own admission in the article!

In my opinion, Charles is right, and you're narrowing what you consider to be the iPad market to just folks that read this site and adjacent. You are welcome to your own opinion, of course, but there is nothing in this article that discounts this point, nor the validity of the headline. Your anecdote about your elderly mother notwithstanding, the entry-level iPad may not cover the needs of the AI reader and their families, which tend to cover the upper 20% of Apple's product line -- but it will cover the overwhelming majority of needs for the tablet market as a whole.

Here's another anecdote: of my family members aged 70 and older, all but one has the entry-level iPad of some sort from the last five years. One has an Amazon Fire. That's still not data, any more than your example is.

And in regards to the call to authority that you registered before Charles did, knock it off. You're reasonable given your post history, and you know full well that AI forum post count nor registration date means a single thing.

Not surprising that you agree with the person who is not being (fairly) critical.  I know what I see and I provided a thorough rebuttal with many points that make sense, which you conveniently overlooked.

”Readers of this site aren’t average users”, which you both stated, has nothing to do with the validity of my points and is simply used as an attempt to downplay or discredit my qualification to make those points and opinions without targeting the points themselves.  That is symptomatic of an inability to counter the arguments directly and is a very common strategy, intentionally or otherwise, when someone cannot defend their argument with sound facts or reasoning.  When all else fails: attack and discredit the person is the logic that your comment follows.  It’s extremely common in politics too, for obvious reasons.

I have further suspicions about the wildly positive “best for everyone” headline (I accidentally misquoted as “best for headline” there for a second) but I won’t go there, yet.  I expect and come here for quality consumer-centric news and analysis and a headline that effectively says “almost everyone” should buy this base iPad in favour of the others doesn’t meet the standard of journalism I’m seeking from a tech reviewer, but is one that Apple would probably be happy with.  They likely want people that can only afford or justify the base to feel like they’re getting the best when clearly they’re not.  Lightning itself is probably (or hopefully) on the way out as well.  The quality of life improvements I mentioned don’t just apply to that particular case either.

Certainly if you intend to push away long-time readers and contributors you’ve done a pretty good job of it.  It’s not what this site needs right now, surely.

However, I think I’d prefer to get my Apple news, opinions and reviews from sources that are more objective and balanced and have fewer (or no) ties to Apple.

22july2013 said:

If the camera has 10x the pixel resolution, how does that affect the quality of FaceTime calls, if at all?