Wesley Hilliard

charlesn said:

Wow. I jumped on this article when I saw it, especially with Wesley's name attached, since I've found him to reliably interrogate thoroughly any topic or piece of gear he chooses to write about. And the headline subject of this article is of extreme interest to me. Sigh. That thorough interrogation I had hoped for was not the case here. This was more of a spec sheet comparison than digging into the nitty gritty of working with each on a daily basis. How do they compare in terms of file management, window management, multitasking, printing, etc. What are the major differences to note between MacOS and iPadOS versions of widely used workhorse apps? Well, I'm hoping Wesley will write a Part 2. 

We made a call. This was going to end up closer to twice the length with hardware and software discussions, but we decided those belonged in two different articles. I agree that an in-depth analysis is needed, and an omnibus article will still likely happen at some point, but we're breaking it into parts for now while we decide how to approach the content for 13-inch iPad Pro.

The software section is a complex discussion and I was afraid the hardware analysis and conversation about *why iPad* would be lost. So this story is about the naked robotic core and why that's an important computing distinction from classic Mac form factors.

get serious said:

Appleinsider said:
"People try to define computers based on their personal needs, so if the iPad won't work for them, they believe it won't work for anyone. "

Appleinsider provides the a disservice to the nonPro demographic that could provide your site clicks and views if they were able to find reasonable advice not Pro puffery.

I understand where you're coming from but if you're buying any iPad other than pro with the intention of using it as a Mac replacement, you didn't need a story to tell you that you could. It's actually quite straightforward, if you're buying the $350 iPad, you never needed a Mac in the first place. iPad Air is more ambiguous, but the real question being asked by this article is, "if I have $3,000, do I buy and iPad Pro or a MacBook Pro." And I detail why you'd choose either.

I don't know if you guys know this, but usually when a developer sells an app, Apple owes them money, not the other way around. Critical accounting error in the headline tells the whole story, a developer would only owe Apple money because of an error. Apple hasn't made an official statement, so we don't know what course of action they will take. But we can only assume that Apple will likely pay Johnson back.

This is probably one of the more straightforward stories we've ever published. And a warning, if you have problems or find errors in content, email us. Posting about it in forums will lead to an eventual ban if we have to keep warning you. Read the forum rules please.

gatorguy said:

Please read what you just wrote again. Maybe we misunderstood what each of us was talking about.
Did you not see you were looking at Magic Eraser from the Pixel 6?

Magic Editor, a new set of tools introduced with the Pixel 8 series and the "thing I linked", uses GenAI trained in part on the Magic Eraser's ML data, and vastly expands what it can now, and how well it can do it. That's why it's not a relaunch of the one-trick pony Magic Eraser being announced again. 

As I said in my previous post, wouldn't you rather wait to see what Apple actually announces for photo-editing on the new iPhones, and what they call it? 

I do see what happened. Yes we were talking about two different things. Magic Editor is clearly based on generative AI while Magic Eraser was an ML based tool.

I suppose I was confused because the article is about a single feature in Apple Photos and not an editing suite like Magic Editor. I was trying to compare Apples to Apples, but I see why you brought it up. It utilizes what Google learned from people using Magic Eraser to teach the AI editor.

I expect Apple's new editing tools will be similar to Magic Editor's object removal function, though it'll be much more private than Google's. I'm not sure why anyone entrusts their photos to that company but here we are.

how good it will be is still a question. Google software is hard to beat, especially since they disregard user privacy in favor of more optimized tools.

i agree, I'm interested in seeing what Apple does during WWDC. It seems Google marketing confused me instead. All these "Magic" tools lol.

all that said, going back to the original discussion, I think name space pollution and calling everything AI is disingenuous and just sucks. I hate the industry went this route.

dominoes said:

Pretty sure that the new iPad Pro no longer has an UW 10mp camera on the back. Is it just a covered hole now?

I've done some digging. There's the Camera, then the big black circle at the bottom is the LiDAR sensor. Then the Flash and under that is the Mic. The only thing I can't figure out and Apple hasn't shared is what the top right black dot is. I'm assuming its a light sensor.