The Watch, Mac and iPhone are doing great but the iPad lacks ambition and doesn't seem to have a direction. Who is in charge of the iPad division at Apple?
Apple isn't organized by product like other large tech companies, instead it's organized by function. E.g. no divisions like iPad, Mac, iPhone. It's divisions like hardware, software, RF, etc. Each division works on all products.
I use the iPad Mini for taking handwritten notes and it works beautifully for that use case.
I would use an iPad Pro as my "laptop" if Apple would let me run macOS. It's a Macbook Air but without a directly attached keyboard saddled with an inappropriate OS for the hardware.
You didn't ask me but I use Nebo; I found out about it when investigating the file format used by the Kobo Elipsa. I like it because of its realtime handwriting conversion, no recurring fees, cloud sync and backup, and easy export to pdf with text conversion preservation.
I remember headlines calling the iPad a big iPod touch when it came out.
…which is maybe kinda true? I have no idea if they want to make it a “Pro” device, despite the Pro moniker, because you still have such weird multitasking UI paradigms and so many limitations in terms of pro features. (Audio routing comes to mind. You can’t have Audio Hijack for iOS.)
And the value proposition of a fully loaded iPad with keyboard case is pretty dubious to me compared to just getting a MacBook Air. I know, I know, less apps, not a touch screen…but I can just do so much more with a Mac, and with the ARM transition, I also get the insane battery life of an iPad.
I think it's really just a limitation of the formfactor. It's first and foremost a touchscreen-centric device. Sure, you can clip a keyboard onto it to type easier and get a weird not-quite-cursor to interact with it, but at it's core, it will always be a touchscreen device, and as such can't expect users to keep peripherals on them at all times to make it more usable. So the OS will always be targeting the vast majority of its users, who are just poking at a touchscreen.
And touchscreen interfaces need to have all their points of interaction on them, or hidden behind non-obvious gestures which does not make for a very good power-user software interface. And iOS at its core (I know they call it iPadOS now, but let's be real, it's iOS with a half-hearted splitscreen/windowing system on top) is made to be a walled garden. A nice walled garden, sure. But not something for productivity, other than its own very specific scenarios, like digital art where you're only planning on drawing, and not going too far outside of the clean-cut path that it expects to be used in.
So for most people, it's just another screen to watch Netflix and YouTube. And it's pretty expensive for that.
I would argue that the typical reader at hacker news is not the target audience for iPad. Think young children and grandparents. My elderly mother loves her ipads. She has three of them. She can watch youtube on them, check email, chat apps, play music, control her TV. My preschool nieces and nephews love the iPad similarly for youtube and games. iPads are the easiest to use computers for people who are, for one reason or another, functionally computer-illiterate.
I like to consider myself computer literate but absolutely hate using a computer other than when somebody’s paying me to do it. At home it’s 100% iPad Pro or Kindle for my screen time.
Having an older iPad Pro has prevented me from buying a laptop. It’s just so easy to crack it open (with Brydge keyboard) and do whatever I need. Anything to prevent me from having to sit in front of my actual PC is good for me.
One has to assume that the ultimate direction is for some sort of convergence of iPad and MacBook. But no one at Apple has figured a good way to do that which isn't a fatal compromise. I use my iPad but it's a pretty optional device for me and I mostly use it when traveling. (I admittedly can't draw to save my life and I really want to get back on a computer pretty quickly when I'm doing things like searching.
Because, for example, I'd prefer to travel with a single device and the MacBook is better than the iPad at certain things and vice versa. It's not that big an imposition to take two devices to be sure--and I'm sure Apple doesn't mind the extra sales. And I can mostly sub my phone and maybe a Kindle if I'm trying to go light. But it feels as if there's the potential for a unified device someday there--if it can be without compromises.
Everyone knows two screens are better than one. So take both, and use the iPad as the second screen when using the laptop, and as a tablet when you’re not?
The trajectory is obvious, and includes iPhone. You don't need three different chips, just different interfaces. One unified computing and storage general purpose computer, available via mobile, audio (Airpods), visual (AR), large UI (Macbook / Mac), health (Watch), etc. They're already unifying under M1 / ARM.
It's far from obvious to me. Unifying back ends and unifying products are night and day propositions. Nothing Apple is doing points towards a thin-client strategy.
I mean, they are building their own processors now, and both the macbook and the iPad have the same processor. Why maintain two operating systems if one could work. I say that because obviously there are differences with iOS and MacOS, but apple controls both.
The problem with the iPad in my eyes isn't the mouse vs. touch issue. Yes, you want the UI to be designed for touch, on the other side the iPad now also supports a mouse.
The thing is a quite different point: the availability of software and the interactions. The iPad limits software to the App Store and its very restricted rules. Which makes the iPad nice for tasks which can be done completely inside one App, if that App exists in the first place. But it is really bad at any work flow which would involve multiple programs and a lot of programs aren't even allowed on the App Store.
On the Mac, one is free to run any software one wants, it is very easy to write your own. If it only is a quick shell script or python program. And it is trivial to combine multiple software in one project, just access the project directory from all involved programs.
There seems to be some capability of sharing file space between apps on the iPad, there is a great Git client called "Working Copy" which I can highly recomment which can interact with other apps, but that is quite an exception. In most cases, Apps on the iPad don't really support free data exchange with each other. My pet peeve: you cannot even add your own music to the music player on the iPad. It is sitting uselessly in Files and I can't access it.
It has the ambition, agree that they haven't figured it out yet. I think that it just might be a hard problem to figure out. I have an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook. I really understand when I want to use the phone or the notebook computer. The iPad is sort of in the middle.
I have made attempts at doing all my work stuff on it, but failed every time. Simple things like taking a screenshot over here and pasting it over there just feel harder on the iPad. I really want them to figure it out though!
I believe it is time for Apple to rethink iPad and MacBook. They both have the same chip now.
iPad should be a Macbook Air.
Apple already allows to run iPad applications on macOS. They should completely destroy iPadOS, and let macOS run on iPad. I would prefer to have powerful OS (macOS) with some glitches on iPad, than to have an iPad with limited OS (and still have glitches to be honest). I even ok to use similar to Windows 8 idea, you aren't plugged in to keyboard - it is going to look like an iPadOS (with different app launcher), and when you connect keyboard you can use macOS.
The only reason I am still own iPad (to be honest two of them), is because I cannot disconnect screen from my laptop, even that is not the biggest issue, but because there is no Netflix app, and I cannot download movies to watch in the plane.
It just seems that trying to use the Mac UI purely by touch would be godawful. I mean how do you Command-click, or right-click a UI element with your finger? These are solvable, but only with horrible compromises. The iPad has a completely different interaction model to very good reasons, and this would utterly butcher it. Microsoft tried this approach and it was disastrous.
Yes the iPad has its limitations, but also incredible strengths. The new multitasking gesture system is a vast improvement.
> It just seems that trying to use the Mac UI purely by touch would be godawful. I mean how do you Command-click, or right-click a UI element with your finger?
That's already in iPad OS/iOS. It's the long touch.
>Microsoft tried this approach and it was disastrous.
Surface Pro/Go is a pretty successful product for Microsoft.
I got a Surface 7+ recently and really like it. I can put full desktop applications (firefox + ublock origin, pycharm) and have it better mirror my dev environment with WSL.
Windows 11 on a tablet is really not that bad.
(I also run linux on a desktop and have an iPhone and Apple Watch, so not a hater by any stretch of the imagination)
The Surface has come a long way. I had (and still have) a Surface Pro 3 that had pretty much everything going for it: excellent build quality, great high-res screen, nice optional keyboard and decent PC-grade specs. There were two major flaws, though:
1. Linux support was pretty bad. You needed a custom kernel for an enjoyable experience, and even that was pretty unusable on anything other than x11 GNOME.
2. The overheating was a dealbreaker. I presume this was either a driver issue or hardware failure, but the device would regularly hit 55c in normal workloads, which was a no-go for that sort of product.
It was so close to being the Linux iPad of my dreams, but fell just short. I might give one of the later models a shot someday, but I'm not really in a rush. Maybe once Alder Lake makes it's way into a decent Windows convertible, it will finally be The Year of the Linux Tablet.
When combined with Apple Pencil it’s the best digital note taking device. I hardly need to use pen and paper any more. Note taking, reading books and watching videos, playing board games makes it’s a fun and work device. YMMV.
Same. I have both an iPhone and a MacBook as well, but with the Pencil, I just want to do everything on the iPad. It’s become my single notebook and sketchbook—-this is saying a lot coming from someone who has gone through countless fancy notebooks and fountain pens. I still use traditional media for anything I want to last, but for ideation and sketching practice, it’s all iPad all the time for me now.
Yeah, maybe I'm doing it wrong. Don't try to do everything on it, just use it for when you would want to sketch things out and don't look back. This comment inspired me to plug in my pencil and try it out for that.
> I really understand when I want to use the phone or the notebook computer. The iPad is sort of in the middle.
I'd never seen it put that way before, but I think it hits the nail right on the head for me. I do like my 2020 iPad Air when I use it, and the pencil is great; however, I basically end up using it as easy scratch paper or when copy-pastable handwriting is useful. Plus when I need an extra screen to go with my laptop.
It definitely has nice features, but doesn't feel like a compelling use-case overall, yet.
The most compelling use case I've seen yet for the iPad is for regular people who don't want a desktop or laptop computer, but don't want to do everything on their phone. The iPad is just a really big smartphone that with a folio keyboard can become an impromptu laptop if needed. In my extended family I have a few people who are using it for this exact use case and love it. Only one of them even has the keyboard, and all of them do everything on their iPad they'd otherwise use a 'real' computer for.
Another great use for the iPad is for sheet music. IME it is better than paper and much, much, much better than trying to use an iPhone or PC (which I've done sporadically).
Niche use case, but totally agreed. I was holding onto paper sheet music for the longest time, but no desire to even look back after switching to iPad for that purpose.
It helps that the app I use easily integrates with any cloud storage you would want to use, so I can easily just get sheet music using any personal device and just drop it into my cloud folder. And the next time I sit down at the piano, all those sheets are already there.
Way back when the iPad first came out, I didn't get it. But I read a lot, got one, and rather liked it. My conclusion was it (especially pre-pencil) was a somewhat luxury and rather optional device that did some things quite well. But was rather unnecessary compared to a MacBook or iPhone (or substitute some generic equivalent). And even non-Max smartphones are much bigger than they used to be.
A while ago I had an iPad, didn’t like it because of its limitations, and sold it. Now I have an iPad and love it despite its limitations. I think iPadOS still has a way to go, but it’s definitely progressing for me.
iPad has so much potential with M1 now. They can make it a hybrid with iOS and MacOS for example. In fact, I’d be shocked if that’s not what they end up doing with the M2 line of iPad Pros.
Yea, what if one could instantly switch between macos and ios?
Imagine having a super powerful ipad pro running mac os for your work stuff, and when you are lying on the couch you detach the keyboard and any external monitors and switch to the more touch friendly ios.
I think that would be a much better approach than to try to merge the 2 OSes into one hybrid OS that can do neither this nor that very well.
I suspect the big issue here is that macOS has far fewer restrictions on its use than iOS does. So Apple would need to either lock down macOS, or open up iOS. They can't lock down macOS because of professionals, and they really don't want to open up iOS.
I don't think iPads would need to run "Mac OS", just quite a few artificial restrictions on iPadOS would need to be lifted. I need to be able to install software myself on the device - be it only a small shell script or python program - and most importantly, I need to be able to share files between programs in the sense that several programs need access to the same file and can interact with it.
I don't think Apple would ever bring full MacOS to the iPad. I could imagine them allowing M1 native Mac Apps to run on the iPad tho.
Since the iPad and the Mac use essentially the same CPU now, why not allow Apps to be cross platform between the two? I know you can run some iPad Apps on the Mac, but why not the other way?
If you could run Mac apps on the iPad, would that hurt mac sales? Possibly. Although, I could imagine many non-mac users would buy an iPad if it could run VS Code.
Anecdotal but I am still fine with a 2013 iPad Air, just missing some features because of the non upgradable os.
Not sure that the fact that sales are decreasing means that the iPad is doing bad
Apple isn't organized by product like other large tech companies, instead it's organized by function. E.g. no divisions like iPad, Mac, iPhone. It's divisions like hardware, software, RF, etc. Each division works on all products.