[upmind]

I owned a few iPads as a kid but as I get older I see less and less reason to buy one.

It kinda sits in the middle of usefulness of a phone and laptop for me. Larger screen than phone yes, but can't run any of the applications I need from a laptop. If it had MacOS, I'd be much more inclined to buy it.

[rossant]

Thank you for making me feel old. The first iPad came out when I was doing my PhD. When I was a kid, Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the web.

[Brajeshwar]

Haaa! I also paused reading at “as a kid.”

I bought the 1st Gen iPad for my daughter while I was in the States for work (2010). Not a phone, big enough, and can be Internet-connected with a SIM. Lots of Games, and later my feeling of having bought something amazing was that my daughter learnt to speak brilliant English with Peppa Pig, way before her formal school started.

Palo Alto Stanford Shopping (USA) › FedEx to a Relative in Maine (USA) traveling to Manipur (India) › he trimmed a local SIM to fit the Nano-SIM tray › Happy Daughter on her 2nd Birthday.

[user_7832]

> Manipur

Well that's interesting having seen so many of your posts on this site, hullo quasi-neighbour! (I'm originally from Tripura!)

[Brajeshwar]

Awesome. Nice to have more neighbors everywhere.

[marrone12]

I remember sitting on my friend's couch drinking beer when they announced the iPad and debating if it was ever going to be popular. Time marches on.

[mercutio2]

I was working at Apple and wondering the same thing ;)

Turns out people like them. Not so much the HN crowd, but c’est la vie.

[pants2]

I remember the total uproar about the name! Everyone said it was too close to a Feminine hygiene product, or too close to iPod. Nobody's complaining any more.

[OJFord]

It is too close to iPod imo, but they killed that line around the same time.

[alliao]

entire generation of kids have grown up since introduction of iphone/ipad... I'm sort of glad I got to live what world was like before internet though, still escape into the mountains with kids so they can some of that disconnected feeling but with starlink hovering overhead nowadays just don't feel the same anymore

[bsimpson]

I've never owned one.

My dad was at Stanford in 84, when the original Mac was announced. We were a Mac family from even before I was born. I watched Steve Jobs give the Macworld keynotes back before everyday people knew who he was.

When I was in college, I actually bought a TabletPC. I still identified as a Mac user - I even tried making it into a Hackintosh - but being able to draw and use gestures was interesting enough that I tolerated Windows on that device.

The day the iPad was released, my parents impulse-bought one. They were heading on an overseas trip that week and thought it would be a fun gadget to bring along.

They had me set it up for them, and I did exactly that. I didn't tinker with it, play around on it, pretend it was mine for an evening… It's the first time I remember a gadget not feeling like a new toy, even though I had spent my formative years dreaming about how cool a Mac you could draw on would be. It was just an object, and I had no interest in it beyond being a helpful family member.

Making "just a big phone" when their phone platform has always been so locked down has done the iPad concept a major disservice.

[MattGrommes]

Mine is 98% for reading comics and 2% learning to draw on Procreate. Most everything else I find awkward to do on it.

[stasomatic]

My current gen Mini is my Reeder, HN, and Balatro machine. Balatro is intolerable on my 15 Max. $400 well spent and i dont care to share it anyone else.

[asimovDev]

same here. Drawing on my 13in M3 Air is a delight with the pencil. I sometimes try to do productivity stuff on it like sitting in zoom calls while multitasking on an external monitor, but it's not a very good experience on iOS 18.6

Haven't tried 26 yet, maybe it will be better

[driverdan]

I would have been using iPads as my primary computing device for the past 10+ years if they gave us root access. Without root they aren't usable and I refuse to buy them.

[SchemaLoad]

I got one a few years ago for drawing on, so far I haven't found it useful for much else. I got the 12.9" one which makes it hard to hold so it sits on a stand.

Later I plan to use it as a lighting control panel but other than that the use cases are limited.

[mmaunder]

There's a small army of pilots who can't live without one thanks to Foreflight.

[selectodude]

I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't full throttle on foldables. I'm more apt to spend $2500 on a foldable iPhone than I am $1500 on an iPhone and an iPad. I don't think I'm alone here.

[CharlesW]

When they introduce their first foldable device this year, keep in mind that Apple has been ideating on and prototyping concept devices with foldable displays long before working prototypes of foldable screens existed. The first Apple patent related to devices with flexible displays was filed in 2011. The first Apple patent related to hinges for foldable devices was filed in 2015.

Foldable device prototypes were publicly demonstrated in 2013. It took five years for the technologies required to enable foldable devices to become mature enough to ship bad products. It took another five years for them to mature enough to meet Apple's scale and quality requirements.

This isn't a "moonshot" (which take decades to build), but hardware innovations like this regularly take a decade to properly productize.

[lloeki]

I see your 2011 and I raide you a 1987

https://youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

[upmind]

They're quite scared to take risks I think, from what I heard it seems it was meant to be released already but they've delayed it a bunch, I wonder if in part due to AVP failure.

[mercutio2]

“Scared” to “take risks”?

This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.

Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.

Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.

[dijit]

I agree, Apple gets hit from all directions.

It's expensive (though largely comparable to business machines) so people dunk on it being low value for money,

People dunk on them for not taking risks, but when there's a reliability problem that would be sort-of acceptable for another product it becomes international news.

When they do take "risks" (like USB-C only) people dunk on them for taking away choice.

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm one of the people dunking on them a lot, I was not a fan of the headphone jack removal, butterfly keyboards, discoverability of 3D touch, change of UI paradigm away from Skeumorphism etc;etc;etc -- but I feel like a lot of the other manufacturers seem to get a comparative free pass, which feels unfair.

[stackskipton]

Rumor has it this year will be release of iPhone fold. They wanted to fix the creases.

Which seems pretty standard Apple. Let others do something, see how it plays out then launch their version of it.

[ebbi]

I'm hyped for a iPhone Fold as a concept.

But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.

I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.

[selectodude]

Yeah, that Galaxy tri-fold is gonna be the sweet spot.

[dyauspitr]

My mom has loved the form factor, currently loves it and will continue to love it. That’s basically her hour or two of downtime at night. It’s the perfect form factor for consumers.

[sagarpatil]

Anyone who has all three and found iPad still useful? I’m mostly on my MacBook and use iPhone when I’m not on my MacBook, or Apple TV.