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>My experience has been that the high-productivity, specialty specific apps I would use haven't caught up Strong agree — lack of robust development environment

>My experience has been that the high-productivity, specialty specific apps I would use haven't caught up Strong agree — lack of robust development environment for DEEP apps is holding iPad back. Yes, iPhone has plenty of apps. Session times on an iPhone are short and it's enough to have just app-ified websites like Facebook app, Instagram, Snapchat, banking apps. Even transformative truly native apps like Uber do not require much development on the mobile platform side (the real work is in the network). On an iPad your sessions are much longer and there's room for more expensive apps you spend more time with. Truly great games, for example. Art, media creation, notes, documents of all sorts, but most of all things that we can't conceive because they're only possible on an iPad. But there's a void here. Free to play dominates gaming, and the result is a lot of crap, with even the gems tarnished by need to drive in app purchases. The "pro" apps are too few and far between. Why? Well, insufficient developer buy-in due to the crappy landscape. You have an app store with weak discovery driven by a combination of whims of a small team of editors and easily gamed, lowest-common-denominator popularity charts. You have uncertainty in the development landscape due to Apple fickleness (store rejections, opaque and changing rules, etc). You have weak cloud tooling from Apple so simply saving state becomes a unique snowflake challenge for each dev. The iPad needs a killer app. The fact that most people can replace one with a knock-off Netflix/YouTube machine is damning. It should be good at more than that. It should be brilliant.

mcgrath_sh 9y ago
I think the "killer app" is the Pencil. I had a mini that had a shattered screen and the cost of replacement wasn't worth it to me. I hemmed and hawed for a year about getting another iPad. It would have been nice to have, but I could not justify the expense. The Apple Pencil changed that. I have never used another stylus that comes within 100 yards of the Pencil. I got the iPad Pro 9.7" heading into my last year of grad school. What a difference reading and annotating with a Pencil than with my Mini just a year and a half earlier or even my laptop. I loathe reading anything that I need to annotate or really understand anywhere else besides my iPad (and that includes paper). The Pencil swung me from "meh, nice to have" to "I will replace this immediately if it dies." I am using a 2011 MacBook Pro that I cannot justify upgrading and will probably not replace if it dies. But the iPad with a Pencil is something I can't imagine not having now.

mcgrath_sh 9y ago

I think the "killer app" is the Pencil. I had a mini that had a shattered screen and the cost of replacement wasn't worth it to me. I hemmed and hawed for a year about getting another iPad. It would have been nice to have, but I could not justify the expense. The Apple Pencil changed that. I have never used another stylus that comes within 100 yards of the Pencil. I got the iPad Pro 9.7" heading into my last year of grad school. What a difference reading and annotating with a Pencil than with my Mini just a year and a half earlier or even my laptop. I loathe reading anything that I need to annotate or really understand anywhere else besides my iPad (and that includes paper). The Pencil swung me from "meh, nice to have" to "I will replace this immediately if it dies." I am using a 2011 MacBook Pro that I cannot justify upgrading and will probably not replace if it dies. But the iPad with a Pencil is something I can't imagine not having now.