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OT: Tim Cook/Apple is on the wrong track. The entire line-up of a product company is fundamentally flawed and heading to nowhere: Today was the first time, I s

OT: Tim Cook/Apple is on the wrong track. The entire line-up of a product company is fundamentally flawed and heading to nowhere: Today was the first time, I saw the new iPad Pro in action in a shopping mall nearby. It was a lazy Tuesday evening and I was in shopping mood. The first thing I did was running Sun Spider in Safari. Not an up-to-date benchmark but still a good indicator for performance. This thing reached insane 119ms. Without having any noisy fans and a battery that runs for days. Then, there is a buttersmooth 120hz screen, also the first time I saw a hi-fps screen live and it's so nice. All packed in some slick enclosure, thinner and lighter than any Surface Microsoft ever made. I would have bought this device without thinking (this is what malls are for after all) and I really don't care if it's 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 bucks. But tell me--what should I do with an iPad Pro? The OS is not just crippled but utterly useless for any real use case. You don't have to be a pro. I could work via SSH on a remote server, nah I can't test properly without the major browser being installed or at least Safari's dev tool. Maybe some mockups with Affinity Designer? It has the most responsive digitizer, so c'mon. Nope, the files are so big and exchange to my desktop goes always through a slow cloud, this feels like going back in time and juggling floppy disks. Maybe some Word? No, I prefer full-fledged Word. Contracts are too important to fiddle them together on a subpar Word, I don't open Word for fun, I make or lose money with contracts. If I used this device the entire day I would also eventually get RSI from moving my hand up and down all the time (there is no Vimium for Safari). This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Let me not start with Macbooks, non-existing Mac Pros or odd, LG-branded screens. Steve thought all features to the end. Tim doesn't and ships one half-baken product after another.

zwkrt 8y ago
All of your complaints were true under Jobs as well.
- beforedawn 8y ago
  That's true but I could imagine that Jobs would have seen these flaws and fixed them after a decade. Just because he uses himself the stuff. Look, Jobs called Goolge's Vic to tell him that the color of Google's second 'o' in the logo was wrong and hence looked bad on the iPhone. Do you think Cook would ever do this, do you think Cook uses any of his products seriously? When did Cook write the last contract himself? Does he code? This guy just write emails, something a Blackberry could do better than an iPad or iPhone, 15 years ago.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Just because he uses himself the stuff. …so does Tim Cook? > Does he code? Did Steve Jobs? He knew how computers worked, but I don't think he ever sat down and wrote some Objective-C.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      He hired the guy who created Objective-C, and understood why Objective-C was better than [alternativeLangs]. The world is full of people who can code. Very few of them think strategically or understand that code is irrelevant unless it has some really, really good reasons to exist and do what it does.
  - athrun 8y ago
    Well, Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. He is a different human being, with his own set of skills (and flaws) and that's OK. He certainly does not "just write emails".
    - beforedawn 8y ago
      He does. In a technical way and re to what he is doing with a computer. He uses emails to delegate and thus does more but this is not what this discussion is about.
      - athrun 8y ago
        Ah, got your point. I'd even argue that as a CEO, he probably doesn't even interact with a laptop all that much at work as I imagine he relies heavily on a team of personal assistants. In that context, he might be an avid user of the iPad. As the result, the iPad might be the perfect device for all sorts of high ranking tech executives. Turns out you and I are just not the target market :)
    - eloisant 8y ago
      Tim Cook was COO. Steve Jobs had the vision, and Tim Cook know how to execute it. Now Steve Jobs is gone, Tim Cook still knew how to make products into real stuff that can be shipped to customers but there is noone to give him a vision.
- throwaway98121 8y ago
  I disagree. Jobs gave us iTunes, iPod, iPhone. These were revolutionary devices IMO. Sure MP3 players existed before, but the customer experience made me feel, “wow I need this!” I haven’t felt that way in a while. There’s nothing really new that apple is doing at the moment. Thinner devices that’s im going to wrap in a case are great. A higher resolution is nice. Deeper blacks and face recognition instead of passwords? Okay cool. Certainly not worth $1000 to me. Don’t get me started about the MacBook Pro. Some how apple managed to take a very fine machine and in 2016 decided, “You know what? Let’s just take a massive dump on this thing and add a Touch Bar.”
  - justicezyx 8y ago
    Well you are fed with the wow products since iTunes, do you think you'll be impressed by apple watch? No, but was apple watch less an achievement than iTunes? No.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    AirPods? Face ID?
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      shitty headphones that are "truly" wireless don't mean a thing to me. have you heard the bass on those things? awful. i'm a basshead, we exist. apple wants us to buy something else. siri is crap and doesn't recognize my accent so fuck everything about even trying to use siri through the airpods to control my device. meanwhile my rha ma 750 connects just fine to assistant on my pixel Face ID? i like the idea of my hands controlling something. Face ID with Touch ID should have been a no brainer. different usecases! Face ID doesn't work when the phone is on my desk and i just want to quickly fire off an action like changing music- i HAVE to show the phone my face - which quickly changes the dynamics of how i feel about my device(goes from boss-employee to the other way around) sorry but i guess i'm in the small percentage of people that apple designers just flat out ignore coz they can
      - baxtr 8y ago
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  I started writing a reply to the GP in this vein, but the examples I came up with didn't quite fit. Yes, the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, but that was never meant to be a computer; it was merely "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device" rolled into one. The original iPad shipped without multi-tasking (pseudo or otherwise), but it was primarily competing with netbooks, which couldn't competently multitask anyway. I cannot recall any Apple products in the "modern Jobs era" that were quite as much of a solution in search of a problem as the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a $1,000+ product aimed at professional artists and content creators who by definition spend their days working on various assets aka files. But the iPad Pro doesn't have a file manager, just a bunch of kludgey workarounds.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    The funny thing is I have seen screenshots of a internal storage file manager in the Files app. Not sure where I saw them, but it seems it had the capability at least once, but the feature was pulled. Not sure if it is still accessible or not.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You can install any third party file storage app like Dropbox, Google Drive etc and they are all accessible from the Files app as well as any program that needs o save and store files. There are file storage apps that store files only on the local file system and expose an ssh server and/or web server that allow you to upload/download files directly from your phone.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    I take it you've never actually used an iPad Pro. I can quite easily take files from cloud storage like Dropbox or S3, copy them to my local device, make changes and push it back to cloud. Or I can edit directly from cloud storage. And if the iPad was such a hopeless device for content creators you wouldn't see Adobe bringing their full Photoshop product to it would you ?
    - 8y ago
- pooppaint 8y ago
  This is quite an assertion. I am not privy to jobs vision for the iPad because I haven’t seen much written specifically and it’s evolution is pure speculation as he’s dead now. But you can’t extrapolate from the iPhone and call it a day. And the iPad and the Watch as well are not practically products that have matured under the jobs umbrella. Critical consensus has been pretty positive about the progression of MacOS under Jobs (it was quite a rocky road but look by 2008).
- rajacombinator 8y ago
  Jobs was able to lift one or two products per cycle to greatness. Without him it’s a deluge of mediocrity.
  - Twisell 8y ago
    Or maybe he’s just cleverly adapting to slower cycles in which customers pay more attention to durability of products pushed by a raising ecological awareness?
throwaway98121 8y ago
Very well stated. I have an older iPad, which I think is a fantastic device, that I use for general browsing, managing my portfolio, and personal email. There’s no reason for me to upgrade other than maybe as a status symbol. Honestly, none of my friends care how latest is my iPad, and neither do I. There’s no use case the newer version has that makes me think, “Wow, I need this in my life.” Speaking of which, combine all this with the ridiculous pricing of the new iPads, it just doesn’t make financial sense to throw away money.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  Referring to the Pro iPads of course, the consumer (6th generation?) ones are reasonably priced. You get basically an iPhone 7 processor inside with a decent screen and tablet form factor.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    The iPad Pros seem to have been an attempt to shift a certain content creation niche away from Macbooks towards the iPad range. They're nice devices for visual creatives and for music, albeit in a rather limited way. (Kraftwerk play live with iPads now.) But they're not a substitute for the full desktop experience. So you get a clash between Cook's smaller-lighter-thinner aesthetic and the real-world demands of professional content creation. The result is a very expensive toy you can do serious work on sometimes, but definitely not all the time.
    - dangus 8y ago
      I think we all have a very short memory in regard to the major changes Apple made to iOS on the iPad for iOS 11. I would expect that the iPad will become more macOS-like over time, especially with the addition of USB-C. I think that means waiting and seeing what iOS 13 brings to it.
bunnycorn 8y ago
Looks like you want a MacBook Pro. It's not Apple's fault Intel/AMD has been producing pile of trash CPU's for years.
bitrrrate 8y ago
Agreed. As some other posters have pointed out Apple has some amazing tech in FaceID, AirPods, an ECG on your wrist. But where they fall down is the assume pros don’t want ports in their laptops, think people don’t want customizable desktops and underserve their best devices with software. Not to mention charging money for mediocre services.
radium3d 8y ago
Hmm, I felt the same way about the iphone vs android when they were first competing. iOS felt very limited and still does to this day. I don't think this is a new problem inside Apple. Tim is no better or worse than Steve I think. Posted from my macbook :P
rorykoehler 8y ago
My wife uses it for illustrating. Nothing else comes close. You don't buy a Ferrari to race in rallys.
- pier25 8y ago
  That and consuming media are the only activities the iPad Pro shines. The rest are just meh.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    iPad Pros are amazing at video editing and audio production. And I love it for doing architecture diagrams and also making changes to building plans for my home renovation. The 11inch model is also a great portable diary/productivity machine. I also have teachers in my family who use it for drawing and projecting mathematical formulas on a screen for their kids which they then email straight after the class. They are selling well for a reason because people use them for different things.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      I pretty much doubt that, unless you plug them into a nice 21" screen display and an hardware console to drive production. Doable yes, amazing not really.
    - pier25 8y ago
      Most of what you mentioned there is drawing and using the pencil, which I concur works great. I completely disagree about video editing and audio production. Sure it's doable for small family videos, but absolutely not for anything remotely pro.
- beezischillin 8y ago
  AstroPad is a great app that allows people to use the iPad Pro like a Wacom Cintiq, especially when paired with their Luna Display. The dumbed-down Adobe drawing products are a joy to use. I will never quite understand why fully-featured apps don't learn a lesson from those --- gesture-based undoing is great when you're drawing! But they're really weak, compared to their desktop variants. With Photoshop on the horizon that might change but I fear that by trying to implement every other feature, they'll just ruin that great workflow the dumber versions of their apps have, unfortunately. A portable second display is also a great use for it. I tried to use it for coding, but I really hate the material the smart keyboard's made of (I own the first gen one so this might've changed since then), I just can't type on it because touching it freaks me out. I hate that the chose that material to cover the keys with. So with coding out of the way, recreational drawing, reading ebooks and watching movies is mostly what I use mine for. Unfortunately that's not anything close to the original promise of its capabilities. I love it and I use it daily but the problem is when I bought it, I expected to see some support for professional use for it, too. The strength of the Apple ecosystem used to be their app support by external developers --- so, let's say for example, when you bought a Samsung (or even Surface) device with a bunch of new features compared to vanilla Android (or a touch/pen-based Windows), you could be sure that nobody will ever enable you to use those efficiently so they were a waste of time even to consider as a reason to get the device, on the other hand, going with Apple meant the opposite. Frankly, it doesn't feel exactly true nowadays. Tim Cook's leadership gives me terrible flashbacks to the Microsoft Steve Ballmer-era.
luka-birsa 8y ago
I'd like to jump on this bandwagon. IMO a decline of a company can come in various forms and here we're seeing an empire built on mobile market growth starting to feel the reality of 1% yearly growth in a mature market. Apple is slowly declining (a percent per year) their market share (they are no longer number two - oppo/oneplus has that position now), next year they won't be number three (Huawei). What happens when they go below 10%? Will developer still deliver applications for OSX? Is there a possibility for the same scenario as it was in the Mac vs PC? Reality is that modern Android mobile phones are good enough for most. Unless you're really into the status symbol part of the Apple, they really don't have something special. Plus there is no need to upgrade a phone anymore. I bought my Galaxy S8+ a year after lunch (much cheaper) and would replace it only because of consumerism - to get a new phone. Arguably there is nothing that really warrants an upgrade today. Headphones, while a great move, won't help them in a long run - not enough margins and good competition. The silver lining with Apple is the that they have a growing services business. Too bad Netflix is kicking their ass in video content wars. Siri is also mostly mediocre. Homekit - who knows, what happens if your market share is falling. Reality is that Android won 3 years back. We'll see if Apple can turn around thanks to their endless coffers of cash. It's not over yet, but they need to do something and not just upgrade what they have.
- hackersword 8y ago
  Android loses when it comes to not having enough clout to enforce a standard on the manufacture and carriers. My last attempt at an android was a Samsung Note3 on Verizon. Pretty much every app had 3 versions - google/android version - samsung version - verizon version Locked bootloader so couldnt' really remove the duplicates. Critical Security update released by a google? Well first has to be approved by Samsung ... that takes a month at least , then approved by Verizon. Realistically if you saw the security update w/in 3 months that was pretty fast. So a zero day exploit ... 3 months waiting for patch. Android really won.
  - piyush_soni 8y ago
    Note 3 was like a century ago in 'smartphone years'. A lot has changed since then (Samsung handled the precise duplicate apps problem you're talking about on the most part). Also, even then Google had its own phones (e.g. Nexus) and the only fair comparison to iOS would be stock Android. Now, the new line of Samsung flagships are really smooth, hugely less clutter than before - however, it remains the case that the only fair comparison to iPhones would be with the Google Pixel line.
tolmasky 8y ago
It’s not attention to detail, it’s vision. There’s no purpose to these devices. Sometimes it seems like there’s too much attention to arbitrary details. For example, the thinness and speed of the iPad, but to what end? The original iPhone was rather underpowered even at the time for what it tried to do, but it was so crazy focused and the vision of what it would allow you to do so exciting, that you were willing to look past it. It didn’t matter that it didn’t have 3G or the best camera. Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Best chip, best camera, best number to write on the back of the box. Boring. As an aside, I am increasingly certain that the sad truth of the iPad today is that a majority of sales are probably the cheaper models used as Envoy terminals, POS devices, and conference room check-ins. If I count iPad’s I see day to day, it’s incredibly lopsided to these uses. What a waste. With Steve, you could draw a straight line from the original Mac to the iPad. You could see one relentless mission to tame unusable hardware into a friendly machine through software. You could imagine Steve wanting something like an iPad even with the original Mac. What’s the narrative of the hodge-podge of devices we have now? Vague speeches about “health” and “AR”, always troublingly highly reliant on the hope others will make use of these technologies. Apple used to lead by example, the first party software set the bar for what others should do. Nowadays there’s just the hope that Adobe bringing Photoshop to the iPad will breathe new life into it. Meanwhile, Apple has not released a new flagship app for the iPad since its original release with iWork and Garageband. It’s been 8 years! Apple can’t figure out a single new app that can take our breath away? If they’ve run out of ideas of how this thing can be used, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
- bsder 8y ago
  > Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Wrong. We know exactly what we want to do with these devices. However, Apple won't allow us to do those things. A friend of mine bought an iPad Pro before going on vacation so that he wouldn't need to bring his laptop. He wanted to upload/download his photos from his camera, share them to other people, do some light photo editing, hunt down tourist sites, book train tickets, etc. He had nothing but problems. My 2015 Macbook Pro? No issues at all. The iPad Pro went back and now he's back on his laptop.
jaabe 8y ago
I think you’re on to the core of the problem. Apple is a software company that build its own hardware because it had to. But for the past decade, they haven’t really made any interesting software. iOS is great for iPhones, it’s not great for a laptop replacement. I think OS/x would be a much better fit for the iPad Pro, but perhaps something completely new would be even better? I think the surface book shows us just why that is by the way. If I didn’t personally find windows so terrible, I would leave Apple for one of those in a heartbeat.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- phodo 8y ago
  Apple is a hardware company that prioritized design and built / bought (next step) software because it had to, and ignored web services because it didn’t value it (at least in earlier days)
  - sschueller 8y ago
    Then why does apple play such hardball against open source software [1]? If they really are just a hardware company they should be supporting open source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Apple dislikes the GPL, not all open source (they work on Webkit, LLVM+Clang, CUPS, Swift, FoundationDB, and a few others). It's not so different from other companies (e.g. on Android, Google used the Linux kernel, but replaced all other userspace components of the traditional GNU/Linux distro by non-copyleft versions, including developing their own libc).
  - jaabe 8y ago
    Maybe it started that way, but I personally buy into the old Jobs view on Apple as a software company. I do this because I myself primarily buy Apple products for their software. It’s anecdotal of course, but I own a MacBook Pro because I like OS/X more than Linux, and, certainly more than Windows, not because it has a touchbar. Similarly I primarily own an iPhone because I much prefer iOS to Android. I also prefer iCloud services and iMessage to all their similar options. In fact my biggest grief with the iPhone isn’t the missing headphone jack or the ludicrous price tag, it’s that Siri is so much worse than the other voice assistants. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect I’m not alone, and that’s why I think their core problem is software rather than hardware.
shaklee3 8y ago
I'm not sure why you're praising the performance, then slamming it for the os. A big part of the reason the performance is great is because it's not running a real desktop/laptop os. If it ran osx and had the same performance, that would be something
hiker512 8y ago
I do not get this comment. Why would a "pro" user try to use the Pro as a Laptop replacement? Rather think of a regular consumer, of which there are a lot more. Just doing a bit of browsing on the sofa, writing a few emails, reading news, watching Netflix in bed or playing some game. Personally, I read a lot of papers and ebooks I get via university on it. It's great for that. Not once did I want to use SSH on it, with or without an external keyboard. I use a proper laptop or computer for stuff like that.
- fredsted 8y ago
  > Why would a "pro" user try to use the Pro as a Laptop replacement? Apple advertises it as such.
  - Twisell 8y ago
    The target is more the creatives pro, than the developers. IT folks are not the only one kind of pro out there. Many artists praise the Apple pencil and we musn’t Forget that creative industry is probably what kept Apple afloat during it’s dark age of the 1990’s so I’d say fair enought! I have literally no use of an Apple Watch or an iPad. But does it bother me than Apple sell them and make big margin on them? Why on earth?
    - thejohnconway 8y ago
      I’m an artist and I have the new iPad Pro. It’s the best piece of hardware I’ve ever owned, and the drawing experience the best I’ve had (better than a Wacom Cintiq). But I do have to agree with the sentiment that it’s software is a major problem. I think a lot of creative pros make things using several files, and organise their work by projects. iOS’s app-based organisation philosophy is consistently painful. So annoying, in fact, that I would probably never try to do anything remotely complicated on this iPad, even though it’s the fasted computer I’ve ever owned. On the hardware front, a 13” screen is no where near big enough for most creative work. I really think Apple needs to be way faster in scaling this thing up to 20+ inches. The hardware will come, but I worry that the whole philosophy of iOS is simply wrong for complex work, and it would take a lot of vision and courage from Apple to fix that.
pasta 8y ago
Did you ever use the hockey puck as mouse? Yes that's from the Steve area... Steve made Apple great but it's an illusion to think a company will grow forever. Steve was also lucky to have Apple in a time where a lot new stuff was developed. He didn't develop it, he applied it the right way. Things like touch screen and tablets were really new back then. But today there is not a lot that is new. VR is from the eighties, so is AI. So I think even today Steve would have troubles to keep Apple growing.
- path411 8y ago
  Or he would have likely kept applying new technology. New technology is still being invented. There are just less steve jobs to actually apply it. I see it like the current movie industry. Lots of reboots and old franchises as they are "safe bets" for the share holders. No one wants to be the guy to make a huge flop and get fired.
scarface74 8y ago
Yes because if Apple made the iPad Pro more attractive to developers all of their problems would be solved. Taking advice from the same audience who said in 2001 “less space than the Nomad, no wireless, lame” hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy....
matwood 8y ago
You're thinking as a programmer. I've accepted for programming I will always need a proper computer. But, as a very amateur photographer, the iPad Pro is amazing. I prefer using LR on the iPad Pro now. I also haven't had any cloud sync issues, speed or otherwise. With that said, there are plenty of improvements needed. File handling is certainly one of them. How to get my RAWs into LR for example is a pain. > Steve thought all features to the end. This is simply not true. If you were lucky enough to have your use case match Steves exactly, then maybe.
- beerlord 8y ago
  All of the problems OP mentioned are software problems. Software on iOS is kneecapped by the 30% cut that Apple takes. Reduce this down to as low as possible, and you will see a huge renaissance. 12% (like Epic) seems reasonable. Apps should cost $500 to launch and $100 yearly to maintain on the store, to ensure quality.
simonh 8y ago
They're not for everyone and every use case, but the app story is improving a lot. For example your comment about Word is out of date. Word for iOS is full features and has complete support for track changes and comments. Your point on sharing files via the cloud would also apply to laptops on Wifi as much as to iPads. Yes you can tether with a Cat-5 on a laptop, but most people don't bother and do pro work just fine. I was worried the iPad would get neglected since Android for tablets is practically abandonware at this point so it has no credible competition at the high end, but instead they're doubling down on the hardware and the software. iOS 12 for iPad was a huge upgrade and the larger screen sizes make running multiple apps side by side a lot easier. sales may have flattened, but they're consistently selling twice as many iPads as laptops.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
> This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Jobs didn't want the iPhone to have apps at all. The original vision was for all third party software to run inside Safari. This is the same man who didn't want slots in the Macintosh, and killed the floppy drive as soon as he returned to Apple. Jobs would have loved the iPad Pro.

zwkrt 8y ago

All of your complaints were true under Jobs as well.

beforedawn 8y ago
That's true but I could imagine that Jobs would have seen these flaws and fixed them after a decade. Just because he uses himself the stuff. Look, Jobs called Goolge's Vic to tell him that the color of Google's second 'o' in the logo was wrong and hence looked bad on the iPhone. Do you think Cook would ever do this, do you think Cook uses any of his products seriously? When did Cook write the last contract himself? Does he code? This guy just write emails, something a Blackberry could do better than an iPad or iPhone, 15 years ago.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Just because he uses himself the stuff. …so does Tim Cook? > Does he code? Did Steve Jobs? He knew how computers worked, but I don't think he ever sat down and wrote some Objective-C.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    He hired the guy who created Objective-C, and understood why Objective-C was better than [alternativeLangs]. The world is full of people who can code. Very few of them think strategically or understand that code is irrelevant unless it has some really, really good reasons to exist and do what it does.
- athrun 8y ago
  Well, Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. He is a different human being, with his own set of skills (and flaws) and that's OK. He certainly does not "just write emails".
  - beforedawn 8y ago
    He does. In a technical way and re to what he is doing with a computer. He uses emails to delegate and thus does more but this is not what this discussion is about.
    - athrun 8y ago
      Ah, got your point. I'd even argue that as a CEO, he probably doesn't even interact with a laptop all that much at work as I imagine he relies heavily on a team of personal assistants. In that context, he might be an avid user of the iPad. As the result, the iPad might be the perfect device for all sorts of high ranking tech executives. Turns out you and I are just not the target market :)
  - eloisant 8y ago
    Tim Cook was COO. Steve Jobs had the vision, and Tim Cook know how to execute it. Now Steve Jobs is gone, Tim Cook still knew how to make products into real stuff that can be shipped to customers but there is noone to give him a vision.
throwaway98121 8y ago
I disagree. Jobs gave us iTunes, iPod, iPhone. These were revolutionary devices IMO. Sure MP3 players existed before, but the customer experience made me feel, “wow I need this!” I haven’t felt that way in a while. There’s nothing really new that apple is doing at the moment. Thinner devices that’s im going to wrap in a case are great. A higher resolution is nice. Deeper blacks and face recognition instead of passwords? Okay cool. Certainly not worth $1000 to me. Don’t get me started about the MacBook Pro. Some how apple managed to take a very fine machine and in 2016 decided, “You know what? Let’s just take a massive dump on this thing and add a Touch Bar.”
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Well you are fed with the wow products since iTunes, do you think you'll be impressed by apple watch? No, but was apple watch less an achievement than iTunes? No.
- baxtr 8y ago
  AirPods? Face ID?
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    shitty headphones that are "truly" wireless don't mean a thing to me. have you heard the bass on those things? awful. i'm a basshead, we exist. apple wants us to buy something else. siri is crap and doesn't recognize my accent so fuck everything about even trying to use siri through the airpods to control my device. meanwhile my rha ma 750 connects just fine to assistant on my pixel Face ID? i like the idea of my hands controlling something. Face ID with Touch ID should have been a no brainer. different usecases! Face ID doesn't work when the phone is on my desk and i just want to quickly fire off an action like changing music- i HAVE to show the phone my face - which quickly changes the dynamics of how i feel about my device(goes from boss-employee to the other way around) sorry but i guess i'm in the small percentage of people that apple designers just flat out ignore coz they can
    - baxtr 8y ago
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
I started writing a reply to the GP in this vein, but the examples I came up with didn't quite fit. Yes, the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, but that was never meant to be a computer; it was merely "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device" rolled into one. The original iPad shipped without multi-tasking (pseudo or otherwise), but it was primarily competing with netbooks, which couldn't competently multitask anyway. I cannot recall any Apple products in the "modern Jobs era" that were quite as much of a solution in search of a problem as the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a $1,000+ product aimed at professional artists and content creators who by definition spend their days working on various assets aka files. But the iPad Pro doesn't have a file manager, just a bunch of kludgey workarounds.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  The funny thing is I have seen screenshots of a internal storage file manager in the Files app. Not sure where I saw them, but it seems it had the capability at least once, but the feature was pulled. Not sure if it is still accessible or not.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    You can install any third party file storage app like Dropbox, Google Drive etc and they are all accessible from the Files app as well as any program that needs o save and store files. There are file storage apps that store files only on the local file system and expose an ssh server and/or web server that allow you to upload/download files directly from your phone.
- threeseed 8y ago
  I take it you've never actually used an iPad Pro. I can quite easily take files from cloud storage like Dropbox or S3, copy them to my local device, make changes and push it back to cloud. Or I can edit directly from cloud storage. And if the iPad was such a hopeless device for content creators you wouldn't see Adobe bringing their full Photoshop product to it would you ?
  - 8y ago
pooppaint 8y ago
This is quite an assertion. I am not privy to jobs vision for the iPad because I haven’t seen much written specifically and it’s evolution is pure speculation as he’s dead now. But you can’t extrapolate from the iPhone and call it a day. And the iPad and the Watch as well are not practically products that have matured under the jobs umbrella. Critical consensus has been pretty positive about the progression of MacOS under Jobs (it was quite a rocky road but look by 2008).
rajacombinator 8y ago
Jobs was able to lift one or two products per cycle to greatness. Without him it’s a deluge of mediocrity.
- Twisell 8y ago
  Or maybe he’s just cleverly adapting to slower cycles in which customers pay more attention to durability of products pushed by a raising ecological awareness?

throwaway98121 8y ago

Very well stated. I have an older iPad, which I think is a fantastic device, that I use for general browsing, managing my portfolio, and personal email. There’s no reason for me to upgrade other than maybe as a status symbol. Honestly, none of my friends care how latest is my iPad, and neither do I. There’s no use case the newer version has that makes me think, “Wow, I need this in my life.” Speaking of which, combine all this with the ridiculous pricing of the new iPads, it just doesn’t make financial sense to throw away money.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
Referring to the Pro iPads of course, the consumer (6th generation?) ones are reasonably priced. You get basically an iPhone 7 processor inside with a decent screen and tablet form factor.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  The iPad Pros seem to have been an attempt to shift a certain content creation niche away from Macbooks towards the iPad range. They're nice devices for visual creatives and for music, albeit in a rather limited way. (Kraftwerk play live with iPads now.) But they're not a substitute for the full desktop experience. So you get a clash between Cook's smaller-lighter-thinner aesthetic and the real-world demands of professional content creation. The result is a very expensive toy you can do serious work on sometimes, but definitely not all the time.
  - dangus 8y ago
    I think we all have a very short memory in regard to the major changes Apple made to iOS on the iPad for iOS 11. I would expect that the iPad will become more macOS-like over time, especially with the addition of USB-C. I think that means waiting and seeing what iOS 13 brings to it.

bunnycorn 8y ago

Looks like you want a MacBook Pro. It's not Apple's fault Intel/AMD has been producing pile of trash CPU's for years.

bitrrrate 8y ago

Agreed. As some other posters have pointed out Apple has some amazing tech in FaceID, AirPods, an ECG on your wrist. But where they fall down is the assume pros don’t want ports in their laptops, think people don’t want customizable desktops and underserve their best devices with software. Not to mention charging money for mediocre services.

radium3d 8y ago

Hmm, I felt the same way about the iphone vs android when they were first competing. iOS felt very limited and still does to this day. I don't think this is a new problem inside Apple. Tim is no better or worse than Steve I think. Posted from my macbook :P

rorykoehler 8y ago

My wife uses it for illustrating. Nothing else comes close. You don't buy a Ferrari to race in rallys.

pier25 8y ago
That and consuming media are the only activities the iPad Pro shines. The rest are just meh.
- threeseed 8y ago
  iPad Pros are amazing at video editing and audio production. And I love it for doing architecture diagrams and also making changes to building plans for my home renovation. The 11inch model is also a great portable diary/productivity machine. I also have teachers in my family who use it for drawing and projecting mathematical formulas on a screen for their kids which they then email straight after the class. They are selling well for a reason because people use them for different things.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I pretty much doubt that, unless you plug them into a nice 21" screen display and an hardware console to drive production. Doable yes, amazing not really.
  - pier25 8y ago
    Most of what you mentioned there is drawing and using the pencil, which I concur works great. I completely disagree about video editing and audio production. Sure it's doable for small family videos, but absolutely not for anything remotely pro.
beezischillin 8y ago
AstroPad is a great app that allows people to use the iPad Pro like a Wacom Cintiq, especially when paired with their Luna Display. The dumbed-down Adobe drawing products are a joy to use. I will never quite understand why fully-featured apps don't learn a lesson from those --- gesture-based undoing is great when you're drawing! But they're really weak, compared to their desktop variants. With Photoshop on the horizon that might change but I fear that by trying to implement every other feature, they'll just ruin that great workflow the dumber versions of their apps have, unfortunately. A portable second display is also a great use for it. I tried to use it for coding, but I really hate the material the smart keyboard's made of (I own the first gen one so this might've changed since then), I just can't type on it because touching it freaks me out. I hate that the chose that material to cover the keys with. So with coding out of the way, recreational drawing, reading ebooks and watching movies is mostly what I use mine for. Unfortunately that's not anything close to the original promise of its capabilities. I love it and I use it daily but the problem is when I bought it, I expected to see some support for professional use for it, too. The strength of the Apple ecosystem used to be their app support by external developers --- so, let's say for example, when you bought a Samsung (or even Surface) device with a bunch of new features compared to vanilla Android (or a touch/pen-based Windows), you could be sure that nobody will ever enable you to use those efficiently so they were a waste of time even to consider as a reason to get the device, on the other hand, going with Apple meant the opposite. Frankly, it doesn't feel exactly true nowadays. Tim Cook's leadership gives me terrible flashbacks to the Microsoft Steve Ballmer-era.

luka-birsa 8y ago

I'd like to jump on this bandwagon. IMO a decline of a company can come in various forms and here we're seeing an empire built on mobile market growth starting to feel the reality of 1% yearly growth in a mature market. Apple is slowly declining (a percent per year) their market share (they are no longer number two - oppo/oneplus has that position now), next year they won't be number three (Huawei). What happens when they go below 10%? Will developer still deliver applications for OSX? Is there a possibility for the same scenario as it was in the Mac vs PC? Reality is that modern Android mobile phones are good enough for most. Unless you're really into the status symbol part of the Apple, they really don't have something special. Plus there is no need to upgrade a phone anymore. I bought my Galaxy S8+ a year after lunch (much cheaper) and would replace it only because of consumerism - to get a new phone. Arguably there is nothing that really warrants an upgrade today. Headphones, while a great move, won't help them in a long run - not enough margins and good competition. The silver lining with Apple is the that they have a growing services business. Too bad Netflix is kicking their ass in video content wars. Siri is also mostly mediocre. Homekit - who knows, what happens if your market share is falling. Reality is that Android won 3 years back. We'll see if Apple can turn around thanks to their endless coffers of cash. It's not over yet, but they need to do something and not just upgrade what they have.

hackersword 8y ago
Android loses when it comes to not having enough clout to enforce a standard on the manufacture and carriers. My last attempt at an android was a Samsung Note3 on Verizon. Pretty much every app had 3 versions - google/android version - samsung version - verizon version Locked bootloader so couldnt' really remove the duplicates. Critical Security update released by a google? Well first has to be approved by Samsung ... that takes a month at least , then approved by Verizon. Realistically if you saw the security update w/in 3 months that was pretty fast. So a zero day exploit ... 3 months waiting for patch. Android really won.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  Note 3 was like a century ago in 'smartphone years'. A lot has changed since then (Samsung handled the precise duplicate apps problem you're talking about on the most part). Also, even then Google had its own phones (e.g. Nexus) and the only fair comparison to iOS would be stock Android. Now, the new line of Samsung flagships are really smooth, hugely less clutter than before - however, it remains the case that the only fair comparison to iPhones would be with the Google Pixel line.

tolmasky 8y ago

It’s not attention to detail, it’s vision. There’s no purpose to these devices. Sometimes it seems like there’s too much attention to arbitrary details. For example, the thinness and speed of the iPad, but to what end? The original iPhone was rather underpowered even at the time for what it tried to do, but it was so crazy focused and the vision of what it would allow you to do so exciting, that you were willing to look past it. It didn’t matter that it didn’t have 3G or the best camera. Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Best chip, best camera, best number to write on the back of the box. Boring. As an aside, I am increasingly certain that the sad truth of the iPad today is that a majority of sales are probably the cheaper models used as Envoy terminals, POS devices, and conference room check-ins. If I count iPad’s I see day to day, it’s incredibly lopsided to these uses. What a waste. With Steve, you could draw a straight line from the original Mac to the iPad. You could see one relentless mission to tame unusable hardware into a friendly machine through software. You could imagine Steve wanting something like an iPad even with the original Mac. What’s the narrative of the hodge-podge of devices we have now? Vague speeches about “health” and “AR”, always troublingly highly reliant on the hope others will make use of these technologies. Apple used to lead by example, the first party software set the bar for what others should do. Nowadays there’s just the hope that Adobe bringing Photoshop to the iPad will breathe new life into it. Meanwhile, Apple has not released a new flagship app for the iPad since its original release with iWork and Garageband. It’s been 8 years! Apple can’t figure out a single new app that can take our breath away? If they’ve run out of ideas of how this thing can be used, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

bsder 8y ago
> Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Wrong. We know exactly what we want to do with these devices. However, Apple won't allow us to do those things. A friend of mine bought an iPad Pro before going on vacation so that he wouldn't need to bring his laptop. He wanted to upload/download his photos from his camera, share them to other people, do some light photo editing, hunt down tourist sites, book train tickets, etc. He had nothing but problems. My 2015 Macbook Pro? No issues at all. The iPad Pro went back and now he's back on his laptop.

jaabe 8y ago

I think you’re on to the core of the problem. Apple is a software company that build its own hardware because it had to. But for the past decade, they haven’t really made any interesting software. iOS is great for iPhones, it’s not great for a laptop replacement. I think OS/x would be a much better fit for the iPad Pro, but perhaps something completely new would be even better? I think the surface book shows us just why that is by the way. If I didn’t personally find windows so terrible, I would leave Apple for one of those in a heartbeat.

deleted 8y ago
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phodo 8y ago
Apple is a hardware company that prioritized design and built / bought (next step) software because it had to, and ignored web services because it didn’t value it (at least in earlier days)
- sschueller 8y ago
  Then why does apple play such hardball against open source software [1]? If they really are just a hardware company they should be supporting open source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Apple dislikes the GPL, not all open source (they work on Webkit, LLVM+Clang, CUPS, Swift, FoundationDB, and a few others). It's not so different from other companies (e.g. on Android, Google used the Linux kernel, but replaced all other userspace components of the traditional GNU/Linux distro by non-copyleft versions, including developing their own libc).
- jaabe 8y ago
  Maybe it started that way, but I personally buy into the old Jobs view on Apple as a software company. I do this because I myself primarily buy Apple products for their software. It’s anecdotal of course, but I own a MacBook Pro because I like OS/X more than Linux, and, certainly more than Windows, not because it has a touchbar. Similarly I primarily own an iPhone because I much prefer iOS to Android. I also prefer iCloud services and iMessage to all their similar options. In fact my biggest grief with the iPhone isn’t the missing headphone jack or the ludicrous price tag, it’s that Siri is so much worse than the other voice assistants. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect I’m not alone, and that’s why I think their core problem is software rather than hardware.

shaklee3 8y ago

I'm not sure why you're praising the performance, then slamming it for the os. A big part of the reason the performance is great is because it's not running a real desktop/laptop os. If it ran osx and had the same performance, that would be something

hiker512 8y ago

I do not get this comment. Why would a "pro" user try to use the Pro as a Laptop replacement? Rather think of a regular consumer, of which there are a lot more. Just doing a bit of browsing on the sofa, writing a few emails, reading news, watching Netflix in bed or playing some game. Personally, I read a lot of papers and ebooks I get via university on it. It's great for that. Not once did I want to use SSH on it, with or without an external keyboard. I use a proper laptop or computer for stuff like that.

fredsted 8y ago
> Why would a "pro" user try to use the Pro as a Laptop replacement? Apple advertises it as such.
- Twisell 8y ago
  The target is more the creatives pro, than the developers. IT folks are not the only one kind of pro out there. Many artists praise the Apple pencil and we musn’t Forget that creative industry is probably what kept Apple afloat during it’s dark age of the 1990’s so I’d say fair enought! I have literally no use of an Apple Watch or an iPad. But does it bother me than Apple sell them and make big margin on them? Why on earth?
  - thejohnconway 8y ago
    I’m an artist and I have the new iPad Pro. It’s the best piece of hardware I’ve ever owned, and the drawing experience the best I’ve had (better than a Wacom Cintiq). But I do have to agree with the sentiment that it’s software is a major problem. I think a lot of creative pros make things using several files, and organise their work by projects. iOS’s app-based organisation philosophy is consistently painful. So annoying, in fact, that I would probably never try to do anything remotely complicated on this iPad, even though it’s the fasted computer I’ve ever owned. On the hardware front, a 13” screen is no where near big enough for most creative work. I really think Apple needs to be way faster in scaling this thing up to 20+ inches. The hardware will come, but I worry that the whole philosophy of iOS is simply wrong for complex work, and it would take a lot of vision and courage from Apple to fix that.

pasta 8y ago

Did you ever use the hockey puck as mouse? Yes that's from the Steve area... Steve made Apple great but it's an illusion to think a company will grow forever. Steve was also lucky to have Apple in a time where a lot new stuff was developed. He didn't develop it, he applied it the right way. Things like touch screen and tablets were really new back then. But today there is not a lot that is new. VR is from the eighties, so is AI. So I think even today Steve would have troubles to keep Apple growing.

path411 8y ago
Or he would have likely kept applying new technology. New technology is still being invented. There are just less steve jobs to actually apply it. I see it like the current movie industry. Lots of reboots and old franchises as they are "safe bets" for the share holders. No one wants to be the guy to make a huge flop and get fired.

scarface74 8y ago

Yes because if Apple made the iPad Pro more attractive to developers all of their problems would be solved. Taking advice from the same audience who said in 2001 “less space than the Nomad, no wireless, lame” hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy....

matwood 8y ago

You're thinking as a programmer. I've accepted for programming I will always need a proper computer. But, as a very amateur photographer, the iPad Pro is amazing. I prefer using LR on the iPad Pro now. I also haven't had any cloud sync issues, speed or otherwise. With that said, there are plenty of improvements needed. File handling is certainly one of them. How to get my RAWs into LR for example is a pain. > Steve thought all features to the end. This is simply not true. If you were lucky enough to have your use case match Steves exactly, then maybe.

beerlord 8y ago
All of the problems OP mentioned are software problems. Software on iOS is kneecapped by the 30% cut that Apple takes. Reduce this down to as low as possible, and you will see a huge renaissance. 12% (like Epic) seems reasonable. Apps should cost $500 to launch and $100 yearly to maintain on the store, to ensure quality.

simonh 8y ago

They're not for everyone and every use case, but the app story is improving a lot. For example your comment about Word is out of date. Word for iOS is full features and has complete support for track changes and comments. Your point on sharing files via the cloud would also apply to laptops on Wifi as much as to iPads. Yes you can tether with a Cat-5 on a laptop, but most people don't bother and do pro work just fine. I was worried the iPad would get neglected since Android for tablets is practically abandonware at this point so it has no credible competition at the high end, but instead they're doubling down on the hardware and the software. iOS 12 for iPad was a huge upgrade and the larger screen sizes make running multiple apps side by side a lot easier. sales may have flattened, but they're consistently selling twice as many iPads as laptops.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

> This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Jobs didn't want the iPhone to have apps at all. The original vision was for all third party software to run inside Safari. This is the same man who didn't want slots in the Macintosh, and killed the floppy drive as soon as he returned to Apple. Jobs would have loved the iPad Pro.