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The big questionmark I see with Apple is: They artificially reduce the usefulness of their products. Can this strategy work out in the long run? They market th
by itry 14y ago
The big questionmark I see with Apple is: They artificially reduce the usefulness of their products. Can this strategy work out in the long run?
They market themselfes as uber-user-friendly. But thats not the feeling I get from their devices. I often feel frustrated by my ipad. Examples:
* I was on holiday in a hotel. Before leaving in the morning I looked up the road map of the local subway stations. They had a nice PDF so I wanted to save it. I didnt find a menu entry for that. I thought "Whats going on here? Where do you hide something as simple as the save command, Apple? I dont have time for searching!". In a hurry, I went to the internet for help and Googled "ipad save pdf". Answer: You cannot do it. What the fuck? You sell me a computer and then you dont allow me to save files on it? A real pain for no reason. I grabbed my android phone from my pocket, saved the PDF and was ready to go.
* Some days ago. I went out for lunch with a friend and wanted to show her a couple of photos I recently made. So I plugged my ipad into my notebook with the usb cable to copy the photos over. When I dragged the photos onto the ipad i got "action not supported". What? I got a strange feeling... googled "copy photos to ipad". And again... not possible. Is this a joke? Ok, so started a webserver on my notebook and then copied one by one in Safari.
Yes, I probably could achieve those actions with additional software. Itunes on my other machines and some apps on my ipad. But I dont want to. I dont feel comfortable with that. I have certain expectations about the basic functions of a computer. I have enough other tablets, phones and notebooks laying around.
* Development. Last year I hired a programmer to write a special tablet software for me. When we planned to go ios or android, from what I understood with ios you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the software on your tablet. While on android you can just get an apk file and run it. So it was a no brainer to go with android. And it worked like a charm.
I heard similar stories from people who wanted to copy mp3s over to their ios devices. And from people who wanted to use their iphones for tethering. I told them "Well, on my android, theres a button for that. It must be on your iphone somewhere too". Just to find out, that even the iphone hardware would support it, there is no software for it built in.
Can that work? Artificially reducing the usefulness of your own product? Even though the competition is offering fully functional products?
Are there any historical examples?
- snprbob86 14y agoPDFs are easily saved by selecting "open in iBooks". Or, you can bookmark a PDF by URL.
- itry 14y agoI dont see "open in iBooks". I have an ipad2. Does it have this?
- egze 14y agoDo you have iBooks installed?
- itry 14y agoNot that I know of. If I have to do this, then please see the "additional software" part of my post.
- kunaalarya 14y agoI would assume 99% of users install iBooks on their iPad. It's not that hard to download it.
- ghshephard 14y agoIt's a free install. They don't include it as part of the operating system so they can upgrade it on an independent cycle. iBooks is one of the "Ten Apps that every iPad User should have" I'd also recommend GoodReader - which should be on every iPad (Except the US Air Force, who got worried it was written by a Russian)
- DominikR 14y agoIt doesn't make sense to argue about this, since different users expect different things from their computers. Either you think that users should be able to save any files they want to their devices (and move them to other devices), or you don't. Personally, I wouldn't accept this even if iBooks was preinstalled. There are so many other file types that you just cannot move/save.