Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Releases New 'What's a Computer?' iPad Pro Ad

MacOS isn't going anywhere. We're going to continuously see iOS features come to Mac and certain enterprise apps and tools come to the iPad Pro. I firmly believe the Mac will always be around for Devs and people that feel more comfortable and grew up on desktop operating systems. it will just be seamless with iOS until they eventually merge or get as close as they can without neutering the OS. Apple has gone from a one sized fits all model under Jobs 3.5 inch iPhone, 9.7 inch iPad, few Mac models, to more complexity. It had to happen. An iPhone 5SE will fit some people, 6S for some, and 6S plus for some. We all have different needs. I can say for certain that an iPad Pro is the most accessible computer ever made. You go to an Apple Store on a Saturday and the Mac tables are all but abandoned with all of the children playing with the iPads. It's not meant to replace a computer for most of us. I firmly believe it's meant for these 10-18 year olds who have grown up on touch screen devices and will feel more comfortable on an iPad to get them through college. If your 60 year old mother wanted something to browse the web, send e-mail, read books, watch movies, etc you can't tell me that an iPad isn't better for her than a computer? That's the beauty of iOS...the simplicity. A 2 year old can pick it up to a 80 year old and everyone in between. My iPad Pro 12.9" has supplanted my Mac for 80% of tasks. Until it gets an IDE, multitasking gets a lot better, and something happens with ergonomics I'll still keep a Mac around. Even then I'll probably always have one. Make no mistakes about it though...the iPad is the future of computing. I don't care what sales data says. It was a new market and people don't upgrade their tablets every year or two. They hang onto them. I absolutely hate iPad's split screen though...absolutely terrible.
 
iOS is much too restrictive of an environment to be a true professional productivity device. The iPad is great for reading and media consumption and light creation like typing an essay or something.

For professional use, IMO the Surface Pro is where it's at. Full fledged Windows with unlimited multitasking and as many simultaneous windows/apps open as RAM allows. You get the exact same desktop apps that you have used for years and are familiar with, but with the added functionality of touch and pen if needed for drawing and markup. The gimped iOS versions of things like Office, Adobe's suite of apps, etc require retooling your whole work flow. Not to mention the difficulty of importing and exporting files and documents with the lack of external storage and file system management.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 5105973
keysofanxiety said:
Yeah you're absolutely right. Nobody can doubt that an iPad is a replacement computer for many people. For others, it wouldn't be.

As Jobs once said (and as others mentioned in this thread) – the computer is a truck. No car will ever replace a truck, as a truck is specialised and does what it does best. It won't sell as many units as a car (iPad), but it'll do what it needs to do better than any other vehicle.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it looks more and more like Tim thinks most of us would be satisfied with something in-between, like an SUV (beefed-up iPad Pro).
 
Osty said:
That's an artificial limitation and one that Apple is starting to address (Swift Playgrounds).

You can write iOS apps on anything - even Notepad++ on Windows if that takes your fancy. You can compile Swift and Objective-C on Linux.

The only part of the process that currently must be done on a Mac is compiling Cocoa libraries and submitting to the App store. Apple could replace that with a build service or Linux tomorrow.
Click to expand...
But they don't.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost
What's a computer?

How about a device where you can actually purchase an e-book, download it, and start reading it. I don't know if they've since fixed the issue, but my wife had to give up on using her iPad as her primary machine because you could not buy an e-book through the Kindle app, nor through Amazon's web site using Safari. Instead, you had to get on a real computer and make the purchase, then you could download it from the cloud using the Kindle app.

As long as Apple plays games with people's expectations by taking an exorbitant cut from app content purchases made on these devices (making it infeasible for content providers to sell their content through their apps at a profit, leading them to completely disable the functionality), trying to portray these devices as desktop replacements is a joke.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost
I liked the idea behind the iPad Pro and was very excited before it came out, just to find that Microsoft retains a big lead with its Surface Pro series. In my business we need to read a lot of papers. I see colleagues printing and marking papers with pen-markers and storing them in folders on shelves. For me that's a no-go in a paperless century. On the Surface you can have DrawBoard, which is an app MADE for PDF marking and storage. But I am in an Apple environment and I thought "well, this is what Apple is going to do, productivity for every day life and use". I was very, very disappointed that there is no app for the iPad Pro anywhere even close to the utility of DrawBoard. Also, the pen does not have an eraser function per se, but is just a buttonless stick.
Like others here, I see the future as a merger of laptop and tablet into one device. However, MS has made the biggest leap towards that yet and Apple is seriously lagging behind. This new commercial only makes me think "time to catch up".
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost and 5105973
chinesedemo said:
"What's a computer"???

The thing you used to make before you got in the watch band business.
Click to expand...

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to make some silly Watch band comment demeaning the article. It only took 14 pages of comments.
 
Paradoxally said:
But can it run Xcode? No?

I thought so.
Click to expand...

Not yet. But soon.

We will be forced to ditch our grandpa boxes at some point. Touch is the future. Touch. Touch your code. Feel your for loops. Let the iPad Magic happen.Touch. In a distraction free environment. One task at a time. If you want to reference an email while writing another, you're screwed. Have fun jumping back and forth between those emails!

Oh yeah, and if you're lucky maybe you'll be able to use that stupid 3/4 view thing. '

Man I hate iPads. They're the abomination of computers. I wish Apple's marketing department would get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to sell a super overpriced overgrown phone as a serious computer. A serious computer has a real keyboard. A serious computer has an operating system that can do multiple things AT THE SAME TIME. A serious computer has a file system.

Damnit, I'm all for innovation. I'm all for reinventing the wheel. Some things, don't make sense. Saying the iPad is a computer, is like saying that replacing the steering wheel on a car with left and right go pedals is a good idea. It's been 48 years since the Mother of All Demos, and 43 years since the Xerox Alto came out, and the mouse still lives on as a pointing device. Physical keyboards still live on. OVERLAPPING WINDOWS ARE STILL A THING.

I want a friggin laptop update. I want a Mac Pro with a top of the line GPU from the current generation. I don't want a shiny tacky ass screen covered in fingerprints that has to keep getting wiped down with a cloth. I don't want $0.99 crapps.

*RUNS AWAY SCREAMING*
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: JamesPDX and jeffreyg
Chair-Sama said:
knowing apple they won't.

pretty soon there won't be IOS either.
there will just be :apple:OS
One operating system to break ALL of our devices as once.
Click to expand...
such a ******** argument, i've owned many apple devices over the last 10 years. NEVER had a device break due to an OS.
 
nt5672 said:
Never happen, there is a reason they outsourced Swift and developed a completely new build system that is linux compatible. Development will move to linux or the cloud in the next couple of years and there will not be any need, in Apple's mind, for Macs or real computer like performance. In 5 years, once all of the source code is in the Apple cloud, freedom to develop computer programs will be gone or expensive.
Click to expand...
I'm certainly no expert, but that doesn't sound very secure. I can only go off of my husband's negative reaction to the last keynote when Tim and company demonstrated how you could be working on something on one device and pick up and work on it in a different device. I thought it sounded cool but my husband had security concerns about it. And that part where Apple goes in and cleans off dormant files on your computer to save space really got my husband irritated and saying Apple better keep its mitts off of his files and there had better be a way to turn that feature off.

My husband and his development team use cloud computing for a lot but there are some things they work on that have to be secured and locked down and walled off from any cloud that they don't completely control. They're not going to trust sensitive data and products in development to Apple's cloud, that's for darned sure.

My husband has a large iPad Pro and a smaller one but he does a lot of his road warrior work on the latest Surface Pro these days. He's not a developer himself, anymore. He was really quite the Apple evangelist for many years but even he's thinking they're slipping a bit in terms of meeting the needs of professionals.

Not just in terms of the hardware itself but just keeping new products available in a timely manner. He wanted a certain new laptop in time for a business trip and even well past a month after its release and even with connections as a high volume business customer, he couldn't get the laptop in time and bought a MS Surface instead. That may have been the beginning of what might be the end of my husband's exclusive business relationship with Apple.

Apple can't just tell an executive who has had his company spend massive amounts of money with Apple for over a decade that they can't sell him a laptop that was released well over a month ago. Apple can't do that to any customer. Executive, student...anybody that has a reasonable need can't be left hanging indefinitely or they will find alternatives. And some will end up preferring those alternatives.
 
  • Like
Reactions: chinesedemo, Benjamin Frost, nt5672 and 2 others
cgsnipinva said:
I don't think this indicates the demise of the Mac. The fact is traditional computers (desktop/laptops) don't need hardware refresh as often as they used to. The chips/memory/video capabilities are more than enough to handle even moderate to power users. I would argue we should judge Apple's focus based on software updates.
Click to expand...

Even if it's no harbringer to the Mac's demise, you have to admit the timing of this ad amidst a total lack of Mac updates is uncanny at best.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost, 5105973 and simonmet
I've always been a huge fan of Apple's ad campaigns. With that being said, wtf is this? Did they not even try here? Looks a bit too much like every MS Surface Pro ad ever..
 
When Apple releases an iPad Pro with touch enabled OSX, then we'll finally be able to ditch our laptops. Until then, it's not going to happen.
 
I think the ad is aimed at the masses who still use an old laptop or a desktop for checking their emails and looking at porn.

Its a shame that it comes across as condescending as it does. They should really fire ad team behind it.

Also I hate to point it out but the ipad pro with pencil and smart case is the price of a fully equipped mac book! But it's missing so many pro features that the macbook (non pro) isn't.

If apple filled all tge gaps in ios I might be able to understand their thinking.

Touch input is a poor second to touch pad and mouse point input. You are more accurate and require far less movement to move around the screen. Arms get very tired on ios compared to a laptop.

Touch input isn't that good IMHO it should be used differently as a track pad to control on screen mouse. But the nail in the coffin of touch is keyboards. They work great on phones but I don't think there is one nice implementation on a tablet. Full side just isn't the solution.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost and 5105973
Osty said:
Just in the consumer space. Computers have been able to multitask since the 1960s - before the desktop metaphor took root, we used to call multitasking time sharing.
Click to expand...

Ok. But my point was that those single task DOS computers were considered computers. So ability to multitask isn't essential for a computer.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Osty
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back