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Comment Re:There is no unmet demand in the US (Score 1) 135

If we were to get vehicles at near China's prices its hard to argue that demand for evs wouldn't improve.

Not necessarily.....most of the folks that want and EV, have one.....there just is NOT the demand for them here in the US that you have in other parts of the world.

A lot of this is due to the recharging infrastructure not being in place unless you live at the extreme west and maybe the east coast too.

I live in the New Orleans area....and from the maps and charging station finders I've seen we Still have precious few public charging stations anywhere in this area....

This is typical for most of the US.

With that comes range anxiety, and there's a TON of people, about 1/3 of the nation's populace that can't charge at home due to being in apartment complexes with large parking nots and no chargers or renting homes without chargers out side or no off street parking.

Unless you own your home and can charge at home, it's just a PITA to deal with and EV over here for a significant % of the populace.

I don't want one.....wouldn't work for me.

Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 54

You know you can buy a new iPad for $349 right? You don’t need the Pro version for you use case.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

  • Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
  • The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
  • The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

Comment Re:Does the author know what a tablet is? (Score 2) 54

This is what a tablet is. Bigger than a phone but not quite a laptop or desktop. There are use cases for this. In my house they are basically portable streaming devices. Someone is watching their show on the living room TV, grab the iPad/tablet and watch your show in your room.

The problem is that an iPad Pro is mostly only useful as a portable streaming device, but costs as much as a laptop ($1300). Meanwhile, you can get an Android tablet of similar size for under $200, which is about what one would reasonably expect to pay for a portable streaming device that is going to get mistreated by your kids and eventually broken.

The product just doesn't make sense at its price point.

Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 3, Informative) 54

More the point, when it came time to find a tablet for use on my electronic organ, the iPad Pro wasn't even a serious consideration. To use it for that would have been a minimum of $1300 for one, and would have likely meant wanting to have two side by side, for a whopping $2600, and trying to figure out a way to control them both simultaneously would have also been infeasible.

Instead, I bought an Android tablet for $450 that is big enough to show two pages at once, controlled by BTLE buttons in the piston bar and USB foot switches mounted for easy knee control. The extent to which Android works better than iPad for that purpose was jaw-dropping.

And if and when I decide that I need a more portable tablet for reading sheet music and my choice is between a $1300 iPad Pro and a $199 13-inch Android tablet from Walmart, you can safely assume I will buy the latter as well. Why? Because it's a single-purpose device, and an iPad provides no obvious second purpose that isn't already fulfilled WAY better by my laptop. I can run 100% of the software that I need to run on my laptop. I can run 5% of the software that I need to run on an iPad.

The iPad Pro, as currently designed, is a waste of money for most users, and cannot fill any large enough niche for a majority of users to justify its price point, with the possible exception of people who use a computer only for browsing the web. And truthfully, most of them don't want to pay the price of a good laptop for something that's only a half-a**ed toy by comparison, but at least they *could*.

Yeah, Apple missed the mark. Very badly. And we've been saying it for more than a decade.

At this point, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that they should have made limited use of all Mac apps possible on iPadOS, and also made it easy to write apps that mix UIKit and AppKit views arbitrarily, so that Mac apps can be converted to UIKit a piece at a time, adding gesture-based controls and floating button palettes and other approaches for making the app usable on iPadOS without a mouse, while still using the rendering code for their complex views and stuff, rather than forcing app developers to completely rewrite their user interfaces from scratch for iOS.

And at this point, it should be obvious to anyone with the slightest clue that not having support for 100% of Mac apps makes iPad Pro unusable as a laptop replacement for a majority of users. The folks who could switch mostly already have, but the problem is that the vast majority of users have a few apps that they run that don't work on iOS, and they are *different* apps, so you can't even point at a few dozen or even a few hundred apps and apply pressure on them to convert their apps and make major headway.

Open up iPad Pro or delete one digit from the price point. Those are the only two options that would make it a real contender in the market, IMO.

Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 54

Unrealised potential how? It does what Apple wants it to do. This is the Apple way. Look elsewhere if you don't want to be impacted by this mentality.

We do look elsewhere. There's just not anything else on the market that has any real potential, either.

iPad could have been the laptop killer. Instead, the iPad peaked back in 2013, and sales have been pretty steadily declining since then. The problem is in part that the only thing they are really good at is media consumption, and once people buy one, they don't ever need to replace it, because the new ones aren't meaningfully better for that purpose.

And when they do replace them, they often end up buying some cheap Android tablet to replace them, because the iPad isn't meaningfully better for that purpose than Android tablets costing a fraction as much.

Comment Re:Could be even more profitable (Score 1) 75

They could have issued an NFT version of the product instead. I'm sure lots of Apple fanbois and fangrrrls would have taken the bait, and setting up the NFT would have been even cheaper than the probably-sub-five-dollar cost of the $230-dollar product shown in the TFA.

Profitable? This could be expensive for Apple. Apple has given iPhone a sock. iPhone is FREEEEEEEEEEE!

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