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Comment Re:Does the author know what a tablet is? (Score 1) 15

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 1) 15

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) 15

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) 34

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!

Comment Re:Check their data sources (Score 1) 96

Not sure these sources are any worse than other country's self-reporting. . . I don't trust any country's self reporting. What would make these more numbers convincing to me is if these sources jived with independent sources.

One reason these numbers do seem plausible is China is FAR AND AWAY the biggest polluter by country and has nearly tripled it's CO2 from 2000. Leveling off should be congratulated... but in the context of the incredible increases over the last few decades it's not as unbelievable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Can someone smarter than me.... (Score 1) 31

Uh uh. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking 'Does this inject a security flaw or hazard?' Now to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all decades just how insecure Microsoft software is. But being this is a Linux kernel, the most powerful kernel in the world, and will blow Microsoft's kernel clean off the rack, you've gotta ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya?

LoB

Comment Re:tell me about it (Score 2) 41

>"I run a very small boutique hosting service and traffic has more than doubled since AI, all attributable to them. OpenAI in particular just seems to come along and hit like 30-60K links per day, no robots.txt rate limiting, just a "gimme all your data" scraping posture. Amazon is by far the worst, "

Oh, there is far worse now. Last week my club website was hit by a full-on distributed bot-net scraping our wiki. Up to a dozen hits per second from 250,000 unique IP addresses all over the world (but mostly Singapore and Brazil addresses). All of them ignoring robots.txt. All of them pretending to be people/browsers. It crippled the old/small server, so I took the content down and the traffic continued for 5 MORE DAYS still requesting various links into the content, until it finally started tricking to 2 or so per minute.

Comment Re:Labor is your most important resource (Score 1) 86

it might be better to pay people based on the value they create in the world instead of whatever the market decides

- market is a collection of all people involved, who is better suited to decide on what the value is other than all of the people as a collective vote?

doctor who proscribes pumpkin seeds to cure cancer actually create negative value, yet they get paid quite a lot sometimes, so therefor the market is an ineffeciant way of deciding how much to pay people.

- they are removing the money from the gullible, which may be argued is a better way to redistribute the money (all done willingly even though misguidedly).

people who make a ton of money by owning things but do no work at all, such as heirs to large fortunes

- the market has already decided that the parents of heirs were productive enough, that even their heirs can now enjoy the fruits of the labor of the people who made the money.

Most americans at this point will piss themselves and run away from dangerous thoughts like these.

- dangerous by what measure?

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