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Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 50

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:Uncanny (Score 1) 50

And neither is good when your hands are full doing other tasks. I'd love to see you do the dishes with one hand while holding your iPad or iPhone with the other, all the while watching videos on a tiny screen rather than paying attention to what you are doing.

1) Ummm what? You know they make these things called ”stands" these days? Some of them are built into cases. 2) You do know the point of "podcasts" is to listen to them and not watch them, right?

These are the standards of iPad users.

The problem seems to be you do not understand how technology works. So let me explain how I use my iPad. Before washing the dishes, I put on a podcast and play it on the speakers. My hands are free to do dishes. If I am watching something, I flip the case so the iPad is standing at angle, and I position it where I can see it. I occasionally look at the screen while I do dishes. Hopefully you learned how people use technology.

Comment Re:Does the author know what a tablet is? (Score 2) 50

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) 50

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) 50

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 Does the author know what a tablet is? (Score 1) 50

Apple spent years positioning the iPad as a third category between phones and computers.

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.

Comment Re:Could be even more profitable (Score 1) 69

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: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 82

The first time you add a website to your home screen, it installs the website's service worker. You have to use the Internet for that, just as you have to use the Internet to download an application from Apple's App Store.

So the service worker installs the entire Grab site to you phone? Grab handles food delivery, grocery delivery, package delivery, ride sharing, financial services, etc.. That seem extremely inefficient to load every single function to your phone just because you visited their website. Also I would imagine that working for Grab requires different functions than consumers. But according to you, every time someone visits Grab, it should install all these functions to your browser. I doubt it.

And I'm curious about what the blockers for even a partial PWA implementation have been during each of these 12 years.

Maybe you should research that before suggesting a solution that has been available for 12 years but not used. But let's step back. If you look at all the companies in the US that do food delivery like Grab: Doordash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Favor, Grubhub, Postmates, etc. They ALL use native apps. All of them. Maybe you should ask these companies why they don't use PWAs.

I don't see where I "assume[d] to know better than Grab".

You suggested a solution that Grab, Doordash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Favor, Grubhub, Postmates, etc. do not use. I pointed out maybe these companies know way more about their needs and solutions than you. Do you accept that?

Comment Re:Mac Mini servers are the worst idea ever (Score 1) 82

1) You do know the M series chips offer the best performance per watt right now compared to Intel and AMD. 2) Saving costs means little if your hardware accomplishes zero goals. Grab develops iOS apps on these machines; what "real data platform" do you recommend to replace Macs?

Comment Re:What? how long can that possibly take? (Score 1) 160

Again my point is Windows does not always boot in seconds unlike what you asserted. I have worked in a few companies where they are probably still using the weakest CPUs off 5400 rpm HDDs. Booting anything on those machines will be slow. I am can imagine a company like a Bank of America being one of them.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 82

The service worker API is explicitly designed to avoid downasaurs in "offline-first" use cases. It acts as a proxy to serve the shell document, style sheet, scripts, and stale data, even without an Internet connection. That's why I asked what obstacles there are other than a downasaur.

And you have not considered to enter offline-first, the service worker API has to load? Again, Grab has been doing this for 12 years. PWA is not new and they have chosen native apps.

I have not presented my ideas to Grab because I am not a user of Grab. I would imagine that most readers of Slashdot are likewise not users of Grab.

But most of us did not assume to know better than Grab unlike you.

Comment Re:Knee-Jerk reaction. (Score 1) 88

Yes I realize it probably took decades for all those warehouses and neighborhoods to develop around the airport and it would now be hard to relocate - air travel is very safe right up until it isn't.

You do know that Louisville is THE major distribution hub for UPS in the US, right? Even if the UPS warehouses were not already built decades ago, it seems to be pure common sense that UPS would build warehouses to hold cargo . . . for their cargo hub.

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