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.

Sounds like they're working on doing exactly that. Chrome, YouTube, Android, and a bunch of other Google stuff seems to use FFMPEG, not to mention any other open source projects they do this to. In 90 days Google might just be saying "hewooo Internet! Here's a vulnerability in most of our software that we didn't even try to fix!"

And I'm guessing you still did not spring for the iPad Pro.

If only they didn't keep sending away people who weren't gang members based on false accusations and thinly veiled racism.

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.

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.

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.

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

How do you decide what the value of someone's work is?

The problem came up before the Russian revolution. The socialist revolutionaries thought yours was a great idea, but the best they could come up with for actually assigning value was "um, a committee of some kind maybe?"

The market answer is that competitive buyers will pay you what your work is worth. That obviously requires competitive buyers, and the absence of obstacles like, for example, health insurance benefits interfering with your ability to switch employers or go out on your own.

We also have 2022 and 2023 settlements of similar merchants vs. credit card companies lawsuits that haven't resulted in mass chaos.

I suppose they could take my "rejected" card for an additional fee. A great way to ensure I never go there again, but up to them I suppose.

Funny. American restaurants almost univesally expect an additional fee of 15-30% called a bri.. er, "tip" but you'll boycott one over the 2% they might pass on to you to use a reward card?

They just make insane profits because of the volume of product that they move.

Walmart's return on assets is ~7% which is not bad, but is certainly not insane. They'd do a lot better liquidating all their stock and stores and sticking the money in a NASDAQ index fund.

Microsoft's ROA is ~18% and Nvidia ~77%.

Walmart's net profit of $15 billion is a BIG NUMBER but only compared to something like an individual's net income. The median American household's ROA seems to be about 42%, although you could argue that should be a little lower if you properly accounted education as an asset.

But Star Wars says clones are way better than robots!

But they can't stay mega wealthy without billions of rubes to steal money from! Oh, and suppress them from just pressing delete on all those stolen numbers.

Prove that. IQ is so complex we've not even begun to find a genetic link. It's been tried forever; still no progress. How about we just make heads and brains larger? nope. Elephants have about twice the brain we do. Brain development is by far the biggest factor once you rule out major defects which do impact IQ - but a normal brain is capable of anything... including relearning to function with huge portions blown away... just imagine what an undamaged brain can learn... if we can figure out how to teach it.