For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

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.

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!

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.