The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
Reality is actually more exciting and more boring. Apple sold about $20B worth of iPads last year alone and it has a sizable install base for all these services Apple is pushing: TV+, Arcade, News+, Apple Music, iCloud, etc.There’s a lot to criticize about the software, it is actually very easy to criticize the software for not doing the things you want it to do because it seems like it ought to be able to, and there is obviously a better way to do the thing you want to do if Apple would only do X, Y, and Z and stop doing A and B to hold it back.Here’s where reality gets really boring though: iPads are only tablets, and only of the stuff in your bag, leave on a table or have it permanently docked in some kind of kiosk variety. That lends itself to being a bit better at some applications than others, but there‘a some applications it will always be downright inferior to compared to a laptop or phone. It’s not going to fit in my pocket better than my phone, and it’s not the entire self-contained package that my laptop is, nor does it have the benefit of always being plugged into a wall socket being able to draw essentially unlimited power that my desktop has. I could try to replicate some of the benefits of those devices with some creative planning and a big enough pile of money with some mixed success, but in exchange for not being as good for certain applications, it is absolutely top tier for reading and drawing. It’s all about the trade offs you are willing to make.If what a tablet is better at is more important to you than what a laptop is better at, and the few things you would prefer to do on a laptop can still be done on a tablet, you might make the tradeoff to spend more money to have both, or you might make the tradeoff to save some money and only have the tablet. Neither is a bad choice to make.Putting it that way is boring though, and it doesn’t play into the narrative that we’re only going to have one or the other at some far flung point in the future and tablets are the predestined winner of that zero sum game, you know, just like how we only have GUIs these days and positively no one uses what we once called the command-line interface.In retrospect the above comment is less a direct response to Gruber’s article, and more a response to a broad swath of sentiments expressed here in this thread and across the part of the web that spends too much time talking about Apple. It should be understood as such anyway.