This is fine. We’re waiting for some new computing paradigm to come in and revolutionize the way we use tablets, but these new computing paradigms and their killer apps don’t come often.
The killer app for smartphones was having a web browser in your pocket. Super damn useful. Maybe tablets just don’t have a killer app on the horizon, and that’s fine? Like how hard drives for 5.25″ bays got replaced by 3.5″ drives, and now SSDs. It completely upturned the industry, but as a consumer I just don’t care. An SSD is just nicer than a 3.5″ HDD for general use and that’s enough for it to take over.
The iPad gets a few years of life as a pure tablet computer, and it has a whole ecosystem of apps designed around that. Now it gets an optional keyboard + mouse, and it will start getting apps built around that paradigm—but you can’t ignore the fact that the keyboard is optional. If the iPad had appeared with a keyboard + mouse from day one, half the apps would never have worked without a keyboard or mouse because they would be simple ports of desktop apps running full-screen.
What I get out of this is a decent, comfortable device which is easier to use than a smartphone and more convenient to carry around than a laptop. A reasonable niche doesn’t have to be a revolution. Half the apps I have on my iPad are half-baked ports from iOS. I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of half-baked desktop ports join them.
Personally, I think the technology just isn't there yet and there's a user interface design issue as much as there is a lack of software.
What could make a tablet come alive for me? First, a precise stylus technology like wacom or similar is a must. The only tablets I've ever found regular use for had this feature. I currently use my remarkable tablet the most, if you want to even call it a tablet. If I can't write on it, I think a tablet is pretty useless. It's clunky and hard to hold and move around with. But I regularly carry books or a pen and writing pad, etc.
Next up, the real breakaway technology would be some type of hybrid screen that can act as both an E-ink screen and something more conventional with back-lighting and color. Something good enough to watch a movie on.
Next, input technology on a tablet sucks. I think tablets should have physical buttons and multiple USB ports and things like that. Bluetooth can be done right, but it's so often done with such cheap hardware that the end result is just unusable, and it's not a real option. A better wireless connection standard could work, particularly one that specified hardware capabilities that were actually sufficient.
Finally, in terms of software, I think the real breakaway technology would be a really seamless and effortless cloud syncing where you never really have to leave one computing environment for another. If I'm reading something on my computer, and I realize its time to make dinner or something, I'd love to be able to just pick up my tablet and carry on where I left off without really having to do anything. Just turn on my tablet and it acts like a seamless extension of my desktop or something.
There's a LOT of technologic magic that would have to happen to make that work though! It may not ever be quite possible, and worse, it may not even be desirable for a broad user base! And none of the above really address the complete scope of user input issues. Keyboards are great. Most modern UI design is crap compared to old-school keyboard navigation. (Though I must once again give a shout-out to Microsoft's Office approach to this. No need to remember an impossilby long list of shortcuts. One press of the alt key and your path is illuminated before you. Whoever designed that concept deserves a medal.)
I think a lightweight 2 in 1 workstation concept with a stylus is probably just a superior idea all around.
The ultimate, yet-to-be-realized killer app of a tablet would be to act as large drawing, editing, and writing surface in augmented reality -- and a cutaway-plane viewer.
Currently, it's mostly used (1) to consume content, (2) as a large touchscreen input device for skeuomorphic apps, and (3) as a drawing tablet.
There’s a whole universe of control surfaces beyond QWERTY keyboards and mice. The iPad is a versatile, cheap, and most importantly mobile substitute/companion for a wide range of professional equipment consoles.
I still want the thing that was supposed to happen a while ago. The phone that is the tablet that is the desktop. You just plug it in to the appropriate form factor, but the computing device is the same.
Why do you want this, though? File syncing is a largely solved problem, and the difference between a "laptop-shaped thing that you can dock your phone with" and "a fully functional laptop" is like $20-$40, at least to be on par with the speed of a phone powering a laptop shell? Why not just spend a little extra and have a full computer?
There are a few reasons I want this outside of file syncing.
1) It somewhat feels like it could be less wasteful. It may only be on the appearance level, but I end up with a new phone about every 2 years, a new computer about every 3, a new monitor...much less often. If my phone was a smart client for these other input devices, I feel like I would be upgrading my phone about the same, but wouldn't be upgrading a laptop as often.
2) It "feels" like the same device. Though I have file sharing, I don't have desktop sharing. The file I stuck on my desktop on my laptop isn't in the same space on my phone. It feels like they are synced, rather than just being my workspace.
3) I have to duplicate my apps on each device, and that is not always possible, so I end up with a comparable app, or having to switch devices. This is becoming less common, but still, do I need to have multiple versions of the same software on each different device and different OS?
4) Notifications everywhere. When I'm being summoned on multiple messaging apps, I'm getting notifications on at least 3 devices! Yes, I could turn notifications off, but obviously, I need some notifications. If I had only one device, acting as the smart hub to other input devices, in theory, it would know which device I'm active on, and just ring that.
At the same time, we work a bunch with graphics, so I don't think I'm getting decent developer capable graphics card in a mobile device anytime soon, but I think other users could move to this sort of paradigm fairly easily.
Pen-based note taking or drawing already seems to be a (small) killer-app. I've heard several people say they bought a Surface or an iPad Pro purely for one of those two tasks.
The killer app for the iPad is to be paired with Zoom as a sketching device for meetings, a shared whiteboard that actually works and you can write rapidly and accurately on.
I've always wanted live monitoring from SLR/Nice Camera straight to iPad for focus/composition monitor. There are hacks to get there now, but they all suck and cost a lot.
This is really a very good point. The iPad still has a hard time looking for its killer app. And the pull to make the iPad more capable is, at its heart, “Why both an iPad and a laptop? My phone absorbed so many of the devices I used to carry; why can’t the iPad do the same?”
When it’s not trying to be all things to all people, Apple has a good story: there’s a single computing surface that spans the edge and the cloud, and whichever device you pick up should give you a window into it, though not always the same window.
So I can read web pages and send mail from my phone, but in many contexts my laptop is superior. The iPad is great somewhere in between but doesn’t leave the house. What the iPad did let me do was switch back to a smaller phone.
Another way to look at that last issue: the phone is hyper mobile. I can open an excel spreadsheet on it, in a pinch, and even edit it if it’s incredibly necessary. But never would I use it as my primary spreadsheet interface. And that’s OK. Likewise it’s a pain to pull out my laptop to look something up when I’m standing up someplace outside my office. That’s OK too.
> They're ubiquitous anywhere [an embedded device] is needed.
Just like the Mac Mini. I’ve heard people ask why Apple doesn’t kill off the Mac Mini since it’s not an extremely popular consumer device. But apparently it finds lots of embedded use. I’ve read for example that some casino floors have thousands of Mac Minis hidden behind cabinets controlling gaming machines.
I worked at a startup that made the bottom-tier unix box for ATT at one time. Trouble was, ATT stores just used it as a sacrificial offering, moving all their customers up to the next tier for a small increase in price. So we sold almost none.
They got used in Texas in gas pumps. Our whole inventory, bought out for this embedded use. Never mind they had a screen and keyboard (kind of a terminal-like deal). They just mounted them sideways inside the pump!
I agree; the iPad would be a Fortune 500 business on its own.
But the "killer app" is the product-making application that defines the product, pulling it into ubiquity (the original example was VisiCalc and the Apple II). The iPad has yet to find one that makes people say "oh, it's an X". Instead, as you say, it's spread around on a bunch of relatively small-volume apps.
It has an excellent toolchain, the best hardware, the best security and has a much better assurance of support for years in a way that no small competitor can offer.
For interface to custom controllers, and back-end databases. Because they solve the software distribution problem; because they have a standard user interface; because they have rich tool support; because you can find developers by the dozens.
I don't really see this - in my experience Apple makes the distribution process more difficult (but I've never published an internal app through App Store) and iOS developers charge more than Android/JS frontend devs and are harder to find (at least in my local market)
Who is comparing this to custom embedded solutions ? Android and Windows tablets are dropin substitutes in this scenario that are cheaper and more flexible.
The App Store in itself is by no means a killer app if all the apps available on the App Store are turds.
I'm not saying they are - I'm an iPad Pro owner and user and there's a few apps I use on a regular basis - Shapr 3D most recently but there are certainly no apps that mean I absolutely need an iPad Pro for as there are equivalent apps, usually better, on desktop or smartphone.
I'm not a gamer but have a few iPad games which are good but again, other platforms tend to have the same or similar games that are either better suited to that platform (console or PC) or are just better than the iPad equivalent.
What the iPad only, sadly, does better than smartphones and better than laptops, is YouTube. And that is possibly it, at the moment. I hope things improve because my iPad Pro cost me a lot of money.
I've used a 12.9" iPad Pro as a laptop replacement since its release in 2018 and I'm happy about the particular series of yesses that have led to this latest OS release.
I've developed a number of workflows that would never work on a Macbook. For instance, I take handwritten notes with the device in my lap during a meeting, convert them to text, and add them to either project management software, or Roam (plug: https://roamresearch.com/).
The pencil is a total joy. I've taken up drawing and painting again and the more laptop-like the iPad becomes, the less I miss my old Macbook Air. In hindsight, it's the laptop form factor that makes less sense. When I need a full OS for some tasks, I use a desktop computer with commodity PC components.
"From a visual standpoint, there might be very little difference between a feature that is not visible and a feature that is out of the way. Conceptually, this is a big deal instead. A feature that is not visible and your only way to find it is by reading about it somewhere, or seeing a video tutorial, is something undiscoverable and poorly executed."
Apple has been doing this since the first Mac. Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done.
For example: They knew all about the Star and Smalltalk and friends, which had a consistent use of three mouse buttons for actions, cut and paste, whatever. Apple instead insisted on the false simplicity of a one button mouse, which doomed future users to a maze of difficult to remember modifier-click finger Twister instead.
There was an explicit advice in the famous Apple Interface Guidelines that a good user interface should have all features be discoverable. The quintessential example was most things should appear in the menus but the menus will tell you about hotkeys. That was on contrast to DOS programs of the day where there were no menus and you were required to read the manual to even get started.
> Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done.
I don't feel like this is true. One thing I'm consistently impressed by in the original MacOS is how well the chosen abstractions map to the actual way things are. There are some exceptions, like the trash can and its famous relationship with removable media, but on the whole it works a lot better than what we have today.
I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse.
There's a similar "swipe a surface that doesn't look like an active surface" trip on the apple TV remote as well.
I may be old-fashioned, but those are very unintuitive in my estimation and I consider them poor design. The look good in pictures, though.
I love, however, my iphone 11. There's somehow more of a conceptual root to all of it- to the point that after I had it for two weeks and someone asked me if I missed the home button I really couldn't remember what all the home button did. I do have to fool around with it to get a screen shot, but it was the same with the home button. Could never remember the order of operations.
It does feel sometimes like it's "design first- hack the UI" though with Apple and it leads to a few annoyances.
> I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse.
This feels like some user-specific customization.
The ctrl-click context-menu right-click-substitute has been around since 1997 (Mac OS 8), and various Apple input devices have had different sort of "right click shortcuts" since then (at least after 2007 or so? it took a while) but I don't know of a tap-to-right-click default. "Click the right side of the apparently-buttonless-mouse" and "two finger click" are the most well-known. None of these are intuitive - the context menu stuff was a power user thing in the Mac world in the late 90s), but fairly unchanging.
I don't have an iPad Pro, but instead the current gen iPad with keyboard cover, pencil and a bluetooth mouse. There's a lot to like about the iPad as a day to day computing device(web browsing, email, light word processing, etc) and it's even to the point where I use is as the main adjutant to my desktop in place of my laptop for most casual tasks. For non-casual work loads, most of my issues are less due to the iPad itself(especially with mouse support being official) and more to do with the app ecosystem needing to catch up, but part of the problem with the app ecosystem with the iPad as a laptop replacement is on Apple's shoulders. I don't expect do be able to do much development work an an iPad anytime soon without using the iPad a just a dumb terminal back to my desktop(which I do occasionally).
I would object to the sentence “ The Surface knows what it is”. From my experience it’s still a regular windows laptop with a bolted on touch interface causing neither regular Windows nor touch to work that well. I think both Apple and Microsoft are in a weird spot where they don’t know where they really want to go so they are trying to cover all bases in a half assed way. One of the strengths that made Apple as big as it is now was the willingness to say “no”.
I've had 2 surface pros. I find them to be incredibly unreliable. They unpair from the lower half and drop peripherals, and the stupid trackpad! Its just awful. It is just so mediocre.
We have quite a few Pros and the keyboard is also pretty unreliable. For testing I used a Surface Book and every time I detach/attach the tablet part the screen resolution, monitor arrangement and USB devices get whacked up. Now I am very reluctant to undock it at all.
My surfacebook also has a terrible screen resolution. 3000x2000. I don’t know why, but windows can’t seem to handle interface scaling at all, and a lot of the apps I used failed to be usable on that super high res monitor. I wanted it to work, but just couldn’t deal with it.
The iPad is a postmodern device - it's about the device itself and the process of doing things on it rather than a productive means to an end. The iPad is the end itself.
I like the idea of iPad pro - I have a top spec macbook pro from 2018 and while this model is particularly bad I've came to terms that processing power in laptop form factor is always going to cost more and provide less than a desktop machine.
So ideally I would have a medium power device with high portability and 4G built in and I could remote in to the big iron PC for the heavy lifting. But iOS is just too limited for this.
Maybe Microsoft can push out a good surface with Windows in the next iteration.
I want to really like the iPad Pro + keyboard and touchpad as a replacement for a Macbook Air. Fanless, huge screen to device ratio, great battery life.
If it just only had developer tools in iOS Safari or better yet allowed alternate browser engines, I could do just about everything on one.
The company was led by a great visioner in the past. He needed great executioners alongside to complement him at management. Now that he is gone the company is led by the executioners who are doing what they are superb at - execution.
I think most of the comments on this are secretely fueled by the idea that the mac is going away. I used to fret until I switched to Windows. Now I don't really care. I think Apple doesn't care for you guys either. As soon as XCode is ported to the iPad, it's a goodbye to all the rest of devs in the world. I just hope you're prepared for that.
Life after the mac is not that bad. I miss some nice stuff, but the esentials are there.
It takes a long time on windows to find the right 3rd party software combination to make for a painfree and seamless workflow. But, once it is done, Windows feels like a very complete OS.
A lot of window's problems seem very solvable on the surface. Some have been solved well by aforementioned 3rd party applications, but I still find myself pulling hairs when some others seem so easy to solve, yet no one has solved them.
I sometimes wish I was a Windows app developer with a lot of time on my hands, and no need for money. There are so many little things that once fixed, would drastically improve the UX...with so little effort.
It's like how reddit is a 100x better with RES, which is built by 1 guy. But a company worth $2 billion can't offer the same features natively.
Yeah, I just use WSL and all I use is in-terminal software (including code-editing) so I'm not too worried about the "host" OS. I'm sure WSL2 will solve most other issues.
The killer app for smartphones was having a web browser in your pocket. Super damn useful. Maybe tablets just don’t have a killer app on the horizon, and that’s fine? Like how hard drives for 5.25″ bays got replaced by 3.5″ drives, and now SSDs. It completely upturned the industry, but as a consumer I just don’t care. An SSD is just nicer than a 3.5″ HDD for general use and that’s enough for it to take over.
The iPad gets a few years of life as a pure tablet computer, and it has a whole ecosystem of apps designed around that. Now it gets an optional keyboard + mouse, and it will start getting apps built around that paradigm—but you can’t ignore the fact that the keyboard is optional. If the iPad had appeared with a keyboard + mouse from day one, half the apps would never have worked without a keyboard or mouse because they would be simple ports of desktop apps running full-screen.
What I get out of this is a decent, comfortable device which is easier to use than a smartphone and more convenient to carry around than a laptop. A reasonable niche doesn’t have to be a revolution. Half the apps I have on my iPad are half-baked ports from iOS. I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of half-baked desktop ports join them.