I don't understand why they're trying to turn iPads into laptops. Just start from their existing laptops and make them more mobile instead of trying to inflate a phone OS into something that does the job? Is this about control over the apps people can run?
In many ways, an iPad with a keyboard is probably the perfect home computer for people who don't really care about computers and just have simple requirements. The apps that people generally expect to find are there and a keyboard just makes it that bit more comfortable to sit and bash out an email or letter.
Sure, if you want to breed even more generations of computer illiterates. We should be encouraging people to learn about the computers they use so they can do actually useful stuff with it later in their life. Not just "hey here's an app, now go make me more money by looking at ads"
Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done is far from computer illiterate. For the majority of the population computers are a tool. Knowing deeply how they work is about as important as knowing deeply how their car works.
If all they ever have access to is phones then their world consists solely of software they have been allowed to install by their platform overlords. Even if they had the urge to try and create something themselves, they would be forbidden from doing so.
Just keep consuming those ads and don't think about it.
> their world consists solely of software they have been allowed to install by their platform overlords
The same will be true of most cars within a generation, and is effectively true for most car owners now; they do not really know how to do much with their car beyond drive it, use the infotainment as-is and bring it in for repair when anything seems off.
> Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done is far from computer illiterate.
Full literacy involves writing, not just reading. At one point the same held for computer literacy. I would not call someone "literate" if they could only read words they already recognized from viewing forms and their writing ability was limited to filling out those forms using a limited but appropriate vocabulary. I would likewise not consider someone computer literate if they were limited to using software written by others.
> Someone using their phone or tablet with a keyboard to get things done
... if you don't get a lot of things done.
The main quality of a laptop is the keyboard is solidly attached to the screen. That means you can use it anywhere and you don't need to dedicate a desk like space for the keyboard.
With an iPad you need a stand, space for the keyboard and then you're close to the space taken by a monitor with peripherals and a desktop under the desk. Might as well get a desktop then since it's more powerful.
It may be useful for tasks that only need a keyboard 1% of the time though.
Does this apply to cars/appliances/medical equipment/any other tools?
I don’t see anything wrong with people excelling at some tasks, such as CAD/medicine/construction/editing media/law/etc, and not excelling at understanding all the details about how their tools work.
Yes. Cars are turning into pieces of shit that need a subscription because techbros made them too complicated for an average person to understand. Appliances, same story. Techbros are turning goddamn printers into a subscription service.
I guess I will have to disagree. My cars have been lasting longer and longer, and the cost per mile keeps going down.
My appliances have also been working fine for 5+ years. LG inverter motor is dead silent in my fridge, and I get the benefits of having a French door fridge on top and freezer drawer on the bottom. Same for all the other appliances I have too. I don’t expect them to last 20 years, but as long as I get 5 to 10, I’m ok with it considering the price I paid.
My brother printers have been working fine for many years, and at least as of 2021, the MFC printers did not need a subscription.
Maybe things have changed and I haven’t needed to buy anything in the last couple years.
Yeah not to mention it’s way easier to use than macOS.
Macs used to be so easy to use on Classic Mac OS. Mac OS X really left a lot of people behind on the usability front. It became much more of a power user OS. Then iPads came along and stole that group (of ordinary users) away.
But now it seems they’re adding more and more power user features to iOS, complicating things again (with even less discoverability due to complex gestures). History seems to be repeating itself.
As someone who’s never used MacOS fulltime, what did OS9 do better than X? I’ve found modern MacOS fairly similar to windows in common tasks and interface.
Going somewhat off-topic here but classic Mac OS had very precise human interface guidelines[1] which strongly emphasised repeatable behaviours and recognisable patterns. For that matter, so did earlier versions of Windows[2]. A lot of thought went into visual cues and design elements so that things looked and acted predictably system-wide and they were designed so that it would always be obvious which elements were and weren't interactive.
Both Apple and Microsoft have regressed in this respect. Minimalism and prettiness have taken priority over usability in both modern macOS and modern Windows and they are far more inconsistent and harder to learn to use as a result. Often something that you learn in one place place or app now doesn't work in another.
In Apple's case this has been mostly as a result of their efforts to make macOS and iOS more alike and to share applications/components across the two, which often creates weird-feeling results and awkward app designs. In Microsoft's case this is mostly because they have more UI frameworks than sense and each new one introduces more problems than solutions. Electron-adjacent apps probably don't help matters either, since they also generally break all of the platform rules and implement their own UI controls anyway.
No. It should be the default. And I bet it only refers to notifications, not to other applications stealing focus (as in bring themselves to the foreground) from the one you're into because they think they're damn important.
The Classic Mac OS Finder used a spatial metaphor. When Apple moved to OS X, they copied Windows by switching to a browser metaphor [1]. For many Classic fans this was Apple's biggest mistake. Ever since then people generally go out of their way to avoid using the Finder altogether because it's so unpredictable and opaque.
I use a combo of desktop computers with giant screens and an iPad. I like this better than having a laptop. I don’t think the traditional multi-window paradigm works well on a very small screen (though I am aware it was invented for tiny screens!). When I’m mobile I prefer to have just one app at a time, or at most Stage Manager.
The biggest problems I run into with iPadOS are not related to the OS, but stripped-down apps, or apps that don’t use the file picker and other iPad features. In a few cases I have to use web apps (which work perfectly) instead of iPad apps, for example with Google Docs, since the iPad apps are more like stripped-down phone apps.
Agree that my biggest gripe with iPadOS is third party apps that don’t take advantage of the platform. Cross-platform apps are the most notorious, usually being stretched out phone apps rather than proper tablet apps.
It’s still a far sight better than the Android tablet situation though, where stretched out phone apps are the norm instead of the exception.
How would you make a laptop more mobile? I think they've gone too small and too thin in the past, now settling on larger laptops.
If i didn't need to program on my computer, i'd use an ipad as a single computing device for everything. It's perfect for couch consumption, and with stage manager, an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it's more than adequate for anything else you'd expect from a computer: office, photo and video editing and watching, internet browsing, email, etc.
For 95% of all use cases, the ipad already is the best laptop.
Perhaps they are turning laptops into iPads. The price/performance of Apple Silicon laptops was a descendant of early iPad Pro SoCs, with current iPad Pros on M2. A couple of years ago, MacOS on Apple Silicon gained the ability to run iOS apps, either via the Mac appstore or by copying .ipa files.
ipad touchscreen is good for reading documents and the like. While I've been a bit of a "make Macbooks with touchscreens you cowards" person, iOS (iPad OS but w/e) has a _lot_ of nice affordances that are centered around getting you quickly to your work in a couple of taps, and not futzing about with typing things in.
The thing I always think about: how fast it is to play an MP3 from "device in pocket" state with an MP3 player vs a computer (or my phone!). iOS affordances around that are good.
Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there. They seem to be trying with some changes though I don't really enjoy the changes so far
> The thing I always think about: how fast it is to play an MP3 from "device in pocket" state with an MP3 player vs a computer (or my phone!). iOS affordances around that are good.
This is a very important metric! Jeff Hawkins famously walked around with a piece of wood in his pocket the planned size of the Palm Pilot, and when he wanted to do something (write down a note) he would work through how many key presses it would take on the new device. His limit was three.
When I tried a BlackBerry I was infuriated by how many key presses everything took. What a horrible experience.
> Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there
Like it or not, Apple’s plan for this remains Siri.
