Technology

The iPad Pro is silly

I say this as someone who has owned an iPad Pro since 2017.

When the iPad debuted in 2010, Steve Jobs pitched it as a “between” device that could do things a smartphone could, and things a desktop computer could–but it could do them in a more convenient form. The activities included:

  • Browsing web pages
  • Reading magazines and books
  • Watching video

All of these activities require minimal interaction, so they are suited to a touch-oriented device. The iPad’s larger display–yet still eminently portable design–makes it superior to a smartphone for viewing web pages or magazines, though with more responsive designs and larger phone screens, this use case is not quite as compelling as it once was. It’s still better for watching video in bed than a laptop or phone, I’d say.

Jobs only lived long enough to see one iteration of the iPad, called, cleverly1Given Apple’s often byzantine and arbitrary naming schemes, this is not sarcasm!, the iPad 2. It refined what was in the original, but otherwise changed nothing. It was just a better iPad.

That changed a bit in 2012 when Apple introduced the iPad Mini. It was, quite literally, a smaller version of the iPad. This didn’t change much, but it did mean that consumers now had two distinct choices when buying an iPad: regular size or smaller.

Apple then blew things up when they introduced the original iPad Pro in 2015. This had some refinements, but mostly it was bigger, going from a 9.7″ display to a 12.9″ one. Apple muddied the waters by later introducing a 9.7″ iPad Pro, which really wasn’t much better than the standard iPad Air available at the time (also a 9.7″ device). Apple “fixed” this by junking the Air (for a while) and bringing in a new base model iPad that stripped away things like the laminated display, but also dropped the price to a mere $299 (the original iPad sold for $499). The Pro models also supported a stylus, the Apple Pencil.

Does anything in the above paragraph look like a carefully-planned, long term strategy? Because it is not. It is Apple deciding one thing (“We need an upscale iPad so we can charge a premium price”) and then shuffling everything else around to make the line-up work. The early iPad Pros, apart from supporting Apple Pencil–an arbitrary limitation that was lifted a few years later, when Pencil support was added to all the myriad iPad models–didn’t really do anything that the base model couldn’t do. They looked a bit nicer, they sounded a bit better, they ran faster (not that you could really notice).

It was the Apple Pencil support that got me to buy that 10.5″ iPad Pro in 2017, then to move to the 12.9″ model when it was new in 2020 (I still use it today). It seemed like a way to get a Cintiq-like device, but (surprisingly, given Apple) for less than an actual Cintiq would cost. (This year’s iPad Pro models have reversed that, as Apple leaned much more into making the Pro model “premium”–even though it still can’t do anything more than a $300 iPad you can grab at your local Walmart.)

When I bought the 12.9″ iPad Pro in 2020, I got it from Apple directly and paid $1167. That’s pricey! The equivalent 2024 version is $1799. That’s silly.

But the price is not the main reason the iPad Pro is silly. You were probably wondering when I was going to get to this.

The silly part is: No one needs an iPad Pro. I don’t, you don’t, Apple doesn’t. Apple started the line to generate more revenue, and now they’ve jacked prices because Apple is in one of its greed-driven, “squeeze them for everything” phases (the last time was in the mid-90s). But in the drive for more money, Apple has boxed itself in, adding bits and pieces to iPadOS (which, let’s be serious, is just iOS with a different sticker on it), trying to make it work more like a laptop, with split screen, Stage Manager, a Files app (which started terrible and has stayed terrible since its introduction). But it is still marred by terrible memory management, arbitrary restrictions, a lack of utilities, and turning one or two click operations on a PC into a maze of steps, swipes and taps that sometimes just fail at the end, forcing you to start over.

It’s a mess and it’s a mess because Apple made a fundamental error in 2015 by introducing the iPad Pro. They got greedy, they made a mess, and in almost 10 years have failed to clean it up. WWDC 2024 is tomorrow, and Apple will probably make a few more token gestures to fixing iPadOS. But I don’t think they can.

The basic iPad experience is fine. Apple should refine what is there now to work better.

But here’s my advice for a company regularly valued at $2-3 trillion:

  • Keep the base iPad, Air and Mini. Lose the suffixes. They are all iPads now, differentiated only by size. If they insist on a cost-cutting base model, call it the iPad SE.
  • Kill the iPad Pro. Yep, kill it! No more iPad Pros! Continue to support existing models for 5–7 years.
  • Introduce a Mac tablet that runs a touch version of macOS. Include optional support to run a virtualized iPadOS.

Now you have a truly professional-calibre touch device. Yes, I’m basically asking Apple to re-invent the Surface Pro, but with Apple’s level of polish and precision.

The iPad Pro is just not going to get better, software-wise, without major surgery on the operating system that Apple will never commit to. So they shouldn’t. They should just give up and put out touch-based Macs instead.

Because the iPad Pro is silly.

Mah site is fixed (somewhat)

After tending to some caching devilry, I seem to have gotten my site back up and mostly functional. It is still in flux, but for now the changes are such:

  • No more colour! Well, very little colour, but it’s mostly a sea of light gray. This will get tweaked.
  • The broad layout of content/sidebar remains. This, too, will get tweaked further.
  • While the layout is pretty much the same, the mono-colour means all the fancy rounded edges have been obliterated. I kind of miss them. I will ponder.
  • Archives and Categories have been demoted and Recent Posts removed.
  • Font Resizer is gone, as are the thumbnails for various links.
  • The links are now in a tidy little list, using Font Awesome icons with a li’l bit of colour (except for the Mastodon elephant, because there’s no non-political FA icon that is not political, and I couldn’t get the FA Mastodon logo to render for reasons).
  • Typography is unchanged (for now).
  • The logo has been made bigger and centred (and given a bit more space between it and the content).

With everything at least working, I will spend some time contemplating what I like and what I will change before diving in and probably wrecking everything again. Excelsior!

Mah site is broke

I did a silly thing last night. I decided to revamp the site, spontaneously, into something much more stripped down and streamlined. I didn’t intend to finish it the same night, but I’d get a lot of the planks in place, so to speak.

While I did this, my internet connection went down, because there are evil gnomes at Telus who know the worst time to make my connection fail.

Anyway, the main change was moving from content/sidebar to sidebar/content–simply switching the sidebar to the other side, and re-organizing the content in it. I also switched to a more muted colour scheme.

Everything looked pretty good. I hit Publish and…every widget in the new sidebar disappeared. I rebuilt it and in the preview it looked good. I hit Publish and again, all widgets gone.

The right sidebar seemed OK, but as soon as I touched it, the curse spread to it, but not as fully–for some reason the last widget was retained, and all others wiped.

My database is quite old–it dates back to 2005, when I started the blog, and I’ve already covered how it won’t properly display all emoji because of some old-timey character set issues. So I’m thinking that perhaps the outage may have corrupted a janky database into something even jankier. But I do not know for certain. I am a humble word-spewer and doodler, not a web developer.

I am pondering now. I’ve added a few things to the right sidebar again, and these few things seem to be sticking for the moment. We’ll see how it goes.

I am sad. 🙁

But I also have renewed my hatred of WordPress. >:( (actual emoji for being angry will not display)

An update on this interesting situation soon™.

“It felt like opening the front door at my birthday party to welcome in a group of iPads on wheels instead of people I like”

Today I came across this wonderfully horrifying blog post about someone using AI (an LLM1Large Language Model, or as I’ve seen some people call them, a very fancy parrot to be precise) to write an email to a friend. Why a friend would do this to another friend is a very good question, because it seems terrible and awful.

The post is filled with great lines, though, one of which forms the title of this blog post, which was generated by LTF2Less than Ten Fingers typing, which is the way I’ll always roll, I think technology.

The allure of the olden times, Part 2: The telephone

Photo by Pixabay

Original post here: Something that really was better in the olden times

I made a note to revisit my February 13, 2024 post about nostalgia and how some things were better in the long ago days of the 1970s, in which I reflected on how life moved slower back in the olden times. I made the note in case I had any new insights to add later. Thinking about it some more, there is one thing I allude to it when I mention a smartphone without reception as a way of escaping the always-connected feeling of life today. And that is the phone, and how we communicated with it (or didn’t) back then.

In 1975, we had a phone in the house. It was mounted to the wall in the downstairs hallway and had a long coiled cord that allowed it to reach partway into the adjacent kitchen, if it was a long call, and you wanted to sit down. 1975 predates any other phone technology–you dialed numbers using an actual rotary dial (at the time you could leave off the first two digits, so you only had to dial the last five, saving some wear on your fingers. Compare to today where there are so many numbers they had to add two new area codes to BC and you now have to dial not just the seven digits number, but also the area code and 1 at the start). Voicemail did not exist in the consumer space and even answering machines weren’t adopted back then, though they did exist in nascent form. This meant that you had one way to contact a person in real time: Call them on your medieval rotary phone and hope they were home. If they weren’t, you just had to try again later, or maybe hope to run into them at the local grocer or something. As a kid, I never called much, I just walked to someone’s house or one of the usual haunts, or we’d pre-plan at school (face to face during recess, lunch or an especially boring class).

Being unable to instantly and always communicate and especially knowing someone who had a lot of 9’s in their phone number (this was a thing) resulted in a certain kind of isolation, but it was never perceived as such. You just had your own little part of the world, your friends and neighbours had theirs, and you made specific, conscious choices to have them intersect. And if you couldn’t reach someone on the phone, you’d just do something else, like read a book, or go bowling.

I’m not advocating going back to rotary phones to recapture some lost magic, they were pretty awful (push button phones were genuinely exciting when introduced), but having that level of removal from everyone else, where we existed as communities, but smaller, more intimate ones, is something I look back on fondly, not with any sense of “we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow” old-man-yelling-at-clouds bitterness, just in appreciation of the quiet it brought. I think of kids growing up today with smartphones practically embedded into their hands, and it does not appeal to 10-year-old me at all. And I was a tech nerd! Maybe that part is a little old-man-yells-at-clouds.

Something to ponder for a future post.

The scales of…weight

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto

Last night, the Garmin scale flashed a battery symbol in its display, a sure sign that the batteries were needing to be replaced soon. Very soon, as it turns out, as the scale promptly died right after. I did not have the four required AAA batteries needed to revive it. But popping out the old batteries and popping them back in revived the scale one last time. I stepped on, and it insisted I had gained over five pounds overnight.

I did not gain five pounds overnight.

I will get new batteries today and convince my OCD that it’s OK to have a one-day gap in my weight this one week.

And yes, in the olden days this wouldn’t be an issue, because back then scales didn’t need batteries. Such is modern life.

Google’s attempt to enrich Google through “AI”

I feel like “AI” always needs to be in quotation marks, because while it is clearly artificial, there is no apparent intelligence involved. It’s all just an elaborate guessing game based on a giant pool of answers that could be accurate, inaccurate, made-up, sarcastic, or some enticing combination.

Google is now rolling out an “AI Overview” in its search results, a furthering of its efforts to keep everyone on its search page (to show them ads and make $$$), with the side effect of killing off the rest of the web as all other sites slowly starve for traffic, revenue and everything else.

It is easy to find examples of this overview being hilariously and sometimes dangerously wrong. Google appears to be fixing the most egregious examples, no doubt by coming across them in their own searches and then fixing the results manually (ie. with an actual human). If this is their plan, they are going to need a lot of humans.

Here’s just one story from Ars Technica and one screenshot (below) illustrating the whole big pile of nonsense. I really don’t think this is going to improve over time in any significant way. Since this is Google, I’ll go further and say AI Overview could eventually end up in their graveyard along with the hundreds of other things they’ve killed.

GIGO

This may or may not conclude AI Week on the blog.

It’s now AI week on the blog

This perfectly captures AI art1I edited out the site and author name to protect the, well, not innocent exactly. Let’s say the purveyors.:

I don’t believe I need to add any further comment to this, except this is how Diablo II (a game steeped in clichés and stereotypes) depicts an Amazon warrior:

They’re almost identical!12

Addendum: I did an image search for “Amazon warrior” and unsurprisingly, they are almost universally depicted as being Very Sexy Women in questionably appropriate combat garb. And probably drawn/inked/painted by men. But it’s AI Week on the blog, not Men and Why They Always Draw Women as Objects Ugh Men Week.

  1. Mmm, sarcasm ↩︎
  2. Also, this woman looks like she’s heading to the office (“I really hope they’re prepared for the meeting this time”), not to fight some battle. I mean, she’s dressed for battle. Maybe this is appropriate for the modern office. Who am I to say? ↩︎

Ed Zitron is zesty and as the kids say, I am here for it

Ed Zitron has a free newsletter called Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At, in which he goes into great detail about how terrible tech companies are. Or at least that’s what he’s been riffing on lately. And he doesn’t mince words when describing the villains of these pieces. The current newsletter as I write this is titled Sam Altman is Full of Shit.

Some might think he’s being overly dramatic with the way he describes the various players and manipulators, but in the current political space, it feels right to me–we need to push hard on this stuff, so the average person stirs out of their social media-induced slumber and realizes what is happening and maybe (maybe) begins to care a little about it. And then change can (or should) happen.

Here’s the full description from Ed’s About page in case you are curious about whom this guy is and why you might want to read what he has to say.

Who Are You, Exactly? And What Is This Newsletter?

My name’s Ed, I’m the CEO of national Media Relations and Public Relations company EZPR, of which I am both the E (Ed) and the Z (Zitron).

I host the Better Offline Podcast, coming to iHeartRadio and everywhere else you find your podcasts February 2024. (Editor’s note: Ed should probably update this, as it’s May 2024 as I type these words.)

I write about stuff that interests me – issues in society, primarily those surrounding tech, but occasionally move into other areas and more personal pieces depending on my mood. I try and write once a week.

I was previously a games journalist, writing for PC Zone, CVG, Eurogamer and others. I’ve been published in the Wall Street Journal, USAToday, TechCrunch, and named one of the top 50 PR people in tech four times. I’ve written two books, and you are welcome to learn more here.

I live and work out of Las Vegas, Nevada.

From the About page of Where’s Your Ed At

Check it out, but be prepared to rein in your OCD–his pieces run long, but those 20 minutes feel like they fly by for me.

Time travel: Future or past?

I saw a poll on YouTube (a post, not a video) where the person asked if people would want to visit the past or future. The future was winning by a small margin. I voted past, and thinking about it now, I think it’s because the past is knowable. It would be a nostalgia trip (depending on how far back I’d go). If I could peek at the future, but not have to worry about some weird monkey’s paw scenario happening, or a Twilight Zone-style twist, then I’d be tempted to change my vote to future. It would probably be depressing, but it would also at least be interesting to see how our world would look in, say, a hundred years. Or even 50 years.

Given the current arc of history, I’m still leaning toward visiting the past, to indulge in a quieter and simpler time (for me).

I did not “Let Loose”

From the Apple Canada website. Missing: Tim Cook saying, “Good mooorning!”

Apple had an “event” today, and I put that in quotes because the event is just another pre-recorded video showing off new hardware. Apple also decided to air it at 7 a.m. Pacific, so I assume they are past getting live views and just want the video out early so tech sites, “influencers” and the like can spend the rest of the day posting stories about what got unveiled. Unless the EC beings down new restrictions on Apple today, then all the various media will pivot to that story, because it’ll be a lot juicier.

I doubt I’ll go back and watch the video now, because what was revealed had all been leaked days, weeks and in some cases, many months earlier. The highlights:

  • iPad Pro but with OLED and M4. Thinner, just the way Apple likes it! Otherwise, it’s an iPad.
  • 13″ iPad Air (new) and 11″ (same) with M2 (new, but -2 from the M4). Gotta differentiate Pro from Not Pro. Otherwise, it’s an iPad.
  • A fourth Apple Pencil, but now it’s Pro1Next year Apple will change its name to Apple Pro Inc.. But it also works with the new Air. But it also only works with the new Air and new Pros, meaning Apple now has four pencils in its line-up that all work with different models and generations of iPad. This Pro one includes a squeeze gesture and “barrel roll” feature. It’s otherwise an Apple Pencil.
  • Apple killed the $329 ninth-generation iPad and brought the price of the 10th generation model down to $349, from $399. This means an overall price increase for the base of $20, which is not bad considering the features of the 10th generation.
  • All front-facing cameras are now on the long side of the iPad. It only took them 14 years to fix this.
  • The base model of the iPad Pro 13″ model, equivalent to the one I got in 2020, now comes with 256GB of storage instead of 128GB. That’s good. It starts at $1800. That’s bad. In fact, it’s ludicrous. Add an Apple Pencil Pro®? It’s now $1968. Fancy a “magic” keyboard, too? $2417. Now, add your taxes and…$2,707.04! Also, note that unless you go for the 1 or 2TB storage options ($830 and $1380 more, respectively), you actually get a binned M4 with fewer cores. Watch the Luke Miani video below for more on this.
  • Fun Fact: That 2020 iPad Pro I bought cost $1169. If you add about $150 to match the 256GB of storage for the new model, it comes to $1319, which is still almost $500 less than the new one. I mean, I understand Apple charging so much more. OLED is a brand-new screen technology Apple just invented, and the company is desperately in need of revenue, as it is down to its last few pennies.
The video is better than the thumbnail.

And that’s about it. Just refinements, some (rather large) price increases, more product confusion, more gating (the Apple Pencil Pro works on the new iPad Air, which has no new hardware, but won’t work on the older M2 iPad Pros, which run the same SoC) and a bunch of iPads. I don’t think these will move sales much, other than the 10th gen now being sensibly priced.