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Domain: mactrast.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to mactrast.com.
Stories · 2
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The iPad Is 5 Years Old This Week, But You Still Don't Need One
HughPickens.com writes: Five years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and insisted that it would do many things better than either a laptop or a smartphone. Will Oremus writes at Future Tense that by most standards, the iPad has been a success, and the tablet has indeed emerged as a third category of computing device. But there's another way of looking at the iPad. According to Oremus, Jobs was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands.
But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar Jobs set for it, which was to be "far better" at some key tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. The iPad may have been "far better" when it was first released, but smartphones have come a long way. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and their Android equivalents are now convenient enough for most mobile computing tasks that there's no need to carry around a tablet as well. That helps explain why iPad sales have plateaued, rather than continuing to ascend to the stratospheric levels of the iPhone. "The iPad remains an impressive machine. But it also remains a luxury item rather than a necessity," concludes Oremus. "Again, by most standards, it is a major success. Just not by the high standards that Jobs himself set for it five years ago." -
Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions
tlhIngan writes "One aspect about the new OS X Mavericks release was that all Apple produced software was to be downloadable and updatable through the Mac App Store. However, this raises the obvious question: what happens to users who bought the software beforehand? Initial reports showed that the Mac App Store scanned your hard drive for software and offered to associate it with your Apple ID. The scans even found trial and pirated versions and upgraded those to fully-licensed versions. Even more interestingly, this is not a bug, and it appears Apple is turning a blind eye to the practice, giving away copies of iLife, iWork and Aperture to users who own trial or even pirated versions of the apps. Apple has also recently stopped providing downloadable trial versions of iLife, iWork and Aperture from their web site."