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Microsoft and Others Mean Stiff Competition For Apple iPad Pro
MojoKid writes: When Microsoft first announced the Surface Pro back in 2012, many Apple fans snickered. Here was Microsoft, releasing a somewhat thick and heavy tablet that not only had a kickstand, but also an odd cover that doubled as a keyboard. And to top things off, the device made use of a stylus. Steve Jobs famously said in 2010, "If you see a stylus, they blew it." But Microsoft forged ahead with the Surface Pro 2, and later with the Surface Pro 3. Not only were customers becoming more aware of the Surface but competitors were also taking note. We've seen Lenovo introduce the ideapad MIIX 700, which incorporates its own kickstand and an Intel Skylake-based Core m7 processor. And most recently, we've seen Apple pull a literal 180 on this design and platform approach, announcing the iPad Pro — a device that features a fabric keyboard cover similar in concept to the Surface Pro and a stylus. Dell and ASUS have also brought compelling offerings to the table as well. However, the big head-to-head competition will no doubt be between the Surface Pro 4, which is set to be unveiled early next month and Apple's iPad Pro when it finally goes on sale.
It's the software and OS it runs that matters.
That's why they've asked IBM to help.
http://www.apple.com/business/...
And they've helped a lot.
http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst...
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
In 2007, Jobs made the comment "If you see a stylus, they blew it", in regards to using a stylus on a phone. Back then (for those of us old enough to remember) phones like the Palm Treo had tiny touch targets and resistive screens that pretty much demanded the use of a stylus. Apple was the first manufacturer to ship a capacitive touchscreen with a large, touch-optimized UI that did not require a stylus for day to day use.
*THAT* is what Jobs was referring to back then. If you're going to toss around the man's quotes, at least get the context right.
The iPad Pro does have a separate digitizer. However, the stylus lacks any buttons and no eraser functionality. Currently the suggested way to recharge the pen is to insert it into the charging port of the iPad Pro.
-]Phreak Out[-
I dunno. I didn't see iPhones as a viable business phone but I was wrong. People wanted them because they were so easy to use. I didn't think the iPod was going to revolutionize portable music but then Apple went and made it so easy to buy music.
Apple has a way of making things that already exist simpler and more attractive. They've got Adobe products and Microsoft Office on the iPad. Assuming you can connect to network shares from the iPad, it's just a matter of convincing people it's better than sliced bread and Apple's good at that.
Even the basic product photos AND the demo showed the hand resting on the screen.
If you weren't aware, you can rest your hand on an iPad today while drawing with your finger or stylus... Apple does input discrimination very well.
The Surface Pro has a separate digitising screen for the stylus
That is all very nice but the Apple Pencil looks to have much better latency which is what really matters.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Surface competes far more against the Macbook than it does against the iPad Pro.
The iPad Pro is all about touch input (still), while the Surface treats that as an extra.
Also the Stylus comment was about requiring the stylus for input - which the iPad Pro does not, you only get the stylus if you need finer-grained input than a touch can give you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Apple has replied to various questions and you can lay your hand/arm/e.bow on the screen and continue using the Pencil.
2. The system is NOT the standard Capacitive touch screen, but is a system designed specifically for the pencil and has much higher resolution (double?) and much higher input rates (double?) so, it can react faster and with resolution down to the pixel on a retina display.
The iPad Pro does have a separate digitizer.
This is from the Apple website page describing the Apple Pencil:
iPad Pro knows whether youâ(TM)re using your finger or Apple Pencil. When iPad Pro senses Apple Pencil, the subsystem scans its signal at an astounding 240 times per second, giving it twice the data points it normally collects with your finger. This data, combined with Appleâ'designed software, means that thereâ(TM)s only milliseconds between the image you have in your mind and the one you see on the display.
That doesn't sound like a separate stylus digitiser layer, it's more like the regular capacitive touch layer goes into turbo mode when the Pencil tip gets close to the screen.
We'll find out definitively when the first teardowns occur I suppose.
when apple innovates a *large step* that everyone lusts after, which they've done well for awhile, apple rules
but when innovation is more iterative, *small steps*, what happens outside the walled garden is much more cutthroat and much more capable of producing something novel that people want
there's also the issue that what was once state of the art extremely rapidly becomes just another commodity, it's brutal. and apple sits at the cutting edge of this game, and has to carefully stay there
as long as it can surf that wave, apple will continue to do well. but the moment large innovative steps become out of reach due to technology coming up short on the bleeding edge, then apple stumbles, and their market passes outside of the walled garden into the realm of the commodities
what amazes me is apple played its game in the 1980s. then in the 1990s apple began dying because there were no great leaps to achieve. it kind of eked out an existence on the edge as a fetish item. when the 2000s and 2010s came along, apple picked up the same game it played in the 1980s with a number of technological and design breakthroughs. which is a rather impressive achievement, to seize that position twice
but the 2020s are coming, and if apple can't find that must have next leap, apple goes the way it did in the 1990s
no steve jobs this time around though to save it in the 2030s
unless their actual product in the 2030s is "steve jobs himself cloned for your desktop"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's just so sad that making things simpler makes them more attractive
It's not sad at all, because done right it means more people get the benefit of complex features without having to be very technical.
Having as many people as possible making use of technology to improve their lives is an admirable goal.
Kind of means people who look for complex features had better make it themselves.
The great thing is they still can; nothing stops them from doing so. But there are ALSO the simpler choices. Before, all we had was complexity which benefitted comparatively few.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
However, the stylus lacks any buttons and no eraser functionality.
That isn't much of an issue when touch controls to adjust things can be anywhere on the screen.
Currently the suggested way to recharge the pen is to insert it into the charging port of the iPad Pro.
You left out the part where it takes just fifteen seconds to get 30 minutes of use from the Pencil, which doesn't seem like an impediment. Frankly it seems like the most convenient way to charge such a device other than some kind of charging dock on the tablet itself - but the quick charge means even if it runs out I'm only fifteen seconds away from continuing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing a lot of articles mulling over the acceptance of the iPad Pro miss, is how it has a very ready market already proven - that currently occupied by the Wacom Cintiq.
Have any of you ever used one? I ordered on a year or two ago, and after day of use I returned it - the display is just OK, and it requires a lot of wires to attach.
At least one article offers an even more informed opinion espousing this same view.
From that standpoint the iPad Pro is going to be successful, since theres a ready made market to absorb even without all of the other people angling to buy one.
The interesting thing is, you could imagine Waccom making iPad Pro software that basically turned the iPad Pro into a Cintiq, using all of the same technology they have today to mirror over a display and forward touch input from the tablet...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oddly enough, when PC's stampeded into business this same argument was often touted - that the employees would be being downgraded to key-clickers.
MIcrosoft is bleeding large amounts of money supporting Surface iterations. Apple, not so much, they deign to make a profit.
Not to say iPad Pro doesn't suck or is marvellous, or merely average, but it is hard to see how Surface is going to even survive, let alone thrive unless Microsoft tosses orders of magnitude more money at Surface than they did/are at XBox. So, stiff competition? Well, it seems like those at Microsoft need to drink a few more shots of hard liquor to steady their nerves while flashing shedloads of money until they get to a point of some form of success or pass out drunk and broke under the table.
That is odd, because the opposite dynamic is at work:
PCs are far, far more capable than what came before (pens, paper, filing cabinets, typewriters, dictation machines, etc.). It's completely mind-boggling how much more capability PCs have than older methods of information manipulation, storage, and retrieval when you think about it.
Tablets, on the other hand, are less capable than PCs. They can do many of the same things, but more poorly because their input interfaces are much more limited. Their only advantages over PCs are mobility and size/weight. Otherwise, they're just less-capable replacements for laptops and desktops: smaller screens, no keyboards (or really crappy ones), no mice, less CPU power and memory and storage, no wired networking, etc. There's literally nothing you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a PC, usually better (unless it involves walking around while you do it). Tablets have obvious utility in things such walking around a warehouse and doing inventory or whatever, or being used for a customer-facing order-placing system (as many Panera Bread locations have done; instead of placing your order with a person, you go use a tablet that's bolted to a table and punch it in yourself; it's great because you'll find out about all kinds of selections (esp. order modifications) that there simply isn't any time for some cashier to read off to you). But it's really just convenience; these things could be done with PCs as well, tablets just have a more convenient form factor for it.
I remember the days before the iPhone. Maybe you don't, but I sure do. Back then, there were two kinds of smartphones: Blackberries and WinMo phones. BBs were expensive and highly tied to BB infrastructure (which if you worked for some big company or the government, you'd have, but if you were just Joe Blow, you didn't), and really were meant for doing email on the run more than anything else. The other choice was Windows Mobile.... which just sucked. There's a reason that thing never went anywhere; no one wanted a crappy copy of Windows XP on their phone, which they needed to use a stylus to do the simplest things. The UI was all wrong for mobile usage.
Somehow Apple figured this out, that what people wanted was a big screen with icons large enough to just press them with fat fingers, not tiny desktop-esque icons that needed high-precision aiming with a stylus.
You'd think this should be blindingly obvious, but apparently not. I think part of the reason we never saw anyone else do it before was because of the market-distorting effect of having Microsoft dominating the software industry so much. With very little diversity in OSes and UIs (unlike the 80s where we had tons of microcomputer vendors like Acorn, Amiga, Commodore, Tandy, etc.), and really the only choices for desktop work being Windows (95+%) and Apple Mac (5%), there just wasn't any other company around with the financial and engineering resources to pull off making a smartphone that wasn't yet another WinMo device. And even then Apple was only able to do it because they had such wild (and rather unexpected) success with their iPods. It's not like it's much better now: BB is barely hanging on now, WinMo is still here with a different look and name (and still no one wants it), iPhone is still here, and the other big player is Android, which of course also had a humongous and wealthy company pushing it. This is a market that simply isn't one which some new startup can penetrate. Apple was really lucky (and also really skillful) in doing so well in it.
Now if you're wondering why MS couldn't do it if it's so "blindingly obvious" as I put it, that's easy: MS as an organization is completely incompetent when it comes to UIs. Whoever they had working there and managing the UI stuff back in the early/mid 90s when they invented Windows 95 obviously is long gone, because everything they've done since XP has either just been a re-skin or tweak of Win95, or a total disaster (the Metro/Modern UI). Why they couldn't realize this and put someone better in charge, I dunno, but it's not just them. Look at GM; what kind of incompetent automaker would produce the Pontiac Aztek? There's countless examples of big companies making products which the general public absolutely hated. Much of this can probably be blamed on the top executives, since they either approve this stuff themselves or have close, hand-picked subordinates who do. Steve Jobs obviously had a gift in understanding what consumers would want, whereas other executives just didn't/don't (like Steve Ballmer), and of course are too disconnected to realize this about themselves. It'll be interesting to see how Apple does without him; so far it seems like they're just riding on past successes.
Fair call on much of this, but citing the Pontiac Aztek as "incompetent" would be inaccurate; it was a niche product that had an insanely high customer satisfaction rate among those that bought it. ("The Aztek had among the highest CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) scores in its class" and JD Power 2001 cites: "The Aztek scores highest or second highest in every APEAL component measure except exterior styling)."
Most people didn't like it, but the mark of incompetence would have been producing the Aztek as the main-line product. (Oh wait, they did: the Buick Rendezvous; just as ugly but without balls.) Producing weird shit that the corners of the market eat up -- Pontiak's Aztek, Nokia N900, Apple Newton, Saturn EV1, the first decades of online "remote" shopping and of television, and other things we love(d) to hate but keep talking about or ended up using -- they generally fall in two categories: they move the entire market/industry forward significantly despite losses, or their makers lanugh all the way to the bank. (Cadillac's styling for their entire current lineup owes more to the Aztek than any other ancestor. It just took GM a while to figure out who wanted Klingon cars.)
To the point: It may take a decade for a ballsy move like the Aztek to translate into a shitpile of cash, but it's better than standing still. Microsoft's failing is that they keep making a large number of unremarkable things, while competitors like Apple and Google make fewer things that are much more memorable, much better milestones. Do you remember what search was like before Google Search? Tablets before the iPad? Can you recall many jumps forward in Windows, Office, or Azure that feel the same? Google ships Chromebooks to schools and makes "lost homework" and quaint archaic idea, and Microsoft shuffles buttons in the ribbon, has us scrolling sideways in Metro, and ships a tablet with a flaccid keyboard. Utterly forgettable if not a step backwards. Repackaged Windows that brings back Win7 UI features? A kickstand idea they got from Archos? Active tiles from IOS? Win10 and Surface: New, yes; revolutionary or memorable beyond the next product announcement, no.
I think not...(*poof*)
Their only advantages over PCs are mobility and size/weight.
and you'd have to deny the smartphone and tablet revolution to dismiss that, but i guess you did.
Back then, there were two kinds of smartphones: Blackberries and WinMo phones
Oh, and there was that other company that had 80% of the smartphone market...
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The iPad Pro is designed as a competitor for the Surface. In case you missed the keynote, there was a large proportion of the time taken up by Microsoft and Adobe demonstrations showing how iPad Pro can be used in a business environment.
As a productivity device, iPad Pro will probably fail. I missed the announcement that it now works properly (i.e. supports screen/application sharing) with business tools like WebEx and Lync. I can't dock it and use a multiple monitor setup. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If I was looking for a consumer device, the sure. I'd probably choose an iPad for consumption. But for business use, it is nowhere near being a serious competitor for the Surface Pro.
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