I know, right? I was literally expecting a decent Wacom-style, all-in-one-device to hit the market 15 years ago.
3 Likes
upsell UPSELL UPSELL
No, I do it at work. At home, I canāt really call any of my computing work āseriousā. 
And I think most average consumers probably fall into a similar category, where any time they are consuming things like videos recorded on a phone, theyāre doing it on their phones, tablets, or laptops. Which is why Iām raging against the inclusion of 4K video recording on the new iPhone, and further promoting 4K as any kind of useful feature for the average consumer. Where my definition of āaverage consumerā excludes people who do graphics/design work at home, or PC gamers, or those who do serious development work at home (all of which can take good advantage of large, high resolution monitors).
Sure. Improving image stabilization, dynamic range, lens quality, low-light performance, global shutter, color science, compression quality and true, pixel perfect 1080p detail would all probably be more useful and less wasteful for a great many uses than simply more pixels. That said, phone-quality-4k converted in post to 1080 is probably a lot better than native phone-quality 1080 because thereās simply more pixel data and less compression to work with. So itās nice to have the option in the āthe camera you have with youā sense.
I think the iPhoneās camera improvements are welcome in general, since it is the most used camera in the world and (Iām hoping) it puts pressure on ārealā camera manufacturers to up their game to compete. For instance, Iād love for not-terrible 120fps recording to become mainstream, and the iPhone (kind of) already has it.
Well, as far as desperate-industry-gimmicks go, itās at least better than 3d glasses, āmotion flowā and who knows what other horrors. Remember those?
Maybe Iām just cynical, but comparing the absolutely dreadful video compression being broadcast to the theoretical image quality potential for each resolution (TV HD vs. Blu-Ray or TV SD vs. DVD) I canāt help but think we might need ā4Kā just to get decent HD.
1 Like
As far as I can tell it doesnāt have an active digitizer does it? Rotation detection? The iPad still cant run Photoshop or Illustrator or Painterā¦Iām pretty sure this is still one of those shitty capactitive styluses (i confess to owning 7 as well as 3 capactivie brushes, most of my styluses offer pressure sensitivity and increase accuracy on the iPad)
The Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 is a much better choice, imho. BUT if you do get one of these new iPads for design work my I recommend the excellent iPad add called AstroPad.
It really is too bad that you STILL cannot connect a usb drive or insert an SD card like you can with Android. That certainly would come in handy if you wanted to use the full capacity of these powerful new devices.
2 Likes
This sounds like it was a little creepy:
Definitely too early to know how better or worse this is compared to anything. How can you possibly determine this before weāve even answered the most basic technical questions or seen a good hands-on test?
From what Iāve read the Wacom Companion 2 is a very good professional pen input device indeed, but not without flaws. And the new iPad seems to have a brighter, higher-res display, more than twice the battery life and half the price of the top-spec Companion model.
So even if it ends up being the āAirā to Wacomās āProā because of the mobile OS limitations or more basic pen features it might still be the better choice for many users.
This early reddit thread might be a space to watch:
Fair enough weāll seeā¦Iām not closed off to the possibility that it will defy all expectations.
Iāve tried to use every iteration of the iPad in my design workflow, own all the major iPad design apps, and every ākillerā pressure sensitive stylus made to work with capacitive screens, I even have capacitive brushes. So, Iām not new to the ācould an iPad work in my design flowā quest.
Apple has resisted giving us designers an OSX tablet that can run full Photoshop/Illustrator/Painter/Whatever with an active digitizer with tilt and rotation detection. Essentially what would be their answer to the Surface. Even this new iPad still runs iOS, so no full apps. The new iOS multitasking is kinda a joke. This seems like something that should have been released 4 years ago, not something that can compete with todays offerings, imho.
Iād love to be surprised and be wrong about all of this, trust me I really really would. For now my money is on the tablet built from the ground up to be a professional design workhorse, designed specifically for designers. Also Iām not saying the new iPad wonāt be a great big screen mobile device and be awesome for many people, Iām strictly thinking about professional design workflows, and how I use devices as an artist.
2 Likes
For that kind of work, and many others, Iād want no less than multiple monitors and a good keyboard.
I long for the future day when mobile devices are useful for complex tasks.
2 Likes
Can an AppleTV 3 run apps. Or is this only an AppleTV 4 thing?
I was wondering how 53 would receive this news today.
I bought their Pencil a while ago (Iām not an artist/designer at all, just bought it to play with). Iād hope this is markedly better.
Donāt forget the external media.
Oh, it runs iMovie? How cute. How do I connect the weekendās 700GB of ProRes to grade and edit? And the redundant array for backup?
Someday Iām sure both processor power and wireless connections will be good enough to touch our phone to the desktop and have it become an awesome hub of displays, peripherals and massive, cheap as free, superfast cloud storage.
Until then weāll just have to keep an open-minded approach to marketing terms like āproā.
2 Likes
According to the Ars Technica liveblog:
The digitizer scans twice as often when youāre drawing with the pencil
Detects position, force, and tilt
With force, touch lightly to get a thin stroke and harder to get a bolder stroke.
Signals emitted from 2 locations in the tip detect orientation and tilt.
1 Like
If that is true and it does detect tilt then likely iāll be getting one and replacing my current iPad as that would be new for iPad, likewise if the position accuracy is greatly improved.
Position and pressure are pretty standard for BT iPad styluses, but tilt or greater accuracy would be improvements.
I really wish theyād release an OSX tablet so we could run full applications. The new Mac Bookās size and weight indicates that they can make something light and thin enough running OSX.
By now it is a foregone conclusion that whatever the issue, Apple is dinged if they do and dinged if they donāt.
Regarding Steve Jobās remark about the stylus, there is a difference between requiring a stylus for operation, and offering one as an option. Iām pretty sure he was knocking the former. The Multitouch UI has been proven successful for a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, there are some applications where a stylus adds value.
It makes sense to not to bundle the stylus and keyboard cover as not everyone will find them useful, and the vast majority of apps will not require them. The iPad family has never included them before.
This is a āproblemā for me, in a grotesquely privileged way, because I expect the base model to be around my price point next time I upgrade. Hopefully thereās an option for recording video at a lower resolution, because a) I donāt need 4k and b) 4k on 16gb will obviously be a grim scenario (and my current iPhone is effectively a 12gb device in terms of user space). In fact I imagine 32gb will be similarly restrictive, and even 64gb will probably require careful management of apps and media, which eats away at the phone feeling like a dependable constant companion.
The obvious solution seems to be support for micro SD or something similar - media you can swap out if you run low on space. So if 4k is the only option from this model onwards, Iāll likely be looking at Android models that support cards - Apple are obviously invested in the cloud as a solution, but I donāt think itās developing fast enough to keep pace.
What is ridiculous is the Ā£90 increment between the 64Gb and the 128GB - NV memory is cheap - Like $5 for 128GB wholesale. As someone said, UPSELL! UPSELL! UPSELL!
Thatās why came to me as well; though Iām not sure how to classify the āstylusā quote among the Jobs-isms:
He liked the pithy and biting, and was willing to sacrifice nuance, so it could merely have been a dig at the(admittedly fairly tepid) resistive-touchscreens-with-teeny-Win95-emulating-UI-elements status quo; ignoring the fact that, even as he spoke, ācreativesā with Wacoms were busily plugging away on macs and had been for years for the sake of a good quip.
However, Apple is also known for occasionally really pissing off their pro customers by making radical changes on the assumption that they know best, and that industry-standard-necessities are just old and busted legacy technology(see their āserverā offerings, what they did to anyone who needs CPU or CUDA punch on the workstation, the rancor RE: Final Cut, etc.); the fact that a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to(with varying degrees of non-success) attempt to bodge a stylus onto the ipad more or less since the first person saw one and thought āWow, a Cintique that doesnāt need to be connected to a computer; except I can only finger-paintā¦ā suggests that this is definitely possible.
The other option is Jobsā other tradition of āRubbish the competitorās product, and mock the existence of the niche it attempts to fill, until your own product is ready for release.ā
Amazon released the Kindle? āNobody reads.ā Not so long thereafter: iBooks are the second coming of reading text of computers! Sing Praise!
The Android market descends into Phablet territory? Lolz. Not so long thereafter: iPhone 6s and iPad mini.
2 Likes
It came out a couple of years ago. Itās called Surface Pro. Runs full Photoshop. Wacom digitizer and everything.
1 Like
It is probable that Apple is using somewhat nicer NAND than your basic flash-drive slinger, since iOS memory management is pretty brutal and things get flushed from RAM and reloaded on demand a lot(which would utterly suck on cheap flash); but that doesnāt change the fact that a reasonably well regarded(ie. not an enterprise SLC NVME device; but a name-brand, well reviews, SATA SSD) is roughly $100 for 250GB of flash, plus the controller and case and similar incidentals.
Well, itās not like you are going to use the SD card slot for upgradingā¦
1 Like
