I’m not entirely convinced on the case that’s being put forward here. Astropad appears to be selling their app as a way to make your iPad into a computer graphics tablet, while sidecar is advertised as a way to make it into a second monitor with some touchscreen capability.
Comparison reviews find many differences between Sidecar and Astropad, so Astropad wasn’t “cloned”. A quick web search turns up the apps iDisplay, AirDisplay, GoodDual Display and Duet Display that all make an iPad into a touchscreen monitor. This sort of weakens the argument that Astropad was uniquely ripped off. More likely, all these apps were making early use of Apple frameworks whose eventual evolution was highly predictable.
It’s actually a reference to what was once an Apple app called Sherlock. The point, if I recall, was that it searched your hard drive, your network shares, and the internet all at once for what you wanted. Presumably it took some of this functionality from an existing and popular 3rd party program, killing the company that developed said program.
They do, but it’s a separate product (i.e. they also sell Astropad with no hardware nugget).
But yeah, the fact that they created a dongle illustrates why the idea that this is some horrifying crime on Apple’s part is… well, dumb. If you are physically modifying someone else’s product to make it better, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? Of course Apple is going to eat your lunch sooner or later. The Astropad and Duet people have always known this was coming, and it seems like they successfully made hay while the sun shone (longer than I’d have guessed). Apple’s utterly predictable response neither stopped them making plenty of money, nor scared them off trying in the first place.
I could buy it more if we were talking about Pages or GarageBand, which aren’t intrinsic to how the device itself is sold; if those had been close copies of existing iOS software then that would look more like Apple abusing their position. But those apps do compete on equal footing with Word and Reason or whatever. It’s a very different thing to say that iPhones shouldn’t be allowed to ship with a mute switch because some guy made a stick-on mute switch for the original iPhone*
Perhaps it should be illegal to sell phones except as commodity parts that you have to solder together yourself and populate with bits of software not exceeding 8000 lines of code per vendor. Sure, it’d suck for everyone, but it would uphold the important principle of… you know… something or other.
* bet you didn’t remember that the mute switch was originally a lock switch
“Your mission is to pick up an app’s path; follow it, learn what you can along the way. When you find the publisher infiltrate its team by whatever means available; and sincerely flatter the developer.”
That 3rd party app was called Watson, so Apple was pretty obvious in what they were doing. Apple’s Sherlock app was faster and better IMO, and evolved into Spotlight. Searching your own computer isn’t exactly a novel idea, so I don’t really get why Apple gets so much grief over what happened to Watson.
If you think otherwise, just imagine if you had to buy several different apps just search for different kinds on your computer, each of them with their own foibles and requiring deep access to your OS.
Astro pad costs eight bucks a month. From a consumer point of view I would love to have a free option. I’m not at my computer or iPad right now to test it, but I’m curious about how well it works and what it costs.
This only matters if you care about faceless businesses though. While I feel for the actual people who are affected by this, it is hard to get worked up over a feature that was previously only available to a select few who paid for it, now being free for everyone. I agree that this raises questions about monopolies, but the practical upshot for the average person can only be a good thing
Yes, but most of the time when Microsoft were using their “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy, at least they’d try and buy out their competition, before copying and/or crushing their product. (eg, Hotmail, Visio, Bungie etc.)
First off, is there a patent? If not… well, what Sidecar and Astropad do seems like a pretty obvious idea to me.
Apple also has prior art in the form of AirPlay. Hell, my 2012 Mac can cast to my Apple TV. Sidecar is the same thing with input from the iPad back to the Mac. Not to mention the same thing has also been done for years on other platforms.
No it wasn’t. On the iPhone it has always been a ringer switch. Jobs demanded a switch to do that because he hated how you couldn’t tell if a mobile phone was on silent or not without taking it out of your pocket.
iOS 9 added the option to change it to orientation lock, before they made that a button in Control Center.
It started out as a rotation lock on iPad, and the option to make it a mute switch was added. I don’t think new iPads even have that switch.
