If you’re going to tell me “normal people” don’t do those tasks, please don’t. Quilters run blogs. Salespeople create presentations. And non-techie writers send revisions to editors. It’s us nerds who insist that iOS solves the “problem” of normal people who don’t understand the file system putting all their files on the desktop. But the desktop acts as shared document storage, which is something it turns out normal people sometimes need, and iOS does not solve that problem. Lecture me about the virtues of containers all you want, but there is no world in which having to use Dropbox as a temporary storage medium is a step forward.
This is a great article, and it hits the nail on the head so hard, the nail’s probably in Fiji by now. The only people going iPad-only are bloggers writing “I went iPad-only”-posts, and people who are trying to prove a point. Neither of them constitute a market.
I agree with the conclusion, relying on add-on services to manage files is stupid, but why blame the nerds? While there are fanboys who defend whatever comes out of apple, many of “us nerds” aren’t afflicted by the RDF and have been criticizing this limitation as well as others from day one.
Edited 2016-07-30 13:09 UTC
Te me the real moral of the story is “mobile OSes are still toy OSes” and its really as simple as that.
I guarantee you that if I handed that guy, despite the fact he’s a Machead, one of those $120 Windows 2-in-1 tablet/laptop hybrids? He’d have had no problem doing those tasks because it runs a desktop OS which means that all the programs can talk to each other and share data, this is something these mobile OSes just do not seem to grasp and from the looks of it won’t be getting what we’ve taken for granted on the desktop anytime soon.
This is why I gave away my brand new quad core tablet and kept my little 5 year old dual APU netbook, because desktop OSes just get out of the way and allow me to work using the apps I want in the manner I want and because they are desktop apps they can all speak the same language, HTML, JPG, TXT, MP3, etc. At the end of the day I was simply able to get my work done faster and with less bullshit on that 5 year old netbook running a real desktop than the latest Android tablet, its just a better platform all around.
Doesn’t spark interface to the dreaded container, so you can reply within Spark and pick your document as an attachment there? I know the default Mail client does this, as I have done it on many occasions.
Containers are a very weak argument anyway, since all Mac App Store apps are also sandboxed. Apple solved the problem elegantly by just having a separate process handling Open/Save dialogs and linking files/directories into the sandbox.
I fully agree that there is no reason why iOS couldn’t open up the filesystem more, and that this is a requirement for daily use.
Given that the tablet market is stagnating quite quickly, one wonders whether we’ll look back on them as we do on netbooks within a couple of years.
I find it interesting that you mention netbooks on two levels. One, I have a netbook from the second generation of them, an Acer Aspire One that has a single core Atom CPU and came with Windows 7 Starter. As old as this device is, I can still get reasonable performance using a lightweight Linux distro, and it’s a full computing device (easy, robust file access, WIMP, etc). That such an old device can outperform a current tablet as a complete computing device means hanging on to it all these years was worth it.
Two, I was able to upgrade it to Windows 10 with zero issues, and while its performance under that OS doesn’t match Linux, it does allow me to run Windows binaries without resorting to WINE, if I so choose. By constrast, I have a first generation iPad and it won’t even run iOS 6, which means nearly all apps have left it behind. It’s basically a browser-only device at this point.
So, my netbook from 2009 can run Linux and Windows OSes from 2016, whereas my iPad from 2010 is stuck at an OS from 2012, and without even the benefit of apps like Dropbox for file manipulation.
I guess that would depend on how much time you spent dicking with it in order to optimize it, unless you have a lot more time than money (I am the opposite).
Not much at all, in this case. Elementary OS runs extremely well out of the box. Granted, over the years I’ve slowly maxed out the hardware (SSD, maxed RAM, replaced 802.11G wireless card with a combo 802.11AC/Bluetooth 4.0 card, high capacity battery), but no “dicking around” necessary for it to run well under Linux. In fact, Elementary runs so well on it that that’s what I leave on the SSD, with Windows 10 on the original hard drive stored in the closet.
Also, by “performance” I mean how it performs as a complete, functional computer compared to an iPad. It’s no speed demon and never will be, but it’s a workhorse and a damn fine one given the time and money invested; $179 original price paid in 2009, $30 SSD, $10 RAM, $15 wireless card, $20 battery. So basically, ~$260 and maybe three hours over a span of 6+ years for an ultraportable, complete computer that runs Linux and Windows 10 very well…I’d say it’s worth it. 🙂
Edited 2016-07-30 19:20 UTC
What do you mean that it depends on how much time he spends messing with it? It’s pretty clear his old netbook can current and full OSes, whereas the Ipad he has cannot even run the latest version of IOS and it definitely cannot run a full fledged OS like Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
There are two ways of looking at this:
In the case of keeping your existing hardware, there is no messing around to optimize the OS because the OS was originally intended to run on lower specifications. At least in the case of popular Linux distributions, keeping that OS up to date is usually a quick and painless process. It is certainly on par with the trouble of setting up a new device and transferring the data over. The same can be said for the associated application software.
If you are getting older hardware, or lower hardware with lower specifications, the cost savings can be in the hundreds of dollars and the time spent optimizing the OS and application software may be a handful of hours. Now if you choose to go with something more powerful or newer because you don’t enjoy doing that sort of thing or would rather be doing something else, that’s fine. Just don’t try to fool yourself by claiming that your time is more valuable (in a monetary sense) because it probably isn’t.
Depends on what you mean by ‘handful of hours’. For example, I’m worth about $30 an hour, so if the time spent setting up/optimizing (or just waiting for slower apps to load) is 10 hours and the cost savings is less than $300, then it LITERALLY becomes not worth it.
Well, unless you enjoy tinkering… which, I did in my 20’s, but not now in my 40’s.
Edited 2016-08-01 21:52 UTC
May be true – but (admittedly is a small sample size) moving moving my parents PC over to Kubuntu in 2011 resulted in a remarkable reduction in tech-support problems, and that’s even with the very shitty 11.10 until I installed 14.04.
Edited 2016-07-30 18:06 UTC
The ironic thing is that most of these bloggers (being the massive Apple fans they are) probably do have a Mac in their house somewhere. It’s often rather hilarious to read an iPad troubleshooting article written by the same iPad-only author listing “restore via the desktop iTunes” as a viable (sometimes only) solution.
With regards to the linked Medium article;
While I agree with the overall sentiment/conclusion, why are all these authors so brand centric? How does mentioning the brand of slip case or sling bag even contribute to the article? All that shows is their intent to monetize, and their materialism.
Edited 2016-07-30 18:43 UTC
“[Linux users] like the challenge. Figuring out how to do what they used to do on a Mac or Windows PC is part of the allure.”
This is insulting. It discredits a whole segment of the population who grew up on desktop Linux/UNIX-like and are more familiar/efficient on those systems.
Figuring out how to be similarly productive when I use a Mac or Windows (with their constantly changing interfaces and configuration options) isn’t alluring; it’s annoying.
Edited 2016-07-30 19:01 UTC
And stupid and wrong. I left Mac OS X because I got sick of trying stupid hacks to make it more like gnu/Linux. I just want a Linux like system without having to jump through a million and one hoops to do so.
I agree, I use Linux not because I enjoy figuring out how to make things work, but because I enjoy it being relatively easy to make things work. I admittedly run Gentoo, so I’m pretty much always tinkering, but it’s not an effort to make things work, it’s an effort to make things more efficiently, but all of that is effort I”m choosing to make, not something required of me because I use Linux. In contrast, with Windows and sometimes with OS X, getting a system to work reliably the way I want is often an exercise in futility.
As an example, I have a home server system with 4 HDD’s and 2 SSD’s running Linux with the storage stack configured so that I can lose 3 of the HDD’s and 1 SSD and still have a fully functional system without having to even think about accessing my backups. It took me about 15 minutes of reading documentation to figure out how to set this up, and maybe 90 seconds of actual time to set it up, most of which was editing text files or running simple commands from the console. Figuring out a similar configuration for an OS X server took me about 2 hours of reading, and then almost 15 minutes of jumping through various graphical tools to set up. As for Windows, after spending 4 hours of reading documentation, I’m still not even sure if it’s possible to put together such a configuration.
It’s not possible under Windows without hardware RAID. Linux, the *BSDs, and Illumos are literally decades ahead on this front thanks to proper software RAID, proper LVM, and next-gen filesystems like ZFS, BtrFS, and HAMMER2. You’d be a fool to trust Windows for file storage at this point if you care about data integrity. Even OS X can use ZFS via MacFUSE.
I know many people that have ditched their computers or never had one that only use a smart phone. And many kids growing up in the smart phone / tablet world, don’t have access to a personal computer. Cost, space, needs, and convenience all play a role in this.
Kind of ironic since you can buy a decent laptop/desktop for the same price as a flagship cell phone.
Most of the cost is due to engineering the small form factor. Flagship phone hardware might cost as little as USD100 if sold as desktop without a screen.
Yeah, reading some of the replies on here reminds me of people in the late 90’s saying people will never replace their home phone with a cell phone because cell phones will never match the reliability of a land line.
Truth is there are an increasing number of people using a phone or tablet as their main or only computer. Those who go back to a “real computer” to do “serious work” often are only doing that because of outdated services/programs that aren’t yet available on Android or iOS.
Personally my desktop computer has turned into a gaming rig, as a rarely spend any time at it for anything else.
didn’t read the article but i can tell you this —
about half of my clients want an iPad or iPhone-only solution. they are usually in the service industry — mechanics, plumbers, contractors — and they are often on-site — construction, inspectors, education, laboratory.
the old way of doing it was to set up a PC or a mac and have 1 person enter data, with clipboards or maybe a couple of other PC’s around the facility, or on site.
the new way is to give the person an iPad or iPhone (sometimes android) and make them manage their data themselves.
But those clients are using the iPad to replace a clipboard, a receipt-book, or an invoice system. It’s a special-purpose function, being solved with a wireless, easy-to-use tablet. That’s fine.
The point of the article is that iPads (and Android tablets, although they’re slightly less so, since you can navigate the file system) are terrible general purpose computing devices, in spite of all the people claiming you don’t need a PC or laptop if you have an iPad.
So you probably should have read the article.
android is annoyingly overly locked down. someone asked me to add a font to their android MS word install…i ended up not being successful even with rooting the tablet. i think they lock it down so you can’t remove the crapware on these damn things.
How for years sites like this was telling me how this year was the year for desktop Linux. (Besides Chromebooks I’m still waiting)
Now Desktop Linux is a punch line. Lol. Funny.
Linux has only become the number 1 consumer operating system on the planet, but whatever lol desktops right?
Don’t confuse the “Linux kernel” (which powers Android) with the “Linux ABI” (vernacular shorthand for the Linux+glibc+X11 ABI) which is what people mean when they say Desktop Linux.
We don’t think it’s clever when we are clearly talking about “Linux which can run the ‘Linux games’ I bought from GOG/Humble/Steam/etc.” and people intentionally misinterpret our words.
You might as well play word games and argue that iOS and OSX are the same thing because they both use the Darwin kernel.
Edited 2016-07-30 21:21 UTC
I don’t think anybody, in this particular website, doesn’t really know the distinction between the Linux kernel and the typical Linux desktop software stack. Thom’s response was a tongue-in-cheek to an also tongue-in-cheek assertion that desktop Linux is vaporware which, quite frankly, is getting a little tiring as time passes by.
I use desktop Linux on a daily basis at home and also use a RHEL-based workstation at work in one of the top IT companies. And with the exception of games, which I prefer to do on my living room console anyway, I can’t say I am missing anything. I could spend two pages here describing my day-to-day activities and how it compares to everybody else’s – in many cases quite favorably – but suffice to say that I’m much more productive on Debian than on anything else!
Linux is available for desktops and it is a solid alternative to the mainstream operating systems and it works fine for those who want it. For me, the year of Linux on the desktop was somewhere between 1998 and 2002.
Some people don’t like Linux on their desktop. Yeah, we get it. Doesn’t change the fact that it is currently the most popular consumer operating system on the planet – as Thom correctly pointed out, even in jest – and that it offers a solid product for desktops.
Edited 2016-07-30 22:06 UTC
No Thom, and the fact that you say this as an editor of a site that covers technology is completely embarrassing. Android is as much as Linux as iOS is BSD. In other words: Not significantly at all by any sane definition.
Android contains just as much Linux as any other Linux distribution, i.e., the Linux kernel. Why is one Linux, while the other isn’t?
There isn’t, it’s the same, in fact I’m running PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Apache, MySQL, etc. I have scripts running under a Crontab, in which I use to produce detailed reports by parsing emails with attached delimited data files, import the data into a local MySQL DB, than using Office HD, OpenOffice rewritten for Android containing the same desktop features. By creating a spreadsheet using the the data from the MySQL DB, when finished I email the report(s), than backup on a corporate server which is mounted as a local folder on the system. I use my Pixel C for web development in which I even have a LAMP server, though I just use it when I’m not connected to the Net, the rest of the time I’m using CodeEnvy, a cloud based IDE.
The point is, I’m doing pretty much everything that I do on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga, running Arch Linux. People who don’t understand how to do this of course will state that Android isn’t anything like a normal Linux box, when it actually is. It’s why frameworks like BusyBox exist, to access this portion of Android more efficiently. Those who compile their own Android builds as I do, have also added in every Linux CLI application, making Android even more of a traditional Linux system. To much for you, well than simply install a distro like Debian under a Chroot, in which you can even bring up Linux GUI applications. Though I’ve found that simply streamimg them using services like rollapp.com is a much better solution.
Edited 2016-07-31 15:52 UTC
Because Android is more about the SDK and Run-time libraries than the fact that is running a Linux kernel. It could use any old kernel under the box and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.
That’s not an answer to my question. If both Debian and Android contain an equal amount of “Linux”, why is it okay to call Debian Linux, but calling Android Linux causes a whole bunch of people to lose their collective shit?
The question’s rhetorical – I know the answer, obviously – but I like watching people twist and turn and jump up and down trying to justify their erratic behaviour.
Because unless you are adhering to the strictest definition most people see a Linux system as the Linux Kernel, GNU tooling and whatever tooling distro provides.
I would agree with them, because I think the Linux part of Android is probably the least important part of the Android. I don’t think that requires any mental gymnastics.
It really upto you how pedantic you wish to be.
Edited 2016-08-01 19:36 UTC
So what’s the magical threshold at which you remove enough of the GNU tooling and distro tooling and replace with other tooling that it no longer becomes Linux then?
And why would you include distro tooling? If distro tooling becomes part of the definition, then Ubuntu and OpenSUSE are not Linux then?
The argument “you can replace stuff” still does not hold regardless of how many assertions have been made.
The easiest definition is: if it’s got code from the Linux project in it, then it’s Linux. That doesn’t require pedantry. It’s literally the least gymnastic definition there is.
When it becomes useful to make the distinction. I write software for a living sometimes that includes Android apps. It isn’t remotely useful at the level I work with (Android SDK) to know that it is Linux.
If I am writing a web service to a server it is useful to know whether it is Linux (and what sort of flavor), another Unix variant or maybe even Windows. So it is worth making the distinction, because it lets me make useful assumptions about the environment my code will be running in.
Now if I worked say with the NDK or I contributed to the Android project, then it might be very useful to care that it has a Linux Kernel.
Edited 2016-08-02 10:01 UTC
lucas_maximus,
Right, but I think what’s rubbing people the wrong way is that as it stands android IS a linux distro even though you only use the new abstractions in userspace.
Sure, it could have been built on BSD or some other unix. Nobody denies that, but the fact is it was not. You may not care one little iota about this fact for your purposes, but it doesn’t change the fact. Android is able to drop the “/Linux” because there are no alternatives and it becomes assumed/implied, but theoretically if there were alternatives then “Android” alone would become ambiguous. Again this may or may not matter to you, but it matters to some people and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Consider another distro where this has been done:
Debian/Linux
Debian/kFreeBSD
https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/index.en.html
The BSD alternative is so rare (and even obscure) that /Linux can safely be assumed. But if this weren’t the case and both were popular, then it would become necessary to tack on “/Linux” to resolve the ambiguity.
Edited 2016-08-02 14:38 UTC
I think it lets people think they are really clever say “technically it is linux.
lucas_maximus,
-Shrug-
I don’t get what the fuss is over and there are more fun things to debate!
Exactly.
technically that’s GNU/Linux. There’s android/linux and chromeos/linux now, both competing very well in their markets.
Where?
Android?
Just because it uses Linux for its kernel, it isn’t GNU/Linux as any developer that makes use of the NDK painfully knows.
It is very constrained with a subset of Linux APIs, for example UNIX IPC isn’t available.
Now with Android N, they are clamping down in the APKs that try to link to system libraries outside the tiny set of allowed ones.
ChromeOS, which apparently is selling like hot cakes on US?
No one using it as Google intended, ever sees what kernel is juggling those Chrome windows around.
In both cases, Google could replace Linux with BSD, QNX, or any other kernel with a POSIX like API and only OEMs would notice it.
How is that an argument that it isn’t Linux? the whole point of Linux and BSD etc is that they implement POSIX mostly faithfully such that they are compatible with each other. Is something not considered Linux if it can be swapped out? On one computer I use, I have Gnome running on RHEL. I could instead use an equally Gnome environment on a BSD kernel instead. Does that mean I’m not actually running Linux on that computer because it can be theoretically swapped out with another POSIX-like system?
Linux is this http://www.linux.org/, also commonly known as GNU/Linux, anything else isn’t it.
Apparently people these days mix Linux with UNIX for whatever reason.
Yes, because the main goal of Linux is to provide a POSIX-like API, except in areas where it didn’t make technical sense to do so.
It doesn’t matter if the kernel can be swapped out. What makes something Linux is if the code pedigree is from the Linux project.
That’s why, when I’m being pedantic, I call it glibc/Linux, X11/Linux, or X11/glibc/Linux.
Those are a concrete, defensible description of what matters to define the platform (the ABI) and are consistent with other platform descriptors, like the “X11; Linux” you see in browser User-Agent strings or the “x86_64-linux-gnu” triples which describe the libc in use, not the userland.
(As evidenced when you compare something like “x86_64-linux-musl”, which makes it clear that “gnu” and “musl” are shorthand for “GNU libc” and “musl libc”)
What about Alpine Linux, which is Linux with busybox?
I’m actually looking forward to the day when musl-libc reaches full ABI compatibility with glibc so I can build a GOG.com-compatible desktop Linux distro using musl, BusyBox, and LLVM and give the finger to people who blindly parrot Stallman’s talking point.
GNU/Linux will NEVER be its name for a variety of reasons:
1. If you’re going by the total contribution to the OS (in terms of LOC or on-disk file size), then it takes some very artificial conditions for GNU to be the second-largest contributor of code. (For any desktop distro, X11/Linux is the name you’d use by that metric. Even for non-desktop distros, you need GCC to pad out your numbers these days.)
Stallman gets his results by excluding X11 from the base OS and including GCC, because it’s not an OS unless it can compile C code and having a GUI is an unnecessary extra if you’ve got console emacs. (Remember, this is the man who browses the Internet via a special gateway which sends web pages to him as e-mails.)
2. If you’re going based on centrality to the OS, the most favourable-to-Stallman name is glibc/Linux, which he doesn’t consider good enough. (And something like SystemD/glibc/Linux is more accurate)
3. Coming from the end-user side, it has too many syllables (more than three) and it’s hard enough getting end users to use “Linux” rather than “Ubuntu” since “Ubuntu Linux” is also too long (five syllables, just like GNU/Linux).
Stallman is just a sore loser who refuses to accept that, because they were too perfectionist about their HURD microkernel, they lost the race to control the messaging. We don’t call Apple’s OS BSD/OSX just because Apple borrowed their userland tools from FreeBSD and we don’t refer to Linux as X11/GNU/Linux or X11/SystemD/GNU/Linux or whatever because it’s too awkward.
It is very much possible that I am mistaken, but I thought GNU should be pronounced like a word, the animal in fact. This makes GNU/Linux only three syllables long, if you don’t pronounce the forward stroke at least.
Because, when end-users, or application programmers, or really anyone except pedants and kernel nerds talk about a platform’s name, they’re referring to either the API (Linux) or the ABI (x86 Linux)… the part which actually has a clear, obvious, and significant effect on the shape of their computing experience by defining which applications they can run.
Besides, your GNOME argument is equivalent to saying that Windows == OSX because you can run Firefox, and Chrome and Microsoft Office on both of them.
Edited 2016-07-31 23:35 UTC
My Gnome argument is pointing out the flaws in his distinction. It’s not itself a description of what constitutes Linux.
So no, it’s not equivalent at all.
No, “non-nerd” end-users call it “Ubuntu” and we get frustrated by that. (I’m speaking from personal experience here.)
Power-users declare “Linux” to be a pair of homographs (“Linux, the kernel” and “Linux, the ABI that is supported by things like Humble Bundle games”) to work around the fact that there is no agreed-upon, simple (3 syllables or less) term that encompasses all glibc+Linux distros (and, usually, musl+Linux distros) while simultaneously excluding Android.
(Which makes sense, given Google’s attitude toward the APIs outside the Dalvik runtime environment compared to musl’s goal to eventually be a more reliable, drop-in glibc replacement. Android happens to be based on Linux.)
Edited 2016-08-01 07:34 UTC
Actually, as far as ChromeOS (and the IoT derivative Brillo) are concerned, they couldn’t just replace Linux with BSD without some development, and replacing it with QNX or most other POSIX kernels would actually require a lot of user-space to be rewritten (not CHrome itself, but a lot of other parts that most people never see). ChromeOS is Gentoo under the hood, and while Gentoo will run on a lot of things (including crazy stuff like Internix), you can’t just swap out kernels without rebuilding most of the system.
Also, just because you don’t know what software something is running doesn’t mean it’s not running that software. Many ATM’s run OS/2 or Windows, but just about nobody who uses them knows this. Lots of small embedded devices run a small non-POSIX UNIX-like OS called Tron. Many routers run Linux (as DD-WRT or similar distros), and lots of NAS systems run BSD or Linux. Not knowing what underlying software your OS is using doesn’t mean that it isn’t using that software. It’s strictly incorrect to say ChromeOS is Linux, but that’s because it uses Linux, not because nobody who uses it knows it’s using Linux.
I know tons of “iPad/tablet only” people. In fact I know more people with PCs getting dust than with iPads getting dust.
“iPad only” is not for every user for sure (it’s not for me for example) but It covers a huge amount of normal people use cases.
Same. Mostly elderly people. My parents have a PC but it gathers dust 99% of the time. They use it to print on their old USB-only printer, and they use it to write longer documents because they don’t have a keyboard for the iPad.
However I do agree that for more advanced computer users the iPad (or Android tablets for that matter) are not sufficient to replace a PC.
Programmers drove development and knew there wasn’t any money in a static product. So instead of keeping what works and hardening the security of the product, they keep screwing with the UI. They keep reinventing the wheel.
My mother in her 70’s adores the Microsoft Surface. I think she has the 3. It’s much better in her opinion than the iPad. She still likes her PC. But she absolutely loves the ability to use full versions of Office and any other PC product from the comfort of a recliner chair. Now she used Office in her former work life, so she is perhaps an anomaly to programmer types. But IMHO there are quite a few people out there like her. If someone on a fixed income cannot afford to buy Microsoft Office as a service, I feel she will be heartbroken to no longer upgrade with each new version. She actually knows how to use many of the complicated tools in half of that product. Office online and Google Docs just were not to her liking. So in her mind a stripped down version is no substitute. I have a hard time believing she’s an anomaly. But at least Surface is satisfactory to appease her PC fixations. I fear she will feel left out if products like the PC – even in Surface tablet form – go away.
I went iPad only and I will admit that are things I can’t do. But there’s also a lot I can do. I did get a flash drive with a wireless to iPad/iPhone connection. Also I have a file manager app. I can send random text files or configuration files around. And also zip up files and use my email to send them.
I had an iMac. And it just turned out I used my iPad mini more. And when the iPad Pro 9.7 came out, I sold my iMac and got the iPad Pro. I am very into drawing and photography. So the iPad works great for me. I will probably get a lower end laptop just to have a laptop. But I am also hoping that Apple makes the iPad stand alone by itself better too. I don’t necessarily think that it needs a standard file system. But it shouldn’t block me if I try to deal with an incompatible file.
Wish I could upvote you for actually trying the iPad-only thing, but already commented. Sometimes I look at the mess of wires running through the house (combined with the thousands of $$$ spent on computing equipment) and wonder what it would be like to just get a 12″ iPad Pro with the Razer mechanical keyboard and call it a day.
The guy sounds like he didn’t use a “modern” desktop Linux in the last… 10 years or so. Seriously, Linux uses the same paradigms as the other desktops to the point where is really hard to day if feature X was first in Windows, OS X, GNOME or Plasma. Everything he says he can do on the Mac but not on iOS, in Linux would be about the same as on the Mac (save to the desktop, open files with different apps, drag to attach files).
Well, if find it amusing every time some iOS users wake up and start complaining about issues that others have recognized as major and blocking. I also find it funny when every now and then someone asks me why I’m not using any iOS device, expecting some anti-Apple argument, then getting surprised when I start listing a dozen points. Not having a proper local filesystem is just one drop in the bucket.
OK, I just realized here that I was reading yet another stupid crap so I just stopped.
Real users and devs can find a way to get their stuff done, and reasoning like the above will never fit their behavior, it’ll just make them angry to have wasted their time reading such BS. “Normal” users are a different breed, but they are much less affected by the lack of features of whichever OS, iOS included, since most of them won’t ever reach the level of sophistication in their usage patterns to arrive to a point to notice those deficiencies.
My kids play and socialize on their iPad/iPhone combinations. But when they need to do something important they fight over the PC. Why? Because the PC has much deeper tools and storage. iOS is a joke to them when it comes to writing up reports, inserting media into them, AND printing hard copies.
iOS doesn’t share data between apps unless they tie into some online tool like dropbox. If teenagers feel that f-ing blows, that speaks volumes. All you programmers out there are getting the proverbial middle finger.
And storage on a service. They complain it doesn’t act like the PC. They navigate devices and folder structures in effortless fashion. Teenagers. What does that tell you programmers? It’s that middle finger again.
The kids all came to the same logical conclusion. They wanted to access their files from the PC while they are on their laptops. They don’t really care for their laptops, but they can’t all use the PC at the same time. So they will type up the text and cut it over to the final product on the PC. Even though the laptops have ways to do the same thing. Even though the printers works from the laptops, too. They logically wanted the equivalent of network folders!
Quite frankly if my kids came to these conclusions on their own from using iOS, laps, and a PC… programmers deserve that middle finger. You’re trying to tell users how they want things they really don’t. The next generation doesn’t care for your line of reasoning
MadRat,
Strongly agree! Network file systems are central to my productivity workflow, I wish both IOS and android would embrace them natively and take them further.
Edited 2016-07-31 13:24 UTC
I don’t care how many think that iOS’s current file management paradigm is fine, I absolutely despise it. There isn’t a single thing about it that I can honestly say, yeah, that works.
As such I simply do not use my iPad Pro for anything but music creation, though even for that, getting my midi/way/mp3 files to and from Ableton Live is enough to stress out even the most Zen amongst us.
At least the iPad has good power management and access to premium content services like Netflix without the need for nasty hacks.
Ok, jocking aside, people have no reason to go iPad-only when their Windows PC from 2011 is still in perfect working order. They can always fire it up and use it for those tasks an iPad can’t do.
Most people are iPad-mostly, and combined with the still-working machines from 2011, this is hurting Windows PC sales.
i know it’s only a small thing but why did he open the word document in pages, why not use Word for the iPad, it’s pretty much fully featured. Since it’s release i haven’t used pages at all.
“Pages” for iOS (actually for OS X too) is as useless as Writepad for Windows.
What an informative comment. I especially like your examples and reasoning.
Thank you! Then become my OSnews fan to enjoy more of my reasoning and wisdom!
I’d give you a +1 if I could for the retort.
I used to be in the crowd that said I couldn’t be productive on these devices, particularly iPads. To be fair, when they first came out I do believe that assumption was perfectly warranted. They had no multitasking, no interapp communication at all, and no real productivity apps.
Fast forward six years. The apps are here–Office, iWork, Adobe, audio editors, remote administration software (including some damn nice ssh clients). Apps can send files to and from one another. Keyboard shortcut support has been added. I’ve found, much to my surprise, that I really can do about 90% of my work on the iPad with the right apps. It requires a serious paradigm shift not only in the way we interact with the device, but with the way we think of interapp communication. Some of it is more streamlined for those with little computer knowledge, and some of it is clunky as all get out from my point of view. Like any computing platform, it’s a mixed bag.
I’m actually glad the iPad has become as flexible as it has. More competition is good for everyone, and I hope we see more growth on all sides from all manufacturers.
If he’s using Dropbox to get files between apps, then he has zero idea how to use iOS correctly.
Back in the mid 1990’s Mainframes for business were on its way out, while desktop PC’s and Desktop Based Servers were on their way on. One of the biggest arguments about the Mainframes were how these Desktop systems weren’t up to the task. Early in the debate they were right. The Desktop market were for kids and games and a few light computing needs. Then after time, new software and systems came up. So the PC couldn’t handle a huge batch processing like a mainframe, however the software was designed to process the data after entry being one person per data entry, it gave the PC time during that 8 hour day to process stuff without lag. Where the Batch mainframe could do in an hour over night.
We are thinking iPads as a substitute for the PC. While the real change is much more interesting it isn’t that we are substituting the iPad for the PC, But we change how we use computing to a way that the iPad handles things. In many ways the iOS way is closer to the old mainframe days. With cloud processing it is much more like a timeshare mainframe. Where the low end device is the Human User Interface like a vt220 terminal. But now we have network connection nearly everywhere we go. Allowing this new computing to be advantageous.
Now there are a bunch of people who are saying the Desktop will die, no not in a while, much like how we still have mainframes today. However their scope will be more limited (I see more of workstation vs a Personal Computer) where they are more common at offices for a set of people who need additional computing needs.
Maybe in the US.
In Australia working online varies between very difficult to impossible. Most home users would be lucky to get 1Mbps upload speeds on their ADSL. Cellular data is always capped and costs about AUD10/GB.
unclefester,
It’s similar in the US. I use about 30-60GB each month through my regular ISP. If I am away from home I will either curb my usual activities or hope they’ve got wifi.
Many restaurants/hotels offer free wifi, but at some airports they will charge for wifi by the hour/day/month.
Often times cell service isn’t even an option, I just took a road trip through new york/vermont and there are long stretches of zero service, so I always plan ahead and use a local GPS app and copy all the files I expect to need onto my devices ahead of time.