Steven Sinofsky:
We used to use PC tools to do things like place orders, deal with customer service, do banking, budgets, and more. All are phone tasks now for billions. AND more volume and new things.
Many things ran on mainframes for years after PCs took over.
Many things ran on DOS for years after Windows “won”.
Many things ran as Win32/OSX apps even though phones dominate computing.
In each case, the new way opened up a scenario to an order of magnitude more people.
Really interesting thread from a guy who knows a lot about this stuff.
To repeat what I’ve said elsewhere:
There are some jobs that Ipads are ill suited for. But for most tasks, the complaint that they cannot replace a PC is not due to shortcomings in the software or hardware. It’s due to mental inflexibility on the part of the person doing the task.
Well, Apple is to blame a bit for the comparison being made as they reference laptops several times in the iPad Pro announcement. At the same time, some things that some people do with laptops are either cumbersome or impossible to do on the iPad. I do web development. The leading apps to design with are not universally available on the iPad (Figma, Sketch). I can’t develop locally since I can’t install a VM or run a LAMP stack on IOS. So, for me, it’s not there.
At the same time, with iOS 11 and the Pro versions of the iPad it IS there for a lot of people so there’s a contingent of people who have moved to the iPad for some or all of their professional tasks. Will I ever be able to? Not sure. I can workaround some of the limitations but there’s not a compelling reason to at the moment. If there is, I’ll do it… but I suspect that I’ll move to an ARM MacBook first.
Neil Cybart is still hammering dogma on this topic.
https://twitter.com/Moeskido/status/1060221938990268416
It feels like every pundit who makes the “iPad as PC replacement argument” thinks iPads are a great PC replacement… for somebody else. Some people use them as a _complimentary_ device, but very few can make a total switch. As a work device there is always something that a PC is necessary or much better for.
It is a bit like the old Joel Spolsky argument about Microsoft Office – everyone only needs about 10% of the program’s features, but everyone needs a different 10%. I think there’s an awful lot of people for whom the iPad doesn’t cover the 10%.
Some of this might be ameliorated in the future with new software, but there is a large number of tasks that benefit from having a lot of data on the screen at once. Fundamentally, a PC with one or more large screens, and a high resolution pointing device is just better than a single touchscreen.
It doesn’t happen all at once. I find that I’m doing less and less that requires a dedicated laptop or desktop. Increasingly it comes down to “Do I like the keyboard?” and “Do I have a good network connection?”.