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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Apple is not doomed, but I think they've taken their eyes off the ball a bit. Watch and iPad Pro are me-too products, and the switch to flat interfaces cost them a lot of differentiation IMHO. They've cheapened their brand and they don't seem to know what market they should really disrupt.

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Personally I'm not interested in the watch, but the iPad Pro is far from me-too. The display on the 9.7" is outstanding, the pencil is top notch, it's light, powerful, sounds great. At this point Apple is just knocking it out of the park in tablets on every front. Nobody else makes anything that comes close.

Maybe (Surface etc), but in any case these marvelous products are just not selling enough. They are nowhere near being an alternative anchor product should the iPhone tank for good; they are just another branch of the iPhone world, in the way MacBooks and iMacs are branches of the classic Mac product line.

The iPhone was a completely post-Mac product; now Apple needs a post-iPhone product, and they don't seem to know exactly what that could be. They are swinging wildly at fashionable fads from competitors (watches after Samsung, pro tablets after MS, cars after Tesla, etc etc), with little end result. But Apple is at its best when it disrupts mediocre and stalling markets (grey PCs, crappy mp3 players, stupid phones), not running after fashionable fads. They should leave "fire and motion" to the rabble and come up with new panzer designs instead.

It depends what you mean by 'enough'. Enough to maintain continuous rapid growth forever? No. Enough to be sustainable profitable businesses in the long term? I'd say that was plenty.

I think tablets have reached market maturity surprisingly fast. At some point it has to become more about profitability, ecosystem strength and market dominance than growth.

It's a surface wannabe.

The iPad Pro is actually really awesome for artists. Pro + Pencil is a better experience than a Wacom Cintiq display, and it's a whole tablet for about the same price point, not just a display.

And this is why when they raised the price of the iPad Air 3, I mean iPad Pro 9", they should have included the pencil. I like Apple products and want to try out an IPP with the pencil, but it's not priced to try out at all.

Any experience on the Microsoft Surface? It seems it works very well for artists also.

Apple Pencil is pretty incredibly and trumps the stylus offered by Microsoft IMHO.

It was alright to use when they were putting in the Wacom digitizers. The N-Trig ones just aren't up to snuff. All my artist friends now just want an iPad Pro that runs full-blown Photoshop.

And for kids. My daughter loves it.

From other side, kids are often artists.

Artists (e.g. Gabe of Penny Arcade fame) were saying similar things about MS's Surface Pro 3 years ago: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

Is the iPad Pro a big improvement on that?

This is a pretty good comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niD1N1d4nTc

Yes and no (am an artist and have both). The hardware profile is exactly what you would want, but the software isn't there. You'd need something like the equivalent of the brush engine in Photoshop in order for it to be viable for most artists, but Adobe seems all in on their paired down and unintuitive mobile apps. Procreate comes close, but their brush system is kludgy.

They have way too many products out now particularly the iPad line.

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