As are most, if not all, commercial entities, Apple's main goal is to generate revenue and profit from that revenue for its shareholders. This fact means that it is virtually inevitable that the company must respond to consumer sentiment and that sentiment is gauged by trends in popularity of products. This, I feel, applies in spite of Apple's record of ability to introduce products that drive demand.
I find the whole 'mobile' phenomenon and that of the smartphone, as both bewildering & contradictory.
The contradiction lies, for me, in the contrast between an apparent desire and action to make computer products ever thinner, lighter, and more integrated and the reversal of that trend towards larger, more complex & multi-task products.
The 'ever smaller' stage saw the Apple 'Air' products, consistently thinner & the ludicrous 13" screens of laptops across the brands and even the Small Form Factor (SFF) desktop machines. It even applies to the cellphone if one recalls the gradual reduction in size from the 'bricks' that comprised the early market to later smartphones.
Yet, now from screens that could barely show a few lines of text we have mobile phones with screens almost as large as my first television set or the original Mac, i.e. 8" [20cm] on the diagonal. The iPad has grown bigger and bigger and larger screens now appear to be returning to the laptop lineup, though it is still difficult to find a 17" equpped model.
We phone, we email, we podcast, we read books, we develop, we shop, we bank, we pay, etc... now, using our phones and almost any other device. The lines have blurred. Indeed, communication companies and others now talk not of 'devices', not of 'laptops' or 'smartphones' or 'watches' or whatever. It seems that every device has to be capable of doing everything. - I wonder, how long before we have a watch which has some form of expanding screen and keyboard?
It all seems somewhat ludicrous to me but perhaps I am idiosyncratic and the only one who finds these developments a confusion of mixed messages and differential development decline.
Yes, I'm old, so that may be the problem. However, as much as I've seen and even welcomed some examples of integration over the years, my mind still considers focus on specific function and need to be generally more significant and nurturing of excellent product development.
I still have a working iPhone 3GS and though I admit to having upgradede to an iPhone 8, that has been more for longer battery life and that I was able to switch for little more than it would have cost me to have the battery replaced in the 3GS. The point is, however, that all I need in a phone is the ability to make and receive calls. Yes, the camera can be handy, as is the ability to recieve news & weather reports as they are released but I don't *need* to do so..
I don't want to struggle with a tiny little screen on a laptop, particularly if I am working on a spreadsheet or database. My, last model, 2011 17" Macbook Pro gives me enough screen real estate to accomplish what I need but is about the minimum with which I could cope - and no, it is not too heavy, or too large, or too unwieldy to carry about. It moves with me quite happily in laptop case, thank you.
When I'm into any serious, (by my standards) computing, I welcome still having the use of a desktop machine and a seperate, reasonably sized 27" monitor. I don't want it all built in an all-in-one. If the computer fails or needs a modification I want to be able to do it and not lose access to my whole system and similarly with my monitor.
The iPad, well mine is only a 2nd generation but is fine for study, taking notes, and many other casual tasks and experimentation that I want to undertake wherever I happen to be. Yes, I can even draft serious writing on it, too. Where it a later model I'm sure that it might come close to being *the great integrated compromise* and may change my mind about the state of play in consumer IT.
For now, I remain reasonably convinced that with few exceptions and when planning and design are done correctly, different task require different tools and different tools are designed for different tasks.
I actually don't think that I'm on my own for so many who write in this field appear to have a range of devices even greater than my own - no matter how much they may rave about one of them.
Perhaps now would be a good time for a review of the IT consumer product industry and some sense of reason and purpose applied to what, to me, has become a market grown like topsy.
