Craig Federighi on iPad's Long-Awaited External Drive Support: 'We're Willing to Acknowledge the 1990s'

[Lesser Evets]

And right there is a reason Apple is going to tank hard in the 2020s: myopic, deaf, arrogant, and full of hubris.

AirDrop is NOT an option. On one hand Apple says the iPad is an autonomous computer, on the other they want us to buy a Mac to support an iPad. And to get around that, they want us to use their crappy cloud storage... for a subscription fee. Subscription fees are a fool's game: today it costs $1 and tomorrow it is $100: people want to pay a one-time fee and be in complete control of their data and info. Apple is already conjoined with arbitrary privacy issues. Now they want us to relinquish control and pay them for it... yeah, good luck with that.

 

[Abazigal]

And right there is a reason Apple is going to tank hard in the 2020s: myopic, deaf, arrogant, and full of hubris.

I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

If you are waiting and hoping that Apple stumbles as some sort of “retribution” for their perceived arrogance, you will be disappointed.

As will all the other naysayers out there.

 

[shadowmatt]

"We're willing to acknowledge the 1990s and go all the way back."

They could acknowledge when Apple made computers professionals could use, rather than making art pieces that they tell professionals how to use.

 

[tech3475]

Is it in their contracts that they have to be arrogant?

This reminds of me the '5 year old computers are sad' comment.

I still regularly use '90s storage' because it can be easier/quicker than p***ing about with alternatives, if there's even a choice. He even says it himself in the same paragraph an example where airdrop is not an option.

 

[seinman]

There's an easy solution to that: backing up. I have about 24 TB of stuff on external drives, half of that is the actual data I use, and the other half is the backup.

Now imagine storing 12TB in the cloud, and having to wait hours or days each time you want to access it, vs. just working directly off of it if it were on local hard drives. And not to mention having to pay for it forever, with the threat that if you ever stop paying, all your data will be deleted. No such risk with hard drives.

I think the cloud is great for calendars and email, and light stuff that needs to be synced across multiple devices. But for storing massive libraries of files? What's the point? It's just going to be too slow to be of any use. Even for a backup, it's too damn slow.

You realize these things can co-exist, right? I have a 24 TB file server (raw, less with redundancy for important files). I also have a 2 TB iCloud plan. I also have an unlimited Backblaze plan. All three of these services serve a different purpose in my storage and access needs.

 

[NufSaid]

Doesn’t anyone see the education play here. One place I know thumb drives are prevalent is education - which is always in the dark ages.

Companies are moving away and even banning the use or presence of them.

 

[I7guy]

I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

If you are waiting and hoping that Apple stumbles as some sort of “retribution” for their perceived arrogance, you will be disappointed.

As will all the other naysayers out there.

People who truly believe apple will tank, should short the stock big time as a symbol of their convictions.

 

[sg17463]

Companies are moving away and even banning the use or presence of them.

In fairness, every company I've worked for in the last 15 years has banned USB sticks or external hard drives. It hasn't been allowed in my world for a long long time.

 

[LordVic]

Also hey there are people that own iPads but don’t own any other Apple products. How’s AirDrop a solution for them?

Just replace all your gear with exclusively apple stuff. That's what they want.

 

[ipponrg]

In fairness, every company I've worked for in the last 15 years has banned USB sticks or external hard drives. It hasn't been allowed in my world for a long long time.

On the contrary in my industry it’s still needed.

 

[bingeciren]

Data to support that?

Or is a market leading position for iPad not good enough for you?

Just look at the number of likes to his post and your post and use it as a data to support that.

 

[LordVic]

I think I saw an SSD external drive that was claiming to be resilient to moisture, mechanical shocks and dust.
Not every external drive is super sensitive and breaks easily.
[doublepost=1559893157][/doublepost]
You don't need a USB C external drive when you can just use one of these:

[doublepost=1559893654][/doublepost]
If the disk itself is not physically affected you can recover the data from it. Most mechanical hard drives fail in such a way that data can be recovered.
I had 2 hard drives fail on me but with enough time to transfer the data from them. They didn't suddenly stop working, it happened gradually.

always depends on what the failure in the drive is. A lot of time some, if not majority of data can be recovered from a dead drive. The problem comes down to cost.

if it's a simple chip failure, that's generally pretty easy for a repair shop (Easy, being relative, it's the easiest for them, but would require me being able to know how ot reflow solder). But more advanced failures internally might require the use of a cleanroom and full parts swap. I once had to use a drive recovery service for some corporate files. The charge was almost $10,000 to recover the data.

That's why external drives are important. They are the simplest, and easiest method for the average person to back up or have secondary locations for their content. Having the ability to use them on the iPad is integral if Apple believes the iPad to be an actual replacement computer for people.

 

[Jsameds]

And right there is a reason Apple is going to tank hard in the 2020s: myopic, deaf, arrogant, and full of hubris.

"Apple is doomed!"

- People, every year, since 1976

 

[LordVic]

Doesn’t anyone see the education play here. One place I know thumb drives are prevalent is education - which is always in the dark ages.

Companies are moving away and even banning the use or presence of them.

Yes and No.

companies aren't banning them because they're storage. But banning them because of the risk of data being stolen on them. I work at a financial institution (Bank). We have blocked USB drives on all workstations. The last thing we want is some grumpy employee loading up a USB drive with personal information of our clients and doing something nefarious with it.

So we've blocked USB.

But that also extendds to cloud providers as well. All cloud services are also blocked. No staff can upload any files outside of our organization. So the iCloud "joke" is still even more out of touch, since if we're taking security seriously and blocking USB, we're also blocking all cloud sharing as well.

but lets be honest. at least in my industry, Nobody is using iPads for day to day operations. it's all fleet laptops.

 

[klerke]

Sadly, I think he is too arrogant to understand why people wanted it... AirDrop? LOL...That's not the point!

Exactly!!!!

 

[Riviera122]

There's nothing wrong with having a progressive outlook toward hardware support, but I really can't stand Apple's dumb "what's a computer" angle. They can cater to the casual market without disrespecting the one which made Apple who they are today.

 

[antonis]

At least they swallowed their arrogance and copied a few features from android. Let's see how long it will take to "invent" the mouse/cursor support for iOS.

 

[barmann]

So many feelings in this thread over an obvious joke.

Didn't seem funny to me, but I'm sure it's hilarious to people who don't get the concept of physical drives .
Or accessible file systems, compatibility, a variety of usable input controls , all that stuff that was available in the 1990s and still is essential - unless you are using iOS .

With iOS, cave painting is en vogue again .

 

[I7guy]

At least they swallowed their arrogance and copied a few features from android. Let's see how long it will take to "invent" the mouse/cursor support for iOS.

Which features are copied?

 

[joueboy]

Maybe its just me, but I have never wanted to have a drive sticking out of my iPad. Thats like wanting Apple to add a CD slot to the iPod back in the day.

You mean you never stick a USB drive or card reader on your Macs or never plugged your iPod to your computer? That's BS! Nobody goes around with sticking drive with their iPad it's more on transferring files pull it out when you're done.

 

[fmillion]

And I'm willing to spend $65 on a 2TB hard drive instead $120 over the course of just one year for 2TB of iCloud storage.

I'm also willing to pay $65 for 2TB of storage that I can upload data to at 100+MB/sec, rather than $120/year for 2TB of storage that I can only upload to at 700KB/sec.

I'm sure Apple has one of the best Internet connections in the world today, but not everyone else does. I don't exactly live in a rural area (large "town", maybe 50K people), but the best I can do here without paying through the nose for business fiber is 100Mbit down/8Mbit up. This is what has kept me from embracing cloud storage, and I'm sure for a huge percentage of the US it's also the reason why cloud storage just isn't feasible for large amounts of data.
[doublepost=1559914192][/doublepost]

Yes and No.

companies aren't banning them because they're storage. But banning them because of the risk of data being stolen on them. I work at a financial institution (Bank). We have blocked USB drives on all workstations. The last thing we want is some grumpy employee loading up a USB drive with personal information of our clients and doing something nefarious with it.

So we've blocked USB.

But that also extendds to cloud providers as well. All cloud services are also blocked. No staff can upload any files outside of our organization. So the iCloud "joke" is still even more out of touch, since if we're taking security seriously and blocking USB, we're also blocking all cloud sharing as well.

but lets be honest. at least in my industry, Nobody is using iPads for day to day operations. it's all fleet laptops.

You almost need a whitelist; it's way too easy for someone to spin up a Nextcloud instance on a Docker-friendly cloud host.

Of course, I could also think of plenty of other ways to exfiltrate data even with extremely limited Internet access, but that's for a security team to figure out how to address...

 

[griffd]

Wow, people really can’t take a joke around here huh? Craig is hilarious, and this was a very funny comment IMO. Obviously they know it is important or they wouldn’t have added it at all! Nobody made them. And during the talk show, Craig mentioned that a lot of pieces needed to be in place before they could add this feature to iOS - ie isolating external file system drivers from the kernel for security reasons.

On the latest episode of the AppStories podcast, MacStories editor-in-chief Federico Viticci sat down with Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi to discuss WWDC 2019 announcements, including Project Catalyst, SwiftUI, and iPadOS.

Craig Federighi at WWDC 2019​

Project Catalyst will make it much easier for developers to extend iPad apps to the Mac. In many cases, adding macOS support to an iPad app is as easy as opening an Xcode project and clicking the Mac checkbox, although Apple encourages developers to further optimize their apps to offer a true Mac experience.

Federighi believes Project Catalyst will allow many developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac, as Apple has bridged the gap between its UIKit framework for iOS apps and its AppKit framework for Mac apps:

Project Catalyst​

Federighi expressed excitement about Project Catalyst, noting that he has seen many apps that look fantastic on the iPad that he has wanted on the Mac. With macOS Catalina and Xcode 11, that is now a possibility, with Twitter being one of several companies that plans to extend their iPad app to the Mac.

He added that Project Catalyst gives Apple the "same kind of benefits of being able to have a single team that can focus on making one thing the best and release it across all of our platforms," which makes "a ton of sense" to the company.

SwiftUI​

As for Apple's new SwiftUI framework, which enables developers to use easy-to-understand declarative code to create full-featured user interfaces, Federighi said giving developers a tool that is "that expressive and that interactive" is going to result in better ideas and thereby better apps moving forward:Turning to the new iPadOS platform, Federighi said that the iPad has "become something really distinct from the phone" over the years and, accordingly, was deserving of an operating system that provides a "distinct experience":

iPads now fully support external drives​

Humorously, Federighi also poked fun at the iPad's newly added support for external storage such as USB drives and SD cards:The full interview can be listened to on the AppStories podcast over at MacStories.

Article Link: Craig Federighi on iPad's Long-Awaited External Drive Support: 'We're Willing to Acknowledge the 1990s'

 

[bernuli]

Apple had some awesome keyboards in the 90s. Let’s grab some of those while we are all the way back there.

 

[LordVic]

You almost need a whitelist; it's way too easy for someone to spin up a Nextcloud instance on a Docker-friendly cloud host.

Of course, I could also think of plenty of other ways to exfiltrate data even with extremely limited Internet access, but that's for a security team to figure out how to address...

yeah, we take a whitelist approach.

by default, just about everything is blocked. We only open up on specific requests on a case by case basis. No access to iCloud, no access to google services, no access to AWS, Azure, etc.

there's no 100% secure and guaranteed way of preventing data exfiltration, since the weakest link the staff. So we have to baby them and treat them pretty poorly unfortunately (if we weren't working with databases containing sensitive private informationa nd banking data, I'd likely not be so strict).

 

[Since1987]

Well ... he's consistent. He's always been an arrogant smarmy condescending (bleep).

Ive, Cook and Federighi.... the Three Amigos of Cluelessness.