The point is that tablets are not evolving, they're stagnating and dying...which is why iPad sales are down 50% from their peak while mac sales are up. The latest iPP is just an iPad 4 with a stylus and a smaller chassis.
If you look at mac sales they've stagnated at 4 - 5 million units per quarter since the end of 2010. While those are good numbers it's not exactly a growing market. iPad Q1 sales are down but Q2-3 numbers show lesser decreases. In at the face of greater competition, Apple does need to do something to get people to want new iPads since it seems the older ones are powerful enough that there is no need to replace as often and they need to figure out ways to bring in potential PC purchasers to consider a tablet instead.
It's not there yet but it is the future.
All those are implemented as cheesy kludges on a defective by design platform and they only serve to prove how refined the modern computer is.
What do you consider defective by design? It's quite good for many users at checking email, surfing the web, watching movies, texting, and other tasks that they don't need a computer.
Just because it has a different approach than the Mac doesn't make it's design worse, just different.
In the 90's, computers were convoluted and a pain to maintain and use. They had small limited displays and clunky interfaces. The tablet brings back those days.
Hardly. If anything, iPads and tablets in general bring back the big iron - terminal model of eras bygone; except now you have a smart terminal with a really good display.
Change is inevitable. We've gone form big iron to desktop PCs to laptops; tablets are the next step in that evolution. Does it mean iOS on an iPad? Who knows. iOS may evolve into being more like MacOS; but given Apple's drive to strip away complexity and beyond just a computer company to one whose products integrate into a broad spectrum of a person's life, from communications to content to home control to telling time and integrating the separate components;it will be interesting to see how their products evolve.
The Mac may stick around but I bet it'll be as different in the future as today's is from the original 128K Mac. Apple, more than other computer companies, has shown a consistent willingness to drive change through deliberate deprecation of features and systems to meet their view of the future.
[doublepost=1486385790][/doublepost]
Or actually put some effort into the iPad ... like perhaps 32GB of storage minimum, SD card, and a USB port. You know, making it into a useful device.
As much as I like that idea it doesn't appear to square with Apple's design philosophy and view the the cloud is the future.
Or even better, put a usable version of OS X on the tablet like what Microsoft did with the Surface.
While that sounds appealing, I'm not sure a desktop OS is the way to go on a tablet. For me, eagles interchange of information is more important. The ability to work on a spreadsheet and pick up on a PC if needed is more useful, IMHO. The underlying program and OS is irrelevant as long as it is transparent to the user.
As for the Surface, I haven't used one enough to form a strong opinion. Th few times I did try one in the MS Store it just felt wrong. Then again, I use an iPad and a Mac so Windows feels odd every time I have to use it.