Apple CEO Tim Cook slags off Microsoft’s ‘deluded’ Surface Book.
The iPad Pro is a giant iPad. Apple chief executive Tim Cook threw down the gauntlet this week by taking a shot at the PC. “I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore?During an interview with the Irish Independent, Cook, while fawning about Apple’s good relationship with its Redmond-based rivals, slammed Microsoft’s Windows 10 laptop as a “deluded” piece of kit. “It’s a product that tries too hard to do too much,” he said, during an interview at an Irish college. “It’s trying to be a tablet and a notebook and it really succeeds at being neither.Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Re/code by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Re/code.
Speaking to a group of philosophy students at Trinity College in Dublin Wednesday, Tim Cook criticized Microsoft’s new Surface Book laptop sharply, reports Independent Business. The 12.9-inch addition to Apple’s tablet line-up went on sale today, and according to early looks at the Pro from a few major publications, the massive iPad will be familiar to anyone who’s used one of its predecessors.
In apps that support it, the Pencil is an unbelievably accurate, fine instrument for creation or control.” Mashable had one complaint about the Pencil however. Cook is trying to advance Apple’s attack on traditional computing: its iPhones and iPads running the iOS operating system have arguably done more to shift computing from the desktop than any other mobile devices.
Critics say the Pro’s 4GB of RAM is the reason why iOS 9’s trio of multitasking features—Split View, Picture-in-Picture, and Slide Over—are extra useful and lightning fast on the new tablet compared to older ones. The reviewer writes, “There is no place on the tablet to store the Pencil and since it’s perfectly round, the Pencil occasionally rolled away from me. The new iPad Pro takes this to the next level, boasting not only a laptop-sized display but a new A9X chip “rivaling most portable PCs” in performance, according to Apple.
That includes everything from email to photo cropping; from reviewing and annotating PDFs to signing legal documents and editing articles and spreadsheets. I think there will be a healthy third-party market for Apple Pencil holders.” The Verge reviewer said, “I’ve always been a bit of an iPad skeptic, never understanding how people can use them all the time for productivity, even with a Bluetooth accessory keyboard attached. At the launch event for the Surface Book, Microsoft’s Panos Panay made bold claims about the Surface Book’s superiority over the MacBook Pro. “I only travel now with an iPad Pro and and iPhone, that’s it,” he said. He also announced that the firm plans to create 1,000 new jobs in Cork, an announcement that comes just months ahead of a European Commission decision on the legality of Ireland’s tax deal with Apple in the new year. “These things are becoming more frequent. He also believes iPad sales will begin to grow after stalling because of the advent of the 5.5-inch iPhone Plus models, which encroach on the territory of the 7.9-inch iPad Mini.
While the iPad hasn’t entirely replaced my laptop, it has replaced so many of the scenarios for which I used my laptop in the past that I turn to the laptop much less often. While iOS, as a mobile operating system, has advantages over the older, desktop-centric OS X, it also lacks features that traditional MacBook users need, for example, support for a pointing device. That being said, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, especially with its fabric Smart Keyboard, seems to be aimed at a similar customer as Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4, skirting the line between tablet and laptop.
Some outright hated it. “I was disappointed with Apple’s optional keyboard case,” says The Verge’s Walt Mossberg. “It’s essentially a shallow Mac keyboard, with keys like Command that mean something only in Mac OS X, but not a single shortcut key to an iPad function, like Home or Search. It’s also not backlit, and it has only one angle in which it holds the screen.” Mossberg found that the MacBook Pro’s keyboard is still the one to beat, but third-party manufacturers can develop their own keyboards. Accessory makers have had to develop workarounds to make iPad styluses that work with the tablet’s multi-touch display, to satisfactory but imperfect results. Of course, we won’t know the answer to that question until, most likely, a year from now when quarterly earnings and market research tell us if people are in fact buying a lot of Surface Books and iPad Pros.
It runs the hundreds of thousands of apps created for iOS, including a few releases timed for the Pro’s launch, like the 3D sketching app uMake and new image-editing software from Adobe. Despite its jumbo size, it’s actually thinner (without the keyboard case) than my 2013-vintage iPad Air and about the same weight as the much smaller original iPad from 2010. And the gorgeous, large display makes great use of the new split-screen feature, available on recent iPads, that allows two apps to run at the same time. Genuine professionals with a professional need—visual artists in particular—are going to line up for them,” Gruber writes. “But it’s also a perfectly reasonable choice for casual iPad users who just want a bigger display, louder (and now stereo) speakers, and faster performance.” On one particular day, I used the Pro to handle all my communications and Web browsing, watched a movie that lasted over two hours, participated in a company-wide video call, typed up pages of notes and played hours of music.
Apple’s keyboard is actually cleverly made, with flat keys that depend, for their minimal travel, on a special springy fabric that covers the whole thing, which means the keys don’t seem like individual units, but behave that way. I also ran into one bug: The Pro wouldn’t let me add photos or location when creating a tweet in Twitter’s official iOS app, while my other iPads do this just fine. It easily sensed pressure and darkened or thickened lines, and it even could be held almost parallel to the screen, like a real pencil, for creating shading with the side of the point. The Apple Pencil has no buttons or batteries — it charges using Apple’s standard Lightning connector, which is a mixed blessing — it gives you one more thing to charge, but spares you from hunting down batteries. Apple claims up to 12 hours between charges, but you can get an extra half-hour in only 15 seconds by just removing a cap on the end and plugging it into the iPad itself.
Though the keyboards are different, Apple has clearly emulated Microsoft’s basic idea here, down to the inclusion of a special keyboard connector on the edge of the device. Apple, on the other hand, is keeping its laptop and tablet operating systems separate, and has a far better-developed app ecosystem for the latter than Microsoft does. Indeed, Microsoft contributed to this by creating a beautiful iPad version of its Office suite for the iPad, long before it did one for its own hardware.