At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.

But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.

Steve wasn't exactly famous for playing nicely with other tech either.

He signed his name to the "fuck Flash" memo, promised to publish interoperable specs for iMessage/FaceTime and never did, presided over the original App Store launch, etc.

A lot of the balls Tim is rolling were first pushed by Steve.

Did you consider... not buying an Ipad Pro?

>There is no excuse for making people pay

I know! I was just out shopping for a towel and these armed gunmen grabbed me and pulled me into this store and held a gun to my kids head until I bought them a new iPad Pro M5. I am traumatized.

Oh, no, wait, I remember, my kid wanted an iPad Pro for their art and for school. They liked their wacom, but the iPad was more portable, and with the keyboard, it was perfect for taking notes.

> The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.

Why?

There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.

If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.

People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.

Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.

Hard disagree. Tim should focus on fixing their software. It has become extremely buggy and it needs to be fixed. No one buying an iPad cares about running some custom browser and supporting it is pointless and is what makes the software emote complex and worse. He should take better care of his paying customers rather than engaging with opinionated activists.

I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.

What gives you the right to tell someone who purchases Apple devices because of the walled garden that they should no longer have that option because YOU don't like it. What an incredibly entitled and selfish position. Have you even stopped to consider for even a second why Apple devices are so popular, especially with normal people who don't spend their time fantasizing about how they want to control other people's purchases with other sweaty nerds on the internet? Have you ever considered that other people may have different preferences and desires from yours? Jfc.

> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys

The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.

Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.

I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?

Tim Cook, or any CEO, is accountable to the shareholders, so job well done it seems. It's still the user's choice if they want to live in the walled garden or not, and lots of people do, so why would they change it?