Yep, anytime I here Tim Cook or any of those folks respond to specific product quality questions (recently it was Cook talking about using his Vision Pro) I find myself pretty grossed out by their response. It really does sound like corporate drivel well rehearsed for the marketing department. Of course they know it could be better but it’s Apple practice to always pretend every product (hear it in Tim’s voice) is the absolute best it could be.
But I do think they are generally speaking the truth about their intentions. The iPad is probably the most contentious product in their lineup but they seem to usually stick pretty closely to their vision and their plans. They’re well aware they’re never going to please everyone and they have their internal numbers on sales, usage, etc.
One last thought on iPadOS and app development. I think the user/enthusiast community can be both insightful and ridiculous in it’s commentary and requests. It’s a lot of people saying a lot of things and most of it well meaning but coming from a place of ignorance in regards to the internal development process and the difficulty of said process. Not just the technical difficulty but getting the user experience design right as well.
My favorite recent iPad specific example:
Community:
- The iPad needs real windowing!
- The hardware is too powerful for iPadOS!
Apple:
- Check out Stage Manager, our vision of windowing for iPad!
- Stage Manager only runs on the M series iPads because multiple windows in multiple stages is more resource intensive
Community:
- Boo! Make it work on more iPads.
Apple:
- Okay, we’ve optimized it and it will now work on these additional iPads.
Community:
- Stage Manager isn’t Mac windowing. Meh.
My take away: Apple built a custom iPad windowing designed around smaller screens and still touch friendly. They constrained it to the newest M iPads because previous iPads had 6GB of memory or less. The same community that complained that the M series iPad Pros were too powerful were now complaining that a new feature required M series hardware. It’s bonkers.
Was Stage Manager perfect? No. And Apple iterated and improved it the following year. All this while, in the background it was also putting resources into Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, two of the big pro apps the community had been clamoring for.
In Spring of 2023 they release the new pro apps for iPad then shortly after at WWDC they show off improved Stage Manager.
The reaction is a mix of excitement and meh which quickly turns to a mix of complaints and mostly meh.
My conclusion, reaffirmed over and over is that no matter what Apple does with the iPad Pro it will not be celebrated or appreciated. The changes to iPadOS, new pro apps, etc will always be too little, too late. I feel like the tech/Apple user community is stuck in a rut of negativity in general. It’s joyless and cynical. I suspect the cause is the dynamics created by a mix of social media which blends into the constant barrage of content creation be it YouTube, podcasts, etc. And I’ll add that I think it fits with larger social trends but that takes us into other areas beyond the scope of these forums.
lol, that’s probably more than you wanted. 
). I also found dealing with Google Sheets (the foundation also uses Google Sheets) doable but frustrating on the iPad. But I find Google products frustrating on the Mac, too, just slightly less so.
