In many ways Dom you have answered your own question. Apple makes the £350 iPad to directly compete with Chromebooks and Windows devices. If anything I would argue at that price an iPad is the best computer you can buy.
The iPhone I think has settled into its own niche in the same way the iMac has with a recognisable camera array that won’t get mistaken for an Android device from the back. I wonder if next year they will add a proper 2-stage camera button to the bottom-right side to complement the shortcut button?
Where I really wish Apple would invest some money is software. This seems to be an area most commentary and blogs just skips over and yet is the reason we buy these devices in the first place.
I won’t have too much of a rant about it but iOS has been in serious need of a rebuild for years. Nothing too drastic visually but Apple (and Google to be fair) failed to rebuild their OS for large-screened devices. They just stretched it out, fudged in the ‘reachability’ shortcut and called it a day.
I should be able to use 100% of my devices functionality with one hand; no interaction should take place outside the bottom half of the display and yet the back shortcut, control centre, notifications and spare home screen icons are all sat there out of reach. Much of this functionality could be rebuilt into the multitasking view without issue with webOS-style bottom-up notifications and controls sitting to the right. Oh, and let me position icons at the bottom!
Much of this carries over to iPadOS which despite generous screen space limits the dashboard to one column and has a lockscreen that wastes space too. Better to get rid of the dashboard (a bit pointless now widgets can go anywhere on the desktop) and have notifications slide in from the RH-side like on the Mac instead. I’d also like the option to have lockscreen widgets on the home screen.
It still bothers me the Max iPhone still runs the ame software as every other device. It should have pencil compatibility and manual camera overrides as standard.
I dislike how greedy adobe have gotten and don’t want my images stored on their servers. If Apple only ever do one thing as a company I wish they would rerelease Aperture as a Mac/iPad app. They could buy the developers of Pixelmator/Photomator and use this as the base.
