I think Apple’s reasoning here is to provide the hardware and see what people do with it.
for sure, and in the rest of the tech world, we call these devkits, not finished products. Apple is trying to convince rando non-dev apple fanboys to pay $3500 for the privilege of playing with devkits. And in many ways, it’s a dead end, especially on input. what a shit show.
I would be potentially interested in developing an app for it there are some things holding me back.
There’s no documentation on how to develop for it, that’s a big one.
I refuse to pay that much money for a dev kit
It’s missing vital features like the ability to connect to a bluetooth keyboard without having to go via a MacBook
It’s so expensive that only business users would buy it, and yet its battery is so small that it’s no good for business use, so where the hell are my customers going to come from?
It’s only available in the United States again limiting the number of customers that I may potentially have
It just doesn’t seem like it’s been properly released yet. It’s a beta product with beta features and has been released as such except it has a non beta price. And also virtually no developers got early access so there’s basically no apps.
you’ll need an m1 or m2 dev box - so $800-3000+ for something with decent ram and storage. and you’ll want an apple care subscription, $400 for two years (which won’t actually pay for repairs, simply reduce the pain of them enough to justify); and you’ll need to pay an apple dev id - $100 for indies, $250 for enterprise iirc; and you’ll want to get some extra batteries to daisy-chain off the usb-c port on the existing battery because that shit only lasts 2.5 hrs at BEST. oh and spend another $100 on each devkit because they don’t come with a fucking case.
it’s like their dev chain is a fucking sadomasochistic loyalty test where the privilege to develop for the device’s barren ecosystem costs more and more at each step. All for the honor of writing xcode apps that are running on ipad os++
for sure, and in the rest of the tech world, we call these devkits, not finished products. Apple is trying to convince rando non-dev apple fanboys to pay $3500 for the privilege of playing with devkits. And in many ways, it’s a dead end, especially on input. what a shit show.
I would be potentially interested in developing an app for it there are some things holding me back.
It just doesn’t seem like it’s been properly released yet. It’s a beta product with beta features and has been released as such except it has a non beta price. And also virtually no developers got early access so there’s basically no apps.
Amen brother, same situation here.
you’ll need an m1 or m2 dev box - so $800-3000+ for something with decent ram and storage. and you’ll want an apple care subscription, $400 for two years (which won’t actually pay for repairs, simply reduce the pain of them enough to justify); and you’ll need to pay an apple dev id - $100 for indies, $250 for enterprise iirc; and you’ll want to get some extra batteries to daisy-chain off the usb-c port on the existing battery because that shit only lasts 2.5 hrs at BEST. oh and spend another $100 on each devkit because they don’t come with a fucking case.
it’s like their dev chain is a fucking sadomasochistic loyalty test where the privilege to develop for the device’s barren ecosystem costs more and more at each step. All for the honor of writing xcode apps that are running on ipad os++
fucking hell