I'll be honest upfront. I'm not an Apple fan. Don't get me wrong, the hardware is beautifully manufactured with an engineering precision almost beyond human comprehension. Just look at the perfectly drilled holes for the microphone on the Mac Book Pro.
There's two problems with the iPad (and iPhone for that matter). The first is iOS and of course the second is Apple itself.
Many people seem to buy an iPhone or iPad because everyone tells them to. Or they get given one by their employer. The third party accessory market is incredible. You want a thingamywatsit for your iPad and low and behold someone makes one. Want a thingamywatsit for your Nexus 5 or even your HTC One and you will most probably have to do without.
The other reason people will buy an iPhone or iPad is because it works. Out of the box 99 times out of 100. Set it up and off you go. No need to tweak, configure, reset, root, change your life, jail break just to get the thing to work. It does it faithfully every time.
Samsung have just announced the Galaxy Tab S. An iPad beating device apparently according to a number of magazines. The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 wiped the floor with the iPad. It was released last September. But have you heard of it. Are Samsung shouting about it from the roof tops? Why go to all that bother if you are going to market it by saying "Hey dude, got this new tablet here. Really cool. You should try it. But only if you want, like".
But what if you don't like the iPad/iPhone keyboard? Or you want a different browser. Before iOS8 was announced you were stuck with the keyboard Apple built in and although you could use Chrome, Safari was always the default browser. You couldn't change it. You can't use widgets either. In the Android world, widgets are those little apps on the home screen that show you useful things like news headlines or what the weather is. My wife wanted to upload a voice recorder file to a web site on her iPad. There's no voice recorder so we tried her iPhone. You can't upload anything other than photos. There's no file manager and the AppStore variants aren't a patch on FX or similar that's available over in Google Play. The standard photo app compresses any folder hierarchy and lumps all photos into a single sub folder. You can have Albums but what if you would simply like to copy a directory hierarchy from your PC?
The iPads have big screens but you can't change the grid spacing hence you have lots of pages of icons all sparsely populated. You can only have one bottom row of fixed icons. I use the Android Nova launcher which supports a multitude of configuration features allowing you to layout your home screens just as you like.
The single physical button is very limiting. Why is there no back button? Why no menu button? It took Apple ages to introduce task switching that was available from day one in the Android world.
Probably the most annoying thing that she encounters is that little message "This accessory is not compatible with your device and may not operate correctly" when plugging in a non Apple USB / Lightning cable. When all other device manufacturers have standardised on the micro USB connector, Apple stubbornly sticks with its own unique design.
The iPhone 6 will be no doubt a beautiful creation with a slightly bigger screen. iOS8 may introduce some nice new features. Meanwhile Android 5.0 will be announced and once again Apple's OS will be superseded. At the same time the sheep go and buy the new iPhone.
