Not only does the iPad have a horrible name, but honestly, it looked kind of lame to me. Just a giant iPod touch. No multitasking, for example. The eBook reader seems cool, especially for textbooks, but it’s a backlight display, not eInk, so I bet it would tire people’s eyes out after a while.
3.
Violet
I can’t believe they didn’t think through the “iPad” name more carefully. I saw it being compared to an “iTampon” on Twitter last night. What were they thinking? The jokes just write themselves.
4.
inkadu
I believe this discussion belongs in the “Status Quo” thread below.
Summary: Big iPhone that makes no calls, does not support Flash, and does not multitask. At least that’s what Hitler told me.
5.
Persia
I am not super excited about the iPad (worst name yet? Possible), but I also do not understand a lot of the complainers. Some guy on NPR was basically whining that Apple didn’t make a custom device specifically designed for him and his grandma.
6.
r€nato
It’s a version 1.0. The first iPod and the first iPhone were pretty primitive as well.
Let me know when it has a camera and mic built-in, multi-tasking and Flash support.
I’m mad about it because it comes so so close to being something that would be cool. Then again, like so many Apple products, wait for the second or third version and it might be cool. It wasn’t until the 5th generation iPod that they were useful.
I did buy a 4th gen iPod as my first iPod, but when the 5th gen iPod came out I was all over that. I wouldn’t ordinarily have bought another one so soon, but yeah that’s when iPod really hit its stride (even though they were selling gobs of them already by then).
9.
inkadu
@Persia: What’s got you excited about the iPad? What do you plan to use it for?
I think the complaints about the iPad is that it doesn’t do many of the thing’s you’d expect a $500 machine to do at that size compared to a comparably priced (or lower priced) netbook, laptop, and is harder to read than a Kindle (with free 3G access) for twice the price.
Are there any problems that the iPad uniquely solves, or solves at the best price?
As a long time lurker and part time commenter, indulge me, Balloon-Juice.
A few days ago, former professional basketball player Paul Shirley shared some thoughts on Haiti that amounted to, “I won’t help you for the same reason that I don’t give money to bums on the street.” Pretty language, but some awful content. You can read that here: Paul Shirley Haiti Thoughts
A fellow law student and I recently started blogging. I penned a response yesterday afternoon. Please take a look if you have a minute: On Reason and Humanity
Yes, it’s a shameless plug. But I do what I can to survive :)
Oh, and on a note that’s related to the open thread “topic” (is there such a thing?), here’s something I don’t get about the iPad. Shouldn’t it have some type of word processing program with which you can take notes? No one could tell me if it had a keyboard, either.
If they’re looking for a hybrid iPhone/laptop, I think it needs to be more functional than what it is now, which appears to be a Kindle with a bright screen and applications.
12.
gwangung
Oh, and on a note that’s related to the open thread “topic” (is there such a thing?), here’s something I don’t get about the iPad. Shouldn’t it have some type of word processing program with which you can take notes? No one could tell me if it had a keyboard, either.
Yes to both. $10 for iWorks, $29 for a new keyboard (but if you already have a bluetooth keyboard, nada). That’s the part that takes it out of the glorified iPod touch area.
13.
JGabriel
Overheard this morning at the Supreme Court offices:
Alito: Can you believe the effrontery of that guy!?
__
Sotomayor: Before you know it, he’ll be wanting to move to the manor house. Oh, wait …
@JGabriel: They can’t believe Barack got ‘uppity’ over their decision.
16.
shirt
To bad you got to use AT&T as a “service” provider. That, by itself, is enough to tell Jobs to keep it. I will get AT&T out of my life.
17.
gypsy howell
I kinda want to want it, but I can’t figure out a reason exactly why I’d need it. It’s not like when the iPhone came out and you go “holy shit, a PHONE could do that?”
All I can come up with for a reason is as a replacement web-surfing device for thurston, who really only uses his mac to read email and surf the web, and sometimes watch a movie. But can you only watch a movie you download from iTunes? For example, we just got the 5-season dvd set of The Wire, but how would I watch it on the iPad?
I dunno. I wanted to be convinced, but so far I’m not. And we are, generally speaking, fairly early Mac adopters.
@gwangung: Perfect. Glad they accounted for it. I love my iPod Touch and my MacBook. After years of PC usage, I turned into an Apple Shill really, really quickly.
If only the iPhone exclusivity could end and we Verizon users could get in on the action….
Much as I despise my verizon service, I would definitely have purchased an iPhone by now if it were available for the verizon network. Can’t believe Apple still hasn’t broken that barrier.
22.
gwangung
That said, I’m a bit on the fence for this. Not an immediate, got to have, but I can think of ways to use it…..
23.
Keith
The product Apple “released” (it’s not out for a bit) looks surprisingly like the one Steve Ballmer showed (from HP) a few weeks back, but without the ability to run an x86 operation system. I know the battery life is better, but 10 hours is basically the norm for StrongARM-based tablets; I figured with Apple’s use of non-removable batteries (that can be shaped just about any way they want), their big innovation would have been an x86-based tablet with crazy battery life.
Just a big ITouch. How can this thing not support Flash? That’s the same problem all the shitty smartphones are having.
Isn’t one of the nice things about a laptop is that you don’t have to hold it with your hands to use it? You can just sit it somewhere and type? Or read? Or watch the movie? This thing you have to hold up at all times, and be extremely careful with at all times–like a smartphone, only bigger and even easier to whack into something.
I would seriously want the thing to come with a kickstand.
25.
gwangung
@gypsy howell: Oh, I can believe it. There are tech incompatabilities, and Verizon’s lower speed service isn’t compatable with the the rest of the world…
Maybe with the next version, though….
26.
some guy
I’m way more excited for the Viliv S10 Blade tablet / netbook. It’s a little thicker and heaver than the iPad, but it’s more feature rich and I won’t be limited to running whatever apps Apple approves of.
27.
Karmakin
There actually is a kickstand you can get for it. Really.
That said, I think this is a serious misstep for Apple. Which would be fine, but I think that missteps actually hurt Apple more than they would hurt other companies. When you’re selling a brand, an image, tarnishing the brand can be a very bad thing.
Everybody was expecting more of an OS X type system. Not the glorified iPhone OS.
They’re already showing a few accessories on the apple site that basically do that, and assuming this thing takes off, you know there will be jillions of accessories developed in the near future. That’s not the part that’s holding me back. I just can’t figure to what it would replace or do better than what I already have. Seems like I’d still have to lug at least a laptop and phone wherever I go.
And yet Jobs is saying it’s the greatest thing he’s ever developed. Ummm … OK. I want to be a believer (I do love Apple products) but this one I just kinda don’t get. Want to want….
30.
gwangung
@gypsy howell: All I can think of is that they’re not aiming at folks who have iphone + laptop + iPad…they’re aiming at phone + computer + iPad, or iPhone +iPad + desktop or cell + iPad.
“Do you think the policies being proposed by Barack Obama will move the country in the right direction or the wrong direction?”
Direction Right Wrong Unsure
Direction
% % %
1/27/10
71 27 2
1/22-26/10
53 43 5
33.
MattR
@Violet: I’ve already heard a couple jokes on the radio from DJ’s in NYC talking about the confusion there is gonna be in the Boston area between ipods and ipads.
@gwangung: Aiming this thing at people who have desktops but no laptops seems to be a miss. People without laptops at this point aren’t going to go for a stripped down computer, since they’re probably nerdalicious high-power gamer constant video card updaters, or they’re broke mofos.
Maybe the iPad is really brought to you by the marketing department at Apple, which is always trying to think different. Sometimes the crowd has the right idea. It’s hit-and-miss. The iPod pretty much saved the company, so you can understand why they’re willing to take risks.
Meh. I’ll probably like the next generations a lot more. Looks like they’re going to take a big hit on this release though. And they released right on the day of an economically depressing speech.
36.
Jon H
@gypsy howell: ” For example, we just got the 5-season dvd set of The Wire, but how would I watch it on the iPad?”
Rip the DVDs into mp4 files, load them into iTunes, sync them onto your iPad.
“…I think it’s worth noting that Chris Matthews wasn’t trying to take a shot at anybody. I also think it’s worth noting that he was attempting to compliment Obama and say something positive about what he’s done for race relations. (See Matthews’ clarification here.) But I think it’s most worth noting that “I forgot Obama was black”–in all its iterations–is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest.
…Ditto for Chris Matthews. The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance–you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don’t know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white…
… I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on Obama’s relationship to blackness, because they know so little about black people. It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you.
…This is why Obama will never be postracial–he can’t make white people face the lie of their ignorance, anymore than Jimmy Baldwin could make black people face the lie of our homophobia. It’s white people’s responsibility to make themselves postracial, not the president’s. Whatever my disagreements with him, the fact is that he is brilliant. That he is black and brilliant is pleasant but unsurprising to me. I’ve known very brilliant, very black people all my life. At some point that number of white people who still can’t their head around our humanity will have to accept the truth: the president is black, and even if you don’t quite know what that means…”
YES….YES….YES!!!!
This sista bows to TNC!
40.
inkadu
@RareSanity: I never understood the whole NSFW thing. I figure if you’re wasting time blogging while you’re at work, you probably don’t have anyone over your shoulder.
41.
Jay in Oregon
This was my favorite response to the pre-release Apple tablet hype:
It is really designed for people with a desktop, smartphone and no laptop. You can then tether the wifi version to your iPad (okay, bad picture in my head now… ack)
Anyways, v2 will be great and anyone who bought the one for sale in 60 days will be kicking themselves.
That’s from an old MadTV episode. Just youtube iPad MadTV. Its why tethering gives me the creeps right now.
44.
Catsy
I’m not an Apple fanboy–I don’t like using MacOS and am inextricably wedded to PC gaming. However, my other half and I both own iPhones and love them. I was really excited about this tablet, because I could think of about a dozen things I’d use it for around the house, purposes for which my laptop is just too cumbersome but my iPhone is inadequate.
But Apple failed here in a catastrophic way. Set aside all the jokes about “iPad”–yeah, it’s a bad name, for confusion with “iPod” if nothing else, but who cares what it’s called? The real failure is in the lack of features.
It really is a glorified iPod touch–it’s like someone took one, grabbed the corner, and did a drag-to-resize operation without bothering to improve anything other than the screen size. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some value in that–I’ve often wished my iPhone was a little bigger when I’m trying to surf on it, and the iPhone does a lot of things that could only be improved by a larger screen. But that’s really all it is, and it’s sure as hell not worth $500 or more for that.
The demo made a big point of citing the iPad as an intermediary step between laptops and smartphones, capable of doing things that one or the other don’t do well, and that netbooks (which really are a shitty product) don’t do at all. The problem is that they’ve created something that does most of the things a laptop or smartphone can do, but doesn’t do most of those things as well as either. The only thing this has going for it over an iPhone or iPod touch is screen real estate–and that’s /it/.
No card reader or any other kind of removable storage–just a retardedly tiny amount of flash storage which cannot be expanded. No USB port for external devices. No replaceable battery. No file system. Apple decided to ignore all the people who complained about the pitiful storage on their other devices, and opt for the customer-gouging cash cow of tiered pricing for fixed storage.
Yes, I know there’s a camera connection kit that you can buy, which provides adapters to plug either an SD reader OR a USB port into their proprietary charging port. Not including either in the device itself is an indefensible design decision, and I’m not going to pay Apple for the privilege of having an adapter to add things that ought to have been a part of the device in the first place.
So yeah, this thing is an overpriced piece of shit, and a serious misreading of the market by Apple. It is a running joke right now, and it deserves to fail. It probably won’t, because there are millions of people who would buy a used tampon if it was called the iPad had an Apple logo on it. But hopefully the ridicule and hostile industry reaction will wise them up a bit for the 2.0 version.
I’m pretty certain the multitasking issue will be addressed in the next OS release – at least for the iPad.
As to the utility, Higher Ed is one of their apparent targets. I understand that virtually all undergraduate textbooks will be available for it by the fall. It has a basic office suite, certainly good enough for working on the road.
But yeah, 2nd or 3rd generation is when it’ll really kick in. It needs handwriting in some capacity to get students. Apple is trying to make consumers question the utility of the netbook, and from that perspective I think it’s a compelling product. The netbook has half the screen size and an equally weak keyboard, and in many cases is sufficiently crippled on CPU, RAM, or OS version to not be much more functional.
The overall market is people that have modest computing needs and limited technical ability. Apple is shooting for the ease of use that they always envisioned the Mac having but never quite getting (which is why the multitasking isn’t there now – the degree of complication that it adds in a traditional setup breaks the goal of the product). As such, this device is really well suited to people that surf the web, do email, some Quicken, and a little bit of productivity stuff around the edges. It has a lot of information and entertainment utility and modest productivity utility. It’s skewed better toward the typical user than netbooks are, particularly when you factor in ease of use. There’s no guarantee that a game you buy will work well on a netbook – but every app store app will work on your iPad – every one. It’s just something you don’t need to worry about, and Apple moving absolutely everything through their own store gateway might be concerning for other retailers and content producers, but it’s absolutely fantastic for customers.
I think Apple has done a good job of working out the right product for the market. Most people are going to be a little slow breaking out of their thinking that they need x,y,z to see that it’s the right product, and Apple has a little ways to go yet (as do developers for the device) to meet the customers where they need to be, and to catch some of the edge markets (like higher ed, as I described), but I think it’s a home run.
Honestly, what was the last time Apple launched a product that wasn’t met by jokes? The iPod was laughed at, the iPhone was as well by people that were convinced nobody could possibly type well on it and that it’d suck for productivity. And yet Apple keeps getting it right and swallowing these guys up.
What we learned about Apple yesterday:1. No women on their marketing team, 2. They don’t watch Mad TV(I mean, really though, who does?)
I was pretty annoyed that they were announcing the iPad (snicker) a month after I got my iPod touch. But now seeing that it wouldn’t really ad any functionality, just take up more room in my purse, I am pleased.
47.
inkadu
@Jay in Oregon: Still waiting for iChron to come out. Although I bet the first generation will only go backwards five minutes.
As to the utility, Higher Ed is one of their apparent targets.
Jeez I hope so. My students lug around 40 pound backpacks filled with fat textbooks that cost an insane amount. And paper textbooks can’t do video etc. (Video has revolutionized my teaching of biology. Biology is made for video.)
I was just telling my students last week as the semester started, “What you guys need is something like the Kindle, but bigger, with color, that will do video and interactive. And that’s all you’d have to carry. And hopefully, you’d pay less for the books you download.” (I can dream.)
Though I’m an Apple-bot, I somehow missed that this was coming. Anyway, yeah, several generations from now, it could be great for students. Maybe sooner.
49.
Catsy
@Martin: I’m on board with the textbook-replacement angle. I think that’s a great, if narrow, use for this product.
But “not as shitty as a netbook” isn’t really a selling point for me. I /already/ think netbooks are shitty and unusable.
@inkadu: Just said I was not excited. I think it’s promising in that it might help shake up/open up the ebook market. If they get one of those under $200 that I could surf the web with I might buy it.
51.
Martin
@Catsy: I appreciate this point of view, but I think it’s important to recognize that a great deal of what makes the iPhone what it is comes not from Apple but from the app market. At launch, there wasn’t a tremendous advantage that the iPhone had over other smartphones, other than visual voicemail and a non-shitty browser. It was the App store and subsequent additions by Apple that turned the iPhone into what it is.
We’re back at the start here with this device. It’s running a somewhat modified version of iPhone OS (3.2), not a full-on version (4.0). I think later this year we’ll see iPhones powered by Apple silicon that will be MUCH faster than the current ones, and that extra performance will be reflected in significant new features in iPhone 4.0 probably to be revealed to developers in June. We’ll start to see apps that just didn’t make sense on the smaller iPhone show up on the iPad and round that experience out.
Yeah, the product right out of the gate probably won’t align well with most consumers, but in 12-24 months, after some hardware features are added and another 100,000 apps show up, that’ll change. Among the things I don’t think people are grasping is how fast this thing is – apparently for web surfing it’s as fast as a MacBook. It’s not a compromise on those types of functions, unlike a netbook, and the netbook will never get better at it.
As for the lack of doo-dads, yeah, that’s what Apple does. They want people off of flash so they don’t support it. And you know what, it works. They want cameras to support wifi or bluetooth, and they’re doing that too. Complaining about Apple’s connectors while tolerating everyone else’s is hypocritical, and Apple has always shoved the market around like this. Hell, USB might not have taken off if not for Apple forcing the issue.
Apple plays a very long game for the marketplace. Nobody needs to buy into it now, there will be plenty willing to do so, but I’m pretty convinced that Apple will prevail in the end.
52.
New Yorker
So between the name and the lukewarm reviews, is this the product where Apple finally jumped the shark? I mean, is this where Apple releases something completely redundant and unnecessary but assumes it will sell well because Apple fanboys will buy anything Jobs releases?
I say this as one who has nothing against Apple and loves his iPod, but doesn’t get the obsession with the company.
53.
Martin
@Janet Strange: Don’t expect the textbooks to get cheaper, but yeah, hopefully more useful and certainly lighter.
The lack of a camera and flash support is just insane. I could give a rat’s ass what they named it.
Imagine if, instead of this $500 crippled piece of kit, they would have included the above, as well as a few standard ports AND a pico LED projector. They could sell them for a grand and people would be lining up in the streets to buy them.
They could have made it an inch thick and another half a pound heavier, which then would support a battery that could last for days.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera. Where’s the convergence that we have been promised with all this shrinking electronics?
I might have paid $500 bucks for a tablet that let me surf at the kitchen table/living room on my home wifi network, but without flash support or a camera for Skype/Ichat they won’t get my money this go round. That said, I believe somebody is going to make the product so many of us have been waiting for. The technology is right there on the shelf waiting to be hooked together. I was hoping it would be Apple because I love all the other stuff of theirs that I own, but their AppStore myopia seems to be getting the better of them. It’s not like I haven’t read a gazillion prelaunch articles wherein the plurality of comments mentioned the desire for a built in camera.
The lack of a camera and flash support is just insane. I could give a rat’s ass what they named it.
Imagine if, instead of this $500 crippled piece of kit, they would have included the above, as well as a few standard ports AND a pico LED projector. They could sell them for a grand and people would be lining up in the streets to buy them.
They could have made it an inch thick and another half a pound heavier, which then would support a battery that could last for days.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera? Where’s the convergence that we have been promised with all this shrinking electronics?
I might have paid $500 bucks for a tablet that let me surf at the kitchen table/living room on my home wifi network, but without flash support or a camera for Skype/Ichat they won’t get my money this go round. That said, I believe somebody is going to make the product so many of us have been waiting for. The technology is right there on the shelf waiting to be hooked together. I was hoping it would be Apple because I love all the other stuff of theirs that I own, but their AppStore myopia seems to be getting the better of them. It’s not like I haven’t read a gazillion prelaunch articles wherein the plurality of comments mentioned the desire for a built in camera.
The G4 Cube, the 25th Anniversary Mac, the Apple Portable, the Newton and its spinoffs (remember the eMate? I do), and the fat iPod Nano all spring to mind.
58.
Catsy
@Martin: I own an iPhone, so I’m pretty personally familiar with just how critical the apps are to making the iPhone more than a fancy touch screen phone. The problem is that you can’t program an app to give the iPad a replaceable battery, industry-standard ports, any kind of removable storage, a camera, or in any other way address the majority of failures in this product. They are intrinsic to the way the hardware was designed, and it’s a bad design.
I don’t dispute that Apple refuses to support Flash because they want people to stop using it, but that doesn’t make it a good decision, and Youtube’s HTML5 beta is not evidence that Flash is on its way out. And even if it were, that still leaves huge chunks of the Internet either unusable on the iPad or suffering reduced functionality, and whether you agree with Apple’s business vision or not, that’s just idiotic when the major selling point of this thing is its web browsing experience. The lack of Flash support is a serious enough flaw that they had to include a custom (and deeply inferior to the web site) Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.
I have no idea what you mean about “complaining about Apple’s connectors while tolerating everyone else’s” being hypocritical. Wanting an industry-standard USB port (rather than an expensive adapter that goes through their proprietary port) is hypocritical? It’s all well and good that they want to drive the market in a particular direction, such as wanting cameras to support WiFi or Bluetooth, but in doing so they are pissing on people who own devices that, you know, /already exist/.
It’s like the lack of a floppy drive in the original iMacs. Everyone knew floppies were on their way out, and indeed, these days the idea of needing a floppy drive in your computer is silly. But in 1998, 3.5″ floppies were still in widespread, essential use, and the lack of one in the iMac shut out a lot of people who otherwise might have used one. There is a very fine line between leading the market and jumping so far out in front that you leave a lot of your customers behind.
Honestly, what was the last time Apple launched a product that wasn’t met by jokes?
iPhone? The only complaint I ever heard about that launch was the pricing of it.
61.
Jon H
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera. ”
You clearly haven’t thought through the practicality of an inch-thick, two-pound, 8″x10″ slab being used as a camera.
At a minimum, it’d be unwieldy. At worst, you’d look goofy as heck.
62.
Jon H
@Catsy: “But in 1998, 3.5” floppies were still in widespread, essential use, and the lack of one in the iMac shut out a lot of people who otherwise might have used one.”
Or they could pay $20 for a USB floppy. Not exactly a show-stopper.
63.
CalD
Apparently Apple released a product yesterday.
Do you know what this MEANS?
I guess it means Apple makes a tablet computer… and so do a lot of other people.
64.
Martin
@Catsy: Almost nobody uses replaceable batteries, and the cost of the devices is getting so low that almost nobody even replaces their battery when it charges out – they replace their device.
And not only is Apple aware of the implications of not supporting Flash, they pointed it out. In the keynote Steve deliberately went to a page to show off the Flash missing plugin box. For the overwhelming majority of what Flash is used for, Flash is unnecessary. It’s the same argument as people that were critical of Webkit and Firefox for not supporting IE quirks.
If we insist on never breaking from the past, we’ll never leave it. That’s why existing tablet PCs are what they are – nobody was brave enough to break backward compatibility with Windows apps, no matter how inappropriate the interface for those apps would be on a tablet, so the majority of Windows based tablets are going to be unwieldily devices because they can’t bother to stop embracing things that make the tables a pain to use.
Wanting an industry-standard USB port (rather than an expensive adapter that goes through their proprietary port) is hypocritical?
A lot of cameras don’t have industry standard USB ports. And why, when your phone has wifi and your car has wifi shouldn’t your camera have wifi? Isn’t that also a standard? I mean, if we’re focusing on a device that is supposed to make strides in mobile computing why would I want to haul around a bunch of cables to hook things together? Sure, some are unavoidable, but the point is to make them avoidable whenever possible.
There is a very fine line between leading the market and jumping so far out in front that you leave a lot of your customers behind.
And yet the iMac dumping 3.5″ floppies was the catalyst to everyone dumping 3.5″ floppies. Apple got that one right by forcing the storage market to embrace USB which had been out for almost 2 years and was being totally ignored. Your USB port might not have become standard if not for Apple’s move which you now criticize them for.
And the problem with putting in these other ports is that developers will get lazy and come to expect them. Apple won’t be able to easily leave them behind in the future once that happens. Like I said, Apple has a very long horizon, and people aren’t used to that. They know they’ll get enough customers even if they leave some out in the cold. That’s okay with them. They also know that by the 2nd or 3rd pass, when customers have caught up with them, that they’ll see the product differently.
@Jon H: Yes it was. It was one more thing to carry around. If you needed the drive at all you needed it pretty much all the time, and had to hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it. You had to use a case (no ‘just carry the laptop over there for you’) to carry the cord and drive that you were going to need regardless of needing anything else.
Worse, the extra $20 was a slap in the face. A fine for being behind the curve, for a machine that ALREADY cost more than a dosbox.
Nope, @Catsy had it exactly right saying Apple was stupid in not including it.
No replaceable battery. No MMS. No tethering. No 3G. No physical keyboard. No push email. No outlook support. Not to mention the whole ‘No computer company is going to wander into the phone space and succeed on their first pass – they’re going to fail a few times before they figure it out’.
Seriously, I’ve made a LOT of money betting against the ‘experts’ when it comes to Apple products.
@Martin: I mentioned this on the other iPad thread, I’ll paraphrase it again.
Not including a USB port was stupid. I use flash drives a fair amount to move things just as people used to use floppy disks. I see a lot of such used by high school students to get homework projects moved around, just for one example.
SDs could have been an alternative. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t include that, either.
People have to hope that they’re in a local WiFi zone that’ll support the quantity they want to move at a reasonable speed. For a sadly large chunk of the nation, that’s unlikely to exist on any consistent basis.
68.
Beauzeaux
The much hyped iPad is nothing particularly innovative or original.
Not including a USB port was stupid. I use flash drives a fair amount to move things just as people used to use floppy disks. I see a lot of such used by high school students to get homework projects moved around, just for one example.
And high school students will never be around wifi spots? Particularly in the areas where they’ll get the most use? (And there’s no peer to peer file transfers???)
I’m not sure you’re thinking this through.
70.
Martin
I think this is probably the best summary of how Apple approaches things, considering the source:
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
So, no Apple doesn’t give a shit how important you think Flash or USB is. If it’s really important a solution will show up for the handful of people that need it. The rest will just skip CNN’s Flash video and go to someone willing to do HTML5 video, and in a few months CNN will get with the program and the problem will be solved, and maybe then you’ll buy one. In the meantime, as CalD rightly pointed out, a lot of other people make tablet computers that will run Flash if it’s that important. That people get worked up about this stuff tells me that Apple has it a lot more right than the other companies and that Catsy and Tim probably really do want a device much like this, but they’re upset that Apple missed their corner of the market – either by leaving out the camera or Flash or getting the price too high or whatever. Apple could make a device that is all things to all people, but then it’d be just like all the others on the market, and nobody is buying them, no matter how important people say all of those other features are.
We’ll see when the final numbers come in, but I’ll confidently predict that Apple sells more iPads than any other tablet manufacturer this year. Bottom line, that’s what matters to Apple.
Let’s not compare announced with mythical products please. If MS ships Courier as what they’ve shown, I agree, it would be pretty revolutionary. But we’ve seen an awful lot of cool prototypes out of Intel and MS and other than Surface I’ve yet to see one actually hit the market, and that one cost $12000 and requires custom software development.
73.
Catsy
Okay, I have to say that the way the new editor closes the editing frame if you reach the end of the allowed editing period–completely losing everything you’ve written with no possibility of recovery–is fucking enraging. Don’t close the window–just tell me the editing period has passed so I can copypasta instead of having to retype an entire goddamn comment.
That said, to add what I was going to: Jon H’s reply to me illustrated not only the kind of attitude that resulted in my not buying an iMac, but the very same attitude that will likely result in my not buying an iPad.
The problem is that Apple likes to get so far out in front of the market that they refuse to include core functionality that they don’t think people need or should use anymore, but that people today do in fact still use and rely on. “We don’t think you need it, and we’ll prove it by forcing you to live without it or pay more for our alternative.”
Noting that people can just give Apple more money to get essential functionality that should’ve been included in the first place is not a persuasive defense of that practice. If anything, it’s worthy of outright ridicule.
74.
Martin
@Catsy: Everybody has that attitude. Why doesn’t Windows ship with decent PDF support? There’s always some key element that vendors are willing to leave to the marketplace, and in Apple’s case, admittedly they were in a rather different situation than today and made the floppy move for other reasons. Apple’s peripheral marketplace was dead. Totally dead. They had virtually no partners out there. Apple intentionally gave them a market to revive things. They almost forced consumers to go to 3rd parties in order to breathe life into them. I know for a fact that they did this intentionally. And you know what, it worked. Old standby vendors that tied their ship to PCs like Kensington were slow to come around but a whole slew of smaller players jumped at the new market and are now mainstays – companies like Belkin really benefitted from that and subsequent moves. And because of that, more and better peripherals became available for customers – and still do. Hell, there were tons of complaints right after that period from PC users that the only USB devices they could find were iMac themed. And Apple repeated that through the iPod dock connector. Apple could never have provided the range of accessories that exist for the iPod, but they encouraged that market to form, in part, by leaving some desired features out.
The main problem the industry faced, and still does, is that most consumers have no sense of value when it comes to computers. They’ll pay an extra $20K to get a BMW over a Honda, but they won’t pay an extra $200 to get a Mac over a PC. Price is the primary factor still used when buying PCs. That made some sense when they were $5K, but I see people drop $150 to get their car detailed, but they’ll still spend 8 hours trying to save $30 on a computer. It’s interestingly irrational.
People view computers as commodity items, like they’re buying gas, and paying the lowest possible price as something of a badge of honor but they also demand that they not act like commodity items by having all of these other features. It’s a fairly damaging cycle to the industry because it’s led to a race to the bottom not just on price but also on quality and the development of computing in general. Quite simply, the money to do R&D to break into new areas is drying up, and what money there is almost exclusively is landing in Apple’s lap. Just the fact that Apple dumped all other chipmakers and are now competing directly with Intel with the CPU for the iPad is both interesting and a little troubling, along with the fact that the fastest mobile processor you can buy is now exclusive to Apple products. I’m happy to see Apple do well – I’m a shareholder – but I’m more convinced every day that we’re going to be dependent on Apple to move general purpose computing forward in any meaningful way, and that bothers me because competition is good – and it’s good for Apple.
Somehow consumers need to take an attitude more similar to the one they have for cars and furniture and TVs and all of the other things in their lives and find a way to apply it to computers. More consumers are, which is why Apple is growing, but looking at the other PC vendors, I think they face a bleak future. That’s not so good.
@Martin: I don’t buy the “everybody does it” defense–especially not when you try to illustrate it by comparing the inclusion of essential hardware to support for a document format. I mean, really? You sound like a fairly sharp guy who has a good grasp of what’s what in this industry, so it utterly baffles me why you would make such an inapt comparison. Do I really need to get into the difference between a lack of support for a given format–which can be remedied in about two minutes online–to the omission of hardware in a sealed and deliberately non-upgradeable device? Particularly hardware such as a USB port or removable storage of any kind, which are absolutely /essential/ if you’re going to design something with so many limitations in storage and capabilty?
Really? Come on.
My family owns two iPhones and three iPods, and two of those iPods are replacements for previous models that died after a couple years. I don’t have an issue with paying for quality. That is the exact opposite of what I’m being asked to do here. I’m being asked to pay a premium for something that does only some of the things that my desktop, laptop and iPhone do, does very few of those things as well as the existing devices, and retains every single one of the worst shortcomings of the iPhone other than screen size and battery life while costing twice as much.
“And yet the iMac dumping 3.5” floppies was the catalyst to everyone dumping 3.5” floppies.”
really? apple was the driver, eh? shocking that a company that just reached 10% of market share in 2009 (if you include iPhone OS) was able to drive the abandonment of 3.5 disks, cause they only had a cd-rom drive. probably had nothing to do with the decrease in cost of cd-r and cd-rw drives, coupled with manufacturers being well aware of the limits of floppies.
here’s the thing. when your customer base is small and devoted, you can be innovative and ahead of the curve. provided you do allow for backward compatibility to be added, for those willing to pay. when your customer base is everyone else, as well as most corporations, you cannot do things like that. backward compatability is a must. for fuck’s sake, every major financial company in this country is still doing the bulk of their admin processing with COBOL. i’ve worked on code that is older than i am, and no, it’s not going to be replaced anytime soon.
the driver for mass adoption of newer technology is not apple. it’s price. pure and simple. once it was cheaper to burn a cd instead of write to 7 floppies, optical drives took over. the rest is marketing.
78.
Martin
We don’t think you need it, and we’ll prove it by forcing you to live without it or pay more for our alternative.
Wait, what? You’re suggesting either that:
1) Apple is cheaper than the alternatives (which is true in a handful of cases, but untrue overall)
2) Apple can add hardware for free.
Look, I personally know the people that design these things. They vanish from my field of view for months and then after events like yesterday I get to talk to them again. You want a USB port in the iPad. Here’s the considerations:
1) How much does the hardware cost to add – not just the little plug, but ensuring the wiring will be reliable over a lifetime of use, the cost to channel out another slot in the side of the device, getting the part installed, the budgeted cost of warranty repair (including scaling up to support the additional number of repairs due to having another breaky thing in it).
2) How much space will that port take up? First, is there even physical space between the edge of the screen and the case to accomodate a relatively deep port. Are you willing to sacrifice the volume of space the port and cabling take up that is now used for battery. Would everyone rather trade 15 minutes (or whatever it is) of battery for the USB port?
3) How much impact would the USB port have on the battery life of the product? That requires additional power management. What software interface will that port get – USB mass storage? Keyboard? etc. Just jamming a port in there doesn’t mean it can be used for everything, and if a frequent use of the port impacts battery life, Apple would have to contend with that on the marketing side.
It’s a lot more complicated than you might think, and in many cases, the cost of adding it to the product isn’t necessarily cheaper than the add-on. Take the Mac Mini. It got a lot of flack over the 2.5″ drive, but the smaller drive made the device smaller and lighter. That reduced packaging size, allowed for more boxes to fit in a shipping container and in a store’s stockroom. And the 2.5″ drives were more reliable because they are more shock resilient (there’s less momentum in the smaller parts) so there’s less warranty work to deal with. End to end, that 2.5″ drive saved Apple a LOT of money over a 3.5″ drive and allowed the price of the product to be lower. Now, you might have had to pay a bit more than that difference to add a 3.5″ external drive, but everyone who didn’t need an external drive saved money.
Are you willing to pay more for the iPad to accomodate Tims camera and flash, or someone else’s front-facing camera, and so on, and are they willing to pay for your extra ports? Apple instead decided to support all wireless and let all the other stuff go through the 30 pin connector, and let everyone hash it out. If USB adapters turn out to be particularly popular, the next version in fact might have a USB port. Apple has reversed course on these decisions in the past.
actually, thinking more on this, including only a CD-ROM drive is not innovative, except as a way to force your users to pay for peripheral hardware. congratulations, you have an optical disc drive! alas, it’s read only, if you actually want to write to any removable storage you have to buy extra hardware…so, no backing up of any important files for you!
that’s looking to the future, but only to the future of peripheral sales.
But now seeing that it wouldn’t really ad any functionality, just take up more room in my purse, I am pleased.
I think the larger size actually means a large increase in functionality.
It’s strange how this is often dismissed or overlooked (“Oh is that what all the fuss is about? Why it’s just bigger iPod Touch!”). But that change in size is what is going to make it a hit.
I have an iPod Touch, and I do love it but what I constantly wish it had is a better surfing experience — and that is mostly going to be improved by a larger screen. (that, and a faster processor for more responsive browsing, which the iPad has).
By the way, not only is the iPad bigger but it’s proportions are different from the iTouch (and iPhone). Its aspect ratio favors readability, not ‘holdability’. The case has nearly the proportions of an 8 1/2×11 pad of paper (1.27 for iPad, 1.29 for the real pad)– and the device itself is close in dimensions to the common 9×7 book size. Those ratios didn’t come about by chance. Those sizes and ratios have been proven over the years to provide excellent readability while still remaining handy.
The iTouch and iPhone are narrower, because they are expected to be gripped in one hand. If they had the iPad’s aspect ratio, they’d be a lot less comfortable for people to get their hand around it.
It all seems like little stuff, but it has huge consequences for usability.
I find using my iTouch to read websites or Facebook or get to my web-based email leaves something to be desired. (Its big advantage is of course the portability enabled by it’s shape and small size). For example, to read this blog on my iTouch I end up doing a lot of pinching to zoom in and out (zoom to make the text big enough for my middle-aged eyes to read easily, zoom out to quickly move around.) I turn the iTouch horizontally to make the lines longer (improves readibility) but then there are fewer lines showing in the screen.
I want to get an iPad, but I what I would need to know before I do is what kind of support it has for printing. If there’s no way to send something to my printer wirelessly — online sales reciepts or ticket confirmations and the like — then it’s a lot less appealing to me and I’ll stick to my MBP.
But now seeing that it wouldn’t really ad any functionality, just take up more room in my purse, I am pleased.
I think the larger size actually means a large increase in functionality.
It’s strange how this is often dismissed or overlooked (“Oh is that what all the fuss is about? Why it’s just bigger iPod Touch!”). But that change in size is what is going to make it a hit.
I have an iPod Touch, and I do love it but what I constantly wish it had is a better surfing experience — and that is mostly going to be improved by a larger screen. (that, and a faster processor for more responsive browsing, which the iPad has).
By the way, not only is the iPad bigger but it’s proportions are different from the iTouch (and iPhone). Its aspect ratio favors readability, not ‘holdability’. The case has nearly the proportions of an 8 1/2×11 pad of paper (1.27 for iPad, 1.29 for the real pad)– and the device itself is close in dimensions to the common 9×7 book size. Those ratios didn’t come about by chance. Those sizes and ratios have been proven over the years to provide excellent readability while still remaining handy.
The iTouch and iPhone are narrower, because they are expected to be gripped in one hand. If they had the iPad’s aspect ratio, they’d be a lot less comfortable for people to get their hand around it.
It all seems like little stuff, but it has huge consequences for usability when surfing websites, reading blogs, doing Facebook or reading my web-based email.
I want to get an iPad, but I what I would need to know before I do is what kind of support it has for printing. If there’s no way to send something to my printer wirelessly — online sales reciepts or ticket confirmations and the like — then it’s a lot less appealing to me and I’ll stick to my MBP.
** edited to make it shorter. damn I am long-winded.
82.
Jon H
@Catsy: “Noting that people can just give Apple more money to get essential functionality that should’ve been included in the first place is not a persuasive defense of that practice.”
Apple didn’t make the USB floppy drives, so if you needed one, and wanted an iMac, you were not giving more money to Apple. And if it’s really *essential* to you, why are you complaining about $20?
The lack of a floppy disk drive was in no way an insurmountable obstacle for people who wanted an iMac but still had floppies.
here’s the thing. when your customer base is small and devoted, you can be innovative and ahead of the curve. provided you do allow for backward compatibility to be added, for those willing to pay. when your customer base is everyone else, as well as most corporations, you cannot do things like that. backward compatability is a must. for fuck’s sake, every major financial company in this country is still doing the bulk of their admin processing with COBOL. i’ve worked on code that is older than i am, and no, it’s not going to be replaced anytime soon.
But people are acting as though Apple is the only player in this market. They aren’t. If you want a tablet with a USB port, there are a dozen other vendors to go to. Why is this an issue? If you need a USB port all the time, don’t buy an iPad – that’d be stupid. If you live and die on COBOL, there will undoubtedly be vendors willing to take your money for COBOL supporting software, hardware, and consulting. But if backward compatibility is a must, then we wouldn’t have anything BUT COBOL right now. Someone had to introduce an alternative and push it ahead. Someone had to break compatibility with the PDP-11, with parallel ports, with DOS or else that’s all we’d have.
I’m not suggesting that Apple will be the only vendor out there and therefore all of our COBOL systems will grind to a halt. I’m suggesting that increasingly Apple is the only vendor willing to break compatibility to drive the next generation of solutions forward, which means that the next generation will increasingly be defined by Apple and not the other players. And they’re going to that in every situation that they can manage. They aren’t stupid about it. They went to great lengths to run home to Intel because that was a bad place to be incompatible, but even there they were the first to go EFI over BIOS. They will never stop breaking the last generation of stuff because they know when the next generation takes root, they now own that market. Nobody is going to be influential in any space by a deep commitment to COBOL. Someone will be happy with those dollars, but Apple isn’t that company.
that’s looking to the future, but only to the future of peripheral sales.
As I pointed out, that was an explicit goal of Apple at the time. Not so much today, because that market is now doing fine, but back then Apple desperately needed it.
“If you needed the drive at all you needed it pretty much all the time, and had to hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it. You had to use a case (no ‘just carry the laptop over there for you’) to carry the cord and drive that you were going to need regardless of needing anything else.”
That’s the iBook, not the iMac. Why on earth would you need it pretty much all the time? It’s not like people were running the OS off of floppies. Were you playing copy-protected games off of floppies all the time or something?
And why would you have to “hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it”? At the very least the iBook had a USB port which was accessible regardless of the situation of the lid.
I just don’t know what you’re talking about.
86.
Kirk Spencer
@gwangung: Here in North Georgia, no. The WiFi (which, by the way, is slow) is protected access for teachers only.
87.
Kirk Spencer
@twiffer: re 3.5 and such, I’ll supplement your remark.
First, 3.5 isn’t dead yet. It’s dying, mind you, but it’s not dead. Dead is when you can’t go to a big box office supply store and get them off the shelf. BBOSS’s don’t do niche unless it’s profitable. (Just got back from Office Depot, and know that at least locally they’re still on the shelf.)
Second, it wasn’t just CDs and DVDs’ (and USB Flash drives) doing in the 3.5s. It was also capacity. Straight text will probably still fit on 1.2MB of storage. The average high school or business project with a bit of graphic and audio added will not.
Neither of those was driven by Apple. What Jobs did was see that this was coming and decided to not wait till 3.5s were dead but rather to just not include them – to anticipate the future.
Of course, there’s been at least one generation SINCE he made that decision, and we’ve already been through the frustration of not having one. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Apple didn’t drive the 3.5 out of business.
88.
Kirk Spencer
@Jon H: You’re missing my point which probably means I wasn’t clear.
By “all the time”, I meant that if you used 3.5s at all you tend(ed) to use them frequently, several times a day. Thus you needed your drive attached. You are right, I did confuse book with box, so the moving issue nullifies in that regard. Nonetheless, it was still that slap in the face. Big deal, $20, except you ALREADY had to pay more for the box. There’s a reason for the cliche of the straw on the camel’s back.
89.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: And there’s no way of that changing? Ever?
The world is not static. It changes in response to what’s going on around it. At some point in the not distant future – starting as soon as 2 years for private high schools and more like 5 for public, districts will face a choice of moving to electronic textbooks for devices like the iPad, as the iPad+books may well prove cheaper than just the paper books. There are a hundred things that need to change for that to happen, and one of them is technology infrastructure.
Saying that the iPad will fail in this role because the wifi is teachers-only is like saying that the automobile would have failed because there were no 7-11s to stop at for coffee between towns. We manage to overcome the small details…
@Martin: apple had a resurgence because of small, portable niche gadgets. recall, without including the prevalence of devices like iPhones/iTouch, they’d still have less than 10% of the market share for computers. until the iPod, they got by on style and marketing. i know you aren’t suggesting they are the only vendor available. despite all the strides in computing, there are billion dollar corporations out there that are still relying on antique systems. ROI is everything. my point remains: smaller players can be innovative because there is less risk if they fail. but early adoption does not drive mass adoption: price does.
your earlier anecdote rings false: The main problem the industry faced, and still does, is that most consumers have no sense of value when it comes to computers. They’ll pay an extra $20K to get a BMW over a Honda, but they won’t pay an extra $200 to get a Mac over a PC. er, no, people get a BMW over a honda because it’s a status symbol: value doesn’t really factor in. the implication is also that paying more for a beemer is an understanding of value? if so, that’s…debatable.
i’ve got nothing against apple, any more than i have anything against microsoft or ibm or any other company. i love my iPod, as it fills my needs nicely. i considered an iPhone, but decided against it, since it would add an additional $30 bucks a month to my cell phone bill (as already having “unlimited data” does not count for the iPhone, fuckers). i prefer specialized devices, as they tend to perform their tasks better (and, as mentioned in a different thread, i carry a bag anyway, so i’ve got room for ’em). i don’t want a tablet anyway…i do want an e-book reader and the specs on the iPad make it a poor choice for my needs.
however, the idea they are huge innovators is marketing. the more they rely on proprietery tech, the more they will back themselves into a corner. leaving off of a usb port in favor of their dock port is not innovation. it’s favoring a proprietary version of a port that does pretty much the same thing.
For what it’s worth, I’ll simplify what I wish had been on the iPad or maybe the courier (if/when it comes out).
1) USB and SD ports.
2) Voice Control (ala – or even exactly – Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking)
Due to local experience I’d like (but to a lesser degree) to also see a 10/100/1000 ethernet port.
Yes, I’d like to keep the bluetooth and wifi and touch screens and stylus. But despite all else it’s still just basically an enhanced reader.
If I were adding one more special enhancement to the above, I’d add a “sleepy notes” tool, where the system could/would record verbal notes made over the microphone while hibernating, and then on wake-up DNS would transcribe them and put them in the appropriate file. The transcription of recorded notes exists already, as does the auto-filing (though I recommend you keep the “confirm?” box option active for a while.)
@Martin: yeah, and i don’t begrudge a company the attempt to make money. but call it what it is. for any computer, leaving off a writable drive is kind of an asshole move, unless you want to give me a 1TB hard drive and magically prevent it from ever frying.
@Martin: 2 years for private schools, maybe. 5 years for public schools has me ROFL. Here’s a hint on that point: What is the average age of computers in public high schools across the nation. Note, not oldest still in use, AVERAGE.
In Georgia, it’s six years – I was part of the survey team that determined that fact. Last year the local school system finally got replacements for the 10% of boxes that were still running Windows 98 – and the adjacent county hopes to do the same this year. Oh – there’s an average of 1 computer per 15 students locally.
My daughter has to share a book for AP Psychology, and the only reason she doesn’t for AP Calculus is the teacher bought a bunch out of his own pocket.
And you think the districts are going to provide wifi readers for all those students?
Nope. That’d mean actually putting money where the mouths are for everyone saying education is important — TAX money.
94.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: I think you missed my point, which is understandable. I know 3.5″ floppies aren’t dead. Hell, I’ve still got a punch card reader *in use* where I work. Technology almost NEVER dies completely, as twiffer noted with COBOL.
Yes, certainly Apple isn’t big enough to kill off a market like that, but Apple killed off the notion that the 3.5″ was critical. Consumers were convinced that they couldn’t live without the 3.5″ drives, just like they were convinced they could live without parallel ports or a physical keyboard on the iPhone or the myriad of gimmicky pointing devices that occupied laptops before the trackpad. Its the unwillingness of tech companies to force this issue why these things tend to stagnate. Once consumers see that, yes, you can still be productive without these things (admittedly on the backs of the early adopters), they’re more open to trying it – and other tech companies are more willing to follow suit.
95.
Some Guy
@Janet Strange: And how. I work in higher ed and with some tweaks this would be fantastic. However, that is not enough of a market in itself.
I lecture from my iPod, buts a little small; I grade using a wacom tablet attachment to my MacBook, which is annoying to lug around; I read journal articles on my MacBook; I have to lug reports and all kinds of paper around and I am truly sick to death of it.
I would gladly have an iMac for major writing (since I have books and shite all over the place when I write it’s not like I can write research anyplace I have my laptop), combined with a nice satellite tablet device for light writing, media consumption, and document mark up.
I can imagine using is without a single problem so for those who can’t see how they would use it: that is fine. But don’t pretend nobody can use it.
Besides, doing major writing on a netbook is silly. The screen is just as small, not as bright, and those things are slow as molasses. If you do major creative work (writing, design, etc.) you are not going to be working on a mini-computer of any kind.
What would have really worked IMO: webcam and significant develop on 3G videoconference for more than 2 people (group videoconferencing), and promotion of this as a much richer, mobile social networking device (which would mean some improvements on the keyboard – perhaps a one-handed, fan in the corner).
Also, getting over Steve Jobs juvenile aversion to the stylus, one of greatest achievements in human evolution, to allow people to draw and interact with text, you know, with their hands like Apple supposedly champions. (Too bad about the Newton but grow up – nothing will ever supplant simple scrawling as a way of being creative).
Finally, bundle the iPad with iMacs and MacBook Pros at a nice discount and market them as the satellite to your powerhouse. They would sell great.
96.
Martin
leaving off of a usb port in favor of their dock port is not innovation. it’s favoring a proprietary version of a port that does pretty much the same thing.
Well, the iPod dock is hardly the same thing – it charges the device, it delivers video, it also has the USB pins. But the dock connector is also the most prevalent (and flexible) connector in the broader peripheral market outside of USB. You’re considerably more likely to find a dock connector in your car than a USB port, and the reason is that nobody else bothered to develop an equivalent to it. There is no port that is a peer to the dock connector in terms of functionality. That’s not Apple’s fault, and others could have pushed the market in another direction, but they never even tried. That’s like faulting Intel for being the driver of the x86 instruction set. They won the market. It happens.
I agree it’s annoying that it’s proprietary, but like other tech it’s not like it’s not licensable, so it’s not completely closed to the marketplace.
97.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: We’re not talking about computers in the classroom. We’re talking about textbooks. I don’t know the K-12 costs off-hand, but higher ed is $1100 per student per year. You take out the cost of printing, shipping, storage, distributing, and so on and factor in the cost of purchasing and supporting iPads with hopefully a commensurate reduction in cost for electronic over printed textbooks and at some point in the nearish future, the electronic book costs will work out to be lower. Maybe not with Apple hardware, maybe not in 5 years in GA depending on your textbook turnover rate and budget (and yours sounds pretty bad), but I would say in 5 years at least some districts will be seriously considering this. I said ‘starting as soon as’. I qualified it pretty significantly.
The real movement will be in higher ed. Students will vote with their wallets and if the textbooks show up in August as I understand they are supposed to, I think the college students will take the hit and move this concept forward. And the universities might support it – it’s hard to say. Right now, there’s a non-trivial administrative overhead of dealing with textbooks, but there’s also a revenue driver for the institution as the bookstores kick something back to administration. I think it’s a wash though. I think the universities will not discourage this ultimately, and the smaller ones, where that overhead is more significant, will embrace it.
@Martin: ah, higher ed. Sure. Odd, however, since we were talking high schools before.
And high schools won’t. Go back to earlier threads discussing why Texas has such a large influence. Schools purchase new textbooks only every few years. See my point about how some classes are short books anyway. Figure the cost of (average) six textbooks per student vs a reader plus six e-textbooks per student. The savings are not good enough – not at what the companies charge for e-textbooks.
As an aside, someday yes. When e-textbooks cost ENOUGH less – enough that the set of books plus the reader is less than the set of print books without reader. That’s not here, yet.
@Martin: Ah, I see your point now. And I still disagree – it wasn’t Apple that convinced them the drives weren’t necessary. I still say it was the necessity of commonly dealing with files too large for floppies.
I don’t see a lot of disk burning at schools and libraries (my area). I see a lot of USBs. Of save, “oops”, tweak and save again. And that wasn’t from Apple.
Contributed to, maybe. Convinced? No. In my opinion, of course.
The higher ed market actually is large enough, but any dedicated device to the market will fail. That’s just how these things work. So if Apple can win over higher ed in a broad market device, the device will be secure.
Steve doesn’t have an aversion to the stylus – he has an aversion to relying on the stylus. That’s a very important distinction and it pervades the history of Apple. It’s why there were no 2 button mice for years. It’s why Apple yanks out ports as soon as they feel they can. Most developers are lazy – that’s obvious enough when you look at what constitutes a good Mac or iPhone app and a bad one. The problem is what happens when developers expect that a stylus is there – they make buttons that are too small to interact with your finger and other decisions like that. Once the marketplace is full of those apps, you can’t possibly get rid of the stylus or else people simply can’t use the device.
Now, there appears to be nothing stopping you from using a stylus or having a handwriting app, etc. and I’m almost positive those things will show up, with varying utility, and there’s even a chance that the Ink API will show up – but Apple isn’t going to hand you a stylus because they don’t want developers to expect that you’ll use one. I mean, Apple supported 2 button mice for 10 years before they shipped one with their name on it. They’re very careful about these kinds of things, so the exclusion of stylus shouldn’t yet be taken as an indication that there won’t be handwriting.
On another note, I just learned that the iPad will support bluetooth keyboards. Same thing. Support is there for hardware keyboards, but developers can’t rely on it. No lazy route for them.
101.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: Higher ed will always plow the way on things like this, but I think k-12 will get there. Yeah, Texas is a big driver, but so is Cali, and textbooks get cheaper now due to economy of scale. That doesn’t exist to nearly the same degree once you stop printing. Electronic textbooks undermines Texas’s influence on textbook prices to a pretty large degree.
And no, that’s not there yet, but we’ve hardly even started on it. The cost of printing and handling paper books is substantial. Incredibly substantial. And the cost of the eReaders will likely go down. There’s support costs to add in, which aren’t nothing, but there are other factors at play here as well – politics, other utilities for the readers, and so on. I think 5 years is still about right for the first public K-12 districts to jump on board. It’ll be a lot faster for higher ed because the book costs are substantially higher and because there’s no bureaucracy to convince. As soon as the books are available, students can decide individually.
er, no, people get a BMW over a honda because it’s a status symbol: value doesn’t really factor in. the implication is also that paying more for a beemer is an understanding of value? if so, that’s…debatable.
But here you’ve demonstrated you don’t understand value yourself. Value isn’t getting the biggest thing for the cheapest price. It’s recognizing what your dollar bought. The BMW could bring performance, comfort, reliability, % higher resale, and sure, things like status as well. If you’re a real-estate agent, that non-trivial. My point is that people can spend $40K for a car and identify what that extra $20K bought. We might disagree that it was worth what they paid, but they know what it was.
If you buy $5 gas and I buy $2 gas, what did you get over me? Nothing. it’s precisely the same damn gas.
With computers, most consumers see a $500 computer and a $400 computer and aside from some gigahertz or gigabytes they see no distinction between the two. There’s not much value given to things like reliability, durability, comfort, and so on. And the status comes with paying less, not more. Truth is, most people use their computer far more than their car, but they see almost no value in making their computer experience better, safer, more comfortable relative to their car experience. I’m not taking sides in this because I think car buying attitudes are pretty freaky myself, but I think its an interesting juxtaposition.
Second, it wasn’t just CDs and DVDs’ (and USB Flash drives) doing in the 3.5s. It was also capacity. Straight text will probably still fit on 1.2MB of storage. The average high school or business project with a bit of graphic and audio added will not.
Another factor that doomed the 3.5″ floppy was that by 1996 they were no longer useful for booting MacOS. And why did you need a floppy drive on the iMac anyways? It had an ethernet connection.
They could have made it an inch thick and another half a pound heavier, which then would support a battery that could last for days.
__
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera. Where’s the convergence that we have been promised with all this shrinking electronics?
How would making the iPad an inch thick and a half pound heavier make it “…a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera.” I have an HTC Hero. It’s a nice, compact device that works very well as a phone and decently enough as a browser and e-mail reader. I can also take pictures with it. I could listen to music on it if I wanted to, but I have an iPod for that.
But the pictures you take with any cell phone aren’t going to be as good as what you can get with a cheap digital camera, the sensors aren’t that great and neither are the lenses, and as far as a miniaturized device replacing my laptop, well, that’s a hard sell because you still need a decent keyboard and decently sized screen. And why would you want the iPad to replace your phone, do you really want to hold that up to your ear to talk? Do you want to have to haul that with you if you’re going on a bike ride or a run and want to be able to call someone in case you need to?
The iPad is an interesting device. I’m not interested in this revision, but if they put an SD reader and a camera for Skype into rev 2.0 I might get one.
The iPad is an interesting device. I’m not interested in this revision, but if they put an SD reader and a camera for Skype into rev 2.0 I might get one.
The camera was omitted primarily because it would have made a cheap 3G plan impossible. Video Skype on millions of Apple devices for $30/mo would kill any carrier right now due to the bandwidth. I think we might see it after 4G networks roll out later this year.
however, the idea they are huge innovators is marketing. the more they rely on proprietery tech, the more they will back themselves into a corner. leaving off of a usb port in favor of their dock port is not innovation. it’s favoring a proprietary version of a port that does pretty much the same thing.
Wrong! They don’t do “…pretty much the same thing”. Here is the pinout diagram for USB. And here is the pinout diagram for the iPod dock connector. USB, four pins, the iPod dock, 30. The iPod dock connector allows for analog audio output and composite and component video output. If you had a USB port instead of a dock connector you’d need some sort of external USB convertofrob with a D/A converter in it to connect an iPod to your stereo or TV instead of just using a simple cable. The dock connector is much more fully featured than a simple USB port. There’s also the question of what kind of USB port you’d put on something like the iPad, a host port (Type A) or a device port (Type B). If you want to connect it to your computer and to external peripherals you’d need both, or Apple would need to invent some sort of brand new proprietary USB connector and then get it blessed by the USB standards committee, and let’s face it, one of the last fucking things we need is another goddamned form factor for USB connectors.
107.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I love this thread. Thank you for all the information. :)
108.
Gromit
Catsy: I own an iPhone, so I’m pretty personally familiar with just how critical the apps are to making the iPhone more than a fancy touch screen phone. The problem is that you can’t program an app to give the iPad a replaceable battery, industry-standard ports, any kind of removable storage, a camera, or in any other way address the majority of failures in this product. They are intrinsic to the way the hardware was designed, and it’s a bad design.
I don’t dispute that Apple refuses to support Flash because they want people to stop using it, but that doesn’t make it a good decision, and Youtube’s HTML5 beta is not evidence that Flash is on its way out. And even if it were, that still leaves huge chunks of the Internet either unusable on the iPad or suffering reduced functionality, and whether you agree with Apple’s business vision or not, that’s just idiotic when the major selling point of this thing is its web browsing experience. The lack of Flash support is a serious enough flaw that they had to include a custom (and deeply inferior to the web site) Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.
So you love your iPhone, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs, what, about $500 unsubsidized?
Yet you hate the iPad, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs $500 unsubsidized.
Granted, the iPhone has a (forward facing) camera and 3G voice capability and fits in your pocket. But the iPad has its own advantages: larger screen, longer (claimed) battery life, no 3G contract hassle, faster processor, more functional apps.
Other than the absence of a camera, your complaints could have been lifted straight from a blog post from 2007 about the original iPhone (ditto for no multitasking). It cost $600 WITH a 2-year contract. Heck, even the camera it HAD came in for a lot of abuse. I’m not saying the iPad will necessarily be the same sort of runaway success, but I seriously doubt it will flop. There are of course technical and practical differences between the products, differences that I don’t discount. But as I see it, the single biggest difference between our perceptions of the iPhone and the iPad is that we’ve both used the iPhone, and neither of us has used the iPad yet. The stories I’m hearing so far sound a lot like those from back in 2007, where folks who try the thing come away with their perceptions changed.
Oh, and Flash sucks and needs to die, or at least be relegated to its original purpose, as a tool for making cartoons. I do not miss it on my iPhone, and if sites want my business they should not require me have it installed.
109.
Gromit
Oops, something went wrong with my HTML above. The second paragraph, ending with “Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.” is Catsy’s, too. If anyone with admin access can fix this, I’d be very appreciative.
So you love your iPhone, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs, what, about $500 unsubsidized? Yet you hate the iPad, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs $500 unsubsidized.
I don’t like the fact that my iPhone lacks those things, but they are not absolute deal-breakers–for a phone. When I buy a mobile phone, I am already expecting to sign up for service to go with it, so I am already paying the subsidized price. I expect my mobile phone to have a certain form factor and handle phone calls and text messages. The fact that it does so much more makes it wonderful.
The reasonable expectations for a portable tablet computer are entirely different. Limitations that I accept in an otherwise excellent mobile phone are ridiculous and intolerable omissions in a computer.
There are of course technical and practical differences between the products, differences that I don’t discount.
Horseshit. The entire first half of your reply to me involves discounting the differences between the products in a disingenuous attempt to illustrate a dichotomy or contradiction that does not exist.
Anyway, I’m out–I should know better than to suggest the imperfection of an Apple product in a thread full of fanboys. Steve Jobs could have walked on stage and squeezed out a steaming three-coiler into a aluminum punch bowl with a flush button, and the next day there would be fifty blog posts about how fantastic the iCrap is and how three years from now no one will use legacy toilets anymore.
111.
Gromit
Good grief, Catsy. You come in here cranked up to 11 with the “indefensible design decision” and the “overpriced piece of shit” and because I don’t find most of your criticisms persuasive, I’m the fanatic?
And what differences did I discount? The lack of a camera? Given that the complaint is about the lack of a rear-facing camera and, by extension, video chat capability, this is only a salient difference with respect to the price of the device. The iPad lacks a camera and the hardware for voice communication. But, in exchange, we get nearly six times the screen real estate, by all accounts a blazing fast processor, (supposedly) longer battery life, and no need for a contract.
I was disappointed there was no camera, too. But the price and the prepaid data plans more than compensated.
If a week ago you’d asked anyone who actually follows Apple in the press and has any kind of a track record if there would be expandable memory, removable battery, flash support, etc., we could all have told you it wasn’t likely to happen. Hell, you have an iPhone, so you know where this company’s head is at, and how consumers have responded. So if you went into this reasonably well-informed and are shocked that Apple is following the design philosophies that have served it well in the past, then I don’t know what you were thinking. I’m open to arguments that there still isn’t a place in peoples’ lives for something smaller than a laptop but bigger than a smartphone, but I really don’t know how you arrive at the conclusion that building on past success is entirely the wrong way to go.
As for the phone part of the iPhone making up for what you consider otherwise serious limitations, you are obviously welcome to your opinions, but I know I’m not alone in saying that of the features on on the iPhone that I use (i.e. disregarding the stocks app and such) the phone app doesn’t actually rank very high. Number one app for me, hands down, is Safari. For me, the web browsing experience is the single biggest draw for the iPhone on a day-to-day basis, with the Mail, iPod and Maps apps lagging well behind, and the Phone app and third party apps trailing substantially. I’m probably unusual in that I don’t even have a text messaging plan, because 1) I think text messaging is a ripoff, even with unlimited plans and 2) I’d rather just send email or call. This probably just speaks to the different ways different people use the same device, but the popularity of Mobile Safari (along with AT&T’s frequent inability to match its capacity to demand when it comes to voice) also cuts against the idea that the iPhone is a crippled smartphone redeemed by it’s great voice capabilities. It’s actually a quite excellent and easy-to-use mobile computing device that also makes phone calls (when AT&T keeps its part of the bargain).
Anyway, if you’re looking for a tablet device that has the features you are looking for, you can probably find one, possibly for less than the purchase price of an entry-level iPad. I would heartily encourage you to get one of these things, and enjoy using Windows 7 or Linux on it, and plug in memory sticks and playing Flash games all day long. I suspect Apple won’t miss your money when preorders begin for their “catastrophic failure”.
Alot of bloggers are not really pleased with this new iPad.There was too much hype about it and alot blogers got turned off.You see, I can actually see some of the cool potential uses of this device. Third-party applications for making music, games, newspapers and magazines and books, tons of cool stuff, but IMHO they failed to sell it right (aside from the books). It smells sort of unfinished
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Comrade Scrutinizer
So what?
Crashman06
Not only does the iPad have a horrible name, but honestly, it looked kind of lame to me. Just a giant iPod touch. No multitasking, for example. The eBook reader seems cool, especially for textbooks, but it’s a backlight display, not eInk, so I bet it would tire people’s eyes out after a while.
Violet
I can’t believe they didn’t think through the “iPad” name more carefully. I saw it being compared to an “iTampon” on Twitter last night. What were they thinking? The jokes just write themselves.
inkadu
I believe this discussion belongs in the “Status Quo” thread below.
Summary: Big iPhone that makes no calls, does not support Flash, and does not multitask. At least that’s what Hitler told me.
Persia
I am not super excited about the iPad (worst name yet? Possible), but I also do not understand a lot of the complainers. Some guy on NPR was basically whining that Apple didn’t make a custom device specifically designed for him and his grandma.
r€nato
It’s a version 1.0. The first iPod and the first iPhone were pretty primitive as well.
Let me know when it has a camera and mic built-in, multi-tasking and Flash support.
zzyzx
I’m mad about it because it comes so so close to being something that would be cool. Then again, like so many Apple products, wait for the second or third version and it might be cool. It wasn’t until the 5th generation iPod that they were useful.
r€nato
@zzyzx:
damn dude, get out of my head
I did buy a 4th gen iPod as my first iPod, but when the 5th gen iPod came out I was all over that. I wouldn’t ordinarily have bought another one so soon, but yeah that’s when iPod really hit its stride (even though they were selling gobs of them already by then).
inkadu
@Persia: What’s got you excited about the iPad? What do you plan to use it for?
I think the complaints about the iPad is that it doesn’t do many of the thing’s you’d expect a $500 machine to do at that size compared to a comparably priced (or lower priced) netbook, laptop, and is harder to read than a Kindle (with free 3G access) for twice the price.
Are there any problems that the iPad uniquely solves, or solves at the best price?
Adam Collyer
As a long time lurker and part time commenter, indulge me, Balloon-Juice.
A few days ago, former professional basketball player Paul Shirley shared some thoughts on Haiti that amounted to, “I won’t help you for the same reason that I don’t give money to bums on the street.” Pretty language, but some awful content. You can read that here: Paul Shirley Haiti Thoughts
A fellow law student and I recently started blogging. I penned a response yesterday afternoon. Please take a look if you have a minute: On Reason and Humanity
Yes, it’s a shameless plug. But I do what I can to survive :)
Adam Collyer
Oh, and on a note that’s related to the open thread “topic” (is there such a thing?), here’s something I don’t get about the iPad. Shouldn’t it have some type of word processing program with which you can take notes? No one could tell me if it had a keyboard, either.
If they’re looking for a hybrid iPhone/laptop, I think it needs to be more functional than what it is now, which appears to be a Kindle with a bright screen and applications.
gwangung
Yes to both. $10 for iWorks, $29 for a new keyboard (but if you already have a bluetooth keyboard, nada). That’s the part that takes it out of the glorified iPod touch area.
JGabriel
Overheard this morning at the Supreme Court offices:
.
gwangung
@JGabriel: Yes!
Osprey
@JGabriel: They can’t believe Barack got ‘uppity’ over their decision.
shirt
To bad you got to use AT&T as a “service” provider. That, by itself, is enough to tell Jobs to keep it. I will get AT&T out of my life.
gypsy howell
I kinda want to want it, but I can’t figure out a reason exactly why I’d need it. It’s not like when the iPhone came out and you go “holy shit, a PHONE could do that?”
All I can come up with for a reason is as a replacement web-surfing device for thurston, who really only uses his mac to read email and surf the web, and sometimes watch a movie. But can you only watch a movie you download from iTunes? For example, we just got the 5-season dvd set of The Wire, but how would I watch it on the iPad?
I dunno. I wanted to be convinced, but so far I’m not. And we are, generally speaking, fairly early Mac adopters.
Adam Collyer
@gwangung: Perfect. Glad they accounted for it. I love my iPod Touch and my MacBook. After years of PC usage, I turned into an Apple Shill really, really quickly.
If only the iPhone exclusivity could end and we Verizon users could get in on the action….
gypsy howell
@shirt:
Like verizon’s any better.
gwangung
@shirt: I think you can also use Tmobile as a provider for the iPad. There’s a tech incompatability with Spring and Verizon….
gypsy howell
@Adam Collyer:
Much as I despise my verizon service, I would definitely have purchased an iPhone by now if it were available for the verizon network. Can’t believe Apple still hasn’t broken that barrier.
gwangung
That said, I’m a bit on the fence for this. Not an immediate, got to have, but I can think of ways to use it…..
Keith
The product Apple “released” (it’s not out for a bit) looks surprisingly like the one Steve Ballmer showed (from HP) a few weeks back, but without the ability to run an x86 operation system. I know the battery life is better, but 10 hours is basically the norm for StrongARM-based tablets; I figured with Apple’s use of non-removable batteries (that can be shaped just about any way they want), their big innovation would have been an x86-based tablet with crazy battery life.
Will
Just a big ITouch. How can this thing not support Flash? That’s the same problem all the shitty smartphones are having.
Isn’t one of the nice things about a laptop is that you don’t have to hold it with your hands to use it? You can just sit it somewhere and type? Or read? Or watch the movie? This thing you have to hold up at all times, and be extremely careful with at all times–like a smartphone, only bigger and even easier to whack into something.
I would seriously want the thing to come with a kickstand.
gwangung
@gypsy howell: Oh, I can believe it. There are tech incompatabilities, and Verizon’s lower speed service isn’t compatable with the the rest of the world…
Maybe with the next version, though….
some guy
I’m way more excited for the Viliv S10 Blade tablet / netbook. It’s a little thicker and heaver than the iPad, but it’s more feature rich and I won’t be limited to running whatever apps Apple approves of.
Karmakin
There actually is a kickstand you can get for it. Really.
That said, I think this is a serious misstep for Apple. Which would be fine, but I think that missteps actually hurt Apple more than they would hurt other companies. When you’re selling a brand, an image, tarnishing the brand can be a very bad thing.
Everybody was expecting more of an OS X type system. Not the glorified iPhone OS.
gypsy howell
@Will:
They’re already showing a few accessories on the apple site that basically do that, and assuming this thing takes off, you know there will be jillions of accessories developed in the near future. That’s not the part that’s holding me back. I just can’t figure to what it would replace or do better than what I already have. Seems like I’d still have to lug at least a laptop and phone wherever I go.
gypsy howell
@Karmakin:
And yet Jobs is saying it’s the greatest thing he’s ever developed. Ummm … OK. I want to be a believer (I do love Apple products) but this one I just kinda don’t get. Want to want….
gwangung
@gypsy howell: All I can think of is that they’re not aiming at folks who have iphone + laptop + iPad…they’re aiming at phone + computer + iPad, or iPhone +iPad + desktop or cell + iPad.
damn good mr. jam
I agree it needs a better name.
How about “Newton”?
General Winfield Stuck
CNN poll before and after SOTU speech
“Do you think the policies being proposed by Barack Obama will move the country in the right direction or the wrong direction?”
Direction Right Wrong Unsure
Direction
% % %
1/27/10
71 27 2
1/22-26/10
53 43 5
MattR
@Violet: I’ve already heard a couple jokes on the radio from DJ’s in NYC talking about the confusion there is gonna be in the Boston area between ipods and ipads.
inkadu
Now this is just mean:
http://missionimpossibleinfertile.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/ipad.jpg
inkadu
@gwangung: Aiming this thing at people who have desktops but no laptops seems to be a miss. People without laptops at this point aren’t going to go for a stripped down computer, since they’re probably nerdalicious high-power gamer constant video card updaters, or they’re broke mofos.
Maybe the iPad is really brought to you by the marketing department at Apple, which is always trying to think different. Sometimes the crowd has the right idea. It’s hit-and-miss. The iPod pretty much saved the company, so you can understand why they’re willing to take risks.
Meh. I’ll probably like the next generations a lot more. Looks like they’re going to take a big hit on this release though. And they released right on the day of an economically depressing speech.
Jon H
@gypsy howell: ” For example, we just got the 5-season dvd set of The Wire, but how would I watch it on the iPad?”
Rip the DVDs into mp4 files, load them into iTunes, sync them onto your iPad.
RareSanity
@gwangung:
Not for 3G, only 2G-EDGE. T-Mobile’s 3G network uses a different frequency band. Same reason an iPhone won’t do 3G on T-Mobile.
@inkadu: Funny, but possibly NSFW.
Kirk Spencer
@Jon H: In other words, only geeks.
lamh31
Leave it to Ta-Nehisi to give the best response to Tweety’s “I forgot Obama was Black…” comment.
Ta-Nehisi Coates get it!!!!
“I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White”
http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/i_remembered_chris_matthews_was_white_tonight.php
“…I think it’s worth noting that Chris Matthews wasn’t trying to take a shot at anybody. I also think it’s worth noting that he was attempting to compliment Obama and say something positive about what he’s done for race relations. (See Matthews’ clarification here.) But I think it’s most worth noting that “I forgot Obama was black”–in all its iterations–is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest.
…Ditto for Chris Matthews. The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance–you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don’t know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white…
… I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on Obama’s relationship to blackness, because they know so little about black people. It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you.
…This is why Obama will never be postracial–he can’t make white people face the lie of their ignorance, anymore than Jimmy Baldwin could make black people face the lie of our homophobia. It’s white people’s responsibility to make themselves postracial, not the president’s. Whatever my disagreements with him, the fact is that he is brilliant. That he is black and brilliant is pleasant but unsurprising to me. I’ve known very brilliant, very black people all my life. At some point that number of white people who still can’t their head around our humanity will have to accept the truth: the president is black, and even if you don’t quite know what that means…”
YES….YES….YES!!!!
This sista bows to TNC!
inkadu
@RareSanity: I never understood the whole NSFW thing. I figure if you’re wasting time blogging while you’re at work, you probably don’t have anyone over your shoulder.
Jay in Oregon
This was my favorite response to the pre-release Apple tablet hype:
http://www.pvponline.com/comics/pvp20100127.png
Evinfuilt
@gwangung:
It is really designed for people with a desktop, smartphone and no laptop. You can then tether the wifi version to your iPad (okay, bad picture in my head now… ack)
Anyways, v2 will be great and anyone who bought the one for sale in 60 days will be kicking themselves.
Evinfuilt
@inkadu:
That’s from an old MadTV episode. Just youtube iPad MadTV. Its why tethering gives me the creeps right now.
Catsy
I’m not an Apple fanboy–I don’t like using MacOS and am inextricably wedded to PC gaming. However, my other half and I both own iPhones and love them. I was really excited about this tablet, because I could think of about a dozen things I’d use it for around the house, purposes for which my laptop is just too cumbersome but my iPhone is inadequate.
But Apple failed here in a catastrophic way. Set aside all the jokes about “iPad”–yeah, it’s a bad name, for confusion with “iPod” if nothing else, but who cares what it’s called? The real failure is in the lack of features.
It really is a glorified iPod touch–it’s like someone took one, grabbed the corner, and did a drag-to-resize operation without bothering to improve anything other than the screen size. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some value in that–I’ve often wished my iPhone was a little bigger when I’m trying to surf on it, and the iPhone does a lot of things that could only be improved by a larger screen. But that’s really all it is, and it’s sure as hell not worth $500 or more for that.
The demo made a big point of citing the iPad as an intermediary step between laptops and smartphones, capable of doing things that one or the other don’t do well, and that netbooks (which really are a shitty product) don’t do at all. The problem is that they’ve created something that does most of the things a laptop or smartphone can do, but doesn’t do most of those things as well as either. The only thing this has going for it over an iPhone or iPod touch is screen real estate–and that’s /it/.
No card reader or any other kind of removable storage–just a retardedly tiny amount of flash storage which cannot be expanded. No USB port for external devices. No replaceable battery. No file system. Apple decided to ignore all the people who complained about the pitiful storage on their other devices, and opt for the customer-gouging cash cow of tiered pricing for fixed storage.
Yes, I know there’s a camera connection kit that you can buy, which provides adapters to plug either an SD reader OR a USB port into their proprietary charging port. Not including either in the device itself is an indefensible design decision, and I’m not going to pay Apple for the privilege of having an adapter to add things that ought to have been a part of the device in the first place.
So yeah, this thing is an overpriced piece of shit, and a serious misreading of the market by Apple. It is a running joke right now, and it deserves to fail. It probably won’t, because there are millions of people who would buy a used tampon if it was called the iPad had an Apple logo on it. But hopefully the ridicule and hostile industry reaction will wise them up a bit for the 2.0 version.
Martin
@Crashman06:
I’m pretty certain the multitasking issue will be addressed in the next OS release – at least for the iPad.
As to the utility, Higher Ed is one of their apparent targets. I understand that virtually all undergraduate textbooks will be available for it by the fall. It has a basic office suite, certainly good enough for working on the road.
But yeah, 2nd or 3rd generation is when it’ll really kick in. It needs handwriting in some capacity to get students. Apple is trying to make consumers question the utility of the netbook, and from that perspective I think it’s a compelling product. The netbook has half the screen size and an equally weak keyboard, and in many cases is sufficiently crippled on CPU, RAM, or OS version to not be much more functional.
The overall market is people that have modest computing needs and limited technical ability. Apple is shooting for the ease of use that they always envisioned the Mac having but never quite getting (which is why the multitasking isn’t there now – the degree of complication that it adds in a traditional setup breaks the goal of the product). As such, this device is really well suited to people that surf the web, do email, some Quicken, and a little bit of productivity stuff around the edges. It has a lot of information and entertainment utility and modest productivity utility. It’s skewed better toward the typical user than netbooks are, particularly when you factor in ease of use. There’s no guarantee that a game you buy will work well on a netbook – but every app store app will work on your iPad – every one. It’s just something you don’t need to worry about, and Apple moving absolutely everything through their own store gateway might be concerning for other retailers and content producers, but it’s absolutely fantastic for customers.
I think Apple has done a good job of working out the right product for the market. Most people are going to be a little slow breaking out of their thinking that they need x,y,z to see that it’s the right product, and Apple has a little ways to go yet (as do developers for the device) to meet the customers where they need to be, and to catch some of the edge markets (like higher ed, as I described), but I think it’s a home run.
Honestly, what was the last time Apple launched a product that wasn’t met by jokes? The iPod was laughed at, the iPhone was as well by people that were convinced nobody could possibly type well on it and that it’d suck for productivity. And yet Apple keeps getting it right and swallowing these guys up.
Shinobi
@inkadu: I think that’s from this old MAD TV clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjU0K8QPhs
What we learned about Apple yesterday:1. No women on their marketing team, 2. They don’t watch Mad TV(I mean, really though, who does?)
I was pretty annoyed that they were announcing the iPad (snicker) a month after I got my iPod touch. But now seeing that it wouldn’t really ad any functionality, just take up more room in my purse, I am pleased.
inkadu
@Jay in Oregon: Still waiting for iChron to come out. Although I bet the first generation will only go backwards five minutes.
Janet Strange
@Martin:
Jeez I hope so. My students lug around 40 pound backpacks filled with fat textbooks that cost an insane amount. And paper textbooks can’t do video etc. (Video has revolutionized my teaching of biology. Biology is made for video.)
I was just telling my students last week as the semester started, “What you guys need is something like the Kindle, but bigger, with color, that will do video and interactive. And that’s all you’d have to carry. And hopefully, you’d pay less for the books you download.” (I can dream.)
Though I’m an Apple-bot, I somehow missed that this was coming. Anyway, yeah, several generations from now, it could be great for students. Maybe sooner.
Catsy
@Martin: I’m on board with the textbook-replacement angle. I think that’s a great, if narrow, use for this product.
But “not as shitty as a netbook” isn’t really a selling point for me. I /already/ think netbooks are shitty and unusable.
Bonus: one of my coworkers just sent this to me. I lawled: http://i.imgur.com/oRffH.jpg
Persia
@inkadu: Just said I was not excited. I think it’s promising in that it might help shake up/open up the ebook market. If they get one of those under $200 that I could surf the web with I might buy it.
Martin
@Catsy: I appreciate this point of view, but I think it’s important to recognize that a great deal of what makes the iPhone what it is comes not from Apple but from the app market. At launch, there wasn’t a tremendous advantage that the iPhone had over other smartphones, other than visual voicemail and a non-shitty browser. It was the App store and subsequent additions by Apple that turned the iPhone into what it is.
We’re back at the start here with this device. It’s running a somewhat modified version of iPhone OS (3.2), not a full-on version (4.0). I think later this year we’ll see iPhones powered by Apple silicon that will be MUCH faster than the current ones, and that extra performance will be reflected in significant new features in iPhone 4.0 probably to be revealed to developers in June. We’ll start to see apps that just didn’t make sense on the smaller iPhone show up on the iPad and round that experience out.
Yeah, the product right out of the gate probably won’t align well with most consumers, but in 12-24 months, after some hardware features are added and another 100,000 apps show up, that’ll change. Among the things I don’t think people are grasping is how fast this thing is – apparently for web surfing it’s as fast as a MacBook. It’s not a compromise on those types of functions, unlike a netbook, and the netbook will never get better at it.
As for the lack of doo-dads, yeah, that’s what Apple does. They want people off of flash so they don’t support it. And you know what, it works. They want cameras to support wifi or bluetooth, and they’re doing that too. Complaining about Apple’s connectors while tolerating everyone else’s is hypocritical, and Apple has always shoved the market around like this. Hell, USB might not have taken off if not for Apple forcing the issue.
Apple plays a very long game for the marketplace. Nobody needs to buy into it now, there will be plenty willing to do so, but I’m pretty convinced that Apple will prevail in the end.
New Yorker
So between the name and the lukewarm reviews, is this the product where Apple finally jumped the shark? I mean, is this where Apple releases something completely redundant and unnecessary but assumes it will sell well because Apple fanboys will buy anything Jobs releases?
I say this as one who has nothing against Apple and loves his iPod, but doesn’t get the obsession with the company.
Martin
@Janet Strange: Don’t expect the textbooks to get cheaper, but yeah, hopefully more useful and certainly lighter.
The Tim Channel
The lack of a camera and flash support is just insane. I could give a rat’s ass what they named it.
Imagine if, instead of this $500 crippled piece of kit, they would have included the above, as well as a few standard ports AND a pico LED projector. They could sell them for a grand and people would be lining up in the streets to buy them.
They could have made it an inch thick and another half a pound heavier, which then would support a battery that could last for days.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera. Where’s the convergence that we have been promised with all this shrinking electronics?
I might have paid $500 bucks for a tablet that let me surf at the kitchen table/living room on my home wifi network, but without flash support or a camera for Skype/Ichat they won’t get my money this go round. That said, I believe somebody is going to make the product so many of us have been waiting for. The technology is right there on the shelf waiting to be hooked together. I was hoping it would be Apple because I love all the other stuff of theirs that I own, but their AppStore myopia seems to be getting the better of them. It’s not like I haven’t read a gazillion prelaunch articles wherein the plurality of comments mentioned the desire for a built in camera.
Enjoy.
Jay in Oregon
@inkadu:
Well, and they apparently haven’t addressed that clock drift issue in the current release.
The Tim Channel
The lack of a camera and flash support is just insane. I could give a rat’s ass what they named it.
Imagine if, instead of this $500 crippled piece of kit, they would have included the above, as well as a few standard ports AND a pico LED projector. They could sell them for a grand and people would be lining up in the streets to buy them.
They could have made it an inch thick and another half a pound heavier, which then would support a battery that could last for days.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera? Where’s the convergence that we have been promised with all this shrinking electronics?
I might have paid $500 bucks for a tablet that let me surf at the kitchen table/living room on my home wifi network, but without flash support or a camera for Skype/Ichat they won’t get my money this go round. That said, I believe somebody is going to make the product so many of us have been waiting for. The technology is right there on the shelf waiting to be hooked together. I was hoping it would be Apple because I love all the other stuff of theirs that I own, but their AppStore myopia seems to be getting the better of them. It’s not like I haven’t read a gazillion prelaunch articles wherein the plurality of comments mentioned the desire for a built in camera.
Enjoy.
Jay in Oregon
@New Yorker:
Apple has had plenty of missteps in the past.
The G4 Cube, the 25th Anniversary Mac, the Apple Portable, the Newton and its spinoffs (remember the eMate? I do), and the fat iPod Nano all spring to mind.
Catsy
@Martin: I own an iPhone, so I’m pretty personally familiar with just how critical the apps are to making the iPhone more than a fancy touch screen phone. The problem is that you can’t program an app to give the iPad a replaceable battery, industry-standard ports, any kind of removable storage, a camera, or in any other way address the majority of failures in this product. They are intrinsic to the way the hardware was designed, and it’s a bad design.
I don’t dispute that Apple refuses to support Flash because they want people to stop using it, but that doesn’t make it a good decision, and Youtube’s HTML5 beta is not evidence that Flash is on its way out. And even if it were, that still leaves huge chunks of the Internet either unusable on the iPad or suffering reduced functionality, and whether you agree with Apple’s business vision or not, that’s just idiotic when the major selling point of this thing is its web browsing experience. The lack of Flash support is a serious enough flaw that they had to include a custom (and deeply inferior to the web site) Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.
I have no idea what you mean about “complaining about Apple’s connectors while tolerating everyone else’s” being hypocritical. Wanting an industry-standard USB port (rather than an expensive adapter that goes through their proprietary port) is hypocritical? It’s all well and good that they want to drive the market in a particular direction, such as wanting cameras to support WiFi or Bluetooth, but in doing so they are pissing on people who own devices that, you know, /already exist/.
It’s like the lack of a floppy drive in the original iMacs. Everyone knew floppies were on their way out, and indeed, these days the idea of needing a floppy drive in your computer is silly. But in 1998, 3.5″ floppies were still in widespread, essential use, and the lack of one in the iMac shut out a lot of people who otherwise might have used one. There is a very fine line between leading the market and jumping so far out in front that you leave a lot of your customers behind.
Janet Strange
@Martin: Yeah, well I said I was dreaming . . .
James K. Polk, Esq.
@Martin:
iPhone? The only complaint I ever heard about that launch was the pricing of it.
Jon H
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera. ”
You clearly haven’t thought through the practicality of an inch-thick, two-pound, 8″x10″ slab being used as a camera.
At a minimum, it’d be unwieldy. At worst, you’d look goofy as heck.
Jon H
@Catsy: “But in 1998, 3.5” floppies were still in widespread, essential use, and the lack of one in the iMac shut out a lot of people who otherwise might have used one.”
Or they could pay $20 for a USB floppy. Not exactly a show-stopper.
CalD
Do you know what this MEANS?
I guess it means Apple makes a tablet computer… and so do a lot of other people.
Martin
@Catsy: Almost nobody uses replaceable batteries, and the cost of the devices is getting so low that almost nobody even replaces their battery when it charges out – they replace their device.
And not only is Apple aware of the implications of not supporting Flash, they pointed it out. In the keynote Steve deliberately went to a page to show off the Flash missing plugin box. For the overwhelming majority of what Flash is used for, Flash is unnecessary. It’s the same argument as people that were critical of Webkit and Firefox for not supporting IE quirks.
If we insist on never breaking from the past, we’ll never leave it. That’s why existing tablet PCs are what they are – nobody was brave enough to break backward compatibility with Windows apps, no matter how inappropriate the interface for those apps would be on a tablet, so the majority of Windows based tablets are going to be unwieldily devices because they can’t bother to stop embracing things that make the tables a pain to use.
A lot of cameras don’t have industry standard USB ports. And why, when your phone has wifi and your car has wifi shouldn’t your camera have wifi? Isn’t that also a standard? I mean, if we’re focusing on a device that is supposed to make strides in mobile computing why would I want to haul around a bunch of cables to hook things together? Sure, some are unavoidable, but the point is to make them avoidable whenever possible.
And yet the iMac dumping 3.5″ floppies was the catalyst to everyone dumping 3.5″ floppies. Apple got that one right by forcing the storage market to embrace USB which had been out for almost 2 years and was being totally ignored. Your USB port might not have become standard if not for Apple’s move which you now criticize them for.
And the problem with putting in these other ports is that developers will get lazy and come to expect them. Apple won’t be able to easily leave them behind in the future once that happens. Like I said, Apple has a very long horizon, and people aren’t used to that. They know they’ll get enough customers even if they leave some out in the cold. That’s okay with them. They also know that by the 2nd or 3rd pass, when customers have caught up with them, that they’ll see the product differently.
Kirk Spencer
@Jon H: Yes it was. It was one more thing to carry around. If you needed the drive at all you needed it pretty much all the time, and had to hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it. You had to use a case (no ‘just carry the laptop over there for you’) to carry the cord and drive that you were going to need regardless of needing anything else.
Worse, the extra $20 was a slap in the face. A fine for being behind the curve, for a machine that ALREADY cost more than a dosbox.
Nope, @Catsy had it exactly right saying Apple was stupid in not including it.
Martin
@James K. Polk, Esq.:
No replaceable battery. No MMS. No tethering. No 3G. No physical keyboard. No push email. No outlook support. Not to mention the whole ‘No computer company is going to wander into the phone space and succeed on their first pass – they’re going to fail a few times before they figure it out’.
Seriously, I’ve made a LOT of money betting against the ‘experts’ when it comes to Apple products.
Kirk Spencer
@Martin: I mentioned this on the other iPad thread, I’ll paraphrase it again.
Not including a USB port was stupid. I use flash drives a fair amount to move things just as people used to use floppy disks. I see a lot of such used by high school students to get homework projects moved around, just for one example.
SDs could have been an alternative. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t include that, either.
People have to hope that they’re in a local WiFi zone that’ll support the quantity they want to move at a reasonable speed. For a sadly large chunk of the nation, that’s unlikely to exist on any consistent basis.
Beauzeaux
The much hyped iPad is nothing particularly innovative or original.
This device, on the other hand…
gwangung
And high school students will never be around wifi spots? Particularly in the areas where they’ll get the most use? (And there’s no peer to peer file transfers???)
I’m not sure you’re thinking this through.
Martin
I think this is probably the best summary of how Apple approaches things, considering the source:
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
So, no Apple doesn’t give a shit how important you think Flash or USB is. If it’s really important a solution will show up for the handful of people that need it. The rest will just skip CNN’s Flash video and go to someone willing to do HTML5 video, and in a few months CNN will get with the program and the problem will be solved, and maybe then you’ll buy one. In the meantime, as CalD rightly pointed out, a lot of other people make tablet computers that will run Flash if it’s that important. That people get worked up about this stuff tells me that Apple has it a lot more right than the other companies and that Catsy and Tim probably really do want a device much like this, but they’re upset that Apple missed their corner of the market – either by leaving out the camera or Flash or getting the price too high or whatever. Apple could make a device that is all things to all people, but then it’d be just like all the others on the market, and nobody is buying them, no matter how important people say all of those other features are.
We’ll see when the final numbers come in, but I’ll confidently predict that Apple sells more iPads than any other tablet manufacturer this year. Bottom line, that’s what matters to Apple.
Catsy
@Jon H:
Thank you for neatly illustrating exactly the kind of attitude that resulted in my not buying an iMac.
Martin
@Beauzeaux: Yeah, about as original as this.
Let’s not compare announced with mythical products please. If MS ships Courier as what they’ve shown, I agree, it would be pretty revolutionary. But we’ve seen an awful lot of cool prototypes out of Intel and MS and other than Surface I’ve yet to see one actually hit the market, and that one cost $12000 and requires custom software development.
Catsy
Okay, I have to say that the way the new editor closes the editing frame if you reach the end of the allowed editing period–completely losing everything you’ve written with no possibility of recovery–is fucking enraging. Don’t close the window–just tell me the editing period has passed so I can copypasta instead of having to retype an entire goddamn comment.
That said, to add what I was going to: Jon H’s reply to me illustrated not only the kind of attitude that resulted in my not buying an iMac, but the very same attitude that will likely result in my not buying an iPad.
The problem is that Apple likes to get so far out in front of the market that they refuse to include core functionality that they don’t think people need or should use anymore, but that people today do in fact still use and rely on. “We don’t think you need it, and we’ll prove it by forcing you to live without it or pay more for our alternative.”
Noting that people can just give Apple more money to get essential functionality that should’ve been included in the first place is not a persuasive defense of that practice. If anything, it’s worthy of outright ridicule.
Martin
@Catsy: Everybody has that attitude. Why doesn’t Windows ship with decent PDF support? There’s always some key element that vendors are willing to leave to the marketplace, and in Apple’s case, admittedly they were in a rather different situation than today and made the floppy move for other reasons. Apple’s peripheral marketplace was dead. Totally dead. They had virtually no partners out there. Apple intentionally gave them a market to revive things. They almost forced consumers to go to 3rd parties in order to breathe life into them. I know for a fact that they did this intentionally. And you know what, it worked. Old standby vendors that tied their ship to PCs like Kensington were slow to come around but a whole slew of smaller players jumped at the new market and are now mainstays – companies like Belkin really benefitted from that and subsequent moves. And because of that, more and better peripherals became available for customers – and still do. Hell, there were tons of complaints right after that period from PC users that the only USB devices they could find were iMac themed. And Apple repeated that through the iPod dock connector. Apple could never have provided the range of accessories that exist for the iPod, but they encouraged that market to form, in part, by leaving some desired features out.
The main problem the industry faced, and still does, is that most consumers have no sense of value when it comes to computers. They’ll pay an extra $20K to get a BMW over a Honda, but they won’t pay an extra $200 to get a Mac over a PC. Price is the primary factor still used when buying PCs. That made some sense when they were $5K, but I see people drop $150 to get their car detailed, but they’ll still spend 8 hours trying to save $30 on a computer. It’s interestingly irrational.
People view computers as commodity items, like they’re buying gas, and paying the lowest possible price as something of a badge of honor but they also demand that they not act like commodity items by having all of these other features. It’s a fairly damaging cycle to the industry because it’s led to a race to the bottom not just on price but also on quality and the development of computing in general. Quite simply, the money to do R&D to break into new areas is drying up, and what money there is almost exclusively is landing in Apple’s lap. Just the fact that Apple dumped all other chipmakers and are now competing directly with Intel with the CPU for the iPad is both interesting and a little troubling, along with the fact that the fastest mobile processor you can buy is now exclusive to Apple products. I’m happy to see Apple do well – I’m a shareholder – but I’m more convinced every day that we’re going to be dependent on Apple to move general purpose computing forward in any meaningful way, and that bothers me because competition is good – and it’s good for Apple.
Somehow consumers need to take an attitude more similar to the one they have for cars and furniture and TVs and all of the other things in their lives and find a way to apply it to computers. More consumers are, which is why Apple is growing, but looking at the other PC vendors, I think they face a bleak future. That’s not so good.
Beauzeaux
@Martin:
Pedantic, pointless putdown duly noted.
Catsy
@Martin: I don’t buy the “everybody does it” defense–especially not when you try to illustrate it by comparing the inclusion of essential hardware to support for a document format. I mean, really? You sound like a fairly sharp guy who has a good grasp of what’s what in this industry, so it utterly baffles me why you would make such an inapt comparison. Do I really need to get into the difference between a lack of support for a given format–which can be remedied in about two minutes online–to the omission of hardware in a sealed and deliberately non-upgradeable device? Particularly hardware such as a USB port or removable storage of any kind, which are absolutely /essential/ if you’re going to design something with so many limitations in storage and capabilty?
Really? Come on.
My family owns two iPhones and three iPods, and two of those iPods are replacements for previous models that died after a couple years. I don’t have an issue with paying for quality. That is the exact opposite of what I’m being asked to do here. I’m being asked to pay a premium for something that does only some of the things that my desktop, laptop and iPhone do, does very few of those things as well as the existing devices, and retains every single one of the worst shortcomings of the iPhone other than screen size and battery life while costing twice as much.
twiffer
“And yet the iMac dumping 3.5” floppies was the catalyst to everyone dumping 3.5” floppies.”
really? apple was the driver, eh? shocking that a company that just reached 10% of market share in 2009 (if you include iPhone OS) was able to drive the abandonment of 3.5 disks, cause they only had a cd-rom drive. probably had nothing to do with the decrease in cost of cd-r and cd-rw drives, coupled with manufacturers being well aware of the limits of floppies.
here’s the thing. when your customer base is small and devoted, you can be innovative and ahead of the curve. provided you do allow for backward compatibility to be added, for those willing to pay. when your customer base is everyone else, as well as most corporations, you cannot do things like that. backward compatability is a must. for fuck’s sake, every major financial company in this country is still doing the bulk of their admin processing with COBOL. i’ve worked on code that is older than i am, and no, it’s not going to be replaced anytime soon.
the driver for mass adoption of newer technology is not apple. it’s price. pure and simple. once it was cheaper to burn a cd instead of write to 7 floppies, optical drives took over. the rest is marketing.
Martin
Wait, what? You’re suggesting either that:
1) Apple is cheaper than the alternatives (which is true in a handful of cases, but untrue overall)
2) Apple can add hardware for free.
Look, I personally know the people that design these things. They vanish from my field of view for months and then after events like yesterday I get to talk to them again. You want a USB port in the iPad. Here’s the considerations:
1) How much does the hardware cost to add – not just the little plug, but ensuring the wiring will be reliable over a lifetime of use, the cost to channel out another slot in the side of the device, getting the part installed, the budgeted cost of warranty repair (including scaling up to support the additional number of repairs due to having another breaky thing in it).
2) How much space will that port take up? First, is there even physical space between the edge of the screen and the case to accomodate a relatively deep port. Are you willing to sacrifice the volume of space the port and cabling take up that is now used for battery. Would everyone rather trade 15 minutes (or whatever it is) of battery for the USB port?
3) How much impact would the USB port have on the battery life of the product? That requires additional power management. What software interface will that port get – USB mass storage? Keyboard? etc. Just jamming a port in there doesn’t mean it can be used for everything, and if a frequent use of the port impacts battery life, Apple would have to contend with that on the marketing side.
It’s a lot more complicated than you might think, and in many cases, the cost of adding it to the product isn’t necessarily cheaper than the add-on. Take the Mac Mini. It got a lot of flack over the 2.5″ drive, but the smaller drive made the device smaller and lighter. That reduced packaging size, allowed for more boxes to fit in a shipping container and in a store’s stockroom. And the 2.5″ drives were more reliable because they are more shock resilient (there’s less momentum in the smaller parts) so there’s less warranty work to deal with. End to end, that 2.5″ drive saved Apple a LOT of money over a 3.5″ drive and allowed the price of the product to be lower. Now, you might have had to pay a bit more than that difference to add a 3.5″ external drive, but everyone who didn’t need an external drive saved money.
Are you willing to pay more for the iPad to accomodate Tims camera and flash, or someone else’s front-facing camera, and so on, and are they willing to pay for your extra ports? Apple instead decided to support all wireless and let all the other stuff go through the 30 pin connector, and let everyone hash it out. If USB adapters turn out to be particularly popular, the next version in fact might have a USB port. Apple has reversed course on these decisions in the past.
twiffer
actually, thinking more on this, including only a CD-ROM drive is not innovative, except as a way to force your users to pay for peripheral hardware. congratulations, you have an optical disc drive! alas, it’s read only, if you actually want to write to any removable storage you have to buy extra hardware…so, no backing up of any important files for you!
that’s looking to the future, but only to the future of peripheral sales.
binzinerator
@Shinobi:
I think the larger size actually means a large increase in functionality.
It’s strange how this is often dismissed or overlooked (“Oh is that what all the fuss is about? Why it’s just bigger iPod Touch!”). But that change in size is what is going to make it a hit.
I have an iPod Touch, and I do love it but what I constantly wish it had is a better surfing experience — and that is mostly going to be improved by a larger screen. (that, and a faster processor for more responsive browsing, which the iPad has).
By the way, not only is the iPad bigger but it’s proportions are different from the iTouch (and iPhone). Its aspect ratio favors readability, not ‘holdability’. The case has nearly the proportions of an 8 1/2×11 pad of paper (1.27 for iPad, 1.29 for the real pad)– and the device itself is close in dimensions to the common 9×7 book size. Those ratios didn’t come about by chance. Those sizes and ratios have been proven over the years to provide excellent readability while still remaining handy.
The iTouch and iPhone are narrower, because they are expected to be gripped in one hand. If they had the iPad’s aspect ratio, they’d be a lot less comfortable for people to get their hand around it.
It all seems like little stuff, but it has huge consequences for usability.
I find using my iTouch to read websites or Facebook or get to my web-based email leaves something to be desired. (Its big advantage is of course the portability enabled by it’s shape and small size). For example, to read this blog on my iTouch I end up doing a lot of pinching to zoom in and out (zoom to make the text big enough for my middle-aged eyes to read easily, zoom out to quickly move around.) I turn the iTouch horizontally to make the lines longer (improves readibility) but then there are fewer lines showing in the screen.
I want to get an iPad, but I what I would need to know before I do is what kind of support it has for printing. If there’s no way to send something to my printer wirelessly — online sales reciepts or ticket confirmations and the like — then it’s a lot less appealing to me and I’ll stick to my MBP.
binzinerator
@Shinobi:
I think the larger size actually means a large increase in functionality.
It’s strange how this is often dismissed or overlooked (“Oh is that what all the fuss is about? Why it’s just bigger iPod Touch!”). But that change in size is what is going to make it a hit.
I have an iPod Touch, and I do love it but what I constantly wish it had is a better surfing experience — and that is mostly going to be improved by a larger screen. (that, and a faster processor for more responsive browsing, which the iPad has).
By the way, not only is the iPad bigger but it’s proportions are different from the iTouch (and iPhone). Its aspect ratio favors readability, not ‘holdability’. The case has nearly the proportions of an 8 1/2×11 pad of paper (1.27 for iPad, 1.29 for the real pad)– and the device itself is close in dimensions to the common 9×7 book size. Those ratios didn’t come about by chance. Those sizes and ratios have been proven over the years to provide excellent readability while still remaining handy.
The iTouch and iPhone are narrower, because they are expected to be gripped in one hand. If they had the iPad’s aspect ratio, they’d be a lot less comfortable for people to get their hand around it.
It all seems like little stuff, but it has huge consequences for usability when surfing websites, reading blogs, doing Facebook or reading my web-based email.
I want to get an iPad, but I what I would need to know before I do is what kind of support it has for printing. If there’s no way to send something to my printer wirelessly — online sales reciepts or ticket confirmations and the like — then it’s a lot less appealing to me and I’ll stick to my MBP.
** edited to make it shorter. damn I am long-winded.
Jon H
@Catsy: “Noting that people can just give Apple more money to get essential functionality that should’ve been included in the first place is not a persuasive defense of that practice.”
Apple didn’t make the USB floppy drives, so if you needed one, and wanted an iMac, you were not giving more money to Apple. And if it’s really *essential* to you, why are you complaining about $20?
The lack of a floppy disk drive was in no way an insurmountable obstacle for people who wanted an iMac but still had floppies.
Martin
@twiffer:
But people are acting as though Apple is the only player in this market. They aren’t. If you want a tablet with a USB port, there are a dozen other vendors to go to. Why is this an issue? If you need a USB port all the time, don’t buy an iPad – that’d be stupid. If you live and die on COBOL, there will undoubtedly be vendors willing to take your money for COBOL supporting software, hardware, and consulting. But if backward compatibility is a must, then we wouldn’t have anything BUT COBOL right now. Someone had to introduce an alternative and push it ahead. Someone had to break compatibility with the PDP-11, with parallel ports, with DOS or else that’s all we’d have.
I’m not suggesting that Apple will be the only vendor out there and therefore all of our COBOL systems will grind to a halt. I’m suggesting that increasingly Apple is the only vendor willing to break compatibility to drive the next generation of solutions forward, which means that the next generation will increasingly be defined by Apple and not the other players. And they’re going to that in every situation that they can manage. They aren’t stupid about it. They went to great lengths to run home to Intel because that was a bad place to be incompatible, but even there they were the first to go EFI over BIOS. They will never stop breaking the last generation of stuff because they know when the next generation takes root, they now own that market. Nobody is going to be influential in any space by a deep commitment to COBOL. Someone will be happy with those dollars, but Apple isn’t that company.
Martin
@twiffer:
As I pointed out, that was an explicit goal of Apple at the time. Not so much today, because that market is now doing fine, but back then Apple desperately needed it.
Jon H
@Kirk Spencer:
“If you needed the drive at all you needed it pretty much all the time, and had to hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it. You had to use a case (no ‘just carry the laptop over there for you’) to carry the cord and drive that you were going to need regardless of needing anything else.”
That’s the iBook, not the iMac. Why on earth would you need it pretty much all the time? It’s not like people were running the OS off of floppies. Were you playing copy-protected games off of floppies all the time or something?
And why would you have to “hook it up when opening your mac and unhook it while closing it”? At the very least the iBook had a USB port which was accessible regardless of the situation of the lid.
I just don’t know what you’re talking about.
Kirk Spencer
@gwangung: Here in North Georgia, no. The WiFi (which, by the way, is slow) is protected access for teachers only.
Kirk Spencer
@twiffer: re 3.5 and such, I’ll supplement your remark.
First, 3.5 isn’t dead yet. It’s dying, mind you, but it’s not dead. Dead is when you can’t go to a big box office supply store and get them off the shelf. BBOSS’s don’t do niche unless it’s profitable. (Just got back from Office Depot, and know that at least locally they’re still on the shelf.)
Second, it wasn’t just CDs and DVDs’ (and USB Flash drives) doing in the 3.5s. It was also capacity. Straight text will probably still fit on 1.2MB of storage. The average high school or business project with a bit of graphic and audio added will not.
Neither of those was driven by Apple. What Jobs did was see that this was coming and decided to not wait till 3.5s were dead but rather to just not include them – to anticipate the future.
Of course, there’s been at least one generation SINCE he made that decision, and we’ve already been through the frustration of not having one. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Apple didn’t drive the 3.5 out of business.
Kirk Spencer
@Jon H: You’re missing my point which probably means I wasn’t clear.
By “all the time”, I meant that if you used 3.5s at all you tend(ed) to use them frequently, several times a day. Thus you needed your drive attached. You are right, I did confuse book with box, so the moving issue nullifies in that regard. Nonetheless, it was still that slap in the face. Big deal, $20, except you ALREADY had to pay more for the box. There’s a reason for the cliche of the straw on the camel’s back.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: And there’s no way of that changing? Ever?
The world is not static. It changes in response to what’s going on around it. At some point in the not distant future – starting as soon as 2 years for private high schools and more like 5 for public, districts will face a choice of moving to electronic textbooks for devices like the iPad, as the iPad+books may well prove cheaper than just the paper books. There are a hundred things that need to change for that to happen, and one of them is technology infrastructure.
Saying that the iPad will fail in this role because the wifi is teachers-only is like saying that the automobile would have failed because there were no 7-11s to stop at for coffee between towns. We manage to overcome the small details…
twiffer
@Martin: apple had a resurgence because of small, portable niche gadgets. recall, without including the prevalence of devices like iPhones/iTouch, they’d still have less than 10% of the market share for computers. until the iPod, they got by on style and marketing. i know you aren’t suggesting they are the only vendor available. despite all the strides in computing, there are billion dollar corporations out there that are still relying on antique systems. ROI is everything. my point remains: smaller players can be innovative because there is less risk if they fail. but early adoption does not drive mass adoption: price does.
your earlier anecdote rings false: The main problem the industry faced, and still does, is that most consumers have no sense of value when it comes to computers. They’ll pay an extra $20K to get a BMW over a Honda, but they won’t pay an extra $200 to get a Mac over a PC. er, no, people get a BMW over a honda because it’s a status symbol: value doesn’t really factor in. the implication is also that paying more for a beemer is an understanding of value? if so, that’s…debatable.
i’ve got nothing against apple, any more than i have anything against microsoft or ibm or any other company. i love my iPod, as it fills my needs nicely. i considered an iPhone, but decided against it, since it would add an additional $30 bucks a month to my cell phone bill (as already having “unlimited data” does not count for the iPhone, fuckers). i prefer specialized devices, as they tend to perform their tasks better (and, as mentioned in a different thread, i carry a bag anyway, so i’ve got room for ’em). i don’t want a tablet anyway…i do want an e-book reader and the specs on the iPad make it a poor choice for my needs.
however, the idea they are huge innovators is marketing. the more they rely on proprietery tech, the more they will back themselves into a corner. leaving off of a usb port in favor of their dock port is not innovation. it’s favoring a proprietary version of a port that does pretty much the same thing.
Kirk Spencer
For what it’s worth, I’ll simplify what I wish had been on the iPad or maybe the courier (if/when it comes out).
1) USB and SD ports.
2) Voice Control (ala – or even exactly – Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking)
Due to local experience I’d like (but to a lesser degree) to also see a 10/100/1000 ethernet port.
Yes, I’d like to keep the bluetooth and wifi and touch screens and stylus. But despite all else it’s still just basically an enhanced reader.
If I were adding one more special enhancement to the above, I’d add a “sleepy notes” tool, where the system could/would record verbal notes made over the microphone while hibernating, and then on wake-up DNS would transcribe them and put them in the appropriate file. The transcription of recorded notes exists already, as does the auto-filing (though I recommend you keep the “confirm?” box option active for a while.)
twiffer
@Martin: yeah, and i don’t begrudge a company the attempt to make money. but call it what it is. for any computer, leaving off a writable drive is kind of an asshole move, unless you want to give me a 1TB hard drive and magically prevent it from ever frying.
Kirk Spencer
@Martin: 2 years for private schools, maybe. 5 years for public schools has me ROFL. Here’s a hint on that point: What is the average age of computers in public high schools across the nation. Note, not oldest still in use, AVERAGE.
In Georgia, it’s six years – I was part of the survey team that determined that fact. Last year the local school system finally got replacements for the 10% of boxes that were still running Windows 98 – and the adjacent county hopes to do the same this year. Oh – there’s an average of 1 computer per 15 students locally.
My daughter has to share a book for AP Psychology, and the only reason she doesn’t for AP Calculus is the teacher bought a bunch out of his own pocket.
And you think the districts are going to provide wifi readers for all those students?
Nope. That’d mean actually putting money where the mouths are for everyone saying education is important — TAX money.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: I think you missed my point, which is understandable. I know 3.5″ floppies aren’t dead. Hell, I’ve still got a punch card reader *in use* where I work. Technology almost NEVER dies completely, as twiffer noted with COBOL.
Yes, certainly Apple isn’t big enough to kill off a market like that, but Apple killed off the notion that the 3.5″ was critical. Consumers were convinced that they couldn’t live without the 3.5″ drives, just like they were convinced they could live without parallel ports or a physical keyboard on the iPhone or the myriad of gimmicky pointing devices that occupied laptops before the trackpad. Its the unwillingness of tech companies to force this issue why these things tend to stagnate. Once consumers see that, yes, you can still be productive without these things (admittedly on the backs of the early adopters), they’re more open to trying it – and other tech companies are more willing to follow suit.
Some Guy
@Janet Strange: And how. I work in higher ed and with some tweaks this would be fantastic. However, that is not enough of a market in itself.
I lecture from my iPod, buts a little small; I grade using a wacom tablet attachment to my MacBook, which is annoying to lug around; I read journal articles on my MacBook; I have to lug reports and all kinds of paper around and I am truly sick to death of it.
I would gladly have an iMac for major writing (since I have books and shite all over the place when I write it’s not like I can write research anyplace I have my laptop), combined with a nice satellite tablet device for light writing, media consumption, and document mark up.
I can imagine using is without a single problem so for those who can’t see how they would use it: that is fine. But don’t pretend nobody can use it.
Besides, doing major writing on a netbook is silly. The screen is just as small, not as bright, and those things are slow as molasses. If you do major creative work (writing, design, etc.) you are not going to be working on a mini-computer of any kind.
What would have really worked IMO: webcam and significant develop on 3G videoconference for more than 2 people (group videoconferencing), and promotion of this as a much richer, mobile social networking device (which would mean some improvements on the keyboard – perhaps a one-handed, fan in the corner).
Also, getting over Steve Jobs juvenile aversion to the stylus, one of greatest achievements in human evolution, to allow people to draw and interact with text, you know, with their hands like Apple supposedly champions. (Too bad about the Newton but grow up – nothing will ever supplant simple scrawling as a way of being creative).
Finally, bundle the iPad with iMacs and MacBook Pros at a nice discount and market them as the satellite to your powerhouse. They would sell great.
Martin
Well, the iPod dock is hardly the same thing – it charges the device, it delivers video, it also has the USB pins. But the dock connector is also the most prevalent (and flexible) connector in the broader peripheral market outside of USB. You’re considerably more likely to find a dock connector in your car than a USB port, and the reason is that nobody else bothered to develop an equivalent to it. There is no port that is a peer to the dock connector in terms of functionality. That’s not Apple’s fault, and others could have pushed the market in another direction, but they never even tried. That’s like faulting Intel for being the driver of the x86 instruction set. They won the market. It happens.
I agree it’s annoying that it’s proprietary, but like other tech it’s not like it’s not licensable, so it’s not completely closed to the marketplace.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: We’re not talking about computers in the classroom. We’re talking about textbooks. I don’t know the K-12 costs off-hand, but higher ed is $1100 per student per year. You take out the cost of printing, shipping, storage, distributing, and so on and factor in the cost of purchasing and supporting iPads with hopefully a commensurate reduction in cost for electronic over printed textbooks and at some point in the nearish future, the electronic book costs will work out to be lower. Maybe not with Apple hardware, maybe not in 5 years in GA depending on your textbook turnover rate and budget (and yours sounds pretty bad), but I would say in 5 years at least some districts will be seriously considering this. I said ‘starting as soon as’. I qualified it pretty significantly.
And damn you for making my pimp my mostly for-shit Governor, but there is some leadership taking place on this issue.
The real movement will be in higher ed. Students will vote with their wallets and if the textbooks show up in August as I understand they are supposed to, I think the college students will take the hit and move this concept forward. And the universities might support it – it’s hard to say. Right now, there’s a non-trivial administrative overhead of dealing with textbooks, but there’s also a revenue driver for the institution as the bookstores kick something back to administration. I think it’s a wash though. I think the universities will not discourage this ultimately, and the smaller ones, where that overhead is more significant, will embrace it.
Kirk Spencer
@Martin: ah, higher ed. Sure. Odd, however, since we were talking high schools before.
And high schools won’t. Go back to earlier threads discussing why Texas has such a large influence. Schools purchase new textbooks only every few years. See my point about how some classes are short books anyway. Figure the cost of (average) six textbooks per student vs a reader plus six e-textbooks per student. The savings are not good enough – not at what the companies charge for e-textbooks.
As an aside, someday yes. When e-textbooks cost ENOUGH less – enough that the set of books plus the reader is less than the set of print books without reader. That’s not here, yet.
Kirk Spencer
@Martin: Ah, I see your point now. And I still disagree – it wasn’t Apple that convinced them the drives weren’t necessary. I still say it was the necessity of commonly dealing with files too large for floppies.
I don’t see a lot of disk burning at schools and libraries (my area). I see a lot of USBs. Of save, “oops”, tweak and save again. And that wasn’t from Apple.
Contributed to, maybe. Convinced? No. In my opinion, of course.
Martin
@Some Guy:
The higher ed market actually is large enough, but any dedicated device to the market will fail. That’s just how these things work. So if Apple can win over higher ed in a broad market device, the device will be secure.
Steve doesn’t have an aversion to the stylus – he has an aversion to relying on the stylus. That’s a very important distinction and it pervades the history of Apple. It’s why there were no 2 button mice for years. It’s why Apple yanks out ports as soon as they feel they can. Most developers are lazy – that’s obvious enough when you look at what constitutes a good Mac or iPhone app and a bad one. The problem is what happens when developers expect that a stylus is there – they make buttons that are too small to interact with your finger and other decisions like that. Once the marketplace is full of those apps, you can’t possibly get rid of the stylus or else people simply can’t use the device.
Now, there appears to be nothing stopping you from using a stylus or having a handwriting app, etc. and I’m almost positive those things will show up, with varying utility, and there’s even a chance that the Ink API will show up – but Apple isn’t going to hand you a stylus because they don’t want developers to expect that you’ll use one. I mean, Apple supported 2 button mice for 10 years before they shipped one with their name on it. They’re very careful about these kinds of things, so the exclusion of stylus shouldn’t yet be taken as an indication that there won’t be handwriting.
On another note, I just learned that the iPad will support bluetooth keyboards. Same thing. Support is there for hardware keyboards, but developers can’t rely on it. No lazy route for them.
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: Higher ed will always plow the way on things like this, but I think k-12 will get there. Yeah, Texas is a big driver, but so is Cali, and textbooks get cheaper now due to economy of scale. That doesn’t exist to nearly the same degree once you stop printing. Electronic textbooks undermines Texas’s influence on textbook prices to a pretty large degree.
And no, that’s not there yet, but we’ve hardly even started on it. The cost of printing and handling paper books is substantial. Incredibly substantial. And the cost of the eReaders will likely go down. There’s support costs to add in, which aren’t nothing, but there are other factors at play here as well – politics, other utilities for the readers, and so on. I think 5 years is still about right for the first public K-12 districts to jump on board. It’ll be a lot faster for higher ed because the book costs are substantially higher and because there’s no bureaucracy to convince. As soon as the books are available, students can decide individually.
Martin
@twiffer:
But here you’ve demonstrated you don’t understand value yourself. Value isn’t getting the biggest thing for the cheapest price. It’s recognizing what your dollar bought. The BMW could bring performance, comfort, reliability, % higher resale, and sure, things like status as well. If you’re a real-estate agent, that non-trivial. My point is that people can spend $40K for a car and identify what that extra $20K bought. We might disagree that it was worth what they paid, but they know what it was.
If you buy $5 gas and I buy $2 gas, what did you get over me? Nothing. it’s precisely the same damn gas.
With computers, most consumers see a $500 computer and a $400 computer and aside from some gigahertz or gigabytes they see no distinction between the two. There’s not much value given to things like reliability, durability, comfort, and so on. And the status comes with paying less, not more. Truth is, most people use their computer far more than their car, but they see almost no value in making their computer experience better, safer, more comfortable relative to their car experience. I’m not taking sides in this because I think car buying attitudes are pretty freaky myself, but I think its an interesting juxtaposition.
Wile E. Quixote
@Kirk Spencer:
Another factor that doomed the 3.5″ floppy was that by 1996 they were no longer useful for booting MacOS. And why did you need a floppy drive on the iMac anyways? It had an ethernet connection.
Wile E. Quixote
@The Tim Channel:
How would making the iPad an inch thick and a half pound heavier make it “…a miniature device that would replace your laptop, phone and camera.” I have an HTC Hero. It’s a nice, compact device that works very well as a phone and decently enough as a browser and e-mail reader. I can also take pictures with it. I could listen to music on it if I wanted to, but I have an iPod for that.
But the pictures you take with any cell phone aren’t going to be as good as what you can get with a cheap digital camera, the sensors aren’t that great and neither are the lenses, and as far as a miniaturized device replacing my laptop, well, that’s a hard sell because you still need a decent keyboard and decently sized screen. And why would you want the iPad to replace your phone, do you really want to hold that up to your ear to talk? Do you want to have to haul that with you if you’re going on a bike ride or a run and want to be able to call someone in case you need to?
The iPad is an interesting device. I’m not interested in this revision, but if they put an SD reader and a camera for Skype into rev 2.0 I might get one.
Martin
@Wile E. Quixote:
The camera was omitted primarily because it would have made a cheap 3G plan impossible. Video Skype on millions of Apple devices for $30/mo would kill any carrier right now due to the bandwidth. I think we might see it after 4G networks roll out later this year.
Wile E. Quixote
@twiffer:
Wrong! They don’t do “…pretty much the same thing”. Here is the pinout diagram for USB. And here is the pinout diagram for the iPod dock connector. USB, four pins, the iPod dock, 30. The iPod dock connector allows for analog audio output and composite and component video output. If you had a USB port instead of a dock connector you’d need some sort of external USB convertofrob with a D/A converter in it to connect an iPod to your stereo or TV instead of just using a simple cable. The dock connector is much more fully featured than a simple USB port. There’s also the question of what kind of USB port you’d put on something like the iPad, a host port (Type A) or a device port (Type B). If you want to connect it to your computer and to external peripherals you’d need both, or Apple would need to invent some sort of brand new proprietary USB connector and then get it blessed by the USB standards committee, and let’s face it, one of the last fucking things we need is another goddamned form factor for USB connectors.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I love this thread. Thank you for all the information. :)
Gromit
Catsy: I own an iPhone, so I’m pretty personally familiar with just how critical the apps are to making the iPhone more than a fancy touch screen phone. The problem is that you can’t program an app to give the iPad a replaceable battery, industry-standard ports, any kind of removable storage, a camera, or in any other way address the majority of failures in this product. They are intrinsic to the way the hardware was designed, and it’s a bad design.
I don’t dispute that Apple refuses to support Flash because they want people to stop using it, but that doesn’t make it a good decision, and Youtube’s HTML5 beta is not evidence that Flash is on its way out. And even if it were, that still leaves huge chunks of the Internet either unusable on the iPad or suffering reduced functionality, and whether you agree with Apple’s business vision or not, that’s just idiotic when the major selling point of this thing is its web browsing experience. The lack of Flash support is a serious enough flaw that they had to include a custom (and deeply inferior to the web site) Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.
So you love your iPhone, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs, what, about $500 unsubsidized?
Yet you hate the iPad, which doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, doesn’t have industry-standard ports, doesn’t have removeable storage, and costs $500 unsubsidized.
Granted, the iPhone has a (forward facing) camera and 3G voice capability and fits in your pocket. But the iPad has its own advantages: larger screen, longer (claimed) battery life, no 3G contract hassle, faster processor, more functional apps.
Other than the absence of a camera, your complaints could have been lifted straight from a blog post from 2007 about the original iPhone (ditto for no multitasking). It cost $600 WITH a 2-year contract. Heck, even the camera it HAD came in for a lot of abuse. I’m not saying the iPad will necessarily be the same sort of runaway success, but I seriously doubt it will flop. There are of course technical and practical differences between the products, differences that I don’t discount. But as I see it, the single biggest difference between our perceptions of the iPhone and the iPad is that we’ve both used the iPhone, and neither of us has used the iPad yet. The stories I’m hearing so far sound a lot like those from back in 2007, where folks who try the thing come away with their perceptions changed.
Oh, and Flash sucks and needs to die, or at least be relegated to its original purpose, as a tool for making cartoons. I do not miss it on my iPhone, and if sites want my business they should not require me have it installed.
Gromit
Oops, something went wrong with my HTML above. The second paragraph, ending with “Youtube app on the iPhone and iPad.” is Catsy’s, too. If anyone with admin access can fix this, I’d be very appreciative.
Catsy
@Gromit:
I don’t like the fact that my iPhone lacks those things, but they are not absolute deal-breakers–for a phone. When I buy a mobile phone, I am already expecting to sign up for service to go with it, so I am already paying the subsidized price. I expect my mobile phone to have a certain form factor and handle phone calls and text messages. The fact that it does so much more makes it wonderful.
The reasonable expectations for a portable tablet computer are entirely different. Limitations that I accept in an otherwise excellent mobile phone are ridiculous and intolerable omissions in a computer.
Horseshit. The entire first half of your reply to me involves discounting the differences between the products in a disingenuous attempt to illustrate a dichotomy or contradiction that does not exist.
Anyway, I’m out–I should know better than to suggest the imperfection of an Apple product in a thread full of fanboys. Steve Jobs could have walked on stage and squeezed out a steaming three-coiler into a aluminum punch bowl with a flush button, and the next day there would be fifty blog posts about how fantastic the iCrap is and how three years from now no one will use legacy toilets anymore.
Gromit
Good grief, Catsy. You come in here cranked up to 11 with the “indefensible design decision” and the “overpriced piece of shit” and because I don’t find most of your criticisms persuasive, I’m the fanatic?
And what differences did I discount? The lack of a camera? Given that the complaint is about the lack of a rear-facing camera and, by extension, video chat capability, this is only a salient difference with respect to the price of the device. The iPad lacks a camera and the hardware for voice communication. But, in exchange, we get nearly six times the screen real estate, by all accounts a blazing fast processor, (supposedly) longer battery life, and no need for a contract.
I was disappointed there was no camera, too. But the price and the prepaid data plans more than compensated.
If a week ago you’d asked anyone who actually follows Apple in the press and has any kind of a track record if there would be expandable memory, removable battery, flash support, etc., we could all have told you it wasn’t likely to happen. Hell, you have an iPhone, so you know where this company’s head is at, and how consumers have responded. So if you went into this reasonably well-informed and are shocked that Apple is following the design philosophies that have served it well in the past, then I don’t know what you were thinking. I’m open to arguments that there still isn’t a place in peoples’ lives for something smaller than a laptop but bigger than a smartphone, but I really don’t know how you arrive at the conclusion that building on past success is entirely the wrong way to go.
As for the phone part of the iPhone making up for what you consider otherwise serious limitations, you are obviously welcome to your opinions, but I know I’m not alone in saying that of the features on on the iPhone that I use (i.e. disregarding the stocks app and such) the phone app doesn’t actually rank very high. Number one app for me, hands down, is Safari. For me, the web browsing experience is the single biggest draw for the iPhone on a day-to-day basis, with the Mail, iPod and Maps apps lagging well behind, and the Phone app and third party apps trailing substantially. I’m probably unusual in that I don’t even have a text messaging plan, because 1) I think text messaging is a ripoff, even with unlimited plans and 2) I’d rather just send email or call. This probably just speaks to the different ways different people use the same device, but the popularity of Mobile Safari (along with AT&T’s frequent inability to match its capacity to demand when it comes to voice) also cuts against the idea that the iPhone is a crippled smartphone redeemed by it’s great voice capabilities. It’s actually a quite excellent and easy-to-use mobile computing device that also makes phone calls (when AT&T keeps its part of the bargain).
Anyway, if you’re looking for a tablet device that has the features you are looking for, you can probably find one, possibly for less than the purchase price of an entry-level iPad. I would heartily encourage you to get one of these things, and enjoy using Windows 7 or Linux on it, and plug in memory sticks and playing Flash games all day long. I suspect Apple won’t miss your money when preorders begin for their “catastrophic failure”.
Madelene Loskill
Alot of bloggers are not really pleased with this new iPad.There was too much hype about it and alot blogers got turned off.You see, I can actually see some of the cool potential uses of this device. Third-party applications for making music, games, newspapers and magazines and books, tons of cool stuff, but IMHO they failed to sell it right (aside from the books). It smells sort of unfinished