iPad

[Quinton]

Regarding iPad being a kindle killer, I honestly don't see it.  Magazines and newspapers maybe, but not novels.

Kindle is 1/3rd the weight, 70x the battery life, 1/2 the price, massively easier on my eyes, and has free wireless instant gratification book purchasing.

The only two things that impressed me was that the entry level price was as low as $500 (but all the options beyond that are super high margin -- 16GB extra flash for $100?!) and the no-contract data-only 3G plans (if I could get $30 data only on my smartphone and use some voip silliness for calling, I'd jump at that).

The software was surprisingly underwhelming.  I expected Steve to show off at least one "wow" app that did something you just can't do well on ipod touch or macbook.  He basically introduced this as a middle ground product (see the slide behind him with iphone | ipad | macbook) and said "we made a new category, you should buy it" without providing much reason as to why it's in any way better than the other two alternatives that most people who'd have $500 to drop on this toy already own...

Steve: "netbooks aren't better than anything"
Me: "well they can run all the software you won't let me run on your walled garden, Steve gets 30% platform"

I guess I fall into the "I don't get it" category on this one.  Feels like Mac Cube or Apple TV to me.

[Selby]

I guess I fall into the "I don't get it" category on this one.  Feels like Mac Cube or Apple TV to me.

Kinda how I feel after reading through everything and exploring it.  It's neat, but other things do it just as well (if not better in some cases) and I'm not sure I am the target market for this thing.  I am sure the hardcore Mac faithful will love it, but I'm just kinda "feh" towards it which is considerably different than when I saw the iPod for the first time (I had portable MP3 player experience since 1999 and Apple was one of the first to get it right).

[Quinton]

Both ipod (original) and iphone entered interesting, growing markets with plenty of demand but lousy execution by the existing players and set the bar for product execution, then proceeded to take a big chunk of the market.  This feels like a very different play to me -- I'm not convinced there really is a ton of demand for bigger than an smartphone but much more limited than a laptop and closed like a console.

[Tale]

Both ipod (original) and iphone entered interesting, growing markets with plenty of demand but lousy execution by the existing players and set the bar for product execution, then proceeded to take a big chunk of the market.  This feels like a very different play to me -- I'm not convinced there really is a ton of demand for bigger than an smartphone but much more limited than a laptop and closed like a console.

Well said.

[Engels]

So, ya, what is the deal with Apple not doing flash? Is it some beef/copyright thing with Adobe or something? Or is it that Flash is just so CPU/Video intensive they can't do it right on the hardware so they just avoid it?

[Quinton]

It's all about Steve getting his 30% cut of all apps and control of app deployment.

Thus their blanket ban on any "virtual machines" or the like that would allow you to execute content that's not gated by the itunes store.

Quite a lot of the ipod/iphone gaming content is "casual games" stuff that could easily be implemented in flash and played via the browser which would be an end-run around their walled garden for app content.

What's hilarious is that adobe is working on tools to "compile" flash apps to native binaries which then can be submitted to the app store.

On one hand, I'd love to see flash die.  On the other hand I'd rather see it die because it sucks rather than because Steve has decided that it allows for insufficient control over his app ecosystem.

[Abagadro]

I haven't owned an Apple product since 1988. The streak shall continue.

[Ubvman]

Well... it will be a hell of a porn viewer though.  

+1
Don't discount the convenience of hand held porn viewers! Porn killed Betamax you know...


Also, comic books, dunno why Marvel doesn't have something on it now since Marvel is now owned by Disney and Jobs is on the board of directors at Disney.

Color is a huge plus for me. To me, the b/w Kindle compared to the iPad is no less a big jump from the old green CRT screens to color VGA.

I think this is a better alternative:
ASUS Eee PC T91 - Atom - 8.9" Netbook with rotating touchscreen

[Surlyboi]

It's all about Steve getting his 30% cut of all apps and control of app deployment.

Thus their blanket ban on any "virtual machines" or the like that would allow you to execute content that's not gated by the itunes store.

Quite a lot of the ipod/iphone gaming content is "casual games" stuff that could easily be implemented in flash and played via the browser which would be an end-run around their walled garden for app content.

What's hilarious is that adobe is working on tools to "compile" flash apps to native binaries which then can be submitted to the app store.

On one hand, I'd love to see flash die.  On the other hand I'd rather see it die because it sucks rather than because Steve has decided that it allows for insufficient control over his app ecosystem.

 

[Tale]

Just a Hitler video, but it's really well done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4

[Oban]

The iPad seems like a nice computer for a six year old, so I am going to get one for my daughter.

[NiX]

+1
Don't discount the convenience of hand held porn viewers! Porn killed Betamax you know...

Porn also killed HDDVD.

[01101010]

This whole thing makes sense if you think about it as a beta product. And oh the potential down the road . . . imagine you can just go to McDonalds and input your own order on these beautiful touchscreens with pretty pictures of burgers and fries



 

[KallDrexx]

I just want something like Microsoft Surface in tablet form tbh.  I think that type of system would have a lot more useful scenarios, and be more fun to play with.

[Ookii]

The internet is on the case:

[Sky]

If it had a little more memory and ran native OSX, we'd think about it. We've been considering laptops for years and Apple is just priced too high for us, this product falls into (the upper end of) our budget. (she's nixed a netbook hackintosh)

Syncing with itunes and ebooks would be a perfect setup for her, though...but then taking away multitasking kinda hurts that combo. Playing some Bach while reading? Opening a browser while playing Bach and reading to check reference on some plot point? If you could hook up a bluetooth headset to it and use it as a phone as well, put in GPS + topo maps...Give us a device that can do all these things, run OSX, be sexy, and not break the bank.

Maybe iPad 2.0, but it's not there yet. About the only flash app we let run at home is youtube, so not really a problem there.

(edit: good point on USB, need to be able to hook the camera up to it)

[Engels]

The only flash you watch is YouTube? No Hulu? No Dailyshow, no news video, no college humor, no vimeo? I guess in a way this worries me the most about apple users. Its not that they're dumb, but that they're slowly but surely being corralled into a sheltered world for the sake of Apple's profit margin. All the dread and agnst once levied at Microsoft back in the 90s about how they were subjugating the world to its small vision of computing seems to have come into full bloom in Apple's vision of the world.

The sad thing is that its probably going to work this time. I work with otherwise brilliant professors in highly sophisticated fields. They are increasingly coming to me with their MacBooks with no idea how to configure their email, run automatic updates and essentially showing an apalling lack of knowledge of how the rest of the computing world works. And these aren't the older professors. The older ones understand computers far far better than the younger ones.

[Surlyboi]

Are you really trying to correlate mac ownership with inability to comprehend the computing world?

You best be trollin'

[Sky]

The only flash you watch is YouTube? No Hulu? No Dailyshow, no news video, no college humor, no vimeo?

At home? No. And the youtube is mostly just some cool music clips I want to share with her, like the Chris Cornell stuff I posted a while ago. Even at work I don't watch much video.

Why should non-tech people have to know how their computers work? That's a failure of computing imo. But lulz that old people are better at computing than young users.

I know I am always thinking "Fuck I hate Bonjour. I wish I had to manually configure every printer, hunt down drivers, etc. Just selecting a printer from a list and having it work BLOWS." 

Your nightmare is my dream.

[Engels]

Some Mac owners come from a *nix world and get IT. Some. They are fairly rare. In my limited experience in the academic world.

When I say 'get computing', I'm not talking about understanding the difference between DDR2 and DDR3. I'm talking about understanding a computer's file structure. Or even knowing that one actually exists behind OSX. The type of knowledge that scientists that are going to be expected to write code in Matlab, ArcGIS or SAP should have some familiarity with.

[Surlyboi]

And again, you seem to be intimating that this lack of knowledge is only found in people who use Macs.

[AutomaticZen]

And again, you seem to be intimating that this lack of knowledge is only found in people who use Macs.

Indeed.  I'm not a Mac user, but I work with a good number of people who know very little about computers past 'clicky the icons'.  And I work in an IT company. (our admin staff have no clue)

[Surlyboi]

Exactly, I used to have to explain almost daily what a thin client was to a VP of IT at Morgan Stanley back in the early aughts. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user and before that, a mainframe guy. And he was far from the only one that didn't understand the technology or would look at me funny whenever I broke out my titanium Powerbook. Now, from that anecdotal evidence, I could gather that all windows users and IT guys in general know fuckall about computing too. I'd be wrong, but I could make that assumption kinda the way Engels did about his Mac using professors.

Bottom line, the vast majority of computer users, no matter what their choice of platform may be, haven't got a bloody scooby about what they're doing with their computers outside of surfing porn playing games and using whatever their program of choice is.

[01101010]

Someone turn up the seriousness today?  (double green)

[Sky]

Why should the average user have to know anything about file structure? Again, that's a failure of people who 'get' computing to create a user-friendly system. A user is not a tech.

I like to help people here learn if they care to. The rest I make things as easy as possible, from their standpoint the only thing that has changed in ten years is they click an icon in the dock instead of on their desktop to get to our server, which (to them) appears exactly as it did when it was running on a G3 box running ASIP. Most people don't give a shit, they have work to do.

[Miguel]

Holy shit...a bunch of people who dislike Apple products and wouldn't have bought this anyway, are saying they dislike Apple products and wouldn't have bought this anyway.

I swear I've read this exact thread before....

Prices announed,  iphone is $499 for a 4gb, $599 for a 8gb

Considering that Safari is a shit shit shitty shit browser and that price is fucking obscene, I hope this device fails. I'd like to stab the I-trend naming convention in the fucking face.

...

Sup guys.

Everyone's done knocking the PS3 now. Anyone says a fucking word, I respond with the iPhone. Old Technology for New and Obscene Prices. Nice going Apple.

I'll keep right on knocking the PS3 along with this fucking thing.  Just wait for the MacWorld hype to die down and we'll all discover that this thing is the second coming of the Newton.

As for Apple TV?  I already have that in the form of an XBox 360 for the same price, and it has the added benefit of playing games and DVD's.  Apple fanatics like to spend money on overpriced shit, I guess.

...

Can we all just say, "Fuck Apple" finally? The iPods are overpriced and overrated, Apple computers still hold that commanding single-digit market share, and Steve Jobs is a bigger tool than Gates could ever hope to be. Stop buying their shit people. Just stop it.

[AutomaticZen]

Holy shit...a bunch of people who dislike Apple products and wouldn't have bought this anyway, are saying they dislike Apple products and wouldn't have bought this anyway.

Holy shit...a bunch of people who may have like this product are underwhelmed and confused!

Engadget

If people walked away disappointed from the iPad launch today, it's likely they had some lofty ideas of what the device might do before Jobs ever took to the stage. At Engadget, we tend to mull over a lot of ideas about upcoming products without ever really getting too attached to them -- so when we finally saw what Apple had created in the iPad, it wasn't exactly a shock. What is was, however, was fairly underwhelming. Maybe underwhelming isn't the right word. Unimaginative might be more accurate.

There's no question that much of what the iPhone and iPod touch do translates nicely here, and there's no question that some of the tweaks made to native iPad apps are impressive, but nothing I saw made me sit up and think, "Wow, I need this."

A jack of some trades, a master of none.

Let's forget about all the hype and expectations (or at least pretend we can). When Steve Jobs came out on stage, he presented a compelling argument to justify a third product tier, but the Apple iPad doesn't live up to that potential. For all its horsepower, we're still relegated to one app at a time. For all its talk of being a great web experience -- and it is really snappy -- we still don't have Flash. The New York Times app showed promise for newspapers and magazines, but for now the experience unfortunately seems to be the exception, not the rule. There are some cool ideas in the iPad, and I was happy with the multitouch keyboard (though not nearly enough to justify writing a book with it), but the new and upgraded apps weren't that dominantly better.

With the App Store effectively splintered across the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad "platforms," I'm not sure the device offers enough incentive to gamers to opt for an "iPad-enhanced" version. Without any iPad games available to really see what developers are able to do with the new device, I can only judge it as a larger iPhone and, well... it's larger. To be fair, that allows for more room for on-screen controls (a huge plus for those of us cursed with largehanditis) and responds better to tilt controls without taking the display out of your line-of-sight. But if you're at home, with actual gaming consoles around, will there be any draw to play higher-res iPhone games? As a portable gaming platform, the iPhone represented a sea change in quality; at first blush, the iPad carries no such distinction.

Maybe I'm too much of an optimist -- you know me, the happy optimist, right? -- but all this instant negative reaction to the iPad just conjures up memories of 2001, when Slashdot famously dismissed the iPod as "lame." I'm far from sold on the iPad as it was presented today, especially without the ability to multitask, but there's a lot of potential there

First, the obvious: there was absolutely nothing Steve Jobs could've done, said, or unveiled today to live up to the unprecedented lather the internet had worked itself into over the past few weeks. Taken in that context, the iPad is a huge letdown -- no groundbreaking display technology, no advanced user interface, no particularly interesting ways for the device to interact with the other devices and computers in your home. If you step out of that context, though, and look at the iPad in a vacuum, does it make sense?

The jury's going to be out for a couple months, but my early feel is that it doesn't. The iPad takes all the disadvantages of a MID -- primarily the fact that it doesn't run a desktop-class operating system -- and combines it with all the disadvantages of a larger-format device, leaving you with a giant iPod touch. You can't carry it around the same way you do a smartphone (and even if you could, you couldn't make cell calls on it), but you also can't use it to run your favorite Mac apps on the go. What's more, it suffers from all of the same software restrictions the iPhone does -- you live in Apple's world and play by Apple's rules.

Ars Technica

Given that matrix, it's hard to see how the iPad is really the no-brainer upgrade over everything else in the world the way that the iPhone was when it was announced.

In the end, Apple has done something with the iPad that I didn't think they were capable of: made it worth my while to look around, or possibly even wait, for a better, more open alternative. I'm ready to buy an ARM-based, thin-client tablet computer—I'm just not ready to buy this one.

One of the problems facing devices that try to straddle categories is familiar to anyone who has ever slipped off a bicycle the wrong way and landed crotch-first on the bar: straddling can lead to awkward situations.

The iPad has a screen size approaching that of a small laptop, but Apple elected to go with the touch-based iPhone OS. At the same time, the company brought in desktop-style apps in the form of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers and tried to make them touch-oriented.

Steve Jobs very explicitly placed the iPad in the category class between the phone and notebook, and it very nicely splits the difference between the two. And that's precisely why I'm a bit disappointed by it—it doesn't share enough of the features of either one of those two devices to actually make it useful to me.

When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I'm almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I'm still stuck lugging two devices.

The iPad doesn't fix that. It's clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and Web browsing than the iPhone, but if I'm carrying one of those anyway, that's not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I'm a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn't work for me. It's just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.

Apple looks like it nailed its target of creating a truly distinct device that's somewhere in between the phone and the laptop. And, for precisely that reason, it doesn't seem like it would be all that useful to me.

Did Apple hit it out the park? Not really, but I'd call it a solid base hit. It's not likely that some of the iPad's downsides will get fixed any time soon—I can't see Apple changing the screen resolution or aspect ratio in a hardware update—but I think it falls pretty squarely into the realm of "good enough."

I dig it.  You like Apple.  But ladies and gents, not everything they do is the second coming.  And to some this is a disappointment and a misstep. 

[Fabricated]

I was just calling for people to stop buying Apple products. I still hold that belief.

[AutomaticZen]

I mean the competitors were already coming, like so:

MSI Tegra Tablet.  That was at CES.  Tegra and Android powered.  
Will it be better?  Who knows.  

Dell has 5-incher.  Also Android.

I'll give it 6-8 months and then see if I have space in my everyday life for a tablet at all.  I doubt it, but who knows.  But I do know I'm not already tied to the Apple sphere for the most part, so that's not a draw for me. (I get my Mp3s through Amazon, for instance)

[Teleku]

Surlyboi, you seem to be a fan of this thing, but so far you've just posted random emoticons and snide comments without actually being able to defend this thing.  I curious to hear your opinion on it.

[Miguel]

I dig it.  You like Apple.  But ladies and gents, not everything they do is the second coming.  And to some this is a disappointment and a misstep.

Hell, I ain't buying one.  I was speaking more toward remarkable similarity of this thread as compared to previous threads on [InsertNewAppleProductAnnouncement].

Let's face it:  Apple is a company everyone loves to hate.  Meanwhile they are printing money at a gross profit margin that would make a Goldman Sach's executive jealous with rage.  The market will vote with their dollars, and so far it looks like the voting is handily pro-Apple.

This thing could have been named iJehova, with flash video support, a $99 price point, sixteen built in cameras, a Terminator-like fusion power source, a screen size that dynamically adjusted to your preferences by scanning your thoughts, and a life-sized head of Katy Perry that popped out and offered to fellate you at the end of every browsing session, and people would still be complaining about it across the net.

I mean, why doesn't it multitask too!

[Samwise]

The best defense I've heard so far is along these lines:

[ahoythematey]

I dig it.  You like Apple.  But ladies and gents, not everything they do is the second coming.  And to some this is a disappointment and a misstep.

Hell, I ain't buying one.  I was speaking more toward remarkable similarity of this thread as compared to previous threads on [InsertNewAppleProductAnnouncement].

Let's face it:  Apple is a company everyone loves to hate.  Meanwhile they are printing money at a gross profit margin that would make a Goldman Sach's executive jealous with rage.  The market will vote with their dollars, and so far it looks like the voting is handily pro-Apple.

This thing could have been named iJehova, with flash video support, a $99 price point, sixteen built in cameras, a Terminator-like fusion power source, a screen size that dynamically adjusted to your preferences by scanning your thoughts, and a life-sized head of Katy Perry that popped out and offered to fellate you at the end of every browsing session, and people would still be complaining about it across the net.

I mean, why doesn't it multitask too!

That's bullshit, and you know it.  There is a difference between unrealistic handwringing from the fringe, and legitimate complaints from a potential userbase.  For you to dismiss this as nothing more than anti-apple froth is unbelievably stupid.

[Righ]

I would actually like a touchscreen device of around this size and capability. I think the price is too high (I'm sure that the screen is very nice, but it's more than I need) and I'm unwilling to have such a device use a phone application stack. I could have been tempted to pay the price had this box run a fairly complete version of OS X and I might still be tempted if somebody gets a stable and fairly vanilla Debian based Linux onto it. The 3G data stuff is of little interest - my applications for such a device put me within range of wi-fi whenever I would use it.

I think Apple will sell fucktons of these things to people with too much money who want to look 'cool' while reading newspapers. I think that both Kindle and Nook are better devices for that, but I don't own any of those devices either so my opinion isn't worth much. I suspect that the success of iPad will stymie the addition of features that would make the device more appealing for other applications, so I don't expect iPad to thrill many people here in its second generation either. Once Apple have saturated the coffee shop poseur market in a couple of years, they might actually do something useful with it. By the time that happens, there may be a viable market for small fully-featured tablet computers without keyboards, but at the moment the ball seems to be in Android's court, not anybody who is building devices for Windows, Linux or OS X. Which sucks - phone application stacks, etc.

[AutomaticZen]

Let's face it:  Apple is a company everyone loves to hate.  Meanwhile they are printing money at a gross profit margin that would make a Goldman Sach's executive jealous with rage.  The market will vote with their dollars, and so far it looks like the voting is handily pro-Apple.

What are we talking about in pro-Apple voting?  

Money? I believe Microsoft cleared more revenue and profit in every quarter last year.

Just phones?

In actuality, Blackberries still beat everything else, for business reasons of course.  Apple is still strong, but Android is growing quickly.

iPods are definitely Apple's market and they control it with an iron fist.  70%+ market share I believe.

Notebooks?  HP holds around 20% market share last I checked.  Followed by Acer, Dell and Toshiba.

Desktop OS?  Windows still holds 92% with Apple in second place at 5%.

So Apple leads in...  one market.

They're very good at design, putting it all together, and controlling the message.

I mean, why doesn't it multitask too!

Why not?  Is that such a bad thing to ask?  To do two things at once?