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What To Expect From Apple's Rumored MacPad
Jeff writes "I decided to review the specifications of recent e-readers and mobile devices as well as the ongoing Apple rumor mill to chart out the most likely features, innovations and configuration we can expect from Apple's long awaited Newton successor/Mac Tablet which I'll call the MacPad. The MacPad will arrive in fall '09 or Jan '10, with a 10" diagonal color display, a $599 price point with a Verizon data plan, a stylus, note taking application and handwriting recognition and an e-bookstore for iTunes. Apple's biggest challenge will be convincing its huge installed base of iPhone owners that they need a MacPad too. Past failed Newtonian predictions by others are available on Slashdot and the likelihood that any of this is right can be gauged by earlier Confucian gems such as Haskin warns that Apple may be setting itself up for a failure with the iPhone."
Really, the gem of this is referring to how previous rumor based stories that sided negative were wrong.. If you ignore the fact that the entire idea of this story is cobbled together from fairy dust and wishes.
I love my mac but.. in the words of William Shatner, get a life!
Personally I think Newton's zombie would be a great name for a MacPad. iZombie.
Plus it'd be a clean, sterile looking zombie, none of this blood, dirt and torn clothes. A MetroZombie.
Task Mangler
Yeah. I know a guy who's brother's girlfriend's uncle's cleaner knows someone who once talked to a guy in a bar, but *that* guy's sister's grandson's nephew's monkey's uncle was a personal friend of Steve Jobs, and he knew the guy who dries the executive's hands in the Apple research division, and that guy knows a girl who once dated Steve Ballmer, but she hated the way he sweats so much, and her friend's cousin once met Steve Jobs, who knows Jonathan Ive's accountant, who's looking for a way to write off the costs of developing a new interface for handling tablet input.
What was I.. Oh that's right, so the secret formula for Coke is mostly sugar, right, and those eleven herbs and spices? Yeah, ten of them are salt and pepper, and one's a genetically modified version of thyme, but it's crossed with a secret DNA strand that was developed in Area 51 from alien genetics. Don't ask me how I know. I'll need a chart to get *that* out.
Why on earth would you hack it to run linux, this thing (assuming it existed) would most likely run OS X... So you take off a perfectly good unix with drivers for all the bits of the hardware, and lots of application support, and replace it with a one-size-fits all OS that doesn't do the half of it... Why?
So what you're saying is that you can't find any reason why linux does the job of this device better than OS X, so you're going to default to "it's free software and therefor must be better". Even though I've demonstrated several reasons why running OS X on it, as designed would be beneficial?
Fair enough, if your reason is "because I can", but honestly, you're deluding yourself if you actually think it's somehow better just by being free.
You're putting up a bunch of straw man arguments here like "iTunes and iPod are horrible lock down"... what horrible lock down, it's a pair of music players that play mp3 and aac -- two formats that will play on almost any other player in the world. What's the lock down?
As for iTunes doing well if it were completely separate to the devices... Well, that's kinda the point -- the reason it's doing well is not because it's locking you down, but instead because apple have a solution that works well. People find it nice to not have to do more than plug in their iPod and have everything work transparently.
Note that your iPod selling at a loss story is a lie -- apple barely breaks even on the iTMS, they make all the money selling the devices.
In the end you will end up paying more for songs because Apple sold you your iPod
Even though I can use mp3s and aacs, and CD audio from all sorts of other sources? How is that exactly?
If iTunes store was infact the best store around, how come you can't just release it into the wild and people will love it?
I'm sorry, what? I really don't get what you're trying to say here.
At the end of the day, all you're doing is throwing up a bunch of FUD about apple, most of which is not true in any way, and at the same time not answering the question -- *why* would you run linux on it... What would it do better?