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Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open
Reader oxide7 is one of the many to note that the heaviest speculation is mostly over (still waiting on the price, though) about Apple's anticipated new device (though there are surely plenty of questions about the device's hardware capabilities and the scope of its software and content marketplace): "At an event in San Francisco Apple released its anticipated iPad.'[It's] Way better than a laptop, way better then a phone. You can turn it any way you want. To see the whole page is phenomenal,' said Jobs." The (0.5") skinny: 1.5 lbs, multitouch, up to 64GB of flash, 9.7" screen, and a 1Ghz "Apple A4" chip (more about the A4 in Engadget's developing story). The iPad is closer in concept to an expanded iPhone (OS and all) than a miniaturized laptop, though it doesn't have quite as much connectivity as you might expect, with no 3G connection built in. (You'll have to make do with 802.11n, Bluetooth, and tethering.) Live coverage is ongoing at gdgt live, Engadget, and Gizmodo, as well as various others. Update by timothy, 19:58 GMT: Got the 3G part wrong; 3G is indeed an option. Prices run from $499 (16GB flash, WiFi but no 3G) to $829 (WiFi and 3G, 64GB flash). Should start shipping in 60 days (WiFi only), in 90 days for 3G. Surprsingly, no built-in camera.
I may still get a Kindle because of this reason.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
You can use this as a mobile device by tethering it over Wifi to an Android or Noikia device.
I have both an iPhone and a MacBook and I use and love both everyday. However, I've never thought to myself, "how great would it be to have a 10-inch iPhone?" After watching the live coverage for the last hour, that's basically all this is. The OS and UI are basically the same, just upscaled and optimized in some places for the larger screen. As far as I can tell, there are none of the clever innovations that are typically present in a new Apple product. The only people that I can see this thing appealing to would be people that have a strong fascination for touch screens and people that don't feel that they can properly lounge about with a laptop (as exemplified by Steve Jobs lounging in a love seat during the presentation). I think the only obvious application would be as an ebook reader (side note: I nearly had a fit when they decided to reuse the term iBook to brand their ebooks). The presentation still isn't done so there isn't a word on price, but if it can't come within range of the Kindle and similar devices, I'd say this thing is purely novelty.
I think this may be a shot across the bough of netbooks rather than smartphones or laptops.
I've got an iPod Touch already. I love the thing. It travels with me everywhere. I can go online, do just about anything I need, etc. I even have Kindle for iPhone installed on it, though the small screen has kept me from reading much on it.
I also have a laptop. It's great for taking on the road so I have a computer in my hotel room, but in reality if I go into a coffee shop or other wifi hotspot, the laptop is just too damned bulky for me.
Recently I had thought about getting a netbook. Not to replace either of those devices, but to complement them. I'd have it for those times when I want a screen bigger than my iPod can handle, but when I want a smaller device than my laptop. Truthfully, having seen this, I'm now thinking about it a bit more seriously than the netbook. The question though, is cost. If it's priced like a netbook, then I see the beginnings of a beautiful relationship. If it's priced like Apple's laptops, then no thanks - I like this product more but not enough to spend several hundred extra dollars on it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
They did the brilliant thing... supporting bluetooth tethering. That means it doesn't need either Verizon or ATT, as long as you have a phone that can deliver data via a bluetooth tether, just get the two close together and you have a mobile internet device. Now, if you have a data plan you probably already have something quite close to the iPad already on your phone, but that's beside the point. Apple doesn't really care if something else can do what it's new product does, they will simply do it with more shine and win marketshare with mindshare.
Sounds like a close relative of the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9: the line of ARM CPUs specifically intended to run end-user applications rather than embedded control software.
On a related topic, people who pray for the end of x86 should be careful what they wish for, because their desire brings completely closed platforms and proprietary app stores. There is one reason why you can install software on your Windows machine without a "developer key" or Microsoft's explicit approval, and that reason is backwards compatibility.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Well, there you go then. If you work on something that doesn't require massive amounts of horsepower, you could just have your own very portable computer to take wherever you want to go.
Yes, a netbook will be cheaper, more durable, more powerful, etc. But there's a lot of appeal to a flat unit you can use like a clipboard while resting back in your favorite lounge chair or sitting up in bed.
There will be a market for this. I probably won't be part of it, but mostly on price and lack of flexibility.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
This thing kills the MacBook Air.
On the other hand, I guess we now know Apple's premium for running an unlocked operating system. (iPad: $500, MacBook Air: $1500; you do the math)
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Flash is the number-one cause of application crashes on OS X, and it's outside Apple's control. No way Flash is going to be supported by Iphone or Ipad.
While I absolutely agree with you that the prices above the base seem exorbitant in comparison to the 'extra' parts you're getting, you're thinking of the prices in terms of construction, not marketing.
It's an annoyance, of course, but the simple fact is that Apple will have put an awful lot of effort into setting these prices: they don't want to sell for under $600 but marketing tells them that launching at less than $500 will hook the customers. Simple solution is to sell a base model at that price which fewer people will buy, but many will decide that they want. Once people have decided they want it and rationalised that they can afford it, it's much easier to upsell to the one that Apple intended on making all along, at the price they intended all along, by adding an extra $20 of hardware. Make them look at a $630 base unit and many people will write it off out of hand.
> and the limited iphone style OS (why not full mac OS).
Because at this point Apple would like nothing better than to find a way to discontinue OS X. The huge revenue stream they unleashed with the App Store has distorted everything at Apple. OS X on the desktop doesn't give Apple a cut of every app sold; so all new products are going to be in the iPhone development model. Hence this new product, which COULD have run a more open operating system and supported a lot of traditional OS X applications (add ARM to the fat binaries and ship) is instead an iPod/iPhone with a bigger display.
Since they will sell a ton of these shiny iTurds expect them to take it as a green light for the next step and move the closed Nintendo/Cellphone OS model to the all in one desktops next. If that works the bottom end of the laptops will go next.
Democrat delenda est
I got an iPod Touch right after Christmas (to replace my Nokia N800) and the iTunes integration is the thing that drives me the most crazy about it. I bought the device under the assumption that I would be able to use it to easily download, manage, and listen to podcasts. This was my first real Apple product and after having heard how cool the iPhone was and how easy Apple makes everything, I figured I couldn't go wrong.
To listen to podcasts on the N800, all I had to do was run gPodder. It automatically checked for new episodes, downloaded them, and kept track of which ones were new, which ones were downloaded, which ones I've already listened to, and which ones have been deleted. Very slick. Too bad the N800 kinda sucked for just about anything else.
After I got my iPod Touch, and after I had fiddled with the pinch zooming, inertial interface widgets, and slick web browser, I eventually discover that there's no podcast manager at all. And further investigation revealed that Apple won't allow a third-party one because they claimed it would compete with iTunes. The problem is, iTunes on the iPhone OS really, really sucks for listening to podcasts. You can only download podcasts that happen to be in the iTunes store. There's no way to just enter an RSS feed. There are no automatic updates and no automatic downloads, you're forced to memorize which episodes you've listened to and you have to download each episode one at a time. The only way to listen to podcasts that aren't in the iTunes store is to sync the device with a desktop computer running the full-blown version of iTunes. The iPod Touch is a portable wifi-enabled computer in its own right, I shouldn't have to sync it with fucking anything just to get content onto it. I have no computers that iTunes will run on, and of course, Apple encrypts communications to and from the device so no open-source software can connect to it either.
Convenient and valuable? Feh, I say.
If Apple were "blocking" Flash and Silverlight simply to preserve their media sales, they would be blocking any kind of streaming media, including HTML 5/ H.264.
Since they are not, it makes more sense that they really don't want any single company to "own" the delivery mechansim, especially if it is buggy, crash prone, or a resource hog.
I rather have Apple kill Flash.
If you're going to wish for something unrealistic and beyond their power, at least shoot for world peace.
Okay, so there are three possible visions of the future Web:
1. The AdobeWeb, where every page is just an empty shell around an embedded SWF. There is some risk that this may happen.
2. The SilverWeb, where every page is just an empty shell around an embedded Silverlight object. With ActiveX barely treading water, this is Microsoft's forlorn hope.
3. The iPhone Web, where every page is HTML+JavaScript and scales nicely to small screen sizes.
Personally, I like option 3 the best. And only Apple (and possibly Google, eventually) are backing this horse.
There is a theme to some of the comments which I wish to rebut. Essentially the theme is that Apple products really are not that good and they sell well only because Apple does such good marketing. The implied assumption here is that if you buy Apple's products, such as the iPod, you are just a sucker fooled by Apple's marketing campaign. Since I have bought Apple products because I thought they were the best products available for my needs, I see these statements as declaring that I am also a sucker and lacking in any real tech smarts. Essentially I feel like I am being called an idiot.
I remember when this debate was between Linux and PCs, and the Linux crowd was trying to argue that nobody should need to run Microsoft software to do their jobs or get things done. This was at time when you could not get Linux to legally read a DVD or use algorithms to do reasonable font rendering. Of course, these limitations were because of licensing issues, some of the most useful software productivity features were protected by commercial licenses or patents. The Linux advocates would argue that I should not be running such software in the first place because it was not "open" software. But that is a different argument. I have far more sympathy for the argument that running Linux is a superior moral choice. But arguing that Linux was a better OS for getting my job done was nonsense.
I am going to come at my argument in a backwards way. Instead of touting features of the iPad, I am going to describe artfully chosen limitations. The biggest limitation is that a developer cannot develop an application that can run as a persistent multi-threaded process. Any application that is not being used at any current moment is torn down and a new one instantiated. This is even more limited than the old Windows 3.x OS with its event driven model for task switching (for those you who don't remember -- Windows 3.x had only one running thread and all applications shared memory). Another limitation is that applications cannot use a shared file system or use shared libraries. You cannot build an application out of other applications or write applications whose purpose is to interact with other applications in useful ways. A user cannot even freely write code for their own application, build it, and run it.
For anybody who likes to tinker with their computers (I consider myself somewhat in that breed, I do programming for a living), this seems almost mind boggling stupid. But there is a method to this madness.
So what do you get back for these choices.
1. A very stable device that does not need to worry about applications doing semi-permanent bad things to your computer requiring a reboot. It is not stable just because applications have a hard time doing bad things, but the basic logic of behavior is so simple that you can "audit" and control it in a way that you cannot control a standard modern OS. This eliminates tangled logic scenarios that come up when you have interactions between device drivers, OS interrupts, glitches in hardware, and complicated applications. Also, it is far easier to write protections against hostile software, especially if you control the distribution of all software for your device.
I think many in the Slashdot crowd underestimate the importance of stability in a portable device. I reboot computers all the time because of glitches of various sorts. It is true that the OS is rarely to blame, it might be the device driver for my mouse, or a disk glitch, a misbehaving network router, or a bad application but generally such issues are fatal. And because of the complexity of the OS, the OS really has no chance at diagnosing the true cause of the problem.
That is not something I will tolerate in a lightweight portable device used for limited but useful activities. I have heard rumors that Android phones, once you start trying to run some of the same application that make the iPhone popular, have far more problems with various issues, such as unwanted battery run down for processes that
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that, y'all, collectively, are not the target audience for this thing. That said, we should be celebrating, rather than bitching. Here's why.
Raise your hands, please: those who've installed LogMeIn on their mothers' computers.
LogMeIn is a crutch, and you know it. You know damn well why you installed it, too. It's so you can support her when shit breaks every couple months, or when she can't figure something out.
The nice thing about the iPhone OS is that it's tight. My mom had never used a cell phone in her life, and figured out how to make a call with my iPhone in seconds. The OS is like an appliance, reliability-wise. The target audience is users, not the nerd herd, and the interface reflects that. It's basically a $500 ticket to never having to support Mother again (or really any user that "just needs the basics").
If you really think it's just a big iPhone, look at the iPad interface video (from about 1:00 - 3:00). It was the first time I actually was like, holy shit, it looks like one of those futuristic computers out of a Hollywood movie; except it actually makes logical sense, yet retains teh bling. Unlike every other OS, multitouch is "baked in" to the iPhone OS, and you can really see the level of refinement in that video. All that shit that Microsoft wishes it could do with multitouch, this thing actually does.
No, it doesn't have multitasking or an OLED display or a webcam or a fucking JTAG header; those people can vote with their ducats and get an HP Slate. Have fun troubleshooting your wireless network in Windows 7 or GNOME using your fingertips. Ugh.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.