Jobs Says No Tethering iPad To iPhone

tugfoigel writes "Anyone who currently owns an iPhone and was hoping they would be able to use it as a mobile Web access point for a Wi-Fi iPad just got some bad news. Reportedly, Steve Jobs has said this will not happen. Swedish blog Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Jobs directly to ask him whether or not you'd be able to tether your iPad and iPhone and received a terse 'No' in reply. According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone."

Comments

You get what you pay for?

[LostCluster]

Why did anybody think that they'd allow users to tether the iPad to anything when it's 3G data plan only costs $30 a month? With its limited OS, you can only run official apps that can't have high-bandwidth uses (like streaming video) on 3G. That's the reason you get such a discount compared to a $60 a month 5 GB plan...

If you want to tether a computer and have iPad and iPhone and let them think they're on WiFi, you want a $60 a month plan and a MiFi device from either Verizon or Sprint.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shutdown -p now]

You're confused. This isn't about tethering something through iPad. This is about tethering iPad (the model without 3G) through iPhone. It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).

I don't see why anyone should be "allowing" (much less "not allowing") me to tether things the way I want, either. In fact, this kind of thing - "Unlimited mobile data plan for just $X! <small>for use with selected mobile devices with provider-supplied Web browser application only!</small>", which is so prevalent in North America, really irks me - back in my home country, I would get a proper data plan which lets me use teh tube however I see fit, without any such bullshit, for those very same $X (usually less, in fact).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[bondsbw]

I would pay more for the option. But I'm still waiting for AT&T to enable tethering on the iPhone.

While I'm here... my biggest gripe is no multi-tasking. Apple enables multi-tasking, they sell me an iPad... it's that simple. Heck, I'd take limited background APIs. But the fact that no third-party multitasking is allowed will keep the device out of my hands.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs could through a baby into a industrial tree shredder and you would still defend him.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?

That's the reason you get such a discount compared to a $60 a month 5 GB plan...

What's the reason? Is the "unlimited" data plan for the iPhone or iPad capped under 5GB? If AT&T wanted to charge $60 for 5GB, they easily could have done that, but they chose to charge $30 for "unlimited" data. If I use a set amount of data, what difference does it make to them if some of that data passes to another device?

Let's just be honest hear: They're charging too much and imposing arbitrary restrictions because there's minimal competition, minimal regulation, and they believe that their customers will put up with being charged for a separate plan for each and every device they own.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

Jobs, or AT&T?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[BearRanger]

$15 a month in the US. The iPad is primarily a wi-fi device, or so it seems to me. Why would anyone pay for the unlimited data plan?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Cryacin]

You sir just sent the English Language screaming through a tree shredder.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Ichijo]

Why did anybody think that they'd allow users to tether the iPad to anything when it's 3G data plan only costs $30 a month?

I'll pay $60 a month then.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tlhIngan]

Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?

Most of the world doesn't. If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to. But if you're using GSM/HSPA/EDGE/etc, you don't.

YOu take the SIM out of your phone, stick it in your MiFi. I'd say to stick it in your iPad, but that requires a micro-SIM, in which case you need one of those and an adapter to fit into your phone. But there you go, one phone, one SIM, one plan, one monthly bill.

Of course, it also means if your phone rings, you're stuck answering it on whatever device it's currently inside.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LynnwoodRooster]

This is Apple we're talking about. It just works. Unless of course it doesn't, in which case you didn't need to do it anyway. Think different!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

Because if they allow it the price for "Unlimited mobile data plan for just $X!" doubles or triples. Other customers would not be happy with that. You should start focusing on trying to get a new plan available for more money instead of trying to screw over the common customer who doesn't use their data plan for anything other than e-mail and an occasional webpage.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

(Don't get me wrong, I hate apple and I hate AT&T, but it does cost AT&T money when you use their services).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[afidel]

Which is how some people got data for much cheaper than AT&T's normal pricing, they bought a Go! phone and added the data plan then moved the SIM to their netbook or other mobile data device and never used any go minutes paying just the much lower monthly fee for data and only $20 every 6 months for new minimum minutes on the phone. This doesn't work as AT&T dropped data as an option on Go! phones after this got fairly popular.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[quenda]

It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone

Any except Apple! Nothing new here. I got the iPod touch way back and really liked it except it stopped working as soon as out of wifi range.
Very frustrating, when I had a 3G phone in Bluetooth range.

Easy solution: ditch the iPhone (you don't need it now that you have an iPad to look cool and run those must-have app's), get an uncrippled phone with wifi, and run a wireless access point on the phone.
e.g. Joikuspot on Symbian or Maemo. Some WinMo phones have it built-in.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tsadi]

> my biggest gripe is no multi-tasking

This is always the first thing I read in any story related to the iPad.

But has it really been confirmed that multi-tasking will not be enabled in the iPad? [citation needed]

Re:You get what you pay for?

[beav007]

The HTC HD2 has the capability to become a WIFI AP as standard.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Totenglocke]

You're complaining about lack of multi-tasking and honestly, unless they changed the iPad to be able to have mutliple windows on screen at the same time, it wouldn't really be worth it. I have a jailbroken iPhone 3GS and multi-tasking didn't really do anything but burn up the battery, so I turned it off after a couple of days.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Totenglocke]

Let's just be honest hear: They're charging too much and imposing arbitrary restrictions because there's minimal competition, minimal regulation, and they believe that their customers will put up with being charged for a separate plan for each and every device they own.

Hence why, if I got an iPad (I won't since it doesn't do anything my iPhone doesn't do), I would use my jailbroken iPhone and do bluetooth tethering (which according to Jobs / Apple, the iPad DOES support) to give it internet.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Totenglocke]

The problem isn't $15 a month vs. $30 a month for unlimited, because I agree, most of the time you'd be using it you'd be somewhere (house, work, school) that has WiFi. The problem is it's $15 for 250 MB or $30 for unlimited (some claims say limited to 5 GB). The fact that the $15 a month plan gives you so little data shows that they're using it only as a selling point to try to look good but that they made it pretty much worthless to use the $15 a month plan. I have an iPhone and mostly have it on wireless and it still doesn't take long to go well over 250 MB in a month. Just stream a dozen videos on youtube and you're already halfway through your 250 MB for the month.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[GF678]

This is Apple we're talking about. It just works. Unless of course it doesn't, in which case you didn't need to do it anyway. Think different!

Funny, I've heard the same statement from Linux/Ubuntu users as well. :)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

There's no real reason that I should have to buy a MiFi and swap SIMs in and out. My phone has WiFi and should be able to set up an ad-hock network.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[blackraven14250]

...by doing what everyone else does!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[feepness]

Steve Jobs could through a baby into a industrial tree shredder and you would still defend him.

In his defense the baby was being kind of a dick.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mr_da3m0n]

Steve Jobs could through a baby into a industrial tree shredder and you would still defend him.

In his defense the baby was being kind of a dick.

Yeah we don't know what was that baby's problem.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?

Your question is almost exactly akin to the sad reality that you have to buy separate CD's to install into multiple PC's, and technically, are somewhat forced to under DRM'ed MP3's. Besides destroying all their neatly calculated estimates for "regular network usage," it is just double dipping, since most users won't know how to do it _at first_.

A single fixed cost to them is turned into a dynamically reoccuring return of investment for the companies. Pirating used to mean sharing freely with coworkers and friends. Now it even means "using a product so ingenously that the producer must tax the value your 're-imagined' usage has added that they didn't already charge at the time of sale."

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Homburg]

Well, you can still use data on Go phones, it just costs a crazy amount of money to do so. They have packages at $20 for 100MB or $5 for 1MB; without that, you're paying 1 for 1KB.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[WCguru42]

Because if they allow it the price for "Unlimited mobile data plan for just $X!" doubles or triples. Other customers would not be happy with that. You should start focusing on trying to get a new plan available for more money instead of trying to screw over the common customer who doesn't use their data plan for anything other than e-mail and an occasional webpage.

Then those customers should get a limited plan. If you're going to text on your phone all the time you buy the unlimited text package. And if you want to save money you buy the 200 a month package. Why can't people just buy the one GB package if they're really only using it for email and the occasional webpage. Unlimited should mean unlimited. And if it ends up that unlimited isn't possible at $30 a month then don't tell me it's unlimited.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[WCguru42]

You're complaining about lack of multi-tasking and honestly, unless they changed the iPad to be able to have mutliple windows on screen at the same time, it wouldn't really be worth it.

Multitasking would be great for music apps like Pandora. It's always frustrating to have to stop the music, check a map for a second and then wait for the phone to reconnect to the Pandora server.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anpheus]

There ought to be a comma after "you" and probably after "sir" in your sentence.

S'alright, it happens to the best grammar nazis.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Totenglocke]

Well it has multitasking for music apps like the iPod app....... =)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

it costs AT&T to have a 24/7/363 service, wither you are using it or not

Re:You get what you pay for?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

This is Apple we're talking about. It just works. Unless of course it doesn't, in which case you didn't need to do it anyway. Think different!

Yeah but this is the company that famously said "There is no step 3.". The process needs to be simple and automatic to fit in with Apple's idea of what these devices should be like. Pairing 2 devices isn't (yet) and so they don't do it (yet.) Add to that that the iPhone itself currently doesn't support WiFi tethering, only tethering through USB and Bluetooth, and the chances of being able to do this when the iPad came out were always going to be low.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sopssa]

At least with Linux you can code the feature in. Same with Windows (Mobile). Even with goddamn Symbian.

$60 a month for 5GB limited 3G plan with some additional device? Jeez. I pay around $20 a month for 1 Mbit/s unlimited 3G and they happily send extra sim cards if you want to use the same contract with extra devices and no bullshit clauses about tethering etc.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shutdown -p now]

This is Apple we're talking about. It just works. Unless of course it doesn't, in which case you didn't need to do it anyway. Think different!

There is no app for that, and that's the way I likes it?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.

All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.

There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.

The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.

There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.

The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Entropius]

The key to computer design isn't to give the users the features you think they will find useful; it's to give the users the ability to decide what features they want. That's why computing is so wonderful: if you give people universal Turing machines they can do all sorts of things on them that you never thought of, and thus your product is more useful than it otherwise would be.

Some people just use their netbook as a net-book -- as a gateway to the internet, email, etc. But I'm glad that there's a full computer inside there, on which I can (and do) run all sorts of things: Picasa, GIMP, Olympus Studio, games, etc.

Perhaps somebody, somewhere, wants to run openssh on their iPad -- or Apache. Just because Apple doesn't think it's a good idea doesn't mean that somebody somewhere won't want to do it. This is the whole point of computing -- it's a universal information processing machine.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[ThePengwin]

But that aside, why would you send a baby through such "a bag of hurt"?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sopssa]

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/27/ipad-sdk-3-2-details-external-display-file-sharing-system-no-multitasking/

Apple has unleashed iPhone OS 3.2 SDK to developers today to prepare for the launch of the Apple iPad. The new iPhone OS 3.2 only runs on the iPad device and will not run on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

- No Multitasking. Only one application runs at a time according to official documentation.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Steve Jobs could through a baby into a industrial tree shredder and you would still defend him.

In his defense the baby was being kind of a dick.

Yeah we don't know what was that baby's problem.

I heard it was a crack baby, so it's an act of mercy.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[kimvette]

and yet, some other providers manage to provide unlimited voice and data for less.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[kimvette]

Multitasking works great for:

* Pandora
* Rhapsody
* Navigation apps, when calls come in they don't suspend on you

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

Would they have the same infrastructure if fewer people used it? You using it DOES cost them because they have to invest more in their infrastructure. Bigger pipes, more towers, more employees.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sopssa]

And because this is Apple in question, fanboys would just join in thinking throwing babies into an industrial tree shedder makes them look super cool.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

Sorry for a second second post, but it really bugs me that I KNOW someone will respond with some idiotic comment like yours, but I always end up giving slashdotters the benefit of the doubt. One of these days I'll learn.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Renderer of Evil]

I think you're confusing background processes with the term multitasking. iPad and iPhone both do multitasking just fine. You could be operating an app or playing a game, take a call and get back to whatever you were doing since the bulk of the application have a clever way of pausing and resuming.

Background apps which aren't made by Apple (iPod, email, ical) are a terrible idea. Aside with the battery drain issues and bandwidth usage problems it eats into CPU cycles. As a developer I only test with stock devices and don't have the resources to test my application against 140,000 apps to see how they play together, especially when I'm pushing the CPU to its developer alloted limits.

Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device? It's bad enough there are unforeseen push notifications from different vendors fucking up the UX, now I have to bend over backwards and play nice with every resource hog on the app store? No thanks.

I think you'd be better off with a laptop. Background apps are bullshit, I don't care how well they are coded. They introduce uncertainty into the mix and I don't want to guess what my users are going to experience.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

You're confused. This isn't about tethering something through iPad. This is about tethering iPad (the model without 3G) through iPhone. It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).

Great, enjoy your netbook and cheapo phone. "Problem" solved!
That was easy.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[dangitman]

Of course, it also means if your phone rings, you're stuck answering it on whatever device it's currently inside.

Except that the iPad doesn't support phone functions, so that won't work.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[aussie_a]

You've heard

It just works.

said about Linux? The biggest problem with Linux is it doesn't "just work". It in fact often "doesn't work" unless you go hunting for patches (which are almost always third party) and install them and all sorts of other stuff just to get stuff to work halfway decently. Linux only "just works" if you've gotten someone else to either vet the hardware and specific models or set up the computer themselves. And then it stops "just working" whenever you want to install any new applications that aren't completely mainstream within the community for that distro.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

And because this is Apple in question, fanboys would just join in thinking throwing babies into an industrial tree shedder makes them look super cool.

And the haters would come out and say "I don't want to throw babies into a shredder, I want to to shred kittens. Why won't Apple let me do this, WRYYYY ? OMG Apple is teh suxxorz."

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Totenglocke]

I never said it was a bad idea, just that as limited as the iPhone is (only being able to have one app on screen at a time and the amount of time to switch between apps is about the same time it takes to launch an app), that I didn't find multi-tasking to be very useful.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

By all means, start a petition. I just hope you realize that in order to make the same amount of money, carriers would charge less for the limited plans, but more for the unlimited plans. And since people will be tethering, they will have to make even more money in order to pay for the increased amount of bandwidth that would occur.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sopssa]

And yet multi-tasking work great with other phones. Why would some idle background process drain battery anyway? It's just idling and additional memory usage doesn't take any more battery.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[h4rm0ny]

There will be equivalents that meet or exceed the same specifications, but aren't locked down. I personally would really like an iPad. I'm just waiting for one that's not made by Apple. It wont be long.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shutdown -p now]

Great, enjoy your netbook and cheapo phone. "Problem" solved!

Didn't say it was a problem for me, did I?

Yes, as it stands, I don't own a single device made by Apple.

No problems.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sjames]

The problem is, the carriers are bound and determined to call the crappy plan "unlimited" because it makes them sound generous. They don't want to have a "we really (well, sorta) mean it this time" plan because then they start to look like the liars they are. They ESPECIALLY don't want to start talking about $/GB because then customers might (GASP!) start comparison shopping.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[michaelhood]

There will be equivalents that meet or exceed the same specifications, but aren't locked down. I personally would really like an iPad. I'm just waiting for one that's not made by Apple. It wont be long.

Though I don't know I'd call it 'equivalent', I have high hopes for Courier.

http://gizmodo.com/5369493/leaked-courier-video-shows-how-well-actually-use-it

Re:You get what you pay for?

[BikeHelmet]

Didn't you hear? Commas went out with indenting paragraphs.

The new indent is a double line! Thanks HTML, for rewriting our grammar rules!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[rsidd]

Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware. Same as Apple -- except that a lot more hardware is supported under Linux, these days. There's a reason Apple doesn't allow third-party boxes to run OS X.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Fjandr]

Since T-Mobile changed their rate plans, I managed to upgrade two lines to unlimited data/Blackberry email for only an additional $10/month (and no contract extension to boot). And yeah, they don't give a damn if it's tethered to something or not. I think this is the exception to "you get what you pay for," unless people really are intending to pay that much to be screwed.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mikael_j]

Well, my experience from using Symbian smartphones is that it doesn't work great with other phones. My problems included constant memory leaks (both from 3rd party apps and apps that came with the phones), CPU hogging while running in the background, apps never shutting down (even when told to) and instead just living on as 5% CPU and RAM-stealing zombies, most of the time on my last Nokia phone I would get about 60-80 hours before it would lock up so badly due to low memory that it wouldn't even allow me to answer incoming calls(!) and I'd be forced to "reboot" it by removing the battery. If this was the only Symbian phone I'd owned I would've been inclined to assume it was a problem with that specific phone, but I've had these problems on two Symbian phones of my own and I've also seen this happen on phones belonging to friends of mine.

/Mikael

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, wait, I want to be thrown into an industrial tree shredder, too!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[commodoresloat]

he only had one mouse button?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Redlazer]

It varies from person to person like EVERYTHING.

Kubuntu has worked out of the box exceptionally for me. Better than 7, but I admit, only marginally so.

You know, some people didn't have any problems with Windows ME. Not many... but someone...

-Fred

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet I have never had any of these issues with my S60 phone, or any of the S60 phones I have owned

Re:You get what you pay for?

[aussie_a]

It varies from person to person like EVERYTHING.

Right, but I feel its safe to say LynnWood was implying that Linux is well known for everything "just working" which it isn't. Its well known for "not working until a kid or someone with a computer degree fixes it."

It might work perfectly fine for someone who installs it without knowing anything about Linux. But that isn't the default case. Whereas with Apple everything is suppose to "just work" without any hassles or changes.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware.

So it works unless it doesn't. Who woulda thought it! Behold the miracle of open source!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[siloko]

The biggest problem with Linux is it doesn't "just work". It in fact often "doesn't work" unless you go hunting for patches . . .

he, he

Roll up! Roll up! chuck that ole 2010 in the bin and welcome to version 1.1 of 1993!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[adolf]

Plainly, as with any other multitasking system, such problems depend on the apps.

You've just chosen better-behaved applications than GP has.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Hognoxious]

The real difference is that with Linux it can be tricky to tell if any particular bit of hardware is supported.

With Apple it's obvious - if it's supported, it costs twice as much.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Ponyegg]

And the haters would come out and say "I don't want to throw babies into a shredder, I want to to shred kittens. Why won't Apple let me do this, WRYYYY ? OMG Apple is teh suxxorz."

Surely whether you want to shred kittens and/or babies it's fundamentally the same process? What you're saying is that Apple doesn't understand Object Oriented Programming.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Ponyegg]

Your question is almost exactly akin to the sad reality that you have to buy separate CD's to install into multiple PC's, and technically, are somewhat forced to under DRM'ed MP3's. Besides destroying all their neatly calculated estimates for "regular network usage," it is just double dipping

To make an analogy with landline/ADSL pricing, it's like your ISP charging you a separate fee for each computer behind your router that accesses the internet.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[dargaud]

I'm in the market for a tablet/notebook too, so this device looks very interesting and original, but this video is about as exciting to watch as drying paint. It shows the device only as a tool to put pictures and quick notes in what amounts to PDF documents. Can you watch videos with it ? And does the dead zone in the middle interfere much ? Can you run standard PC .exe on it ? What can you do without the touch screen (any buttons) ? Can you, gasp, run Linux on it ?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly enough, this applies to closed source as well... wait... maybe it applies to ALL software. Wow.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Hognoxious]

Unlimited should mean unlimited. And if it ends up that unlimited isn't possible at $30 a month then don't tell me it's unlimited.

Agreed - call things what they are. Anything else is fraud.

Some people seem to think limited plans are a violation of their fundamental human rights, but I don't mind a limit provided I know what it is (in advance) and can easily check how close to it I am.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware.

Really? In that case I have yet to find any supported hardware...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[knarf]

I've heard the same statement from Linux/Ubuntu

In that case you should have your hearing checked. When something does not work in Linux the reaction is 'make it work, the source is available, did you file a bug report' - a marked difference I'd say. For the average user the end result might be similar but in Linux' case all it takes is a not so average user to make it work.

Another very big difference becomes apparent when that user finally makes it work while another similar user makes his Apple-branded product do the same...

• Given a solid implementation the Linux user will see his work spread to different distributions. He (or she of course) will receive praise from users and developers alike.
• The Apple user will see his work derided as a hack by the Apple faithful. He (or she) will be branded as a hacker and possibly pirate in the common media sense of the word as he will have breached several license agreements to be able to make the thing do what it should. He will also see his work been made ineffective with the next firmware release and will read stern warnings about 'unauthorized firmware modifications' being the cause of 'bricked' products.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[indiechild]

Brilliant!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

*throw

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tcr]

Great if that's what you need.

On my Android, I like using Spotify and a Shoutcast client in the background.

So I could never switch to an iPhone; from my point of view, it has a defective operating system.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually he just sent the English Language screaming threw a tree shredder.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[MeNeXT]

Hey man get out of the 1990's

If you wish to complain about hardware support you should complain about VISTA.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[saihung]

Even? I've been using a succession of dumb phones and then Symbian smartphones to tether for years and years, first via IrDA, then USB cable and then via bluetooth. When I hear iPhone users talking about this like it's the next great thing, I think (honestly) that they're a bunch of freaking imbeciles.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confused. Everything on Linux is third-party.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

Indeed. I don't have landline connection to my home, so I use a Sony Ericsson K800i 3G dumb-phone to connect my computers to the net. I just got a bluetooth dongle so I don't need to use the USB datacable anymore (it was a real pain: my phone gets a reliable 3G signal only by the living-room window, so I had to arrange the room to suit. But no more). "Tethering" is a simple function that even my ancient nokia 3220 (vintage circa 2002?) could handle. Then I read posts by excited iPhone users describing the various hoops they have to jump through to do the same with their wondrous gadget. Puh-leeeze!! Incidentally, I've got my phone on a "pay as you go" basis, which gives a week's "unlimited mobile internet use" for a couple of pounds. According to the small print, this is meant to be just internet use by the phone - web browsing with the phone's browser, email via the built-in email client and so on. Use of phone "as modem" is specifically forbidden. Yet I've been engaging in this forbidden behaviour for several years now, often downloading up to a GB of data in a day. I was more cautious in the beginning, fearing that large data transfer would set off the alarms. But I'm now pretty confident that my service provider *can't* easily differentiate between the different types of usage. I've heard that Vodafone UK is more on the ball in this respect. But my provider is either lazy or dumb, or maybe both. Though you'll note I haven't named them here, I don't want to tempt fickle fate too much!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because they should be able to!

this is, imho, just typical scam from Apple

in a word it's evil

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

Only the 'Score: 5, Funny' gave any indication that the parent isn't true. And I'm still not so sure: the truth very often is funny.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll do that. I'll also continue to post in stories where Apple fans rationalize and praise their crippled devices like they're the second coming of Jesus.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

Linux-based software "just works" on a wider range of hardware than does Mac-based software.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[jimicus]

Indeed - the last time I checked you can still compile in support for MFM hard disks in a recent 2.6 kernel.

I'm not sure there is any such thing as a computer physically capable of running a 2.6 kernel any quicker than "might just about boot before the heat death of the universe, but don't expect it to do anything useful" and a controller which can be plugged into said PC, but the functionality's there if you need it.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I pay £10 a month to O2 and have a unlimited 3G data plan, I get HSDPA+ (3.75G) too.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[PopeRatzo]

can't have high-bandwidth uses (like streaming video) on 3G.

So, I can tether my iPhone to my laptop, but not my iPad.

"Daddy said "NO!" and that's the end of it. Now go to your room and get your credit card out."

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Vectormatic]

would that by chance have been a N96?

I had a n96 for a brief period. After using a 6120 classic for a year, i decided to get a better plan, and get a real smartphone in the process. I liked the S60 OS on my 6120, so i went for nokia/symbian again, in the form of the n96. BIGGEST CRAPPHONE EVER

The n96 is a horrible phone, and a true shame for symbian. The 6120 i have however, works nicely, even though its screen isnt the biggest ever.

in short, there are crap symbian phones, but there also are quite capable symbian phones

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

But what if you want to shred more than one baby at a time? A true multi-tasking shredder could deal with whole litters of the damn things.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

Let's just be honest hear: They're charging too much and imposing arbitrary restrictions because there's minimal competition, minimal regulation, and they believe that their customers will put up with being charged for a separate plan for each and every device they own.

No, they know that their customers will put up with being ripped off. What's the alternative?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tclgeek]

You can't be serious. You can't. I've used various flavors of unix for roughly three decades, and as much as I love it I just can't agree with that statement. Linux requires tweaking and knowing arcane stuff. I'm sorry, but it simply doesn't "just work". Ok, granted, you can pop in an ubuntu disk and be up and running lickety split, but "it just works" as a meme means more than it "just works". It means you can go about your task thinking more about your task than about the OS. Linux is simply not there yet.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Hi, I'd like to take a moment to inform you that the year is 2010, not 1995, the year you last seem to have used a linux system.

Thank you for your attention.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tclgeek]

Multitasking is highly overrated on devices like the ipad. Just yesterday my son was saying he downloaded an app that does nothing but close other apps on his droid. *that* is why Apple doesn't want (much) multitasking. It takes away from the user experience if you have to stop now and then and run an app that closes a bunch of other apps that are taking up memory and CPU.

Sure, I want to listen to music and surf like the next guy, but genuine multitasking is not necessary. Maybe I'll change my tune after spending some time with the ipad. Time will tell.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Jurily]

Yes, but we can dual boot.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

Uh, at least with Ubuntu, the list of unsupported hardware includes such minor things as all Nvidia graphics cards. They work fine with the (supported) default driver, but without any OpenGL.

I've installed the official driver manually, and now every time there's a kernel upgrade (which seems to happen about once every other week right now), the graphical user interface breaks, and I'm dropped back to the command line. Then I have to reinstall the Nvidia driver manually again to get back to work. It took me about two hours to locate the problem and find the solution for the first time (it's not like the system tells you what is broken, it just doesn't work).

Note that the kernel upgrades pop up automatically with the message "there are important updates you should install" and are only a click on "install" away.

So, tell me how my mother should be able to handle that?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Jurily]

unsupported hardware.

No such thing in Linux. There's "experimental driver", though.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[hey!]

Bingo. They aren't allowed to fix prices, because that's illegal. So they do the next best thing. They make it impossible for the customer to compare prices for what he is getting.

This is like buying a car. Every time I've tried to buy a car, the salesman has tried to make the deal more complicated. Let's talk trade in! Nope. I'm selling my car separately. Well how about financing? Nope, I'm paying cash. What about this nifty special warranty the dealer offers? I'd rather just hand you the money than going through that charade. And no, I'm not handing you the money. Well, an extended manufacturer warranty? I'll self-insure, thank you.

You see, we both know on some level that what I want to buy is a car. The dealer is trying to trick me into forgetting that.

What I want from a mobile carrier is bandwidth. Period. I don't want to use *their* app store. I don't want to use *their* messaging service. I don't want a relationship with them other than this: I pay them monthly, and I get to make/receive phone calls and send data.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the typical user will use MORE bandwidth on a desktop/laptop than they will on a phone. And that would mess with their cost/benefit analasys that told them they could make a profit selling the unlimited plan for that price.

Since they havn't figured out how to distinguish between "teather use" and "non-teather use" transfers, and people already complain about the cost of the data plan, it's just easier to say "you can't do that".

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had such problems on my E63. Especially not from the built-in apps. I imagine there are many poor applications out there but that's true on any device.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[MrHanky]

Oh, please. This isn't done to make things "simple", it's done to make you pay more. That's all there is to it, you're just making excuses. Ever wondered why you Mac Fanboys are so despised? Perhaps you wouldn't be if you didn't feel the need to do ridiculous PR exercises to save Apple's image all the time. They're not working for your best interest, so you should feel no obligation to work for them.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Miamicanes]

> If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to.

Correction: "If you're stuck with an AMERICAN carrier (who uses CDMA), you have to.

CDMA has a perfectly good feature called R-UIM, which is literally a superset of a GSM SIM card (you can use one in a GSM phone AS a SIM card, but you can't use a GSM SIM card as a R-UIM). The problem is that Sprint and Verizon are both assholes and refuse to let us have phones that use them. If you Google "+HTC +Apache +RUIM", you can read all about how the HTC Apache (sold as the PPC-6700 by Sprint and the xv6700 by Verizon) had the vestigial remains of a R-UIM card (missing only the bracket), and how users outside the US were able to buy American phones for a pittance, solder in their own R-UIM card sockets, and use them in India (I believe it also worked in New Zealand, South Korea, and possibly China).

The fact is, all four of America's major cell phone networks are assholes that go out of their way to MAKE their phones as mutually-incompatible as they possibly can. Obviously a CDMA phone isn't going to work with T-Mobile or AT&T, and a GSM/UMTS phone isn't going to work with Sprint or Verizon, but in America you can't even use a Verizon CDMA phone on Sprint, or an AT&T iPhone on T-Mobile -- locked, unlocked, or otherwise. Sprint won't let you use a CDMA phone whose ESN isn't already in their holy database. Verizon doesn't support R-UIM cards, and won't give out the provisioning info you'd need to make an arbitrary imported CDMA phone work properly with Verizon's voicemail or EV-DO data service (Sprint won't either, but their ESN-filtering means you won't even get far enough for it to matter anyway). AT&T and T-Mobile are technically GSM, but neither company will sell phones capable of UMTS on the other's network (unlocked or otherwise), and both go out of their way to make it as difficult and painful as possible to use their phones in a foreign country with SIM locks. Mark my words, when AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity, Apple is going to have two different GSM iPhones -- one that does 850/1900/2100 (so T-Mobile/US customers won't be able to use it), and one that does 1700/1900/2100 (so AT&T customers won't be able to use it).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[fastest fascist]

Wow, you USians really are getting reamed with cellular pricing. I pay 10 euro a month for unlimited 3g data transfers in my country. (Phone calls and SMS are separately priced, nominal bandwidth at this price is 384 Kbps). I can tether anything I like to the phone, my carrier doesn't ask.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

The process needs to be simple and automatic to fit in with Apple's idea of what these devices should be like. Pairing 2 devices isn't (yet) and so they don't do it (yet.)

The process should be incredibly simple when you make the hardware and the software for both devices. It would be trivial to have a single push-button activation on one device which scans for local devices and triggers an acceptance prompt on the other device - bam, single step pairing. If they're not allowing this then it's not for reasons of UI complexity.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[fastest fascist]

So did you, sir.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that this was modded 5 Funny barely minutes ago (long enough for me to send it to all the Apple boffins at work) and is now only a 4, just goes to prove the age old saying: The truth hurts!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

They should just stop claiming unlimited usage - sell people an amount of data (make it easy to go over that amount and pay extra, or completely variable so you pay less on a month where you don't use the allowance). It irks me no end that in this country (UK) we have "WOW UNLIMITED DATA PACKAGE, ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR £X!!!* (*subject to 700mb/month fair use limit)" instead of just saying "750mb/month for £X". I also notice fair usage only ever works in their favour - so we pay for unlimited usage, we get punished when we hit a fairly small limit, we get no benefit when we stay below that limit, how this can even be called "fair" use under advertising standards is baffling.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Overzeetop]

You should get a winmobile phone. With the exception of Opera 10 (which fucks the system if you switch to lansdcape), and an old stand-alone GPS program, it's rare that I need to soft-boot. The last time it happened was more than a month ago. It's never (to my knowledge) prevented the phone from working like a phone. (FWIW, it's an HTC Raphael, aka AT&T Fuze)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[IANAAC]

So, tell me how my mother should be able to handle that?

She would call you, just like she does now when anything goes wrong with her Windows or Mac machine.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sorak]

You sir just sent the English Language screaming through a tree shredder.

And no one defended him...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[sorak]

Steve Jobs could through a baby into a industrial tree shredder and you would still defend him.

In his defense the baby was being kind of a dick.

He could have grown up to be the next Hitler. Jobs saved us from Hitler.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confused. This isn't about tethering something through iPad. This is about tethering iPad (the model without 3G) through iPhone. It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).

Great, enjoy your netbook and cheapo phone. "Problem" solved! That was easy.

Yes, the answer is to never question Apple. They know best. Who do all you doubters think you are with your suggestions for improvements which would give you a better user experience? Have you spent the money Apple have on researching user experience? No? Then how do you know what you like? Tut. Personally I trust big corporations to make all my decisions for me without question - what could possibly go wrong?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[gparent]

Except she probably doesn't call him every patch tuesday.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

Why is "user experience" always the standard answer to these kind of questions? If you particularly want or need multitasking then the practise is quite blatantly diminishing your user experience. What's the harm in having it disabled by default and giving power users the option to enable it - even if it means looking up how to do so and trawling through a few menus, that short term initial hit to user experience will be cancelled out for that user by the long term benefits.

Am I just being too cynical/paranoid when I say this is probably less about user experience and more about resources? Killing multitasking pretty much guarantees everything runs faster on your device compared to others, even if your hardware is underpowered, suddenly you can better price your product against your competition for hardware which is required to run applications X, Y and Z.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

Hell, I never had any of these issues with the PDA I used almost a decade ago - and that was running Windows! For the vast majority of apps it's just not an issue. If you're doing something that requires intensive network access or gaming, then it's not unreasonable to expect the user to close a few apps. They manage to get their head around this basic concept on desktops/laptops, so what's so much more complex about the iPhone/iPad that they wouldn't understand?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[hazah]

WTF are you talking about??? In my statistically insignificant personal experience that hasn't been the case for nearly 3 years at least. What on earth are you installing? Or did you stray too far from the bridge?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

Well one alternative is to not buy a data plan.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

Jailbroken industrial tree shredders in 3... 2... 1...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

The support contract with my mother does not include an incident every other week.

I'm trying to get her to buy an iPad to get rid of that one support incident per year she's having with her Mac right now (most of them involving moving image files around between Mail, iPhoto and the desktop).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LordLimecat]

Ah, so its a terrible idea for my blackberry to allow me to start my music player and then switch into google maps. Im glad youve made that decision for me. Its also nice to know that while our remote support (ie, remote control) solution supports Blackberry and windows mobile, and Pre support is coming, it will NEVER support the iPhone because of course you cannot run background apps. Not that that has any practical use, no siree.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[StayFrosty]

The NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers have been easily installed in Ubuntu by a program called jockey since the 7.x releases. It's under System --> Administration --> Hardware drivers. It can be launched from the CLI if you so choose with either jockey-gtk or jockey-text. Installing NVIDIA or ATI drivers is as simple as clicking on the driver and clicking "install." When there is a kernel update, DKMS automatically recompiles the driver for the new kernel so there is no screwing around with that any more either.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mcgrew]

If someone tells you "you get what you pay for" hold on to your wallet, because you don't always get what you pay for. You do, however, usually pay for what you get, and in many cases what you're paying for is a fancy label on an equal or even inferior product. Con artists always say "you get what you pay for."

What do you get when you buy a Rolex? A status symbol that won't keep time any better than a cheap Timex. You pay for what you get. What do you get? A meaningless status symbol.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[SQLGuru]

I've decided that this is how I want my 3G/4G/...79G/etc. devices to work from now on:

Get a MiFi like device for my data connection. This device will support mobile data upstream and WiFi or Blue Tooth connections downstream. It will also have the ability to transfer a data stream from one connected device to another -- seamlessly.

My phone will be running some sort of smart OS (Android, iPhone, WinMo, Chrome, Linux, Windows 7, whatever) and have a decent VOIP client and app store. It will connect to the MiFi device via WiFi. [* - I'm ok with the phone and MiFi being the same device, but the transfer to other devices is important]

My netbook/tablet/slate/MID/notebook/etc. can connect to the MiFi via WiFi or Blue Tooth and has the same VOIP client. With the MiFi shared data stream, I should be able to being a data session on one device (say my phone) and transfer it to my tablet and then back again as my needs change.

The VOIP service should support device to device transfers of calls as well (even across different connections such as switching from MiFi to the Starbucks WiFi).

So, here's the mythical scenario I would like to be able to play out:

While in your kitchen having breakfast, you're surfing the web on your tablet and the phone rings (using the WiFi in your apartment). Using the tablet's built in mic/speaker, you answer the phone and begin the conversation -- while continuing to surf the web. Your cab is here, so you transfer the call to your phone and put your tablet in your briefcase; as soon as you leave the house, the connection switches over to MiFi. The cab takes you to the airport while you continue to talk on the phone. At the airport, your phone recognizes the WiFi you already have configured and switches from MiFi to WiFi (seamlessly).

All of the technology exists to make this scenario happen. We just need the device makers and service providers and software guys to get on board with it. Of course, the cell providers won't like it because it means I only need one data plan instead of four or five like they want today.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mcgrew]

I don't see why a pay per minute carrier wouldn't allow tethering, as it would increase their profits (more useage = higher bill), but I can see why Boost doesn't want me tethering; it increases their cost without increasing my bill. I looked into that last week after buying a netbook, and was disappointed when I read the terms; unlimited doesn't mean unlimited. They'll shut you down if you use your phone too much, which is false advertising. If they shut me off I'll be calling my state's Attorney general.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

Well, that one can't find my Nvidia driver, probably because I installed it manually...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mdwh2]

I love that when MS were considering limiting an edition of Windows on netbooks to three applications, there was no end of ridicule. Yet now Apple have a device with only one application at once, it's a good thing.

Just yesterday my son was saying he downloaded an app that does nothing but close other apps on his droid.

Not sure what that's about, I've no need for such a thing on Symbian.

How many applications are running on your computer right now - do you find it annoying to have to close them? Or maybe you're still using a (classic) Mac?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mdwh2]

Try it on a non-Iphone. Multitasking just works fine on my 5800.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Sandbags]

Jobs can not confirm iPad to iPhone tethering officially because AT&T does not allow tethering the iPhone at all. When this changes, the story will change. This is not news, this is Apple trying not to get sued for promising a feature they are well aware that user contracts forbid clearly and openly.

Its possible there's an underlying dock-dock connection physical incompatibility, and that is is in fact not possible to crossover connect to device as such, but bluetooth tethering should still be completely feasible.

I can only see the ISP as the intervening authority here, not Apple.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

Oh, or support meaningful regulation.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Sandbags]

and OS 4 won't do this? You have fore knowledge that is counter to most rumors? If you doubt it, wait until June then see and decide, but please stop claiming it "doesn't" have multitasking when it should simply be stated "doesn't YET have multitasking" especially when there clearly there's hints as to pop-over functionality in the new OS, and apple has already rumored about in-development APIs for things like background music (which honestly is the single and only app outside GPS I'd ever need more than a notification for).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mdwh2]

By that logic, my 5 year old cheap dumbphone could multitask, because I could run the built in mp3 player at the same time as the built in email client.

(And I just love that as soon as Apple drop multitasking, we have no end of people claiming it's a great thing. Should netbooks, laptops or desktops not multitask either? Why, when MS said they were going to limit Windows 7 on netbooks to 3 applications, didn't we have praise, with people saying they should go further and only allow 1 application?)

Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device? It's bad enough there are unforeseen push notifications from different vendors fucking up the UX, now I have to bend over backwards and play nice with every resource hog on the app store?

You do realise that no one is forcing you to install every single application on the "app" store? The reason I want to share cycles with an application, is that if I've chosen to install it, it probably means I want to share cycles with it! If I didn't want to, I wouldn't install it.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Sandbags]

1, from experience, other phones that background don;t just work, they're buggy and crash regularly.
2. a web page left in the background is refreshing, might be running flash, has adds, and yes it DOES drain usage. Music over WiFi drains a lot more power than music from a local disk. Chat APIs are not idle, they're pining against servers constantly. The POINT of ANY background app that can;t simply use a notification is that it very much IS doing something, and IS using CPU cycles, if it wasn't, notifications would be completely acceptable (and simpler for devs).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit trolling and look at the restricted drivers manager. Ubuntu will happily install and use the Nvidia binary driver with about three clicks, and then automatically update and maintain it. But you went and installed a blob from somewhere, outside your package manager, and everytime your kernel upgrades you wonder why that blob is suddenly incompatible?

Maybe you should be using Windows.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[randomencounter]

To pull out an ancient quote:
Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who it makes friends with.

I guess Linux just doesn't like you.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[atfrase]

I've installed the official driver manually, and now every time there's a kernel upgrade (which seems to happen about once every other week right now), the graphical user interface breaks, and I'm dropped back to the command line. Then I have to reinstall the Nvidia driver manually again to get back to work.

This is what DKMS was invented for. As soon as nVidia starts using it in their binary driver packages, this problem will go away and all your kernel modules will be recompiled automatically when a new kernel is installed.

So, tell me how my mother should be able to handle that?

This is a total straw man and you know it, and I'm disappointed the mods didn't call you on it.

If your mother can't run one script from a command line and follow the prompts to reinstall the driver, then she probably doesn't need the extra 3D performance from a proprietary binary video driver either. Set her up with the open-source driver and kernel updates won't be a problem.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[TheGatesofBill]

Why does your mother need OpenGL?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[randomencounter]

Wait, what? I've been running NVidia cards under Ubuntu for years now using the NVidia commercial driver which was autodetected and installed when I popped the thumb drive in (Y'all still using disks, how quaint).

Just works.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fucking please. Then just remove the manual driver, go drop back down to the command line, "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" to reset the X config, restart X, and "apt-cache search nvidia" to find your nvidia driver, and install via apt.

If you did it right the first time when you first installed (with all the graphical interfaces), you needn't jump through hoops. And don't get me started with 'oh but in Windows...". Yeah, your average Joe wouldn't have figured out how to get as far as you have fucking up your X config like you have.

Either you're lying to just trying to prove a point (which I disagree with), or you're in that stage of "knows enough to enough to be dangerous, but not enough to go changing stuff", in which case you do the same stupid shit to fuck up Windows as well.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, some people didn't have any problems with Windows ME. Not many... but someone.

I have NEVER had a problem with Windows ME. No not one!

But then again, I never used it.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Gr8Apes]

and even once all the hardware is supported, more or less, then you get to have fun with software.

Don't agree - try running a system with SVN 1.5 on Ubuntu, at least on Hardy Heron (8.04) about a year ago. It doesn't just work. FYI: 8.04 was current, SVN 1.5 had been out for at least 3 years, it still wasn't supported on Ubuntu and required some interesting playing around with software repositories that could royally screw up your system if you weren't careful. Yes, I left the repo in when an "update" occurred. Very interesting after effects, such as an unbootable system. I almost thought I was running a MS OS, except it only took about 15m to fix it.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Rozine]

I understand your frustration, but you're doing it wrong. If you use the official hardware drivers program in the administration menu, kernel upgrades will not cause this behavior. (This is actually the default behavior on a new install now - it pops up and asks you). And it is supported by Canonical.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

If your mother can't run one script from a command line

nope

and follow the prompts to reinstall the driver

she would have called me by then

then she probably doesn't need the extra 3D performance from a proprietary binary video driver either.

uh wtf? So you're saying just because my mother enjoys playing some casual games that require 3D once in a while, she has to become a Linux wizard who's able to recompile drivers on the command line? Don't you think you're a bit out of touch with reality there?

To phrase it differently (and more generically): How is the desire for using the hardware you payed for to its fullest potential (or close to it) related to the requirement that you learn programming?

To move to another example: A 3D graphics artist requires 3D graphics, but programming and/or compiling stuff on the command line (those two are pretty much the same for non-geeks) is not part of the job description.

I've got one more: I'm programming using CUDA right now, so I need the Nvidia drivers (and the latest ones at that). However, I'm not paid to f*ck around with the system every other week to get it to a working state again.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[BrianRoach]

You somewhat gloss over it but I do have to say - Ubuntu 9.10 was the first distro that has ever "just worked" for me, and has now done so on 4 different machines.

Everything else over the last 15 years ... something wouldn't "just work" ... in fact, it usually involved hours of getting something to work. It's also the first distro I've been 100% happy with running as a desktop - I only boot windows to play games.

So in that respect, it IS getting better. A lot better. I don't own any oddball hardware though, so YMMV.

That being said, I also like Apple products - they do exactly what they say they do. If you don't like it, don't buy them. No one is holding a gun to your head. The iMac I bought my wife is *perfect* for her, and she loves it.

I'll never understand the endless bitching from certain people ... it's like they have to justify why they're so much cooler for NOT owning an Apple product ...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mcgrew]

The biggest problem with Linux is it doesn't "just work".

Linux isn't Linux; there are many, many flavors of Linux. I tried quite a few, and settled on Mandriva. It was dirt-simple, and gave me no problems at all, installing in half an hour including apps. It got on the internet effortlessly, and this was five years ago.

Even the wireless mouse and keyboard combo worked, but not completely -- the proprietary windows-only extensions that needed to run in Windows memory (extra buttons on the moyse, volume control on the keyboard, etc) didn't work, but you can't expect Windows code to run in Linux (unless you install Wine), Linux code to run on an apple (unless you install Linux on the Apple), or Apple code to run on Windows (ever, at all, unless it's Windows code written by Apple).

Windows doesn't "just work" unless it's preinstalled at the PC factory. Installing Windows on a homebrew box is a pain in the ass, far harder than installing Mandriva.

If your version of Linux doesn't work on your hardware, simply try a different distro. Suse wouldn't work on the hardware Mandriva worked with, but I'd bet there are boxes that Suse works fine with that Mandriva has problems with.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, they do have the 'official' NVidia drivers in the administration panel.. You click on the little hardware icon, select the driver version you want and click 'activate.'

Done... No module recompiling for kernel updates required...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Duradin]

I wish I had some mod points.

'No' is the only safe "business" answer he can give.

If there's no tethering on the iPhone (in the US) at the moment then it would be rather logical that you can't tether the iPad to the iPhone (in the US).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[rgviza]

you rename rpm or yum (or whatever), and write a wrapper script that automates reinstalling the video driver by parsing the output from the package manager and reinstalls the video driver if it sees "kernel" in the package manager output, and/or renames the pm again, replacing it with the script if it sees the name of the package manager.

It's not rocket science. While I agree that linux is not for normal users "out of the box", with a few simple tweaks, you can automate everything.

Linux is an engineer/hobbyist's OS. You can make it do anything you want, including update itself without breaking stuff and other things that would make it suitable for your mom. The distro maintainers aren't allowed to do it because of copyright and the fact that the nVidia vendor driver is closed source. That doesn't mean you can't do it yourself. You also have the choice of using nVidia's proprietary crap or the open source version of the driver, which would also eliminate the problem.

I've seen similar issues on windows (like bluescreens, bad drivers), so it's not like linux is any worse. At least it's predictable. In this case you created your own problem by using nVidia's crap driver instead of the one that came with the distro. Which leads me to the next question. If you are capable of knowing that nVidia's driver existed, and capable of installing it, aren't you capable of writing a simple shell script to handle the driver reinstalls?

quit slackin...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

I just remembered what happened when I set up the system.

It did offer to install the driver, but that one wasn't recent enough for me, since I needed the newest one for running CUDA. So I resented to installing the one from the Nvidia page instead, which apparently you shouldn't do.

The others in this discussion are probably right in the way that my mother wouldn't need the most recent driver, the old one would probably work out fine.

But still, why do I have to tinker around in the system that much? I'm a programmer, not a system administrator.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[am 2k]

Linux is an engineer/hobbyist's OS. You can make it do anything you want, including update itself without breaking stuff and other things that would make it suitable for your mom.

Yes, that I can agree with.

If you are capable of knowing that nVidia's driver existed, and capable of installing it, aren't you capable of writing a simple shell script to handle the driver reinstalls?

Well, I think I'm a bit unusual for a programmer in that regard. I know how to do this stuff, but I just don't want to. My spare time is very short already, and I don't want to spend it fixing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. I just want to get my work done and then do something productive (I'm not paid by the hour).

I guess that's why I'm one of the comparatively few programmers using a Mac.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the Apple-bashing is not new and it is CERTAINLY not insightful any more.

I realize that it's complicated to understand that, for many people, a streamlined interface that gets out of your way and lets you perform the tasks that you want to perform is actually worth something above and beyond your average open source app that lets you do everything you could possibly want to, but through an interface cluttered with cryptically-labeled buttons and menus. Your accusation that Apple removes features to "make you pay more. That's all there is to it" is not only wrong, it's either intentionally overly simplistic or you're just dumb. Apple is not about feature laundry lists and never has been, and if you still don't get it by now then that's your deficiency, and choosing to project your hatred onto people who choose to use Apple products just isn't entertaining any more.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Haxzaw]

Cool, a car analogy that works. Good job.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[furby076]

This is like buying a car. Every time I've tried to buy a car, the salesman has tried to make the deal more complicated. Let's talk trade in! Nope. I'm selling my car separately. Well how about financing? Nope, I'm paying cash. What about this nifty special warranty the dealer offers? I'd rather just hand you the money than going through that charade. And no, I'm not handing you the money. Well, an extended manufacturer warranty? I'll self-insure, thank you.

Really? Buying a car is that complex?

"How much is the car sales person? X you say? Ok I will give you Y. Great now that we agree on Z let's move on.
I would like to finance, what's your rates? Q you say? Well that's better then my bank, so great let's move on.
I want to sell you my car, how much are you offering? M you say? Well, M is a bit low, how about N? Great now that we agree on O let's move on.
"Finally, the warranty, how much? S you say? Ok I will give you T. Great we have a deal"


It's four fairly simple steps...if a person finds that difficult then I'd imagine Linux involves solving the mystery of the universe. At any point in the process if you are unhappy with one of the rates you can decline. If your car purchase is anymore complex then that (other then inspecting the car) then you are doing something entirely wrong.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they are. People who buy apple products are USED to overpaying. Kinda like how Warhammer 40k players are used to being overcharged as well.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[trurl7]

I'm glad it worked for you. You must be one of the lucky people who doesn't have to deal with the slithering abomination known as "pulseaudio" that Ubuntu's devs hardwired into gnome.

9.10 has, in fact, been one of the buggier releases that Ubuntu has made. I've been using Ubuntu since 6 or 7, I think, and 9.10 has made me seriously consider going to Fedora. And I hate bloody rpm. :)

I'm sorry, Linux does indeed "just work", but only "just". I'm willing to go through the arcana - I think it's worth it. But as you get older, your time available for tinkering with BS gui issues shrinks and you wish to hell someone had done elementary QA.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[natehoy]

consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.

Silly boy! You can change desktop wallpaper in Vista Basic. What you meant to say was "Windows Seven Starter".

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Yunzil]

Oh, please. This isn't done to make things "simple", it's done to make you pay more.

These aren't mutually exclusive.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shadowfaxcrx]

And those of us who are experienced in buying cars/dataplans know the industry tricks and how to get around them.

But a first time car buyer isn't going to know that the salesman is trying to get you to commit to a monthly payment rather than the price of the car. He'll gladly put you in that car today for only $200 a month! Of course, he doesn't tell you that this is over 15 years and you've just bought a Kia for 36 grand plus down payment plus gap insurance plus extended warranty plus "dealer prep fee" (aka: they'll wash it before you drive it home) and so on.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[MrHanky]

Oh, the old "Apple's interface is magically better" pseudo-argument. Hey, if there was any truth to it, Apple users would be more productive and thus more in demand. Corporations that standardise on the Apple platform would perform better than their competition. The only such company I know of is, well, Apple. Since the supposed superiority of the Apple UI has no measurable real-world impact, we can also suppose that the said superiority does not exist in the real world, or at least is greatly exaggerated.

Also I've never claimed that Apple is "about feature laundry lists", so why counter that argument? I'd say they are about making money, which is true, and which is what they do, and do exceptionally well. The obvious commercial choice of not allowing tethering, whose actual, real-world function is to leech money from their customers, can't be explained away by "OMG u just don't get it: it's an interface that gets out of your way and lets you perform".

Thirdly, I couldn't care less about which product you choose to buy. Just stop advertising it all the time.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[petermgreen]

For better or worse the linux kernel doesn't have a properly designed stable ABI (linus says he does this deliberately to avoid ever getting locked into a driver API/ABI because too much becomes dependant on it) so it's very hard to fix the kernel without introducing ABI changes that require third party modules to be recompiled (debian do try but don't always succeed, not sure about ubuntu).

The problem it it's only very recently that a system for managing this automatically has been introduced and there is no standardisation of such a system accross distros (i'm not even sure if distros outside the debian family have a system at all)

So if you get the drivers directly from NVIDIA they won't operate within this system and will have to be manually fixed each time.

It sucks but there isn't a whole lot the distros can do to change the behaviour of stuff that is installed ignoring the package manager and module management system they use.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[tehcyder]

Linux isn't Linux

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of Linux, you have to go and confuse me...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shadowfaxcrx]

Plus, "Language" should not be capitalized.

Btw, there should be a semicolon or a period after "S'alright," and Nazis should be capitalized. ;)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[amicusNYCL]

Right. Linux: a sociopath OS for sociopath people.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[shadowfaxcrx]

I'm not sure, but Jobs was shouting something about "Motorola..."

Re:You get what you pay for?

[david_thornley]

I bought a couple of Ubuntu computers from Dell, and except for upgrading the OS I've had one issue in several years when I had to work around the OS. I've seen people have that sort of issue frequency with Windows. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu just works for me.

So, my anecdote cancels out your anecdote.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[MrHanky]

Certainly, but the claim that it's done to make it simple is still a blatant lie.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[amicusNYCL]

Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device?

Indeed! It doesn't work for you, therefore it works for no one. I'm glad that Apple made this choice for users so that no one would have to make it for themselves.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that the iPad doesn't have bluetooth? Oh crap, yes it does (http://www.apple.com/ipad/design/)

Clearly pairing is such a difficult thing that the iPhone has had it since day 1.

Are you telling me that the iPad doesn't have a USB connection? Oh wait, it's got a standard iPod dock. Make an iPod to iPod cable and you got the two of them plugged in to eachother no problem.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Sabathius]

Get a new baby. Not that big of a deal.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[gknoy]

Perhaps she wants to use Compiz Fusion. (Is that the old name or the new one? I forget.)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[IANAAC]

Except she probably doesn't call him every patch tuesday.

Unless one of those patch tuesdays cause a BSOD at boot time (that happened last year sometime, no?) Like or not, it's possible to have nasty problems on *any* system if you're not careful.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[david_thornley]

You have described what a computer is like for a geek, not a non-geek, and the non-geek market is far larger. The average person wants a computer as a tool. It's a neat tool because it can do word processing, web surfing, and games. We know that's because of the power of general-purpose computing, and we want to have such computers available. The key to computer design for the masses is to give the users the features they'll find valuable, in an easy to use form.

This is why most Slashdot people aren't going to get an iPad, and why a whole lot of people are. The iPad will do things that people find valuable, and do them very well. It has serious limits on it, which people like us would find frustrating and most people wouldn't notice. I, personally, am willing to live with those restrictions on my phone, but not on anything larger.

And, by the way, I do have a ssh app on my iPhone. I don't use it much, because it's something of a pain, but it's sometimes very handy to be in the middle of nowhere checking up on my home system.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

back in my home country, I would get a proper data plan which lets me use teh tube however I see fit, without any such bullshit, for those very same $X (usually less, in fact).

In soviet russia, internet tethers you!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[kayoshiii]

You should perhaps install the Kernel Headers package. The current official nVidia drivers will automatically rebuild themselves for a new kernel but require the headers to be installed. This should probably be listed as a dependency of the binary nvidia drivers. Also Ubuntu allows you to get back to previously installed kernels should you have a problem. I am not sure it shows them by default for a release.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[kayoshiii]

just install the kernel headers.... Ubuntu will take care of the rest.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[leptons]

I have a fuze, and use Opera Mobile and i've never had a problem in landscape mode, none at all. I'm using the latest version.

The phone does work really well and the ability to run multiple apps does slow the performance down a little, as expected, but the utility the multitasking provides is totally worth it. I usually run Opera Mobile, VNC, Google Maps at the same time, without too much slowdown. It also tethers easily, and it does so many other things that I have a hard time imagining using any other phone OS.

The fuze also runs Android :) Someone made an Android 2.0 loader for the fuze, and it works pretty well. I'm not a fan of Android (yet), but if Microsoft continues trying to turn itself into Apple by releasing more and more watered down devices (windows phone 7), I will gladly go to android.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mcgrew]

Wouldn't that be "You sir just sent the English Language screaming throw a tree shredder"? ;)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[rgviza]

ya but if you went through the trouble to build the linux pc, it takes less time to automate this stuff than it will to answer the phone, drive to your mom's, and reinstall the video driver every time there's a kernel update.

Just sayin...

I know a ton of developers (including myself) that use mac os and apple gear. I also use linux and windows os's. Mac use is actually prevalent with the developers I know.

What I'm using to do what at any moment depends on who is paying my salary, what their requirements are and where I am physically located. If I'm at the beach, I'll be shelled into my servers using ssh over a VPN from the iPhone, on Edge if I have to :-p.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Mr. DOS]

But my provider is either lazy or dumb, or maybe both.

I guess it'd be too much to hope they're actually decent.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[agrif]

They're a click on "install" and a password away. Make sure she knows that when the computer asks for a password, it's asking to do something that could seriously screw things up, and should only be done with expert help.

Besides, you do know that the official nVidia driver is available in Ubuntu through the "Restricted Drivers" window, right? These get updated with the kernel, so this shouldn't even be a problem.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... your doing it wrong.

I have my nvidia card running fine on ubuntu. put the install disk in and in 30 mins I had a working os that had recognized all of my hardware, including the Nvidia card, it asked me if I wanted to install the official driver blob, i clicked a button, it installed, restarted and then I had a composited desktop with drop-shadows and other cutesy visual effects.

So, since you're having such an issue, did you file bug reports?

Probably not, because you just wanted to whine about the "Linux Experience TM" instead of making it better.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[gparent]

Lately, there was a patch that caused a BSoD on malware-infested machines. I can guarantee you that I can cause a kernel panic on your machine if you run my malware as root.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[WCguru42]

Well it has multitasking for music apps like the iPod app....... =)

And sometimes I prefer to listen to Pandora, to find new music.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Bigbutt]

Ooh, anecdotes :)

I have two Ubuntu boxes here. On one, while in a term window, if I paste from the clipboard, the terminal session never comes back. strace shows it going berserk. The other one is fine and pasting into a text editor is also fine.

It's annoying that I have to log in remotely to boot the box every time I forget and paste in some string.

[John]

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Belial6]

Ok, so after going through a bunch of documentation, and editing config files by hand with a text editor on the command line, I'll ask. How do I make only my company's IP addresses run across my VPN connection on the MAC, while having everything else not go through the VPN without hand editing arcane text files? I know there is the "Send all traffic over VPN" check box, but that control whether all traffic is sent over the VPN.

Mac is for the most part, in the same boat as Linux. Basic usage that would satisfy 90% of the population works just fine out of the box. Anything beyond that is going to be a bit trickier.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[iMac Were]

> It costs twice as much and it looks nice.

Defailed that for you, sugarbuns.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Snaller]

"Why did anybody think that they'd allow users to tether the iPad to anything "

Indeed - and the bigger question is why do anyone still buy Apple - the soft and hardware which locks you down and removes choice. Wait for Googles Padd

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Sandbags]

God, if I wasn't marked as a fanbio I'd have expected to get modded +5-insightful for this post.

Troll however I guess is the tag issued to anyone who backs Apple or Jobs in any way with an insightful comment or valid argument.

Did i post negatively? no.
Did i use foul language? No.
Did I incite a vicious conversation thread based on an off or controversial comment? no.

Yet, TROLL I am labeled....

I don't even plan to buy an iPad, i was just pointing out that there could be business logic behind this statement, contractual obligations, as ya know, the iPhone can't tether today in the first place, so how could the iPad tether through it!?!?!

Some nice guy who agreed with me got modded redundant...

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Snaller]

"In fact, this kind of thing - "Unlimited mobile data plan for just $X! for use with selected mobile devices with provider-supplied Web browser application only!", which is so prevalent in North America, really irks me - back in my home country,"

Their greed makes them fall behind - what else is new.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Belial6]

In my home, I run Ubuntu, Windows, and OSX (as well as some older ones just for retro fun). I can say out of the three modern OSes, OSX is definitely the least intuitive. When I bought the Mac, I was shocked at how poor the UI was. It's not that it is unusable, and by 1990 standards, it is quite good. It's just that for decades, the meme that Macs had the best UI had me convinced that it would be at least on par with Windows and Linux.

The inconsistencies and unitativeness are numerous, but the two most glaring are the fact that a green plus icon will make your windows smaller...sometimes. And, that a red X icon will leave the application running in the taskbar...sometimes.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[spitzak]

You mean subversion?

I find it hard to believe. I thought maybe you are trying either some really new or really old version, but on my Ubuntu machine I have 1.5.2 (r32768) so that does not seem to be the problem. Been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and using svn extensively (as this is how I accessed development code at work) and never had problems.

I do remember somewhat earlier having to update to a new version (perhaps this 1.5) but this was on the older Mandrake machine I had. Even then it was no problem though I had to download not from the repository but from the svn site.

Being a Unix-based development tool, subversion has always been by far one of the easiest things to install and I never ever worried it may not work, and certainly never had a problem.

Maybe there is something else called SVN? Otherwise I can't imagine what your problem was.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[spitzak]

He manually installed the NVidia drivers from the NVidia page. This I can confirm royally fucks up Ubuntu so that it will break if you do much of anything to the kernel or if you attempt to turn the driver on or off.

I don't think Ubuntu can do much to fix NVidia's behavior but it would be nice if they added some ui to their hardware installer to detect this and at least cleanly remove the NVidia install and then install the Ubuntu one. I have never been able to do this except by reinstalling the entire operating system (ok I'm probably an idiot but I try to delete everything I can and it still won't decide to install the Ubuntu file).

Re:You get what you pay for?

[randomencounter]

Well, you go mucking about in the system files like that you'll break most anything. It's like complaining that your coffee maker is broken after taking it apart and putting it back together wrong. Darn Mr. Coffee can't make a good coffee maker!

That's why the Ubuntu team packages up reasonably current NVidia drivers in the first place. Reduces the temptation for people to do such things

Re:You get what you pay for?

[nine-times]

Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device?

Well certainly part of the problem is that people hear "no background apps" and they have an averse response without even thinking about it. I mean, really, do you need your PDF viewer to continue to run and eat up system resources while you're *not* looking at the PDF?

There are certain things you want to be able to "run in the background", such as email and IM clients, because they sit around and wait for something to happen and then notify you. Of course, it's not really that you want them to run in the background, but more that you want them to notify you of things. If you can have some kind of system for notifications that can run in the background, then background applications aren't really necessary for that.

Second is the problem of "losing your place". If you have an ebook reader, for example, you don't want to have to quit and then go find the page you were on again. This sort of problem can be addressed by allowing applications to save their state before quitting.

And then finally, you have applications where you actually want them to continue to do things while you work on something else. For example, if I have a bittorrent client, I don't want to sit and watch the bittorrent progress bar. I want to leave it downloading and get on with my work. This is the only case where you really need background applications.

So the real question for the iPhone and iPad is, for what purposes do you need the last kind of background applications on a phone/mini-tablet form-factor? Is there really no sensible solution for those cases for the iPhone?

There are a bunch of possible uses, but I don't know how many that people are actually looking for. More often, it seems like people are just saying, "I've heard that I can't have background applications, and that sounds bad, so I'm going to claim it's a deal-breaker without thinking any more about it."

Re:You get what you pay for?

[spitzak]

I agree, but this mistake does appear to be common and it would be nice if Ubuntu addressed it in at least making it easy to fix.

The complaint comparing it to Windows is unfair. There are plenty of users of Windows who are just smart enough to fuck up their systems by editing files or installing some 3rd party "accelerator" or something. This is the same thing. "Grandma" is not going to download and install the Nvidia driver, so saying that "grandma can't fix it" is not at all fair, when nobody complains that Grandma can't fix messed up tweaks to low-level Windows files either.

However if perhaps Microsoft took examples of fucked-up systems and made their install software smart enough to get around or fix this mess when you updated to the next version, then they would be doing something that Ubuntu is not doing. I don't know if they are doing anything like this so I cannot comment on it. I can also see a slippery slope: Ubuntu or Windows could always fix anything by throwing away all hand-made tweaks and reverting to stock behavior on any update. That can be equally frustrating for a user to lose their changes however. Not clear if it is possible to distinguish a fuck up the user wants to clean from a careful adjustment they want to keep.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[randomencounter]

There's a philisophical point there.

At some point you have left the space where it is reasonable to expect the source of a product to provide support for it. Whether it is attaching a turbocharger to your coffee maker or installing unvetted third-party system software eventually you hit a point where the original source has to throw up their hands and give up because they can't tell what the hades you were trying to do in the first place, let alone what you actually did.

At that point you own it completely, whether it works or not.

I live in violated warranty land so I do appreciate more folks coming to join me, but I find the folks who don't realize that they've strayed across the border and think the commercial land rules still apply kind of annoying.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[hguorbray]

I lucked into something like this for my Moto smartphone about 6 years ago.

the plan is Media Net it's $15 a month for unlimited access (but they nail you on international roaming):

http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/messaging-internet/media-entertainment/faq.jsp

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/services/serviceDetails.jsp?LOSGId=&skuId=sku1160057&catId=cat1470003

This was before they decided to charge $30 or more a month for a 'smartphone' plan which is why I opted for a Blackjack 2 which would work with MediaNet instead of an iPhone or crackberry which would cost me another $180 a year just in the difference between those 2 plans let alone about $2-300 more up front.

-I'm just sayin'

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Gr8Apes]

yep - subversion. Back when 8.04 came out. There was no svn 1.5 client available at the time. Take a look at ubuntu forums for some of the details on what it took to get a 1.5 client working on 8.04 x64.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[lonecrow]

If the rest of the world worked this way:

Oh you want to drive that car on the highway and city streets? Sorry that will cost more.

Are you going to fry that chicken or bake it?

Are you going to wear that shirt to work and to social occasions?

Are you going to watch your cable vision while sitting on a chair or a couch? and btw, how big is your TV because you might have to pay the widescreen surcharge.

There is no justification except gauging. Is that Nader fellow still around? Does he have a replacement yet? Who stands up for consumers these days?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[SkimTony]

Shortly followed by people wondering if they can get a jailbreak after using industrial tree shredders inappropriately...

Do industrial tree shredders come with warnings saying not to put small children or pets in them?

Re:You get what you pay for?

[spitzak]

I think I downloaded a binary executable and put it in /usr/bin and it worked. Not sure where I got it. Don't have it any more as I wiped everything when updating to 9.x. We did need SVN 1.5 because they did something complex with the repository so that checkout for platform A (such as Linux) did not checkout all the files needed for other platforms (such as Windows/Mac). This was pretty vital as these guys liked to check in compiled binaries.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the morons at their stores do not know how it works

Re:You get what you pay for?

[aussie_a]

Funny, I was using Linux only a few years ago (a few being 2-4). But I guess facts don't matter when you're trolling.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[aussie_a]

If your version of Linux doesn't work on your hardware, simply try a different distro.

This hardly epitomises the "Just Works" philosphy that GF678 was attempting to attach to Linux.

My post wasn't to bag out Linux. It was to say that it doesn't have a reputation of "just working."

When they came for the iPhone users

[merc]

In all seriousness, I'm proud to live in a Microsoft and Apple-free household.

Maybe someday when they realize how harmful DRM really is I'll take another look.

Nonsense like this isn't convincing me I'm wrong.

Bye.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[wampus]

Christ, you sound like an AA meeting.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Yvan256]

FYI, there's also AAA, C, D and 9 volts meetings.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[DAldredge]

In what way is the DRM in Windows 7 harming me?

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Anonymous Coward]

Good concise answer.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Cryacin]

Perhaps his tone simply derives from his Overclockers Anonymous meetings.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Kitkoan]

In what way is the DRM in Windows 7 harming me?

Tthe glitch where it thinks it's been pirated and down grades you to changing to a black background and nags you to buy a real copy (even though you are using one)

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[jmactacular]

I recently tried changing my IP from auto assigned to a static ip on my win 7 box, and after it rebooted, it said it needed me to activate windows. What doofus would make your network settings tied to windows activation? Or anything that might change after you've already activated it?

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[kjart]

In what way is the DRM in Windows 7 harming me?

Tthe glitch where it thinks it's been pirated and down grades you to changing to a black background and nags you to buy a real copy (even though you are using one)

It must not be nagging very effectively if he hasn't noticed it yet.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[meerling]

I've always liked Atomic Batteries, can run your space probe for 20 years and my junk usually doesn't survive 10...

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[blackraven14250]

Maybe it was tied to rebooting and not the network settings modification....

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Cassius Corodes]

I doubt that is the case - its probably a coincidence that those two things happened at the same time. Especially as you don't need to restart to change your IP settings.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[MoralHazard]

I just spent the last three hours debugging and fixing Xorg on my Intel Q35 onboard graphics adapter, under the Fedora 12 Linux distro. My eyes are bleary, and I have to be at work in five hours, but I actually feel pretty good. I read your comment and started smirking like a jackass.

Short version: Xorg and the kernel have completely fux0rd the current (2.9-ish) Intel GPU support. For some reason, Fedora shipped this pile of steaming crap with F12, and so many people with fast, stable, accelerated graphics (beautiful Compiz!) under F10 and F11 have found themselves sorely disappointed by F12. I was one of those people, this weekend, when I finally got around to upgrading to F12.

But I feel good, not shitty. My problem is solved: I have Compiz working fine and fast at full res. I spent some quality time with Google, and I re-learned how to use 'xrandr' and 'xorg.conf', and I hard-coded all the modelines I need (which the X driver can't seem to figure out, on its own), and there you go.

Yeah, I'm a smug bastard. And any Fedora release certainly ships with more bugs than any OSX release. But dammit, it's nice to be able to fix stuff when it breaks, instead of staring mutely like an ape at some smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable $700 white plastic brick.

Much as I want to strangle certain members of FESCo right now, I still wouldn't trade my F12 install DVD for anything else. (Except maybe F11. Those fuckers.)

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Anonymous Coward]

In all seriousness, I'm proud to live in a Microsoft and Apple-free household.

Maybe someday when they realize how harmful DRM really is I'll take another look.

Nonsense like this isn't convincing me I'm wrong.

Bye.

And the toilet out back with a moon on the door suits me just fine. If God had wanted me to fly he would have given me wings and if he wanted me to use Windows he would have gotten rid of all the exploits and if he wanted me to use a Mac he never would have invented iTunes! Oh and Clippy was the work of the Devil and wasn't God's fault.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[jimicus]

Yeah, I'm a smug bastard. And any Fedora release certainly ships with more bugs than any OSX release. But dammit, it's nice to be able to fix stuff when it breaks, instead of staring mutely like an ape at some smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable $700 white plastic brick.

I used to use Linux on the desktop, and it was after one too many nights like the one you've described that I said "Enough!" and bought myself a smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable white plastic brick. This was just over four years ago.

It hasn't broken since. And even if it had, you know something? I've spent too much of my life fixing one configuration only to find another is also broken. Frankly, I'd rather replace broken hardware, reinstall the OS and reload from the last Time Machine backup than dick around trying to figure out what's wrong. My solution requires considerably less input from me 80% of the time, and is a surefire guaranteed fix 100% of the time.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using atomic batteries in a laptop, I'd be surprised if your "junk" survived 10 minutes...

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[delinear]

Maybe he's married.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Anonymous Coward]

On a somewhat unrelated note, for many of us with ATI -- F12 (and the upcoming F13) both have shipped with massive graphics improvements (i.e. F12 = ati opensourc graphics finally works flawlessly, F13 = opensource 3D works)

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[natehoy]

my junk usually doesn't survive 10

Turn off your spam filter for a little while, you'll get plenty of possible solutions for that. :)

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[Yvan256]

Perhaps, but at those frequencies you wouldn't hear his tone anyway.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[pscottdv]

My experience with Fedora is that the odd-numbered releases seem more stable and usable than the even numbered releases. I don't know why that is.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[mcgrew]

Christ, you sound like an AA meeting.

If I could change water into wine I'd probably need AA, too.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[MoralHazard]

There's a fatal flaw in your argument, because you're missing one critical difference between my approach and yours: I'm not contributing thousands of dollars to Steve Jobs' homeopathic doctor every time my computer breaks down.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[jmactacular]

It wasn't a coincidence. I had activated my windows many months ago. And this was the only change I made before rebooting. I didn't say it asked me to reboot, but I did reboot, and that was the result. If you feel inclined to disprove it, try it, and let us know if you get a different result.

How are they going to stop it though?

[lordsid]

Personally I'd like to know how he thinks he's going to stop it. Nothing like telling someone 'no' to challenge them.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Chances of stopping 100% of cases? Pretty much zero.

Chances of making the process annoying, complex, and/or risky enough that relatively few people will bother? Pretty much 100%.

When all you see is the aggregate profit/loss numbers, those relatively few will be basically irrelevant. If they somehow manage to use massive amounts of data, AT&T will just ban them anyway, and probably charge them a stiff ETF for the privilege.

That's the thing to keep in mind: Content-level DRM is doomed because it only has to be cracked once, it can spread like wildfire in the clear from that point forward. Device-level DRM only has to be reverse-engineered once(per iPhone OS update, hardware revision, silent baseband revision bump, etc.) but the crack has to be applied per-device. TOS-level control can be circumvented merely by ignoring it; but you face the constant threat of termination and possible penalties.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[rsborg]

Personally I'd like to know how he thinks he's going to stop it. Nothing like telling someone 'no' to challenge them.

Seriously... any device that serves as a wifi AP should be a valid signal for the iPad... how are they going to discriminate? If I did have a wireless-enabled family, I'd seriously consider just using the verizon MiFi and iPod Touch / iPad wifi (in addition to other devices, laptop, etc).

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nothing like telling someone 'no' to challenge them."

Or ... you know ... get a product from a competitor that comes with less restrictions out of the box? People who complain about things like tethering should be tech-savvy enough to get a laptop/tablet with a real OS.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[lordsid]

I can see the idea of a challenge is lost on you.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to spite you, I'll tether my cactus to the microwave, so I can iron my clothes with the dish washer. Woohoo! Challenge!

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...that relatively few people will bother? Pretty much 100%"

Some bored 16-year-old in Uzbekistan is cursing your name and programming furiously just to prove you wrong.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[t0p]

Haven't you heard? Steve Jobs is pretty damn powerful. Who do you think got Eve to try that apple?

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you can jailbreak your iphone/ipad and do whatever you want. But the Warranty Boogeyman will get you.

Re:How are they going to stop it though?

[Sandbags]

This may very well be the reason he said "tethering" is not possible. First off, dock - to - dock connector cable? Was the connector designed for this? Is there a crossover option? likely not.

Next, is it relevant? If the iPhone can operate as a hot spot via an app, assuming it's AT&T approved since this is akin to tethering which is currently NOT approved, then there's no reason to "tether" at all.

Jobs has to be careful about what he claims the device is capable of when there may be provider blocks in place contradicting that statement, and he;s also got to be careful to not state things like "well, on anyone but AT&T" openly. Also, the iPad is being launched US only from day 1 right, or at least in wifi only versions (3G overseas is not yet announced), so he could simply be limiting his comments to announced product versions.

Don't seriously think for a second this won't be able to be done, and likely with a non-jail broken device, but without provider support he can't commit to it without violating some unspoken contact term, so he;s got to be careful...

hackers say yes tethering

[Khashishi]

how long before it's cracked?

Re:hackers say yes tethering

[Yvan256]

I guess it depends on the size of the rock you choose to crack it.

Re:hackers say yes tethering

[tlhIngan]

how long before it's cracked?

Hopefully not a long time. However, given that the second run of iPhone 3GS aren't completely jailbroken yet (they require a tethered jailbreak every reboot), Apple may have learned and make the new iPads even more difficult to jailbreak.

Now, given that Apple's developers make stupid bugs, if you're planning on this, I would suggest buying an early revision iPad as it will likely have the buggy boot ROM allowing an easy jailbreak. A few months down the road (when a jailbreak happens) might be too late.

So, the iPad may take suggestions on the iPhone 3GS to be even harder to jailbreak. Or, given it's a new SoC, there may be exploitable bugs that make a more permanent jailbreak possible. It's a tossup at the moment.

Re:hackers say yes tethering

[kimvette]

Tosh already cracked one. All it took was a golf club.

iPad failurez

[Anonymous Coward]

http://f00.inventorspot.com/images/ipadTT.preview.jpg

that's all I've got to say about that.

why buy an iPad when you can get nice 16 or 17 ounce computers...

Fujitsu LifeBook UH900 Mini-Notebook

Re:iPad failurez

[am 2k]

Why buy a boat when you could also buy a car?

that's all I've got to say about your post.

This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[mirix]

Steve's deathgrip on what I can and can't do with _my_ device... Why would anyone subject themselves to that?

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. I actually dropped my Cable connection and have been exclusively tethering via my Droid for the last 2 months!

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Degro]

Apple as of late has really rekindled my appreciation for Windows on my personal computers. Sell me the hardware and then let me do what the f**k I want. I'm just waiting for the next major version of OSX brings in the wonderful strangle hold of the app store too...

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[larkost]

Maybe because the devices his company produces do what most people want, and do those things really well. Not everyone want to go digging under the hood. Most people really don't care about what is happening under the hood, they just want it to happen. For example I will be buying a 3G iPad when they come out with the express idea of playing with it for a month before giving it to my grandmother.

She needs something to replace the email-only station that she has, and I think that the simplicity of troubleshooting ("press the big button if you get in trouble"), and the single-midedness of doing one task at a time will mean that she might just venture out beyond the email-only realm she has been in. With a computer the first step to get to email is simply too much, and it does not matter Windows, MacOS, or linux for that statement. But with an iPad there is a chace that she will be tempted to view the photo sharing sites that my parrents and aunt have setup.

And my fiencée has already said that she might use it to replace her Windows notebook that has been nothing but a headache in the year she has had it (a couple of bad design choices by HP have caused real problems and it has already had two warentee issues). For the most part she just does email and web surfing. The only thing she was worried about was that she might not be able to save PDF reciepts from the bills she pays online (a legitimate worry).

As to myself, I am a professional geek and I specialize in MacOS. While I dig pretty deep in the desktop version of MacOS X, and do some lite programming (mostly on the heavy side of scripting), I have never been tempted to jailbreak my iPhone, or dig into the iPhone SDK. It is an appliance for me, and I am happy that it just does the job I want it to do.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[DigiShaman]

Because they're a techno-masochist.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[MightyMartian]

Translation: I'm a money-flinging Apple fanboi lacking in imagination and has a masochistic complex, getting a kick out of some useless pile of dirt CEO telling me what I can do with the stuff I buy.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[badasscat]

Maybe because the devices his company produces do what most people want, and do those things really well.

I'm not going to argue with your main point but there are a couple of statements you make that I do disagree with.

Disclosure: I just got over a 36 hour iPhone binge, where I thought my old phone had broken and it turned out that the iPhone was the cheapest smartphone I could actually get given my upgrade status, so I tried one. I returned it the next day.

I also own an iPod, and I do love that.

Given my experience with the iPhone (and the iPod), I don't believe these devices do anything particularly well. What I think is that they don't do anything badly. That's a different thing. Apple is really good at not fucking things up for most people, and at not allowing most people to fuck things up for themselves. They are not very good at doing anything that's particularly amazing, or inspiring, or whatever you want to call it.

Just one example. Turn on the iPhone and what do you see? (I mean after you "slide to unlock", which you're forced to do every time you turn the screen on.) Yep, a sea of basically random tiny icons. This is the "revolutionary" interface some people talk about - random tiny icons. The home screen on the iPhone is almost totally useless. Without the tiny little message indicator above the email icon and the date on the calendar icon, there would be no reason to even look at it.

Most people buying iPhones have never used another smartphone, or at least not another good one, so they don't know what they're missing. I'm not sure they're going to be as forgiving of the same interface on the iPad.

It is an appliance for me, and I am happy that it just does the job I want it to do.

That's fine, and my wife loves her iPhone too and I'm happy that she's happy with it.

But what's wrong with giving people options? That was one of the reasons I returned my iPhone. I am completely fine with people getting a device and then just not even bothering to touch it except for making calls and sending emails using all the default stuff that it comes with. My wife got hers because it supports Japanese natively (which Windows Mobile doesn't and I don't think Android does either), and she can easily write emails in either language using the virtual keyboard. She never even bothered with the app store until literally six months after she got it. That's okay, her priority is just to have a phone with Japanese support that works out of the box and she loves it for that.

But what's wrong with giving the rest of us the option to do more? Why limit it? I mean seriously, why? It is borderline sadistic on the part of Jobs, to basically say "our phone is really powerful but WE WILL NOT LET YOU tap that power, and you therefore must deal with the experience created for the lowest common denominator even though this device is capable of doing anything you might want it to do."

I mean, you can't even disable "slide to unlock". You can't alter the home screen. You can't replace the weaksauce email app that doesn't even seem to have a "mark all as read" function that I could find. Why not? How does it hurt anybody to put in the option to do those basic things? What, they're afraid of support calls? So you make a function that's buried in some hidden menu that says "geek mode" and you put a little checkbox next to it. And you bury the instructions on how to find that menu on some members-only web site, and then it gets distributed through sites like Slashdot that only geeks read anyway. The geeks are happy, the normals are happy, what's the problem?

My first computer was an Apple II, and I loved it precisely because it was so open. This is a different Apple these days, and it's unlikely that I'll buy another multi-purpose device from them again. I do like my iPod, but it is intended to do one thing: play media. Just not screwing up a device's intended function is enough on a single-purpose device, especially because so many other manufacturers do. But I need more than that on a device that's intended to be "smart", which to me means it's not supposed to be limited to the functionality it has when it arrives in the box.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[bashibazouk]

I get it with the mobile version but the desktop OSX? Really? The same desktop OSX that recently gained UNIX certification with all that entails?

Me thinks you are being just a bit melodramatic...

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[trapnest]

They're not doing that with OS X, lol

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is going to stop you creating/using a tether on your iPad/iPhone. It may invalidate your warranty though.

It is a bit like complaining that Tesco won't allow you to boil fish in the kettle you got off them.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same reason why most people - rich enough - still continue to buy phones that are limited in features, or locked-down smartphones.

They don't care, they don't bother, they just want something that works. And is (hopefully) easy to use.

Or they go for the 2-year contract for a cheaper price - and they don't care if it's not extensible - they're locked to the contract for 2 years anyway.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Tromad]

It's actually kind of genius for them if they do. A central app repository like linux but monetized and polished for OSX. And like Steam they get a cut of every OSX app sale.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[indiechild]

I'm not trying to troll you or anything here, but in what ways was the Apple II so open that the current Macs aren't? And just to be clear, we're talking about computers, not the "appliances" like iPods or iPhones.

Steve Jobs is an industrial design geek. He sees the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad as appliances, not full-blown computers, so to him they don't need to be open and hackable. In fact, to Jobs, as appliances it's desirable to limit them and lock them down -- it's less likely to confuse novice users and they can't break things as easily. Despite what some foolish pundits say, Macintosh computers aren't going to be locked down in the same way. But what we will see in the future is more and more "appliances" being sold, which will supplant traditional computers. Eventually, only the hardcore geeks and tinkerers will be using "computers" as we know them.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Apple have MacPorts if you want a UNIX type SPM. I'd love a desktop SPM like the App Store, however it will need to be more open, perhaps allowing other repositories to hook in to it too.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Vectormatic]

just nitpicking, but you do know you can choose which "random icons" are on the home screen right? even the bar on the bottom is completely configurable in that respect.

As for returning it after 36 hours, sure, but if your wife has one, then why oh why didnt you mess around with that for a while? My girlfriend has a 3GS, and i messed around with it enough to decide to get an ipod touch for myself (basically an iphone minus the phone bit), and i love it.

Not to say the iphone is the jesusPhone some people make it out to be, but it seems like you went about trying one half-arsed and arse-backwards at the same time..

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[delinear]

100% sense. What I see time and again on these threads is some guy/girl saying "Hey, I don't need to do x, if you need to do x, buy a different device". What they don't think about is the point where they suddenly do need to do x (or some equivalent), but there's no option, and they've already bought into the product.. At that point, by their logic, there's no logic in asking Apple to implement x when they can just replace all their hardware and software and completely change their way of working to accommodate that. I've yet to see any of them effectively answer the question about burying the option in some hidden menu to at least give users the choice. Like most people they think about their own needs first, so long as $CORPORATION meets their needs they're happy to carry on blinkered without wondering what else the product could do.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[delinear]

Nothing is going to stop you creating/using a tether on your iPad/iPhone. It may invalidate your warranty though.

It is a bit like complaining that Tesco won't allow you to boil fish in the kettle you got off them.

Nice attempt at a strawman, but for the analogy to be fair it would have to be a world where the majority of other kettles Tesco sell already allow/support you boiling fish, and then Tesco claim that it's not practical to boil fish in kettles, even though everyone's already doing it. And then you find out that the exact same kettle bought from Sainsbury's or Asda allows fish boiling out of the box.

Your analogy completely ignores the fact that everyone else is already doing tethering, and that even the iPhone does tethering with other devices.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[FuckTheModerators]

A couple more "can'ts" that are the reasons I've got a Blackberry for a work phone when we had the option to get iPhones:

1. No ability to change the New Mail notification sound without jailbreaking.
2. No ability to set up alerting rules for email. If one of my servers goes down at 3 am, I need to be woken up to fix it. If Dell sends me spam, I don't. Yeah, there are apps, but they involved, at least a couple months ago, forwarding your email to an outside server and then having it come back into the app. That won't fly for business.
3. Zero support for importance flags in email. Maybe this is an MS-only, non-RFC thing. I'm not sure. But if business adoption is desired this is a pretty widespread piece of functionality to ignore.

If I'm wrong and there's some buried functionality to do this (without jailbreaking/warranty voiding) that Slashdot will flame me for not finding, great. You'll have made the IT dept of a smallish company very happy.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Yunzil]

But what's wrong with giving people options?

Because people, broadly speaking, don't want options. They want their stuff to work. You don't like the iPhone because you're not in Apple's target market.

As soon as you start adding options, the complexity of the system goes up. The time it takes to make sure all the options work together correctly goes up exponentially. The chances for bugs and obscure problems rises. And while it might make a small percentage of people such as yourself happier, the people Apple are selling to (for example: your wife) don't want to make any choices and wouldn't use them even if they were available.

My first computer was an Apple II, and I loved it precisely because it was so open. This is a different Apple these days

The difference is, the Apple II days were a long time ago. A large percentage of people who bought one were computer geeks who wanted to take the cover off and poke at the wires. These days, not so much.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[david_thornley]

The problem with your argument is that options are expensive. Suppose the iPhone had a general multitasking option. It would cost Apple to develop it and support it properly. They'd have to come up with a new interface and make sure it worked well. They'd have to make sure all their stuff worked properly under more different conditions. Developers would have to make sure their apps worked nicely together, and how they did with a CPU and memory hog in the background. Some people would find ways to crash their system or drain their battery fast, and Apple Support would have to be able to deal with that. If you develop software, you may notice that it's easy to put options into a program if they don't have to be smooth and if you can always hack them a little, but adding additional features to shrinkwrap software is expensive.

The question is whether having the option would be worth the cost, and reasonable people can differ on that. Fortunately, there are multiple phones on the market. People who really want to keep their options open can buy an Android phone or something like that, and people who don't care that much about it on their phone can buy an iPhone. Having options is a feature of a phone, and isn't free.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your wife sounds hot.

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[llamafirst]

But what's wrong with giving people options?

See the book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz (Author)

Of course...

[wampus]

Steve must produce additional sizes of iPod Touch before they can join to form iVoltron.

Re:Of course...

[gad_zuki!]

I often fantasize about Jobs and his cult of Apple piloting the blue robot.

Didn't he say this..

[zoid.com]

I'm pretty sure he said this two days ago. Yep... here it is:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361029,00.asp

2 days ago...

I used to come here to get the lates tech news.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[zoid.com]

Oh, and BTW: I bet it will tether to my G1.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[errgh]

depends if it connects to adhoc networks or not. if it does connect to ad hoc networks then IT WILL tether to iphones (jailbroken ones only in the US) and other mobiles.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[peregrinebebop]

The Palm Pre out of the box can create a hotspot that the iPad will certainly connect too. I'd bet you can get an Android app that will do it for you on the G1.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[Anonymous Coward]

> I used to come here to get the lates tech news.

Then you came here for the wrong reason. Slashdot is for discussion.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[Kirijini]

I used to come here to get the lates tech news.

Yeah, okay, grandpa. Did you have to trudge uphill through the snow to get here too?

I bet you liked it then.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago it did seem to keep more current with news, though. Nowadays it seems to be largely about what was on other tech sites the week before.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[Anonymous Coward]

No way to tell right now. Jobs may be saying that the ipad won't tether because they want to sell more of the 3g version OR it's because the ipad actually has a technical limitation. Yes I think everyone is aware of how smartphones these days will share their connection over wifi, my iPhone does it too but it's jailbroken. The problem is if the ipad is setup to only connect via access point rather than adhoc network which is how 99% of phones share their data connection.

That's the question that can only be answered by reviewers or by waiting until the thing is released.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't come here, it's that simple. Of course, you still will.

Re:Didn't he say this..

[JourneymanMereel]

Oh, and BTW: I bet it will tether to my G1.

And to my Palm Pre
http://www.precentral.net/dear-steve-jobs-tethering-ipad-easy-palm-pre-plus

Re:Didn't he say this..

[JourneymanMereel]

The Pre, using MyTether on Sprint (a $15 "donation") and presumably the Mobile Hotspot app on Verizon (additional monthly fee applies) create a Wifi Access point and then shares the EVDO connection with any device that connects to it. No adhoc support required.

It's getting ridiculous

[linumax]

I'm expected to pay the service provider 30$ for home Internet, 30$ for phone and now 30$ for tablet?! Very soon our cars will be connected devices and not long after that glasses, watches, etc. Are we supposed to keep paying up per device? It's highly unreasonable, specially since most people don't use two devices at the same time.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[zoid.com]

It's easy, don't buy it.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[NiteRiderXP]

Well eventually it will probably be narrowed down to two pipes.
You will have a fixed wired connection and a wireless connection, two simply due to bandwidth differences.
You will probably carry something like a MiFi that intelligently acts as a gateway for all of your gadgets.
That's the hope anyway...

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[jgreco]

It's all about that growth number. As cell phone penetration is slowly reaching the saturation point, the choices for pushing growth are decreasing.

Since the number of potential subscribers in the country is growing fairly slowly, and since corporations cannot (yet?) manufacture new consumers on a production line, the only real option is to find a way to increase the revenue per subscriber.

That used to mean selling minutes. Then it was texting. Then data. Then additional wireless devices. There always has to be a new gimmick, and of course many people will pay up.

The problem is that eventually the charges become outrageous and people stop buying. Growth will hit this wall eventually.

I don't see it as viable to pay for a $60 data plan for the laptop, a $30 data plan for the iPhone, and then another $30 for iPad. As you say, most people don't use two devices at the same time, and in fact the availability of more devices tends to mean each individual device gets used somewhat less than it would otherwise.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop buying apple products.

Problem solved. (mostly)

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

*Very soon our cars will be connected devices*

Umm, yeah. See OnStar and XM radio.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Animats]

Very soon our cars will be connected devices

Very soon? More like since 2005 or so. OnStar is $19 to $30 per month. It's tied in to the vehicle's systems: "We automatically run hundreds of diagnostic and maintenance checks on your vehicle's key operating systems and deliver a summary report right to your inbox every month." And, of course, they can stop your car remotely.

With the Chevy Volt, OnStar will allow remote phone access to some car functions.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[QuoteMstr]

It's easy, don't buy it.

Err, so anything that people do buy, by definition, is good? I don't think so. Try joining the real world.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Totenglocke]

30$? I'm assuming that you've never even traveled to the US then........

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[linumax]

I'm afraid that's not a solution, not even a workaround. It'a "borrow two more legs and run away" plan doomed to fail. If you read my comment carefully, I didn't say iPhone or iPad or iCar. I said phone, tablet, car, etc because it's a growing trend even outside of Apple's world. Should I give up on all the useful new tech because they are not absolute life necessities?

I've been tethering on my iPhone long before my carrier allowed it, that's not the case for 99% of the market and since more providers are adopting this scheme/scam I'm having more and more trouble keeping up. That's why I said it's getting ridiculous.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[nategasser]

You use electricity in your vacuum cleaner, your blender, and your hair dryer, and you pay for each, even though you don't use them at the same time. Nobody complains about that.

The difference is the unlimited plans. If consumers would consent to paying straight metered rates for bandwidth, like we do for electricity and gas/oil, we could be free of all these stupid packages and deals and calling circles and contracts.

Cell phone service and broadband internet are commodity utilities, yet they're marketed as "lifestyle" services -- which means, expensive advertising that appeals to emotions.

I hope that, before every device in our lives gets connected, that bandwidth becomes as boring and predictable as electricity or heating oil.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont agree.its not easy, we buy it. ..................
adamsjacson
thanks

DrywallCompany

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[badasscat]

Are we supposed to keep paying up per device? It's highly unreasonable, specially since most people don't use two devices at the same time.

We're going through the same thing right now with wireless telcos that we did with ISP's about 10-15 years ago. Some people probably don't remember it, others may have actually been too young to really know about it, but there was a time when the cable and phone companies considered having a router on their service as a terms of use violation. They would cut you off if they discovered it. People would actually hide their routers whenever they'd have to make a service call (I remember doing this!). They charged for internet use per connection, so to them using a router was "theft" because you could use one router for many different computers.

Of course, today that sounds ridiculous, and ISP's even give away wireless routers. Verizon's standard DSL and FiOS modems are wireless routers.

So hopefully in 10 years (or less), we'll be at that same point with the wireless telcos, where they realize they'll actually get more business by simplifying and letting people do what they want with their connections. And they actually will sell their service per household or subscriber, and not per device connection.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[LynnwoodRooster]

Maybe not good, but good enough to warrant spending the money...

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[commodoresloat]

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[cbope]

Technically, the devices mentioned are gateways, not routers. A router by strict definition does not contain a modem, nor does it provide NAT or port address mapping. A router simply routes or forwards packets from one subnet to another based on a set of rules.

I'm feeling pedantic today.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the advice! I won't then.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[chazzf]

All too well, all too well. I had a home-built gateway/firewall running Slackware which I kept under my desk. As far as Charter was concerned *that* was the computer connected to the Internet. What a joke.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[MistrBlank]

Agree. I'm buying an iPad and I don't see the point in paying a premium for a service I barely use on my iPhone.

Any time I'm on the web on my iPhone I'm usually using a wifi that's free and usually faster than 3G.

Can we please start talking about features the average user would really want like network and bluetooth syncing and local network media streaming?

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[MistrBlank]

Most ISPs actually still believe you should only have one device connected to the connection. It's just hard to enforce it though by kicking everyone off of their network and still maintain profitability.

I checked my agreement a few months ago and it still has parts of that policy in it that refer to a single device.

I think these days they have pulled back so that the reality is such that you're not trying to connect multiple modems to their services. Technically your modem is a computer, as would be your router.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[butlerm]

As I am sure you are aware, there is hardly a DSL "modem" on the planet that isn't actually a router. Calling it a "modem" is a marketing gimmick.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, the PHONE company (the only one at the time!) used to do this, back in the day... If a phone tech came to your house and saw that you had spliced in a second phone- not a second line, mind you, another phone on the SAME line- you'd have to hope he wouldn't tell on you. Most techs were cool about it, though; bribes were not usually not needed. Usually.

Now get off my lawn...

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Kielistic]

The problem all of us have with that is, as Slashdot is a perfect example, even self proclaimed intelligent people are complete idiots. Unfriendly tactics like these make metric butt-loads of cash and before long there are no other options because the strategy "Maybe not good, but good enough to warrant [people] spending the money..."

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[earlymon]

Then you also remember how, after the breakup, with the popularity of things like 1200 baud modems you had to contact the phone company and let them know that you had another device on your line? They didn't charge you for it, but initially they could and sometimes would discontinue service for the "unknown" additional device on their circuit.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

But here the issue is tethering, not metering. When I pay for a connection I just want to be charged for the *ability* to send and receive packets. Where I terminate the packets I receive, and where the ones I send are generated, should not be any of the ISP's business, metered service or not. I'm not even offered a choice to switch to metered service to get that unfettered ability so your point is moot.

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't pay $20+/month for the vacuum's electricity, $20+/month for the toaster's electricity, etc. We do for 3G wireless devices. Tethering is a sensible way to manage data use, the only reason for not allowing tethering is to make more money by selling loads of minimum plans, which are more profitable than one maximum plan. However, as Apple never comment on products before release, I reckon the claim is "unconfirmed" if not "totally bogus."

Now I feel stupid...

[zoid.com]

He said it 3 days ago..

do what you want with an apple product?

[Reed Solomon]

good heavens! That's crazy talk.

Another reason not to buy an Ipad

[thinktech]

Just another in a long and growing list of reasons not to buy a larger Iphone screen with less functionality than your phone and not even close to the functionality of a laptop, but more expensive.

Re:When they came for the ...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they came for the people who misappropriated Niemoeller for stupid shit they suddenly realized they were going to a much larger lake of flaming brimstone than they had originally thought necessary.

Forged Headers?

[NiteRiderXP]

This is Slashdot, wake up people.
How hard is it to forge headers, it's not like his email was signed with a cert?
Maybe I should send a story in with fake headers and see if it gets posted...

Re:Forged Headers?

[phantomfive]

Yeah, but why? It's not like anyone would be offended if he had a secretary answer his emails, there is no reason to forge them. And if he did sign it with a cert, he could have just as easily given the cert to the secretary.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Sir_Lewk]

The point is we have no reason to believe those emails came from jobs, anyone representing jobs, or even anyone sharing a point of view with jobs. It could have been some 12 year old eating cheetos and hotpockets while trolling mac forums in his mother's basement using a 15 year old PC running netbsd.

Is that likely? Probably not, but acting like headers tell you anything is idiotic.

Re:Forged Headers?

[yuhong]

it's not like his email was signed with a cert?

Yea, I was thinking that CEOs like Steve Jobs and other famous people should sign their emails and USENET postings with a cert or a PGP signature, so that the authenticity of their emails can be verified. Anyone know of any CEOs or other famous people that does that?

Re:Forged Headers?

[yuhong]

And login using their account if possible (OpenID should help a lot) when commenting on blogs and forums, too, for the same reason.

Re:Forged Headers?

[amRadioHed]

Faking email headers is trivial. Getting Steve Jobs personal email so that you can fake a reply is slightly harder.

Re:Forged Headers?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Had it been the real Steve Jobs, he would have bricked the iPhone of the guy who asked the question, just to remind him whose house they are in....

Re:Forged Headers?

[Mistlefoot]

Not to mention, to ask Steve Jobs a question via his direct email address and then get a reply means either:

1) someone is hacking Steve Jobs incoming email and read the question and replied
2) someone guessed that Steve Jobs was asked this questions and then coincidentally spoofed an answer to person they correctly guessed asked it
3) Steve Jobs replied.

number 1 is big news - Steve Jobs email is not secure!!!!
number 2 is conspiracy theory material
number 3 confirms what Steve Jobs said in a pcmag article 2 days ago and seems the logically obvious choice.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Sir_Lewk]

4) someone faked the entire exchange so they could get links to their website spread around the internet.
5) any number of other possibilities, limited only by your imagination.

We don't know what happened because email headers do not provide authentication.

number 1 is big news - Steve Jobs email is not secure!!!!

Newsflash, if you are not using GPG/PGP, which apparently Steve Jobs is not, then your email most certainly is not secure. This is only big news to anyone that doesn't know how email works.

Now personally, I'm going to go with "Steve Jobs actually said this", mainly because it sounds dickish enough to be something he'd actually say, but this is a completely seperate issue.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Sir_Lewk]

If nobody knows Steve Job's email, then how can we confirm that the headers indicate it was sent by him?

Re:Forged Headers?

[toastar]

Not to mention, to ask Steve Jobs a question via his direct email address and then get a reply means either:

1) someone is hacking Steve Jobs incoming email and read the question and replied
2) someone guessed that Steve Jobs was asked this questions and then coincidentally spoofed an answer to person they correctly guessed asked it
3) Steve Jobs replied.

number 1 is big news - Steve Jobs email is not secure!!!!
number 2 is conspiracy theory material
number 3 confirms what Steve Jobs said in a pcmag article 2 days ago and seems the logically obvious choice.

What is this? Logic? I'll have none of it Sir!

Re:Forged Headers?

[dangitman]

number 3 confirms what Steve Jobs said in a pcmag article 2 days ago and seems the logically obvious choice.

The pcmag article cites the very same dubious Swedish source we are discussing here. It's bizarre that you would use that as independent confirmation, as it's just repeating the same thing. Shoddy journalism.

Re:Forged Headers?

[BUL2294]

1) someone is hacking Steve Jobs incoming email and read the question and replied

[sarcasm] That's totally impossible when using OSX. [/sarcasm]

Re:Forged Headers?

[badasscat]

If nobody knows Steve Job's email, then how can we confirm that the headers indicate it was sent by him?

We "know" nothing, however as others have said, Occam's razor basically applies here - all the other explanations are more convoluted and require more jumps in logic.

I don't see why it's hard to believe that Steve Jobs would reply to a question like this with a "No." For one thing, it sounds like him. For another thing, I doubt he'd see it as big news that there'd be no tethering. It's not like they're planning to have some big announcement at MacWorld or something that the iPad and iPhone won't tether. Oh no! Steve Jobs just spoiled his next "oh, one more thing!" No tethering!

Also, this story has actually been around for a couple of days now and nobody from Apple has denied it.

Lastly, I just want to say that email addresses are funny. Most celebrities and public figures have email addresses that would be the first thing you'd guess. I can't remember what the exact address in question here is but when I first saw the story elsewhere, I wasn't surprised that it was something like steve.jobs@apple.com. The reason people think "nobody knows" these addresses is simply that random emails from outsiders usually get ignored, and also because most people think the most obvious address would *never* actually be real. But even most celebrities, in my experience, don't really care *that* much about keeping their email address private, especially because they all have other, *actually* private email addresses that they use for important stuff, like chatting with friends or family. The professional email address just has a bunch of filters that separate all the random stuff out into junk folders.

I actually get to work with a lot of celebrities for my work, and the first few times somebody handed me their card with an address like "alec.baldwin@gmail.com" on it (that's not real - though it may be! - but just an example), I was really surprised. But now I realize how common it is.

I have no idea why Jobs would respond to this one email, but maybe he was just searching through his junk mail box and it piqued his interest for some reason.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs has replied to personal emails for a long time. At one point, years ago, there were discussions about not abusing this "feature" of Apple for silly complaints. Every time people seem to come out and doubt it's actually him, but it is (or an assistant I suppose in some cases).

I've been surprised how many celebrities in the tech word actually reply to personal emails. I emailed Joel Spolsky about hating calculus and being unsure of compsci back in the day and he replied with a really nice email a week later.

Jobs replying to someone's email isn't the news, the content might be though.

Here's a few recent publicly reposted replies from Jobs:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/20/steve_jobs_e_mails_terse_response_to_upset_apple_developer.html

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/03/30/steve-jobs-sends-pointed-email-to-macbook-pro-owner-poor-customer-service/

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=413104

http://macsoda.com/2008/08/30/wow-steve-actually-replied-to-me/

Re:Forged Headers?

[Caetel]

I'm not arguing for any particular theory but you do know the PC Mag article uses the same source for the article linked in the summary, right?

Re:Forged Headers?

[A Nun Must Cow Herd]

0) they've set up the email account to be answered by a team of people, giving customers that 'I got an email from Steve Jobs!!!111!' feeling.

Re:Forged Headers?

[yabos]

Actually, lots of people know Steve's email address and it's not that hard to find. He does actually reply to some emails, and if you have a problem with your Apple device that isn't getting resolved, emailing him directly usually gets you a good result if you have a legitimate problem. This one could have easily been faked since all you have to do is find previous emails he's replied to and copy the headers.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm certain it was not someone eating hot pockets. They would have responded with:

"You no hungry for tethering..."

Re:Forged Headers?

[Sir_Lewk]

I don't see why it's hard to believe that Steve Jobs would reply to a question like this with a "No." For one thing, it sounds like him.

I completely agree, the only thing I'm annoyed with is people thinking the phrase "According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone." means anything.

Re:Forged Headers?

[bwalling]

to ask Steve Jobs a question via his direct email address and then get a reply means either:

Why are you assuming that this person sent the email and received a response? Isn't the far simpler answer that this person faked the entire exchange?

Re:Forged Headers?

[moonbender]

4) He told one of his colleagues "Hey, guess what, I sent a mail to Steve Jobs" and that colleague decided to prank him by forging a reply.

Re:Forged Headers?

[e2d2]

Do you know Steve Job's personal email address? Neither does this guy. So it's unverifiable correct?

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or:

4) Someone made up both the question and the answer.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

ya srsly. nobody ran netbsd 15 years ago.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, to ask Steve Jobs a question via his direct email address and then get a reply means either:

1) someone is hacking Steve Jobs incoming email and read the question and replied
2) someone guessed that Steve Jobs was asked this questions and then coincidentally spoofed an answer to person they correctly guessed asked it
3) Steve Jobs replied.

number 1 is big news - Steve Jobs email is not secure!!!!
number 2 is conspiracy theory material
number 3 confirms what Steve Jobs said in a pcmag article 2 days ago and seems the logically obvious choice.

Nice use of Occam's Cup of STFU.

Re:Forged Headers?

[amRadioHed]

sjobs@apple.com, steve@apple.com and sj@pixar.com are all reported to work. It's no secret.

Re:Forged Headers?

[nine-times]

Also, Jobs is known to occasionally reply to email sent to his personal address. It's not extraordinarily common, but it happens.

Re:Forged Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

or... This was faked and posted by Slashat.se to get their name out there and drive traffic to their site!

But I'm sure that's not what happened. :-\

"Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Job"

[myocardialinfarction]

He won't have been able to get it, since God is testing his faith.

yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[Ruvim]

Starting with the name, following with the luck of functionality, awkward ports and now that... Am I the only one who thinks that this paticular Apple product is going the way of Newtons?

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[ducomputergeek]

I'm not so sure, because this is exactly the type of device we've been looking for to give to our sales reps. We have a web-app product we like to demo to people. Potential customers usually don't like playing with the app when it's on a sales rep laptop or netbook. Many of the people I think have a fear of using somebody elses computer and they'll "screw something up". Plus it costs us $60 per month per sales rep for the wireless cards. We tried using iPod Touches/iPhones for demos, but the screens are too small.

These devices seem to be perfect. Its a lot easier and I'm going to say less intimidating for reps to carry into demos, especially initial calls, and $30 per month is cheaper than $60 per month.

People often have a fear of computers. We noticed that when we handed over an iPod Touch with the demo, people were more willing to pick it up and play around with it. It was perfect for demoing the Mobile version of the application, but horrible to show the full browser version.

I think it will play well out in the general market. You just have to realize that the general market is not the slashdot crowd.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[EastCoastSurfer]

I keep wondering the same thing, but you can't ignore the Apple marketing machine and the people who love all their shiny toys (even I enjoy my MBP and iPhone). The problem is if someone already has an iPhone and a MB/MBP I don't see what the iPad brings to the equation. I guess it could simply take the e-reader market?

I've read a lot of people saying that the iPad will replace their laptop of some sort. That might work if they only consume content, but even my non-techie friends seem to do a lot of typing on IM, email, FB, etc.. and the iPad seems horrible for any sort of typing (and awkward when typing then touching the screen and typing again). I'm sure someone will point me to the keyboard accessory, but if you're going to carry around an iPad and the attachable keyboard why not just get a proper laptop to begin with?

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[Al Dimond]

A couple other people have pointed out niche business uses for the iPad. The general market may not be the /. crowd, but it's not your niche, either.

And if the iPad browser doesn't support your web app just the way you want it you can't install a browser that does. Which kinda sucks. Apple's control over the device, to me, makes it poorly suited to any business use.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thinks that this paticular Apple product is going the way of Newtons [wikipedia.org]?

If you mean a product that launches a whole new paradigm of computing devices, then yes.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[ducomputergeek]

My general experience is that if you stick to the specs, web-apps work pretty well the same way in Safari, FF, Opera, and Chrome. Until Apple turns Webkit into IE, then it's time to look at other platforms. But as I said in the OP, the full browser app renders perfectly on the iPhone/Touch but the screen is too small to make an effective demo.

But Apple's control makes it relatively easy to work with in a small shop. Why? We know exactly what the rules are and have a much smaller number of variations to do QA against. If it works on one iPad, it's going to work on them all. It makes it easy to offer our clients a written guarantee of "This will work with the X version of the iWhatever". To contrast that to Android, we're currently charging clients double the amount for the same guarantee because with Android we have to spend a lot more money on acquiring hardware and QA testing.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[knarf]

There have been tablet PC's on the market for more than 20 years now. Is there any reason why those can not be used by your salesfolk to show the app to potential customers? Why does it take an Apple-branded tablet to make this concept viable? Existing tablet PC's give you all the freedom in the world to set them up just right for your demonstrations. They can be tethered as well so - assuming that the salesperson has a non-Apple branded 3G phone - there would not even be a need for that extra wireless card...

Why does that Apple on the back of the device suddenly make it a viable choice? This does not seem rational, especially given the restrictions which Apple-branded mobile products are know for and which started this whole thread in the first place.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[jimicus]

If you still have a web app which doesn't display well in most HTML rendering engines, you should be shot. Any organisation which is still stuck on IE6 is unlikely to be forward-thinking enough to care about the iPad anyway.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[e4g4]

Tablet PCs are just that, PCs - they still have start menus, and "feel" like a PC, in spite of their slightly different form factor. The iPad, at first blush, bears no resemblance to a PC, and as such is undoubtedly less intimidating to those who fear using someone else's machine. Say what you will about lack of functionality - but a computer designed to operate more like an appliance will, without a shadow of a doubt, be more inviting to an unsophisticated user than one that operates like a "PC". As long as said unsophisticated user believes that they can break it (which they will, when it's a Windows box (or even just windows-like), because they undoubtedly have "broken" other machines running windows before), then they will always approach it with trepidation.

This does not seem rational

It isn't, nor should you expect it to be - the GP mentioned that people had an irrational, emotional reluctance to using someone else's netbook to play with a demo app; the rational answer is to present the demo app to the user on a device that does not engender this response, is it not?

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You just have to realize that the general market is not the slashdot crowd.

Next you'll be telling us that we have to start reading the articles.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[MistrBlank]

That's because their browser supports a standard, which is what you should develop for instead of a specific browser.

This is 90% likely to be FUD...

[MrCrassic]

...because it will most likely get hacked just like the Kindle and iPhone were. Unless by some miracle the iPad becomes un-'jailbreakable.'

Re:This is 90% likely to be FUD...

[ThePengwin]

That could actually be plausable.

Look at the 3GS. it has a tethered jailbreak, and cant be restarted without being connected to a computer running the jailbreak software.

I think they would be doing something along those lines.

Not just 'No' ...

[PPH]

... but iNo!

Ouch.

[Chonnawonga]

At the risk of being moderated "Troll"...

What a jerk.

Tosh.0

[BUL2294]

The more I read about the iPad's failings, the more I'd love to do this to a (free) one...

"We never even turned it on!"

Apple flipping the bird to users?!

[SlappyBastard]

I'm outraged. Absolutely outraged. This is unprecedented. Unheard of.

It's a shame

[toastliscio]

It's a shame that in the 21st century you buy a device like that and then you have to ask permission to the company that made it for doing something obvious. The iPad can do that, but they prevent you from doing it via software, just because if you want to do something like that, they want you to spend even more money on another of their devices. So actually they don't make money on what they give you, but on what they take away from you. The EU has much more articulated antitrust laws than US (see MS Windows browser case), let's hope they'll do something, sooner or later. BTW, I'm a Linux and GNU and FLOSS supporter, so from my point of view Microsoft is nothing more than a company that tries to do its business, but before MS came along all kinds of computers where closed like Apples. Microsoft opened up the market and spurred strong competition between hardware producers so that now we have better tecnology at lower prices, now with Apple we can see again what the closed world was like. Will the apple hype ever deflate in front of such things?

Email Headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone.

Perhaps his reply gave it away:

No.

Sent from my iPhone

Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes, the good old days. News flash -- they're GONE.
Now even the USA's crappy GSM carriers are trying to control which GSM devices
you can use your GSM service plan with by creating some artificial 'incompatibility' (i.e. bullshit deceptive marketing assertion) between their
plan X and device Y. If you have a shiny enough GSM device, or even just anything
that ISN'T purchased through your carrier directly in association with your specific service plan, expect them to either block your data service or forcibly
switch you to a "compatible" (read: two to four times the cost for the same technical service) data plan. You're screwed if you try to use a netbook, laptop, USB GSM modem, PCMCIA / Expresscard data modem, "smartphone" (whatever that is these days .. apparently even the dumb ones run an OS and have ARM11 CPUs and internet and JAVA). Or if you "tether". Then you're treated as a prime mark for extortion and they'll try to charge you $30, $40, $60, $+++ / month just to use your existing service with the sim in or connection to one of those devices.

IMHO that seems to violate the Carterphone regulatory precedents, as well as the USA's anti-trust "tying" laws about trying to sell X service plan only with X carrier branded / approved model devices, even if other brand devices are FCC approved for use with that carrier in the USA, i.e. there's no technical or regulatory / legal incompatibility causing them reason to deny or restrict service.

Lawyer, anyone???

Tmobile even has an "android data plan". Yes, who'd have guessed it. If you happen to be running an open source OS on your phone, you get to pay 3x the amount you'd pay for THE EXACT SAME SERVICE if your phone ran Symbian. Sounds a lot like anti-competitive / unfair discrimination to me.

It would be the same as having your ISP try to charge you 4x the prices if you have a Mac, and 6x the prices if you run LINUX as if your PC has the ISP branded version of Windows XP installed. Why would we STAND for this in this day and age DECADES after this kind of anti-trust BS got AT&T broken up, carterphone, etc.???

iPad limitation?

[Grizzley9]

Cant you just turn your JB'd iPhone into a WiFi hotspot using one of the many apps out there?
Connect iPad to iPhone wifi network,
done.

Re:iPad limitation?

[Totenglocke]

Well you can do that, but the easier way is that the iPad will do bluetooth tethering and a jailbroken iPhone can also do bluetooth tethering.

Why so much Apple hate?

[Trolan]

So we have a simple question: Can I tether an iPad to the iPhone? Let's break this down.

Within US:
Non-issue, you can't tether anything to your iPhone. Who's fault? AT&T.

Outside US:
If you've got a provider which permits tethering of devices to your iPhone, you can start to have a case to be miffed at Apple. However... iPhone tethering is available over USB (isn't one on the iPad), and BlueTooth. While you can tether your devices to your iPhone over BT, you've never been able to do it the other way. So why are people surprised that the iPad is the same?

Re:Why so much Apple hate?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Logic ? Don't bother, it's the daily Two Minutes Apple Hate.

There's an app for that...

[spmkk]

http://www.rockyourphone.com/index.php/mywi.html

Handy little utility to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot so you can tether any wi-fi enabled device, including the iPad.

(Disclaimer: I haven't used it personally, but it comes highly recommended.)

Re:There's an app for that...

[grub]

I was going to mention MyWi but you beat me to it, so I'll second it.
MyWi is a great app.

Re:There's an app for that...

[ekhben]

I did try it. Locked up my phone good -- it needed to be restored through iTunes. So now it's 3.1.3 and not jailbroken. I'm not too keen to try again.

MyWi on Jailbroken iPhones

[EmotionToilet]

I haven't had a reason to jailbreak my own iPhone, but I understand there's a tethering app on Cydia called MyWi that creates a wifi hotspot from your iPhone and routs traffic through the 3G connection. The iPad could just connect to the iPhone this way and it would treat it as a normal wireless network. The app looks super easy to use. I imagine this would be the simplest way to tether the iPad to the iPhone.

Steve Jobs was my homeboy

[trouser]

I was hanging out at Steve's place the other day, he used to jokingly call it his iPad but after the announcement of the new tablet he got a letter from Apple's legal team, now he calls it the iHouse. I told him that was pretty lame but he says what the hell would I know anyway.

We had a few beers, ordered pizza, watched some sport on TV, we we're going to play some games but his XBox 360 is in for repair and there aren't any games for the Mac so instead we got to talking about the new tablet. He says, you gonna buy one? And I'm like can I tether it to my iPhone? And he's like hell no. So I punched him in the face as hard as I could and went home to play some serious PC games and shit.

not news

[Tom]

and this is news, why? Anyone who is surprised by that has been living under a rock and only heard about this "iPad" thing yesterday night after at least five beers. Even the guy who asked the question didn't really expect a different answer.

Do you own a cell phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The tethering restrictions are with all likelihood the discretion of AT&T, not Apple.

more evidence of the big overlord

[Anonymous Coward]

I am forever surprised at how many people buy into apples proprietary world of goodies and control. As someone that has been in the business for a very long time I really wonder why people have not learnt their lessons from the past.. In the 80's and before we had so many proprietary platform providers.. now we really only have one major platform (i386/x64) and several niche platforms (RISC etc) but even the big boys in RISC now have standard parts and interconnects for a large number of their bits.. yet apple still force people down the proprietary lock in controlled group.. If a government tried to do what apple does it would not be accepted by most.. seems people forget that these evil empires control a much larger portion of many people's day to day life than the .gov's.

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[Homburg]

If you happen to be running an open source OS on your phone, you get to pay 3x the amount you'd pay for THE EXACT SAME SERVICE if your phone ran Symbian.

I don't think that's true. If you buy an Android phone, they force you to buy an unlimited text and data package; but this costs the same as adding unlimited text and data to any of their regular packages. And, if you bring your own Android phone, TMobile isn't going to know, or care, about it: they'll charge you the same for data access as they would charge anyone else.

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[Khyber]

"If you buy an Android phone, they force you to buy an unlimited text and data package"

If what you say is true - THAT is illegal. You may not tie a service to a device as a requirement and force them to pay extra for it.

No Tethering on dA iPhone

[mysidia]

The great and powerful Jobs has spoken!

Go away and come back next year.

Next year? Oh? But I want my tethering now. Can we at least tether the iPad to the iPhone?

Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Jobs! I said, 'Come back next year.'

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain....the...Great......Jobs has spoken.

It's done all the time...

[BUL2294]

Think about it... Panasonic makes multiple models of plasma TVs. Within a product line (i.e. models that end in "8" vs. "80" vs. "800"), the ONLY difference is what's enabled in the firmware, the $5 embedded speakers, and maybe the plasma panel--the chipset is identical. As consumers, we put up with that and accept that the "8" model is $1000 cheaper than the "800" model...

Re:It's done all the time...

[toastliscio]

What you say is true, but there is a difference between putting a not-so-powerful software into an embedded device's firmware and putting a powerful-but-pinioned software inside it. The former can be annoying but is understandable, because software R&D is expensive and has to be paid with the money earned from the product's sales. The latter is hardly jusitifiable from a consumer/free market point of view, because you artificially keep alive the high-end market by mutilating low-end products. That's also what caused criticism of Tivo and led to GPLv3. Most people, even inside the FLOSS community, see FSF and GPLv3 promoters as zealots/integralists/commies, but sooner or later everybody will see that it's just about free market: FSF was right, they just seen the problem years before most people will do.

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[trapnest]

It's not true. They offer and unlimted data + text package, but it's just one of many choices, and it costs the same as the two options separately. And they do offer an "android" data plan, but it costs the same as the "blackberry" data plan, and the "smartphone" data plan. Why they're separate I don't know, but they're the same price.

Anybody really wonder?

[garry_g]

a) Apple wants all its fan-boys and -girls to run out and get their WLAN iTampon once it's out ... then after the 3G version is released, they want the same people to go out and buy the new one (along with the version 2 that will be released a year from then as well as the "S" version that comes along a year later, which then contains half of the features hoped for or desired during the first releases)

b) seeing the revenue Apple is getting from mobile carriers for their exclusive contracts, of course they'll make sure to build the devices exactly the way the carriers want them, so you better make sure to pick up half a dozen mobile data cards for your phone, GPS, iTampon, mobile data stick etc. ... can't really expect the carriers to make a deficit due to the "unlimited data" transfer they already sold you on your phone, can you?

I reckon we won't see a Squid app for the iPhone on the app store any time soon...

FTFA

[commodoresloat]

Jobs's reply--"No. Sent from my iPhone"

The big news here is that even Steve Jobs himself can't figure out how to turn off that annoying sig line.

Re:FTFA

[Nesman64]

Would have been better as:

>No.
>Sent from my iPad

Not any phone.

[weston]

It's something that you can do with any cheapo netbook and any cheapo phone (not even smartphone).

While it's true that you can do it with a lot of phones (I've done it through two Nokia Series 40 phones), it's important to note that you CAN'T do it with any phone via bluetooth. And finding out which phones you can do it is even murkier since almost nobody labels their products with the specific bluetooth profiles a device supports. And most of the carriers seem interested in obfuscating or even crippling the DUN profile on hardware that has it.

Wish I knew what to do about the problem.

Re:Not any phone.

[shutdown -p now]

Well, my 3 year old Nokia (S40) can do it via Bluetooth, and so can any other S40 Nokia that I've seen.

Re:Not any phone.

[weston]

The Nokia 1006 I've got right now is an S40. No bluetooth DUN for me, tho'....

Re:Not any phone.

[mobby_6kl]

I did this with a SonyEricsson T68i. The phone EIGHT years old now. Sure, it's not completely obvious, but it's easy to check if the phone has the needed profile, which in my experience most modern bluetooth phones do.

The email is reprinted in the article

[commodoresloat]

They know it's real because of the signature -- "Sent from my iPhone."

The email from the Swedish bloggers is real too. It's all "Bork, Bork, Bork"....

'Tersely worded'

[FooRat]

I know Apple has a reputation for sometimes seeming a bit on the benevolent side, but I think they're making just a bit much of the "tone" being read into the message from its "terseness", and making too much of the message itself; I know a few people who run software companies and they're generally extremely busy people who deal with large volumes of e-mail and other queries continuously for years ... this leads to the habit, out of necessity, of cutting to the chase quickly and replying to things quickly and briefly. Add to that they "identified themselves as" a random Apple customer and not anyone particularly important, and it was just a short question, what did they expect? Also they didn't ask "officially, are you stating it will never support this" --- they just, having identified themselves as an 'Apple customer', asked "Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?", which any reasonable person would've concluded was a customer asking not "Will the wifi-only ..." but "Does the wifi-only ...".

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[lennier1]

The 5GB per month for my N900 set me back €20 and by the end of every month I can change the data plan to 1GB at €10 (in case there's not much 3G traffic to be expected) and back to 5GB by the end of another month or even completely cancel it.

But then again I bought the device separately and it runs a lot more than just glorified Java applets and certainly more than one application at the same time. I'll never understand why people even put up with those limitations.

Good news for everyone else

[obarthelemy]

almost all WinMob and Android phones can do wifi -> 3g routing, so your iPad will be able to tether without even realizing it's tethering. Bluetooth -> 3G and Bluetooth -> Wifi would prolly not work, though, if the iPad's BT stack is anything like the iPhone's.

I'd be leery of buying from a company with such a customer unfriendly attitude though. Their goal is clearly to sell more 3G upgrades, on which they take 90% margin.

No need to tether iPad, its 3G cheap as tethering

[gig]

Tethering is always at least $30 per month, and usually has a 5GB cap. The iPad has unlimited 3G for $30 per month. If you could tether iPad to iPhone for $30 a month that would just wear out your iPhone battery unnecessarily. If you want 3G in your iPad, it has a SIM slot and $30 per month unlimited. Solved. It's wireless tethering without the incredible battery drain of Bluetooth.

Also, this question is backwards. From a 3G perspective, the iPad is another iPhone. In iPhone OS, there is a simple tethering switch, a big ON/OFF slider that shares the device's 3G connection with the Mac/PC it is attached to via USB or Bluetooth. So the question should be, "can I tether my Mac/PC to my iPad?" We haven't heard about that yet.

And the other question should be, "WTF is wrong with AT&T that they still don't offer iPhone tethering? It's available everywhere else!"

Tether to the tether?

[chunkylimey]

So a device that, at a certain price, you can put a sim card into to connect it to the internet... and you want to bypass this by buying the cheaper one and tethering it to a phone (that costs more than the difference between the two versions of the device).... Firstly clearly no grasp of business and pricing structures. Secondly pathetic complaint. Thirdly DUH! Yeah it's over-priced, yeah it might be gimmicky, but since most of the critics are clearly dumber than the people fooled into buying one; it's probably looking at being a success.

Re:No need to tether iPad, its 3G cheap as tetheri

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that if you already paid for tethering for your phone (say for use with your PC) it would cost you nothing more to tether the iPad.

Or, just skip AT&T's network and get a VZN Mifi device and tether your iPhone, iPad, PC, and whatever else to a better network.

Jobs Says No Tethering iPad To iPhone!

[L4t3r4lu5]

L4t3r4lu5 says no buying of IPad and IPhone!

BTW, my winmob 6.5 device can emulate a wireless access point. I've had Linux and Windows clients use it, and I've had Linux and Windows clients share the data connection over USB. I've also had an iPod Touch use data over wireless, so no reason for the iPad not to either.

Chew on them apples you poloneck-wearing, goatee-sporting, Kool-Aid-drinking Apple apologists!

Just Tether from iPhone using Wi-fi instead of USB

[maitas]

With JaiBrake iPhones you can export the 3G data plan through Wi-Fi. Theres no way they can stop this.

US centric answer

[yabos]

In most other countries, you can tether your iPhone to your computer and you are just subject to whatever data cap you get with your plan. I have a 6GB plan with my iPhone for $30 CAD/month and all I have to do is plug my iPhone into the computer with tethering turned on and the computer(MBP w/ Snow Leopard) recognizes the internet connection.

AT&T also has a 5GB cap on their "unlimited" plan so they are not in danger of people doing hundreds of gigs per month over cellular. AT&T also just removed the restriction of streaming video over 3G with the Slingbox app and similar apps. Same thing with VOIP over 3G which is now allowed on AT&T.

Now as to why they won't allow tethering the iPad through the iPhone? I think it has more to do with the carriers view it as a separate mobile device since it has it's own 3G radio(if you get that version). They wouldn't allow tethering a cell phone through another cell phone, so that is probably the reason. Even though that's a BS reason since the iPad is more than just a 3G device, but that's my bet.

Think shareware/crippleware

[freaker_TuC]

• All those windows editions, mostly being the same build. Difference? Price. The software is virtually the same.
• DVD players and region control; same software - different region.
• Multiple expansion cards available with features enabled/disabled while the hardware is present.
• Firmware crippling and missing connectors while being essentially the same hardware. One port extra could mean doubling the cost towards the customer.

There is no law in Europe preventing this; only common sense and voting with your wallet.

oh noes..

[freaker_TuC]

.. another battery addict on the road!

We are using the electrons

[Anonymous Coward]

We are using the electrons on whatever we want. With the ISP we're not allowed to use the bits on whatever we want. THAT is why we don't complain on the former (if we weren't allowed to use a gang socket you'd hear us complain) but we do on the latter.

After all, a router cannot push more packets out at one time than the connection maxes out at. We can't use the same data packet for multiple computers.

With ISPs the packet is like the electrons of our electrical system.

And we're not told we can't use multiple devices on our electrical service but we ARE told we can't use multiple devices on our internet service.

Its got electrolytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

free configurable computers will be terrorists tools. People could suddenly start to question the given options and demand more. They should be happy with sorted and approved apps. Its for teh children! Its safe and its got electrolytes!

DKIM: signing headers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot, wake up people.
How hard is it to forge headers, it's not like his email was signed with a cert?
Maybe I should send a story in with fake headers and see if it gets posted...

The headers would be signed if Apple is using DKIM.

I now balk at Apple products.

[philcolbourn]

It is artificial (AKA marketing) limitations like this that cause me to balk when considering Apple products. I have several. And I like them. And they work well. But I have not purchased an iPhone and instead I will probably get an Android phone and one for my wife as well. I like the iPad, but these limitations, no camera and the high cost of the extra GB's will cause me to look for something else. And while I am on the topic, iTunes is also a great system - as is iPhoto. But I am feeling locked-in and I will move to something like Picasa for photos and ??? for music, videos and podcasts.

I tether my apple to my peach...

[Anonymous Coward]

:-)

Translation

[fulldecent]

When Steve Jobs says "no", all I hear is "not until you jailbreak it".

This is a deal breaker.

[Fastfwd]

It just makes sense to get your bandwidth from the phone since this is the device you always have with you. I can understand a 3G tablet for someone who does not have a phone but expecting people to pay service on both the phone and the tablet is ridiculous.

My Nokia E71 with joikuspot allows me to turn the phone into a wifi access point. It eats at the battery but when plugged into the car it means I have wifi in the car to be used on other smartphones, laptops, tablets, gamepads, etc. Tethering by bluetooth is better but was less reliable and not all devices can do it.

I would not bother me as much if they would at least make some kind of special deal where you pay for the bandwidth once and get to receive it on all your phones/devices independently. In Canada right now you CAN tether the iphone but bandwidth is not unlimited; I think this is the way to do it.

Allowed AFTER the initial suckers buy the 3G model

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect at some point soon Apple will allow it, but they aren't going to come out and say it now. It's reasonable to assume that most iPad owners will have an iPhone. Steve is not going to advertise that tethering works because then it will could kill sales of the 3G model right off the bat. What I suspect will happen is that he will wait until the early adopter suckers stop buying the 3G model, and then they will announce tethering for the non-3G model with the iPad in a few months or with the new iPhone 4.0 OS update this summer.

Similar to how the initial iPhone was $600, and they waited for the true fanboys to buy them up at that price, and then 2 months later they lowered the price to $400.

You mean like copying stuff off your PVR?

[Fastfwd]

There are all kinds of things that CAN do something but won't just to try to extract more money out of view. This is a clear failure of free markets since nobody is stepping in to fill the gap with something that does it.

Because WE let them

[gearloos]

Why do asshats like this (OMG ! he just called Steve "god" Jobs an asshat!!)get to choose what I do with a device, or if I decide to upgrade, change, modify etc.. Simple-->because WE let them. This world has gone crazy. We need to just stop buying from anyone who implements any kind of DRM or makes any restrictions on how you use a device. This is like saying I can't repaint my car blue because Chevy doesn't have a partner program with the paint shop I want to use.

In Releated News

[konohitowa]

Damn. I was planning on getting an iPad with GSM so that I could tether my iPod Touch to it. I'm betting I'm not gonna be able to do that either. Well -- there goes my iPad purchase. And tell Steve J. I said so!!!

You say no to tether

[Karem Lore]

I say no to iPad and iPhone...

who lost?

not me...I have an alternative...

Sorry, but you "nice" interface and flat sleek look are not enough...I need something that fits the way I work, not the way you want me to work...

iPad same OS as Touch and iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that the iPad runs the same OS as the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Given that you cannot tether (wire or blue tooth) a Touch or an iPhone to another device that does tethering why would I expect the iPad to do it. The new OS being talked about sounds like a point release not a major functionality change so initially it should not be a big surprise. Sure it is disappointing but one of the key reasons I like my iPhone is that Apple continues to stand behind it and provide updates. I fully expect to have OS updates from Apple for my iPhone for a couple more years. All of previous phones had no hope of any software updates after 6 months and even then it was tough trying to find them (and get them installed). The manufacturers pretty much prefer I just get a new one. Now if Apple continues to provide hardware improvements, I will upgrade to get that functionality, but I expect the software to pretty much work the same way.

Now if you consider a wi-fi connection as tethering, then all of the devices can do that to a device that does the wi-fi to cell data routing. I believe you can get jail broken apps that allow iPhones to act as wi-fi stations and that other smart phones like some Android based ones, Palm WebOS, and even Windows Mobile had apps that could allow that functionality. I hear that even cars are looking at that functionality in the near future if not already available as a 3rd party option. In all I think this is of those technology transition points, fun and frustrating where you want to be attached to some company that is willing to travel down the path and take you with them in a reasonable fashion. So far Apple is the one that is delivering on this for me.

So Jobs saying that the currently planned iPad cannot tether to an iPhone should be no surprise,

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[Homburg]

You can't require purchase of a particular device to use a service, but is the reverse true? After all, none of the wireless operators in the US will sell you a phone without voice service, as far as I know; how is refusing to sell you a phone without data service any different?

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[Homburg]

20 Euros is about $27, which is round about what T-mobile and AT&T in the US charge for their "unlimited" data plan (which is in fact a 5GB plan, despite the name). I don't think they'll give you a lower price for less usage, unfortunately (this is, in general, an annoying feature of the US cell phone market - the providers are keen to sell expensive "unlimited" plans, and reluctant to sell you a cheaper plan that only offers what you actually need).

This just in

[jackspenn]

There is nothing Steve can do to prevent you from using the iPad to Android wifi tether. Well accept for the fact that the iPad is retarded and most people who multitask will find it lacking. Oh and you cannot upgrade storage or swap batteries, or use flash or java.

Re:Isn't this anti-trust / tying / anti-competitiv

[lennier1]

Seems like 5GB have become pretty much the standard for phones. Not sure about US providers but over here after the 5GB the speed is capped to GPRS speed.

But so far I haven't exceeded 2GB per month. The higher data plan mainly is a safety measure in case I need a modem for my notebook when I'm on a business trip.

Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Apple. Fuck you. Dear AT&T. Fuck you.

OT: Your web site

[Anonymous Coward]

Just figured I'd let you know that if you're using noscript, your web site shows a big blank page...

Is this really a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... Why would anyone expect Apple to allow tethering to a device that they would want you to purchase the upgraded version? You know, the one that comes with 3G...?