Slashdot Mirror
Apple iPad Reviewed
adeelarshad82 writes "Since the iPad's initial introduction back in January, many of us still wonder why we should drop hundreds of dollars for what is termed as a large iPod. Missing features like support for multitasking, a built-in camera for video chats, and Flash support in Safari only add to the dilemma. However, a recently published review of the iPad starts to clear up these doubts. To begin with, the iPad is packing some real quality gear under the hood. Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comment from Apple, the touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast. Furthermore, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, and is currently the only device that runs this version of the operating system. iPad's graphics capabilities come from a PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch. It can render about 28 million polygons/second, which is more powerful than the Qualcomm Snapdragon found in devices like the HTC HD2. Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, the battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
Let me ask you something in advance of the inevitable comments, for a chance: do you complain because the firmware in your TV set, microwave oven, and dishwasher is "locked down," too?
"Missing features like support for multitasking, a built-in camera for video chats, and Flash support"... "the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2" ... "PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch" ...
So it IS just a large ipod!
The IPad being a good buy? That's an OK April 1st joke but you could have done better, Slashdot.
"Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
*sigh* Guess we have to wait until after April Fools' Day to get a real review.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I guess this makes the news "Apple iPad contains specs Apple claimed it would have!"?
then again i guess its the 1st already.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I still don't quite get it myself and wouldn't buy one, but I guess its hard to speculate how the market will react.
A semicolon splice? You don't see many of those around.
At the bottom of the
Since the disco era, there has been this constant push for more bass, to the point where the drive to get lower has become a caricature of itself in places like Miami and Los Angeles. True audio lovers know bass is only one aspect of a rich audio experience.
So when I hear that Apple is turning bass way back, I know they are answering the prayers of audiophiles. Finally a company with the balls to do the right thing.
Thank you Apple!
Personally, I find that I am slowly developing an RSI type problem wrt touchpads and touchscreens, preventing extensive use. Anyone else?
iDud - my much preferred name for it is iFad.
Andy Ihnatko's Sun Times review + Unboxing
Xeni Jardin's Boing Boing review
Goatberg's WSJ review
Baig's USA Today review
and Pogue's awkward review for NYT
In the realm of electronic music production, the iPad is showing a lot of promise.
This is sort of a big deal amongst electronic musicians, as before the iPad the only similar alternative was the US$2,000+ Jazzmutant Lemur.
So now the scourge that is Intel's integrated graphics gets pwned by even a low-power, handheld device. Have they no shame?
I ordered the 64GB 3G model so I have to wait. Shouldn't the people who paid the most get theirs first? Of course I'd have paid $100 more for a video camera built-in.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
But does it run Linux ?
* ducks *
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
It's the first story dated April first, and it's a slashvertisement. Maybe that will be the theme.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
This isn't a missing feature. It's a bug fix.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/technology/personaltech/01pogue.html?src=mv
Just some Slashdot nazelgazing.
For all I care it can have a Ferrarri F1 car under its skin ... I mean, who cares if it doesn't do anything particulary usefull?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Apple has been receiving an extraordinary amount of attention on /. these last years. Apparantly some of \.'s editors are serious Apple fans. Just mod the article binspam or better yet, ignore Apple stories and move on with your life.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
"""
Furthermore, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, and is currently the only device that runs this version of the operating system.
"""
Because 3.2 > 3.1.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
That's the tipping point for me - I don't give a damn about cameras or flash or any of that. During Steve's entire presentation, I was thinking, "If this thing has multi-tasking, I'm in." Oh, well.
When you buy into closed systems, you put money into the hands of people who will perpetuate closed systems. As a result, more advertising, sneaky (I say that because its closed) innovation, and influence is produced and then the culture of computer use trends further in that direction...
Many forces right now are interested in producing limited/closed systems, and furthermore very thin 'clients' that would have the majority if the processing and data storage done in the cloud. Nevermind that you are limited by the permissions inherent to the construct of the closed system -- and subject to the inevitable "nickle and dime" pay/fees attached.
Buying into this junk is a way of voting with your money for a future that has more of it. I'm pretty happy with the freedoms I enjoy in computing. Right now, computing is still kind-of a 'wild west' of sorts, with many freedoms still open and available. As have many other aspects of life, the power of the susceptible consumer buying into bad ideas has led to the limitation of access to variety/possibilities/alternatives; that which is not mainstream loses its ground and at some point has no platform to present from.
Think for yourself. Do you want a 'computer' that only allows you to do what they want you to do? Do you want people who offer this to get your money and drive the market further in that direction?
Apple v. HTC (2010, USA) [swpat.org] (including multi-touch prior art)
Since when did the Apple vs HTC litigation have anything to do with multi-touch?
... and then they built the supercollider.
"iPad's missing functionality is offset by Apple providing hardware that would have run those functions really, really well."
Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple; touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast.
I'm sure Apple engineered the entire chip, including the ARM core, which is the reason why it's so fast. Actually, I'm not sure. Designing a modern pipelined cpu is extremely difficult, especially one that is fast and low power. ARM (the company) designs and implements their own cpu's, including the Verilog/VHDL source for the actual layout, along with some hand optimization at the synthesis stage. They then sell this to Apple/Philips/Qualcomm, who add the peripherals and then fab the actual silicon itself. Apple isn't going to reinvent the wheel by reimplementing an entire cpu. They're going to buy the core from ARM at a cheaper price than what they could do themselves. Apple is not the only one that wants a fast and low power arm core: everyone does. ARM already employs the best people to do this, they know the most about their own cores, they've had the most experience, and they are the ones most interested in doing it, so they can sell it to pretty much everyone. (How many arm cpu's are around you? More than you think. WAY more than you think.) Anyways, don't give credit to Apple for the fast ARM cpu, they most likely just bought the core from ARM, who did most of the engineering, and Apple added some other on chip stuff and had the chip manufactured.
Now I get to watch this modded into oblivion after I spent 5 minutes writing it.
Think for yourself. Do you want a 'computer' that only allows you to do what they want you to do?
If you want a general purpose, programmable computer, don't buy an iPad. Nobody is forcing you. I see plenty of uses for one which don't involve running much beyond the standard software.
If I want to do more than that, I have a "real" Mac (something upon which the iPad also depends).
Now, the moment Apple try to "close" the Mac, I'll drop them like a ton of bricks for PC/Linux, but currently the Mac scores pretty high on openness.
Meanwhile, if you want to run your own software on the iPad its simple: forget the App store and code whatever the hell you like in loverly open standards-based HTML5/ECMAScript/SVG and host it on your Real Computer. Practical upshot: odds are your "cloud" apps will also be compatible with anything running a half-decent browser.
...and I love the way that the slashdot group mind treats Flash as the spawn of Satan and destroyer of worlds until Apple leaves it out (and, consequently, persuades a number of large video sites to switch to standards-based HTML5 video).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The critics say it's just a big iPod. Your response is . . .
iPad's graphics capabilities come from a PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch.
But, hey, at least you're only paying double (32 GB iPod Touch, $299; 32 GB iPad, $599).
user name jobs
password is iamgodumofos
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Really, does anybody have the slightest idea? Is it 256 MiB, like the 3GS?
Don't worry about it - he pops up with that biased site every time an Apple/Google/Big business story shows up. Ending software patents as a whole is a noble goal, but they're going about it the wrong way with that wiki. Shame, it could be quite a good resource.
You realise that a tampon is a small cylindrical object and never called a "pad" right? Maxi pads and tampons are two different things that do a similar job.
It does't surprise me that you don't seem to know the difference though - I mean, that would first mean you would need to get close an actual girl.
...or you're a Apple hater who can't stand to see Apple finally crawling out of the ditch that they dug themselves into during the 90's
Is that they have a very clear idea of what their users do with their products. Not because they leave it up to their users to decide, but because they tell them.
Here is your powerbook.. with it you can videochat and edit your holiday photos.
They are doing the same with the ipad: http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/
They take the application and then very much optimize the hell out of the application until it fits perfectly to the device its running on.
Other manufactures just build a tablet. And this is why this product will be a success.
Please not i'm not an apple fanboi. I don't even own any of their products.
I see what they are doing there. Talking up the technical capabilities all over like that? Look. It doesn't matter what the technical specs and capabilities. Apple still holds the machine's leash... even [especially] after you buy it. Also note the beginning parts identifying the limitations -- ALL software induced -- by Apple. The hardware parts are the ones the summary really talks up... stuff you don't really have much access, control or influence over. "New OS! Yay!" Really? Why is it good? Because it's new? Vista was new.
I really wanted to see Apple put out a netbook and they didn't. Turned out to be a big iPod. My wife is an Apple fan but uses a Windows based netbook. Apple doesn't make one. (Interestingly, I put MacOSX on one of our Mini9s and she didn't like it that much... this is a CLEAR indication that I don't understand the mind of Apple or its users. There. I said it.)
I think over all, a lot of people will get their iPad ebook reader and will be happy with it. At the same time, a lot of people are already soured on the device because of the announced limitations. It's really hard to say that this will be a flop over all, but it's really telling that Apple fans and others were already disappointed BEFORE the thing was released onto the world. Not many Apple iProducts can offer that notoriety.
I own an iPhone and a MacBook Pro (15 inch) and I'm not sure what to make of the iPad. It is certainly an interesting, even a promising device, but I don't see a place for it, not for me at least. I've never been in a situation where I was using my iPhone and thought, "I wish this screen was bigger" AND I didn't have my laptop with me. I can't read for long periods of time on a screen and nothing is as pleasurable (to me) as a real dead tree book so that's out. E-mail is fine on my desktop, laptop, and phone. Watching videos is again a case of either the phone works good enough or my laptop is handy. I don't mind carrying around a laptop so portability isn't a selling point to me.
On top of all those reasons is the fact that it's just not that compelling in the things that it does do. The home screen is very underwhelming. It's the same as the iPhone which is my biggest complaint. It's just a grid of icons, some of them with various badge indicators for e-mail, SMS, etc. But other than that the screen is just a list of icons that do other things. I look at the Android phones and I'm envious of what they can do--although I dislike them for various reasons too. With the extra horsepower and screen space I was hoping the iPad would do more with the "desktop" screen than just having it be a list of icons, time, battery indicator, signal strength.
It's a very cool device, certainly. They've put something interesting in a nice looking package. It also has some novel uses like playing games on a large touch screen in that handheld format. Battery life is also very nice. It's just not useful enough and I suspect that there are plenty of other people who feel that way. Regardless, I know it's going to be successful because it's the hot new thing from Apple. And maybe in a few revisions I'll find it worthwhile. I wasn't that impressed with the first gen iPod, but now I'm on my 3rd, fourth if the iPhone counts as one. I see a lot of promise, but this gen-1 device is, to me, a testing ground where Apple will use early adopters to really improve the later revisions and that's when I will be most likely to pick one up if I ever do.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
According to lab tests(Apple), my Unibody MBPro 17" promises up to 7 hours when using my 9600m GPU. That would be great, but I've never got more than about 4 hours on a charge and I charge it 2 to 3 times a day. My iPod Touch's battery dies in about 2 hours, if I use it to view simple websites or play a game. So when Apple says their iPad lasts about 10 hours, I have my doubts.
http://www.b3ta.com/challenge/ipad/
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
Today also happens to be the 34th anniversary of Apple's founding (1976.)
If the iPad is as game changing as it's being hyped up to be, it would've been interesting if they were to let it hit the streets today instead of Saturday.
It's a real shame about the missing webcam. They'd make such nice portals if they had them:
Put two iPads back-to-back. You could see right through them.
Put two iPads on opposite sides of a wall. Instant window.
Mount an iPad in the kitchen; mail another to grandma and grandpa. An intergenerational wormhole for family to stay in touch.
Mash up a classroom full of iPads with chat roulette. Try to figure out who's match with whom. Turn to face a neighbor to make the longest continuous viewing path.
Two iPads, one bed. Fun views for you and your partner.
Which of those devices are tablets? Oh! Apple fanbois and the RDF!
despite not being in technology for the last decade any longer, I can tell you anecdotally that I can count at least 20-30 iPad purchases from the people that have called me to combined rave about how much they want one and ask if they'd be somehow stupid for buying it.
You would tell them they are.
I told them it's probably the best thing for them. Joe Consumer that you mentioned wans a few things:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. World Wide Web
4. Email
5. YouTube
That's pretty damned much it for most of the people that I help with their PCs at home. Yes, many of them use computers to do this or that work, but this stuff they do at work generally comes down either to web browsing or the use of Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
At home all they way is a way to do #'s 1-5 above. That's it. Yes, they CAN do this on their phone already in many cases, and a lot of them do, but they want a big screen.
Yes, they really DO want a "bigger iPod Touch." That's exactly what they're hoping it is when they ask me about it. Because the iPod Touch/iPhone does everything they want right now at home, only the screen is too small for extended use while sitting on the couch or eating microwave dinners.
Slashdot users are so ridiculously out of touch with nontechnical people it's amazing. They imagine "nontechnical people" to be any friends they have that don't case mod and don't game. In fact, there's a whole universe of people out there that is going online every night with a 7-year-old computer that hasn't been upgraded and has never been backed up and that contains a whole bunch of completely random saved images and spyware, and all they do is Facebook+World Wide Web/eShop/YouTube, and that's all they really care to do with their computers.
The iPad gets them all of this, and it gets them this in a fast, reliable, portable, and much safer way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If Apple had won the computer wars, we'd probably be stuck with some half-baked system which was only just dropping backward-compatibility with Apple II.
If the guy from Digital Research hadn't been out flying his plane when IBM called we'd probably be stuck with some half-baked system which was only just dropping backward-compatibility with CP/M for the Z80 (and probably on closed IBM-made hardware, too).
If any one company "wins" the computer wars and gets the sort of monopoly enjoyed by the Wintel PC then, a few years down the line, we'll be stuck with crap, proprietary systems from a company with no incentive to innovate. Film at 11.
Fortunately, Apple are a million miles from that sort of monopoly (even their iPod/iTunes empire doesn't come close to the sort of dominance Wintel enjoyed at its height). Meanwhile, they're doing a great job of dropping the occasional bomb under the industry's ass. By all means go and buy an Android device instead (although Google are out-Borging Apple at the moment) but don't delude yourself into thinking that Android (or Palm Pre, or HTC's customised versions of WM6, or WM7) would exist in anything like their present form without the inspiration provided by Apple.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I think if you're an experimental musician, or willing to use it as a gimmick, the iPad could be useful.
However, compared to a real musician's workflow, the iPad is just a toy. Yes, sooner or later someone will come up with a halfway decent sequencer app for the iPad. But it will always pale in comparison to the openness of real sequencers. There are just some things that will not work well on the iPad, without extreme effort. Just to name a few:
1. File-management to access and organize real samples in the proper uncompressed formats at the proper bitrates.
2. Ability to use standard plugins, like VST and VSTi.
3. Ability to multitask and interact with other software using standard protocols.
4. Easy integration with hardware using standardized ports
Yes, you'll get distracting fun music "toys," and little cheap DJ mixing apps, but the "pro" of having a music device with a little Apple logo on the back can only cover up so much "con" of having to re-invent every wheel that a music producer uses by restructuring your workflow and buying/downloading a new app to do everything you are used to doing on a modern full PC or Mac.
Finally, multitouch full-PC tablets have been around since before the iPad, and will now flood the market now that the iPod has legitimized multitouch tablet computing. That's the one benefit, in my mind, to the iPad, and notably it doesn't entail buying an iPad. It's much smarter for a musician to simply wait and buy one of the Win/Linux multitouch tablets that are now springing up, and have full access to your existing work environment. Certainly, because Apple strongly controls their hardware, you probably can't get OSX on a tablet. But the great thing is, even if you used a Mac exclusively before, you can switch to one of these Win/Linux systems with little issue, because both have full-fledged sequencers that aren't limited like the iPad in the ways I described above.
In short, the iPad is a great little toy, and I'm sure if you buy enough apps and spend enough time recreating your entire workflow, determined musicians can certainly use it to make music. But it's in spite of the iPad, not because of it.
Hey, did you know that Apple computers are more secure than PCs?
Just kidding. April Fools. :3
My name is Jeff and I am a PC.
Ve-e-e--ry rusty on the use of semicolons, but I seem to remember this construction is only needed (jn place of a simple comma) if the two clauses being spliced contain commas, which here they don't.
...but just in case, here's a pretty good summation of said device.
Loading...
If you can really look at the iPad and think Apple should have just shipped a netbook, then not only have you completely missed the point, but the next 10 years of computer industry evolution are going to be very confusing for you, as the mainstream market increasingly ignores the tech specs that geeks obsess over in favor of user experience considerations that are far more relevant to normal users.
You forgot to tell them that they are stupid and smelly and that they have cooties.
next 10 years of computer industry evolution are going to be very confusing for you
OK... fine... you DID insinuate that they are beings of lesser intelligence and diminished capacity for reasoning.
Still.. the post above lacks core elements that would make it a valid kindergarten-level post.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually we're all wrong, this is not a semicolon splice, because
Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple.
is not a sentence.
He could have written:
The in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple; touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast.
Source: according to: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/semicolon.htmlhttp://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/semicolon.html
I'm not surprised Apple doesn't support Flash on the iPhone and iPad. I can personally testify that Flash is a serious battery-life waster on laptops too. One morning I was using a web site that had an animated banner ad at the top of each and every page, and I got only 2.5 hours out of my unibody 13" MacBook Pro's "9 hour battery." Without Flash running I can get at least six hours. Then I found the BashFlash app, and realized how often Flash takes 30+% of the CPU. Now I regularly use it to kill the Flash plug-in. Too bad Adobe doesn't give you tools to manage irresponsible Flash adds. A second or two of animation would be fine, after that Flash should "dial it down," but no... continuous attention-grabbing is what the advertisers seem to want, at the expense of my hard-earned battery life!
I agree, but how many of them are going to want/expect to listen to music and browse facebook at the same time? or play those flash based face book games? Everything i have seen says one thing at a time, so i have 0 hope that i can even do something as simple as read an e-book while listening to music count me out, granted what i'd really like is this running OSX or an option to enable "advanced mode" that is full OSX.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
The iPad complaints above give me a feeling of deja vu: we saw the exact same type of (unfavorable) bullet-point feature comparison here when the iPhone first came out. It was obvious to some that the iPhone was not worth the price, since it lost the bullet-point spec competition.
Then as now, the whiners are totally missing the point: Apple is not selling a bullet-point list, they are selling a user experience. Apple did a marvelous job with the iPhone UI, and the reviews lead me to expect that they have done a similarly good job with the iPad. If you don't value the Apple user experience, then don't buy Apple (for you, it is not worth the money). Lots of people do value the Apple user experience, and will pay for it; the iPad promises to extend this experience to a new level.
But we don't get stories about microwaves and dishwashers on Slashdot. What is this - News for Nerds, or Consumer Product Weekly?
(Of course, I know damn well that if Apple were to release a dishwasher, we'd start getting daily Slashdot stories about it, with people and the media labelling it a "Washing Up Bowl Killer" and going "Apple have revolutionised the market" even before it's released, and even when it's only got 1% of the market, claiming "It doesn't matter that this technology existed already, because no one actually used it before Apple came along, honest". Stories about dishwashers from the market leaders would be ignored - the only coverage of other companies would be if Google decided to release one, which would included to make Apple's small share look better.)
Don't forget FarmVille... How many of them are going to get on Facebook (Yay!) only to find their beloved Flash games unavailable?
LRN 2 SWM
I don't know why I'm buying it. I don't know what I will use it for. I just know that somehow it will make me cooler and more hip.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's going to be a throwback to the 80s. Nevermind the minaturisation of the last decade - Apple fans love their products, they want everyone to know they use them, so what good is making Ipods and Iphones small, where no one can see the shiny Apple logo unless they wave it around in people's faces? No, we're now going to see Ipad users walking around, carrying their Ipads on their shoulders, blasting out music and showing how hip they are, whilst all the business yuppies will be holding their brick-sided Ipad to their ears to conduct the latest business deals.
I wish people stop bullshitting about how blazing fast the iPad or the iPhone 3GS is.
This is crap, total FUD and it's highly dishonest.
-Wtf is he talking about ?
-I'm talking about comparing a device running 1 application and others devices running several applications.
Now on your 4Gb of ram, 3GHz quad core desktop it may not seem like something important, but when you have a single core 1ghz CPU and 256Mb of RAM it changes everything.
Remember your Pentium 3 ? yeah well get it out of the garage, get rid of the dust and try watching a video while browsing the web on IE unzipping shit and using word. slow ?
Now try one each @ a time.
Stop comparing Apples and oranges.
Have they made it so it fit in your pocket? No. Then I don't want one. If I am going to have to carry a bag around to put my device in I am going to carry a netbook or laptop. I don't know why anyone would give us RAM, keyboard, HDD space, multitasking, plus plus plus, but to carry the ipad.
So is it time we can just admit the entire IPad is an April Fools meant to be revealed today and move on? What? Why the suddent silence?
The only reason I am interested at all in the iPad is the iBooks store. The device is the same order of magnitude in price as the Kindle-DX, and it seems like the iPad may have way more publishers creating books (not to mention that Amazon has a kindle app out for it already anyway...). My library at home is out of control, so if I can get all the fiction books I read on a single device and eat up digital space instead of bookcase space, so much the better. The technical books would be even better. Many books include color illustrations that help in understanding the material, and the iPad can handle this as well. So I see no reason that it couldn't work for technical books as well as fiction. Things like Programming Languages, Algorithms, and Mathematics books....
Also I trust that if apple decides to get out of the DRM business, either it will unlock everything, or it will tell me some known workaround to disable it. Their reputation is too important to just say "screw you ha ha you paid for your books and now they are useless".... And the greatest thing that could happen is that Apple is responsible for killing eBook DRM the way it killed a lot of music DRM.
But still at the end of the day publishers and recording studios should fear... It's not the pirates that are the problems, it is artists finding ways to reach their audience directly without needing publishers/record labels. No amount of DRM will fix that either.....
If Apple had won the computer wars, we'd probably be stuck with some half-baked system which was only just dropping backward-compatibility with Apple II.
Instead, we are stuck with a quarter-baked system which was only just dropping backward-compatibility with the IBM AT. I heard some PC now come without an A20-gate.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The things teens mostly do on computers these days is chatting, listening to music, and browsing the web. All at the same time. This is trivial. No I'm no teenager, but until the iPad can do this, why would I want one?
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iPad-iMat-iBoard-Joke,news-5968.htmliPad iMat iBoard iMat
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
They should have called it the iWhine based on the reactions it evokes in people. Mod me troll but you know in your hearts I'm right.
With the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad, you CAN listen to music while using any other application, such as the web browser. This has always been the case. When people say that the iPhone/iPad doesn't support multi-tasking, they are referring to using more than one third party application at a time.
Even then, the second clause is missing a definite article.
I think the author intended to use a comma, in which case it should be:
Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple, the touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast.
And that's only the beginning. It got "little" comments? (Should probably be "few.") How many "responses" does it have? (Should probably be singular or "response time(s).")
Overall, a very poorly written sentence.
The definitive guide for proper semicolon use.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
"Slashdot users are so ridiculously out of touch with nontechnical people it's amazing." - I can't agree more with you. Why is multi-tasking keep coming up as an issue at all? It's is a non-issue - just look at iphone/itouch sales numbers!! The customer's use case does not involve multi-tasking. I mean, if those users want it, they can get Windows Mobile instead. Multi-tasking is awesome, right? :)
Nice link. But that stuff about pauses is confusing; it's the kind of thing that will cause people to drop them into sentences wherever they hear a long breath, rather than because they make grammatical sense there.
... but definitely frivolous. Great quality, but just an expensive frivolous toy... Just like all things Apple...
Twitter? Really? Joe Consumer actually uses Twitter? And here I thought it was only used for personal brand promotion...
Or did you mean that Joe Consumer wants to read Twitter?
It's okay for Apple to decide to sell appliance.
Now there are different ways to do it.
Take my current phone : Palm Pre running WebOS. It's nice, functional and if I'm an average user it does everything I want.
It perfectly fulfils the "appliance" role.
Now this device isn't locked down. At all. Right out of the box, without needing any exploits or whatever, it can be switched into developer mode (by just typing the proper command in. Used to be a nod to the konami code, but recent version of the webOS have also a shorter and easier to type alternative). Then I can pretty much do whatever I want with the device.
If you want Palm-approved and checked applications, to be run in the default safe walled garden, go the standard route (and use the official Apps downloading client).
If you want to experiment with something else, switch temporarily the phone into developer mode and use it to install Preware, then you can also install applications from indie source, etc.
Lambda users use the phone as an appliance, geeks can play around with it if they want.
In result, the Palm Pre is a nice device with interesting capabilites.
The same goes for Maemo and Android powered device, or even - gasp! - evil-Microsoft Windows Mobile powered one (although this might change with Windows Mobile 7).
Whereas, Apple strategy :
iPhones/iPad/iPod are appliance, too. And Apple goes to great length making sure it remains so. You want to do something with your Phone ? And it wasn't approved by His Majesty Jobs ? Too bad for you ! If you want to do something beyond the arbitrary set of crippled feature that Apple condescended to allow to 3rd party developers, you'll have to jailbreak the phone to unlock its full possibilites. In order to do so, the only way is to exploit bugs in the official firmware. But Apple might patches this hole in the next firmware.
And beware, the next firmware might be done in a way which specifically bricks jailbroken devices.
For the average users the device works so,so (there are complains about missing features from average users too). For the geeks, the device is almost useless, they'll move to something else (Android, Maemo, webOS, even Windows Mobile)
In result, the iPhone/iPod/iPad are just expensive toys with a nice shining polished finish.
but the next 10 years of computer industry evolution are going to be very confusing for you, as the mainstream market increasingly ignores the tech specs that geeks obsess over in favor of user experience considerations that are far more relevant to normal users.
I'm perfectly okay with the industry shifting from massive multi-purpose customisable modular beasts (like our current desktops) toward ready-to-use special-purpose consumerist appliances (you want to read a book ? I'll sell you an E-Reader !). As long as the maker don't use every mean in their power just to make sure the things remain locked down. Sorry, but I value my freedom to tinker too much (And my ability to fix and repair stuff myself too).
Most constructors are indeed going that route (leave an open door for tinkerer).
Apple is the lone rider doing otherwise (fucking customer who want to do a bit more with their own legally bought devices). The only reason for their success is that they entered the market early and managed to get quite some mindshare (leveraging their fandom and their former success with iPods). But I'll be pretty much happy without them.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It would be OK to use "little official comment".
At the bottom of the
That's pretty damned much it for most of the people that I help with their PCs at home. {...} At home all they {want} is a way to do #'s 1-5 above. That's it. {...} The iPad gets them all of this, and it gets them this in a fast, reliable, portable, and much safer way.
And is completely locked. Why ? Why not leaving a way for other, non-average users, to do a bit more if they wanted to ?
Every other high-tech gadget you can think of (Nokia Maemo, Google Android, Palm WebOs, Sony's Playstation 3 fat-version with "other os") fulfils its basic role, but let advanced users do more if they wish to.
Also you forgot a 6th function that most people do at home (but not necessarily while on the move with a phone). They chat. A lot.
A function at which the iPad fails royally by not allowing 3rd party background tasks : you won't be finding a port of Adium that you can leave running in the background while you surf and which will pop-up chat messages. Too bad for you, but the divine Jobs doesn't want you to (officially, for the fear you might drain your batteries too fast).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
People will buy anything if it feels right.
Apple is all about feel, and they have figured out how to tap into the minds of a large segment of the populace. I was talking to a guy the other day who had already ordered one of these devices. He wasn't even a Mac guy. He just wanted to be part of the herd and he liked how Apple felt. It "feels" successful and slick and friendly, and many of those who aren't part of that herd are going to feel left out and will want to convert. This is what Microsoft doesn't sell; community. Everybody needs community; it's hard-wired into us, and with the PC and everything surrounding that, the community is mapped on to it in an ad-hoc manner by naturally occurring forces. Apple, on the other hand, is deliberately sculpting it. They're pushing buttons. In short, they've figured out that they're not selling computers. They're selling a religion.
Think about it; it started off small, and they were persecuted, but their warm, "loving", non-confrontational approach has grown. It's the Christianity of computers, and they KNOW it. I doubt it was deliberately set up that way, but some bright spark in the marketing team saw the connection, and now they're tapping into it directly with gusto. And it's working. They even call their front line iPhone developer staff, "Evangelists", and they dress them like those door-to-door God people. (Pod-will-save-you? Ugh.)
And that 'Pod' word. That's another thing! They know exactly what they're doing, and it really depresses me. They're selling the Body Snatchers theme, offering people the choice between going deeper into sleep and waking up, and they know that roughly half of the population will choose sleep. -Especially if they can make sleep look like a respectable, successful thing. People can bullshit themselves into thinking that a medicated haze of happy nihilism is the right path. Apple makes me feel sick. It always has, but I could never put my finger on it before.
-FL
You installed VMWare, obviously don't know much about what the problem was, admit you didn't investigate it, and get enough up mods that I actually see your sorry excuse for contributing to the public discourse. For shame. VMWare is a complicated thing. Your license is hereby revoked, until you go to school on it.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I was browsing Dilbert and came across and ad that I was the 1,000,000th vistor and won a free IPad. I didn't know Scott Adams was trying to drive away his technical fan base...
I really don't think that reviews focusing on what an Apple product has (or doesn't have) under the hood matter as much as they do for most other products. Apple tends to make products that are "solutions" for a problem (that you may or may not know you have). Having the most features or the biggest/fastest hardware or the lowest initial cost is irrelevant to their customers. The only reviews that really matter for Apple customers are functionality based and since that's too subjective to market to a large audience (it's also why once a customer is happy with Apple's products they continue to buy more).
Because that leaves the door wide open for the average user to fuck it up as much as they do their PCs, and you're back to square one.
Oh, yeah. Just as this happens with the countless bricked Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, Nokia N8xx/N900, Sony PS3s, etc... those device devices just keep getting damaged by the users~ It looks like only the iPhone never get damaged by clueless users~
It works for every single other vendor, why should things be suddenly different for Apple ?
Oh, yes ! I know why : Because Apple started censoring boobies in their Apps store, users would now be massively forced to unlock their phone if that was an easy procedure, just to get their daily amount of pr0n~~~
As long as the basic functions work perfectly for all users (and that the advanced access require some user confirmation before hand - to avoid clueless newbie accidentally enabling them), the advanced functions will get unlocked only by knowing advanced users (or clueless wannabe, who none the less went through the "Warning: There be dragons" message box).
The reason that clueless users fuck up their PC is that everyone THERE IS NO walled garden at all. The only way to use your computer is to install software from various places, etc.
What I'm speaking is about all the (non-Apple) device which currently offer enough of a basic experience, so not all users need to go beyond that ; but still leave the possibility for advanced users to fuck up their devices if they really want (after confirming their intent by putting the device into the corresponding mode).
To make a metaphor :
- PC = A motorbike.
You definitely need to know how to drive and need to wear proper protection, otherwise you're going to get really hurt.
- All (non-Apple) PDAs and Smartphones = bicycle with training wheels, in children playfield.
The average joe can't fall and hurt himself. But the advanced user can unscrew the wheels and try the bike for a real ride out of the field. (Note that the user HAS to intentionally unscrew them prior)
- Apple's PDA and Smartphones = tricycles. Used only on a special track. And the track is isolated with trellis and barbwire. Including the roof. And the entrance door is locked. From the outside. To be sure that nobody will get out of there.
To get out you must use a pair of pliers to cut a hole in the trellis, but there's a high change that you'll hurt yourself in the process. And beware, next week Apple is going to install a moat filled with crocodiles around, just to punish anyone trying to get out.
No thank you, I like my bicycle pretty well, and just unscrewed the training wheels the other day.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And yet these same people you speak of already have iPods and/or iPhones. While that particular mind-set, the one that lead these people to buy Apple products, lends itself to susceptibility to marketing which includes half-eaten fruit, Joe Consumer can't really afford US$1500.00 for what is ostensibly a netbook with a touch-screen but no fixed keyboard, a music player (that already does most of the same things as the net book) and/or a phone (that already does most of the same things as the net book and the music player). I'm afraid you have painted yourself into a niche market, sir; a market made up of people who want to upgrade their iPods. When you see Steve tell him "Good luck with that" from the Slashdot crew.
Hulu.com, the Web’s headquarters for free hit TV shows, won’t confirm the talk that it’s working on an iPad app, but wow — can you imagine? A thin, flat, cordless, bottomless source of free, great TV shows, in your bag or on the bedside table?
My God! You mean, a way to sit and watch TV in bed? Wonders will never cease.
And a source of TV shows in my bag? Nope. Don't want it, don't need it. If I'm going somewhere on business, I've got a laptop and some form of internet. So, I can get all of this. Or a TV in my room. Or I'll go to the cinema. I'm not going to sit on a bus of a train with my iPad out watching a movie.
Just about every use-case of the iPad that I've thought about kills it when you think about it in practical terms. The only thing I've got is "surfing the web while I sit with my wife and she's watching something else on TV". That's it. And I can already do that with a laptop, so that has to be qualified with "and I don't want to put such a strain on my knees". Sorry, not going to spend $500 for that.
Is this the same Slashdot crew that predicted that the iPhone would be a complete failure?
And the same Slashdot crew that greeted the first iPod with "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."?
And the same techno-pundits who are, once again, predicting the spectacular failure of a new device which, by all indications, appears to be headed for a spectacularly successful product launch?
Yeah, I'm sure Steve Jobs is sweating bullets over the opinions of some AC's here at Slashdot.
Ahh, i've never used on of the touches. can i run the pandora app and read an ibook? how about last.fm in the browser(if flash ever makes it to the device) and an iBook?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I'd always hoped that Apple would roll with a tablet laptop. The iPad really let me down.
Exactly how many April Fools jokes am I going to have to read on Slashdot today anyway!
Ya ya, your right... all of them.
you'll suddenly find it in demand amongst the Slashdot crowd, and there will be a proliferation of sad little pages here and there across the web hosted on an iPad running iPad Linux + Apache and containing nothing more than a few lonely screenshots and photos of Linux on iPad with just a penguin image and an xterm (because most of the libraries haven't been ported due to various as-of-yet unsurmounted constraints).
And there will be a smattering of Slashdot stories about iPad hacking and iPad Linux in which Slashdot users will post that iPad Linux will soon "finally make the iPad usable for real work."
Meanwhile, as those iPads are gathering dust waiting for further Linux development or being booted into Linux every couple of weeks or so just so a starry-eyed geek can watch an xclock run on an iPad, the world of regular iPad users will be doing useless, sandboxed, Apple fanboi things like browsing the web, reading books, and working on MS Office files.
Point:
Slashdot "ideal mobile productivity device" = a case-modded Sparcbook with the bottom cover off, hotwired to use some particular and obscure iteration of the TNT Quadro series from Nvidia that you can find every now and then on eBay, with unstable but mostly working drivers connected to a wirewrapped display made out of 15,000 $0.39 red LEDs with no X support yet but a working minimal webserver, enough to host a page about the project.
Real world "ideal mobile productivity device" = no customization or settings to worry about, Web+Office, super light weight, with a really long battery life. Basically: iPad.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I have an N900 too. Yes is is awesome and open. Real Linux, beautiful screen, decent speakers, IRDA, two cameras, WiFi, etc (and runs Flash).
However, the e-mail client sucks. Slow, badly designed (new message notifications confuse rather than inform) and crucially lacking spell check. I use the N900 most of the time, and the supplement this with an iPod Touch for e-mail, Twitter, apps, etc. Joikuspot on the N900 provides Internet access to the N900.
The combination of iPad and N900 will work pretty well for me. Looking forward to using a great closed device with a great open device.
For most people, listening to music is listening to the thousands of songs they already have. You are not in the majority to be using last.fm. Most people would rather not take the battery life hit to be streaming and running flash while they read an iBook. Most people would, in fact, not understand why their battery life was shorter.
Twitter? Really? Joe Consumer actually uses Twitter? And here I thought it was only used for personal brand promotion...
Or did you mean that Joe Consumer wants to read Twitter?
Yes. My sister-in-law and her high school friends use Twitter as a drop-in replacement for IM/texting. My understanding is that this is pretty common.
Repo man's always intense.
I think you've got it backwards. The Slashdot crew claims that the Iphone is the most successful phone ever, yet the market reality is that Apple are one of the least successful companies in the mobile market (after Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, RIM etc).
And the same Slashdot crew that greeted the first iPod with "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."?
That was one person, not a crew. And yes, why is his opinion invalid? Popularity doesn't mean a product isn't lame - or are you telling me that Windows and IE are the best products ever?
And the same techno-pundits who are, once again, predicting the spectacular failure of a new device which, by all indications, appears to be headed for a spectacularly successful product launch?
Again, you've got it backwards. All I see is endless amounts of hype and free advertising over a vaporware product, that in the real world, no one gives a shit about.
Yeah, I'm sure Steve Jobs is sweating bullets over the opinions of some AC's here at Slashdot.
*snort* And obviously the Ipad is going to be market leader, because you say so. The sad thing is that even if reality proves me right, like the Iphone, you'll be here in a year's time nonetheless insisting that the Ipad is market leader. Facts don't actually matter anymore. Meanwhile, I'm going to go back to my Amiga, which is the number one selling computer.
Except that the main chat systems don't feature a push (although I don't know about the iPhone Facebook App. Does it support chat ?). Therefore that mean you have to go through a separate service (like IM+, Nimbuzz, Meebo, etc.) to whom you have to transmit all your credentials. Privacy/Security problems at the gate.
And that's just the basic privacy. It's doesn't even take into account that such solution make it impossible to implement true end-to-end encryption, which has been available to Average Joe mac users in Adium for ages. (And that's without any need for advanced configuration. Thanks to Sociallist Millionaire "it just works(tm)" out of the box).
In addition to that, sorry but having a push notification pop-in up and having then to start an App has nothing to do with the snappy response of simply flipping cards around or whatever is the metaphor of your local multi-task non-Apple phone OS.
Add to that the game you're playing might be a 3rd party app too, and you won't be able to put it into background while loading the IM app to answer. Oh, no. I forgot. iPad won't support flash so 99% of the casual games that lambda users are playing won't work on it~
On the absolute, Push is a useful feature in some instance. But it's a poor replacement for true multi-tasking.
It might be a sufficient stop-gag measure for iPhone and iPods, which are supposed to be used while on the go, and where the users use chat the way they use SMS: They need to be alerted of offline message, and will only seldom start the chat application to exchange a couple of messages.
But the iPad is supposed (according to the whole Apple marketing) to target a completely different set of uses: you have it on your lap while comfortably laying on your couch by the fireplace in your home. It has to provide a full chat experience, otherwise it will just be a glorified e-book reader.
In short: sorry, but the Saint Steve Jobs-approved solution has big privacy, security, responsiveness and overall user experience problems. Try better next time.
Or just move to a *real* phone operating system.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously. I love it when people actually know what they are talking about and have a great perspective.
Meanwhile, I'm going to go back to my Amiga, which is the number one selling computer.
In which parallel universe? Even classic macs sold better than amigas.
How much have TVs, microwaves or dishwashers have progressed since their inception? Precious little. Any person that saw the first of those devices decades ago woould pick up how the current devices work.
The same people would find hard to understand how a modenr computer works and what you can do with it.
Closed architecture against open one.
So you want your computing architecture closed and ruled by a commercial entity? Fine, but let forever be noticed that we had examples to learn from about how closed, centralized development is a bad idea (why TVs are not media centers for example? Copyrights and DRM. That is why).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The moment Apple locks applications in your Mac in a similar way to what they are doing in the iPad and other gadgets, it will be because they consider to have a mandate from the mindless consumers that are voting with their wallets.
Not only that, but by making this a successful business model other companies and organizations will have a big incentive to set shop in the same way.
Things are bad enough as they are, we really don't need closed gardens when buying a piece of hardware that for all intents and purposes is a general computing device which has been locked down, and thus dumbed down, in purpose.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That you put that as reasonable says all what is needed regarding this bastardized computing device.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In a free computing world If you can't program you either
- Learn to program.
- Pay other people to program for you (you can band together with other people so what you pay is a small fee).
In a closed computing environment
- You can learn to program until hell freezes over, if Uncle Steve does not approve your application you are out of luck (and Uncle Steve is a Puritian and anticompetitive type, has always be, he will eve be).
- You can't pay nobody to fix things for you. Uncle Steve again.
The "Stallman" philosophy is the only thing that has ensured that Microsoft has some degree of competition. Without that we would only have Microsoft computing (Apple would have been engulfed long time ago, Linux competition gave Apple enough time to switch their OS to something based on more openness not less. It is ironic that Apple fanboys claim Stallman is wrong but forget that a BSD project (not free, but that is another matter) saved Apple's skin in the computing arena.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... if marketing and hype didn't surround Apple products launches.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To expect Uncle Steve to give me more features (or at least the same) as others do for my hard earned cash.
The cheek, those ungrateful people not thanking Apple for constraining their computing devices, not being grateful for having to buy all their software from only one source (this is screaming Monopoly all over the place, or at the very least unfair restriction of trade).
Keep sucking it up to Apple dear fanboys, the house of cards will come tumbling, and the tumble will be one of the most spectacular in the short history of computing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They are so confident they are solving a problem that they are selling you a keyboard for the trinket.
it is a netbook, keyboard and all, but in which they decide which software you can run.
That so many people are falling for this (apparently, I still hope people will come to their senses, were in a economic crisis after all) is frankly depressing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.