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Steve Jobs, Before the iPad, On Why Tablets Suck
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Edible Apple: "Apple didn't release the first tablet computer or even come up with the idea for tablet computing itself. If anything, Microsoft, and Bill Gates in particular, were championing tablet computers years before the iPad was released. In this video clip from the first All Things D conference in 2003, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains to Walt Mossberg why Apple, at the time, wasn't keen on tablets and more specifically, why Jobs felt that stylus computing and handwriting recognition were inherent failures."
What a misdirection? Besides, styluses are for good nose picking.
Whats the point they were failures; not that I'm an apple fan boy, just sayin.
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.
Then I was for it! Then I opposed it! Then I supported it! And now I'm back to arguing against it!
That was before he accidentally stumbled into the goldmine that was iOS (remember he didn't want to allow any apps at all at first) and his earlier arguments were made moot by a tsunami of cash.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
We all remember what Steve Jobs was saying that Apple had "no plans at the current time to make a tablet." We are now 9 years in the future so it is hardly "the current time" that he was referring to. I know it is fashionable here on Slashdot to make fun of Apple but this time there is nothing to laugh at. He was talking about how tablets suck, not that people won't by them, and quite frankly I can only agree with him.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Tablets still fail as computers, and I don't think Jobs' ideas about them have changed. But there are a lot of people who can afford $500 as their "third" computer (or now "second" with laptops being powerful enough to be a primary). And Jobs said there was a market for that, it's just a lot bigger than it was 8 years ago.
There's a reason there isn't a keyboard accessory sold by Apple. If you want a keyboard, and you're going to type so much you need one, get a MacBook. Unfortunately, I think that's holding back the desire to get a pressure sensitive stylus added to the interface options on the iPad (well, that and probably a ton of patents held by Wacom), which would expand the usability of a tablet quite a bit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Wow, if Pogue had joined in, it would be a good three some.
Sorry, but Walt Mossberg does not deserve any clicks, neither does Pogue.
That was back before anybody really knew how much money people would throw at a company that makes throwaway electronics with short shelf lives and no user replaceable parts.
I guess this shows you how clear and consistent Steve Jobs' vision has been on this topic?
he's right about handwriting, and keyboards, and email
but email wasn't the killer app
the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.
and email started to decline and texting grew. because texting is just email you can tolerate to write at 2 cps, and was already on phones.
and, interestingly, phone calls have died as well. because the phone-computer idea wasn't about calling people, it was about having that whole package of computing and connectivity in one pocket instead of two or three.
then, once the small-form-factor touchscreen interface device got popular, it was a natural transform to pull on its edges to make it, simply, a bigger version of the same thing. hence we're back to tablets. which aren't notebooks without keyboards; they're smartphones with extra spatial extent.
and i doubt that jobs saw this coming in 2003. all he saw was that tabletized notebooks were bollocks. which they were.
Get your facts straight. Misc comments on styluses and handwriting aside, Apple fellow Alan Kay came up with the first known concept design for the tablet back in the 1960's with the Dynabook. At the time he was working for Xerox PARC, the facility's researchers came up with the first Windowed Graphical User Interface and the first Ethernet controllers. Granted Apple ripped them off mercilessly for the original Mac design, but Xerox signed a released that allowed them to have it. Go figure. Ironically the Xerox Star (prototype of the Apple Lisa, forerunner to the Mac) was the smallest version of a dynabook possible back in early 70's. In any case, Bill Gates was not a player in this game beyond creating a hackneyed attempt. Much earlier attempts were made in micro-sized PDAs from all fronts. Wake up and smell what you're shoveling.
To say Apple didnt invent the tablet and then point to Microsoft seems indifference to that toy that Apple released so long ago called the Newton... before Palm..
The user interface is more compact on a cellphone, not bloated like on a PC. A fortuitous discovery Steve probably made after 2003.
anyone with the title of CEO. That title is roughly equivalent to business politician.
This should come as no surprise to anyone. Jobs says the problem with tablets is no one wants to handwritten input. He later builds a tablet that does not use handwritten inputs; it sells well and people are not asking to write on it.
I worked on one of the input methods Microsoft licensed. They were working really hard at trying to solve the tablet input problem.
The key insight is what Walt Mossberg brought up about the tablet being a good content viewer.
An alternative content viewer is a tablet is good for, and the market size is really defined by the price since everyone can use yet another content viewer at some price. At $1500 very few people could justify the splurge on a tablet so it was a niche market, at $500 I have one, at $100 to $150 they will be everywhere.
He also said that people need a keyboard and that Apple believed tablets were going to fail. Apple is now banking on tablets to succeed without keyboards.
Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.
Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The last quote in there is still just as accurate today: "You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market." The purpose of a tablet hasn't changed at all, the market is what changed to make it possible. Prices of desktops and laptops went down and they became ubiquitous. Everything just became cheap enough so that everyone could afford to splurge on a 2ndary or tertiary device. The majority of tablets are bought as 2ndary devices to complement larger computers/laptops. I have yet to meet anyone who does significant volumes of work on a tablet, and the ones that come close always have a real keyboard attached to their tablets.
Microsoft and Gates' vision of tablet computing back then was a full desktop operating system with a stylus and handwriting recognition.
Steve Jobs pointed out in 2003 that even done very, very well, handwriting recognition still sucks.
The iPhone, a mini tablet released in 2007, had an operating system built ground up with a touch interface (no stylus), and when it came to text input it popped up an on-screen keyboard (no handwriting recognition).
The article closes with Jobs acknowledging that tablets would be good for reading articles (I saw a project on hack-a-day where someone built an iPad bracket into their kitchen so they could read recipes), and joking that tablets are a niche market.
Microsoft's tablet efforts in 2003 were worse than niche market, they were failures. Apple blew the market wide open by not following the same path.
I guess this shows you how clear and consistent Steve Jobs' vision has been on this topic?
Being able to change your views and business focus makes you survive the next crisis or get rich on the next boom.
Stick to your ideas, views and principles and your business will fail or stay niche at best.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
"Arthur Dent" as in The Late Dent, Arthur Dent? A bit of a pun, you see.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Apple took the GUI from Xerox.
Microsoft used a stylus because the OS (and all the apps) demanded it: there are too many small controls to manipulate with fingers. The stylus included with every TabletPC was (literally) a pointer to the actual problem.
By the same token, the lack of a stylus on the iPad (and devices based on its design) points out the fact that they are (at best) less-than-optimal for most content-creation tasks. For example, although I really like Apple and iOS, a slate-format TabletPC is a far better tool for drawing than an iPad ever will be, because it has a precision, pressure-sensitive input device.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
No MS used a stylus because they never really thought beyond the idea of running Windows on a tablet. They never thought to optimize a tablet for touch. To be fair, Apple didn't solve this problem. They sidestepped the problem by using multi-touch and using a completely different model for UI.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Then tell me how I ordered an Apple Ipad keyboard with my pad on the apple web sight. Its got the same white apple keys, in the same size as does the Imac keyboard, just with the right hand junk pads missing. I think you got your facts a bit off.
Wow, looking at the picture, he was a chubby guy not too long ago... damn... Hope his treatments are working out for him.
I8-D
> "[...] why Jobs felt that stylus computing and handwriting recognition were inherent failures."
Well, yes, they *were* failures. This is why currently successful tablets (a) do not use styli, and (b) do not depend on handwriting recognition for primary text input.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And throwing misdirections to lull the competition into complacency also helps. At this Jobs have been a master. It is almost as if one can make the claim that the more Jobs decried something, the closer Apple was to launch a product in that segment.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Yes iOS is probably the biggest tablet improvement but the different hardware paradigm was also a huge differentiation.
All Windows tablets were also too bulky, too expensive (~$1500), and weighted too much.
But what percent of the 90 trillion e-mail messages are unsolicited bulk e-mail? Because people in some major markets pay to receive text messages, there are laws against text spam.
Of course the folks who created the first even-a-little-bit-popular tablet had a bunch of opinions about tablets and really high standards. I would be shocked if s/he didn't.
This was the guy who was denying there was an iPhone a month before it came out. I'm not saying he didn't change his mind but if they did have a proto iPad at the time he sure wouldn't have spilled the beans to Mossberg.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
And how exactly does that contradict what I said? :)
The problem was that the UI wasn't designed for tablet use; Apple solved that, by creating one that was.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
this is literally exactly what the guy you are replying to posted
Do you think the Windows Tablet edition of XP would have dominated the market had they made their GUI better? The tablets of the era needed a stylus because every tablet I ever saw was running a high resolution screen with the stock GUI, meaning teeny-tiny little "dropdown" buttons, scroll bars, etc. But they could run any Windows program without modification. They didn't sell. Even if the OS had been fully optimized for tablets (it never was,) nobody cared that they could run a teeny-tiny screen version of Excel, because they still expected full desktop usability out of them.
As you said, Apple broke backward compatibility from day zero, and told everyone "No, you will NOT get a desktop experience from this machine. Only custom-written, Apple-blessed-and-approved iPhone-specific apps will run on our devices." Microsoft even tried that approach early on with WinCE, but they found only a few dozen embedded customers (printers, etc.,), got it installed on a few crappy slow phones that served mostly to embarrass them with their awful performance, and the marketplace really didn't care at all. For $(DEITY)'s sake, they were so bad that the crappy Nokia phones outsold WinCE phones! By trying to accommodate multi-platform software, Microsoft failed on all platforms.
Microsoft may even have been the ground-breakers here, showing the world that a small device could have great potential, while providing a rich list of mistakes to avoid making. Apple learned those lessons much better than Microsoft.
John
"Microsoft, and Bill Gates in particular, were championing tablet computers years before the iPad was released"
.. even if you’re only concerned about who was first, shouldn’t that credit go to Apple, for the Newton MessagePad that first shipped in 1993?" link
"The punchline being that Microsoft’s 2001 Tablet PC initiative was the forebear to whatever it is that Apple seems poised to unveil, and Microsoft isn’t getting its due credit for this trailblazing effort. This is funny in two ways
Batteries, RAM, disks, wireless card, possibly GPU. Heck, my first laptop even had a socketed CPU.
So you could replace all that, even the CPU - yet I'll bet you don't use that laptop any longer.
While yes, you can replace RAM or disks on most laptops, how long can you realistically do that for and still have a usable laptop?
The iPad is built such that the components it has serves as well as the total life time of a laptop with replaceable components, possibly even longer (early days but it seems that way currently).
The reason why replaceable components are getting harder to find is that you can build a much nicer device - more robust, reliable and smaller - if you do away with the ability to remove components. An ability I might point out, that few if anyone actually uses...
And as for claiming Apple is in the wrong here: OK then, who is in the right? Who builds tablets with replaceable processors or RAM?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The ipad succeeded because... drumroll... it was made by Apple.
I guess you don't remember all of the people who claimed it would fail. There was no expectation of success, there was not a huge consumer rush for it initially.
The reason it took off was because it actually worked as well as they said it would, they shipped with something like 3k apps (and remember each and every one of those apps was only ever tested on the iPad simulator!!!) and it was HALF the price everyone (well, except for me, I called the price) was expecting.
Apple could announce today a slick white electronic toothpick for $300, and there'd be lines outside apple stores nationwide tomorrow morning
Apple Cube. Apple TV. DENIED.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While it could have been revisionist, Steve did say that they started working on the iPad first, only to shelve it and focus on the iPhone:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364498,00.asp
He also said in 2004 (at All Things Digital) that Apple had a new "PDA" that they decided to not bring to market:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29#Newton_technology_after_cancellation
Based on this, I have a hard time believing that as of the statements he made in TFA, they weren't already working on the iPad. So he was planting stakes in the ground for iOS, which would have been a bit different than the model of computing at the time.
Apple still doesn't sell a stylus.
Also remember that in 1998 he canned the Newton project, and had to defend that decision, at least on the surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Return_to_Apple
Well MS only thought about designing a tablet to run Windows. That was the total sum of their design. Apple did not design the iPad to merely run OS X. Apple actually thought about what design choices would be required to use all touch interfaces. As such iOS is different than OS X. Windows Tablet edition was generic Windows with a few tweaks.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The Wright Bros certainly did invent the airplane (i.e. powered, controlled flight). Yes, they were the first. And they made crucial breakthroughs in doing it:
1. First directed research and development program.
2. First 3-axis control system.
3. First propellor theory (enabling them to build propellors twice as efficient as anyone else's).
4. First aero engine (i.e. had a high power/weight ratio)
5. Use of wind tunnel and invention of the weight lift balance to devise correct airfoil shape and size wings properly
6. Recognition of the "adverse yaw" problem and how to fix it.
None of the other claimants to "first flight" came even close to these. To top it off, the Wrights had the sense to document what they did, photos and all. None of the others are able to prove any flight took place. None of the others left enough evidence to repeat their alleged results. Other experimenters dropped their designs and starting copying the Wright ones as soon as they were aware of it. All modern aircraft designs can trace their evolution directly back to the Wright Flyer, and no other root.
Note that exacting replicas of the Wright Flyer have been made, and they flew in an equivalent manner to how the Wrights described their flights.
One notes that the iPad uses neither a stylus nor handwriting recognition...
Texting, or SMS as it has been known in the rest of the world since the mid 90s, was almost universally popular long before the concept started to grow in the US. SMS had replaced email as the most popular communication medium for most younger people in Europe by 1999. This was long before smartphones were commonplace.
Both the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet and Samsung's just announced Note have styluses, and there is almost certainly a market for them, even if it's only a niche. Businesspeople who need to sketch processes and write notes, professionals who need to sketch ideas and students and artists who need to, well sketch have a definite need of Styluses.
The reason they didn't sell before is, as the OP says, because Windows was a horrible tablet OS, just as Windows mobile prior to 7 was a fucktastic mobile OS. We'll see if Android fits the bill better.
I'm betting that this time it will be better.
Waaaaaaaay too much rationalization after the fact.
Steve Jobs doesn't do anything which doesn't promote the sale of ever-more Apple product. Newton cult-candy to the Apple fanboys was a personal kill of Steve Jobs precisely because it fostered the market mythos that Apple was just and would only be a ' cult company' selling to niches.
Pay attention! Lesson #1: Beat the competition at their own game. Steve Job's NeXT OS was _the_ solution to saving Apple. How? Steve Job's knew that he could revise and release new versions every six months. Microsoft could not. At best, MS would release every 3 years. Steve deliberately set out to obsolete the competition reminding the public 2 times yearly that the system if not the hardware they were using was not new, in fact it was old. So old that depending when MS released new version update to Windows could be many generations behind shipping Apple products released with new version software. At best the competition could answer with updates not new versions.
Lesson#2: Build strong bridges! Extending the same OS across multiple products familiarized, homogenized and reinforced users confidence and use of technology in products that ' Just Work'. MacOS X, iPod, iPhone, iPad etc... Just Work!
Lesson#3: Real Developers Ship! Adding features and fixing problems by incremental updates was the competition's technology edge contained in Service Packs. Steve Jobs embodied features in new hardware products eliminating altogether the very promiscuous idea that hardware could simply be improved, serviced and maintained. Apple invented, obsoleted and superseded existing products, competitor and Apple alike, shipping real products, real improvements and unique solutions to new problems. Ship, Ship, Ship!
Lesson#4: Forget Big Money! Enterprise, corporations and institutional solutions have an inertia all their own. Not easy, not quick and deathly prone to crisis with $$$$$$ attached to failures. Steve Jobs NeXT OS was banned from sale outside the US for National Security reasons. NeXT ' eliptical encryption' assigned munitions grade requiring registration with the US to use. And NeXT hardware was part and parcel dangerous in the wrong hands. Exactly what Big Money needed to compete was too dangerous to sell.
Lesson#5: Trust the Markets: Intel processor switch taught Steve Jobs that the sheer depth of talent, scale of economy and inherent competition eclipsed all innovation in the sandbox. Given incentive to earn % of a larger marketshare, engineers, designers and developers produce far superior products than proprietary innovation can surpass. Thank you Microsoft and the installed PC hardware infrastructure Apple went mainstreame never looking back at MOTO.
Lesson#6: Listen to your Customer! iPod taught Apple that the next Big Thing is in the marketplace not the lab. iPAD/iOS acknowledges Consumer intelligence shipping a product in search of a solution and waiting for the market to find it.
Lesson#7: Nothing motivates a man standing in a leaking boat water up to his knees with a bucket at hand... Steve Jobs was a man who had been Dx with a named disease, chronic if not fatal. Single-minded purpose puts meaning in Life. Steve didn't have time to run a democratic corporation, governance by committee nor achievement by popularity poll Steve Job's had time to ' stay hungry, stay foolish' and ship a product for which there was no market nor answer to a problem waiting to be solved...
I think this belongs to star trek the next generation....
http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=star+trek+padd
which started airing in 1987 and I'm sure the concept was thought up well before that by Roddenberry himself or his staff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation
You're actually wrong. Gates did take tablets very seriously, and he did shape Windows to match (hence "XP Tablet Edition"). The problem was that his vision of these things was all about 1) handwriting recognition and 2) voice control. You can still see a lot of that stuff in both Windows and in Office, as a legacy of that era.
It wasn't actually such a far fetched thing if one considers tablet primarily a business tool - rapid note-taking etc. I've seen Windows tablets with styluses used towards great effect for precisely this kind of work. The problem is that tablets in business are very much a niche thing, and they never really took off. Where Apple scored is in realizing that, if you can build a thing that can be operated with just fingers - from bottom to top - you can actually sell it as a consumer "entertainment" device, a much bigger market.
My dad worked at Grid and did the Convertible. Cool stuff for back then, too bad hardware and the OS available at the time were too slow and clunky.
Remember the Newton? Yeah, even Apple's own tablets sucked.
IfYDGI: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/04/eggfreckles.jpg
It's been fascinating to me to follow the evolution of the smartphone/tablet. I've been involved with technology on some level for a number of years and over the last 10 mostly as an end user of a product. I no longer look at technology for technology sake,and I like to think I can distinguish the merit in a face to face exchange of ideas from that of texting. That being said, I can't help but think that all the discussion on the "tablet" is missing the point. And the point is, what are people doing with it. For example, I'm in the medical field and I use my for primarily reference and it has greatly helped in streamlining my time to a complicated diagnosis. (I'm not a genius after all). I don't use it for texting, don't need anything more than wi-fi, don't even follow my email on it. I use a Kindle for my casual reading, and prefer reading my journal articles on plain paper because it is still quicker and easier for me to find that particular article in my old fashioned file cabinet. Heck, all this talk of electronic medical records? It takes me about 3x longer to review labs results and consults because I can't easily incorporate it into my thought process.
My point, is the success of the IPad is the user interface. And for me, its still not an ideal interface. The ideal interface requires flexibility, not patterning the vast majority of users. And that flexibility has to be intuitive. And yes, I'd also like to have to not make the incredible investment in time and $ that the ipad requires. (Yes those Skyscape apps still cost money.). So... pens, paper, great. Iphones/iPads, great. But tell me how it makes my daily life more productive, not less, and most cost effective, no more.
... Of bill gates saying something along the lines of nobody would ever need more than 640k to run a program...
Captain Kirk had a tablet long before Bill Gates had in idea.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
"Apple didn't release the first tablet computer"
No, indeed ... ...) in the 90's : http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6565/GRidPad-1910/
Check this GRID tablet, made by Samsung (... so long for Apple
idea probably existed before, Apple did play around with a keyboardless tablet idea as early as the late 80's. As seen in the book "Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group" by Paul Kunkel. That was way before Microsoft's tablet computer and before the Newton.
I don't own an iPad, but I have used friends' iPads on several occasions. They pretty neat little devices, and I think they have their role as a consumer electronics device and in certain industries (medicine, etc). However, text entry is an obvious failure in my opinion. Touchscreen keyboards make sense in a smartphone form factor where one can hold the phone and type with their thumbs. But a larger tablet has to be laid on a surface or else all you can do is hunt and peck with a single finger. It's fine for a URL or a word or two, but typing more than that is a chore at best.
Real-time handwriting recognition is kind of misguided, if you need a lot of ASCII text, then you ought to be entering data with a physical keyboard. But if you need a flexible and efficient manner of recording data in a tablet form factor, handwriting is the only way to go. You can do the handwriting recognition after the fact if you need to at all. Styluses shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for text entry, but an augmentation for when free-form entry makes sense like note-taking, sketching, etc.
I think I vaguely remember seeing a tablet computer in the late 90's, or really a small computer with a wireless touchscreen. I think it also might have ran Linux - but I was to young to know anything about that then. It might also been related to some defense project - at least the guy who had it was working IT in the military. Can anyone remember this machine, and know what it was?
While I won't disagree on Apple (per iPad, and GUI), or Edison; I will have to with the Wright Brothers. Yes, there were contemporaries trying to tackle the same problem, but there was only one other successful person in the field, and they were pretty much both operating in isolation from each other. They also invented major portions of what is became the modern airplane - per controls, wing structure, etc.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I do not understand why everybody has a problem with the stylus. I used a Psion Series 5 for a long time and it was great. By modern standards it is too slow to browse the web and so on, but I would really love to have an updated Psion with the same form factor but faster CPU and more storage (I am sure that it would be possible to do that in 2011, compared with what was possible in 1997). And maybe actually running normal Windows on it.
The fact that the Psion could work on AA batteries was also great - if I forget to recharge and the batteries run out, I can just go and buy alkaline ones, no need to look for a 220V outlet and wait a few hours for it to recharge. The form factor of the Psion is also good - small enough to fit in a (big) pocket, but big enough to have a keyboard that is big enough for my fingers.
Jerry Kaplan and Mitch (Lotus123) Kapor at GO Corp. did this before MS and Apple's Newton. MS "partnered" with GO and sunk them.
When I bought my laptop in 2005 it had 512MB RAM and 80GB hard drive. Some time after I added a 1GB RAM stick (making total to be 1280MB). Last month I replaced the hard drive with a 160GB one(the only one I could find with an IDE interface), though the reason was not the lack of space, but the fact that the old hard drive was dying.
But you had to replace those components either because of wear, or because of needed application support.
The flip side of that in "sealed hardware land" is that you get the same (or better) life of service.
The battery being sealed in, can last much longer and is built to be more durable. Instead of an HD the iPad uses an SSD which can last longer than a physical drive. And because user cannot install more memory, programmers cannot be sloppy with resources just because they system THEY are using has 4x the RAM of the average user - so even newer applications will tend to run on the device for quite some time.
I am not saying I ever want to live in a world where nothing is user replaceable. I am just saying a world where popular devices are sealed is still acceptable and can give many of the same benefits with less work on the part of the user.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This was the guy who was denying there was an iPhone a month before it came out.
Who, the Anonymous Coward?
Fandroids hate facts.
No, Jobs. A month is pushing it, but he was never one for showing his cards.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
No, Jobs. A month is pushing it, but he was never one for showing his cards.
Oh sorry. So by "denying there was an iPhone a month before it came out" you actually meant "back in 2003". That must have had me confused, you were obviously 100% right in your claim, just your timing was a little off.
Fandroids hate facts.
No, Jobs. A month is pushing it, but he was never one for showing his cards.
PS: and even in 2003 he didn't deny there would be a cell phone from Apple, he denied there were plans to make a tablet:
M [Walt Mossberg]: A lot of people think given the success you've had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a PDA.
J [Steve Jobs]: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out . We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
Fandroids hate facts.
I remember a lot of speculation about an iPod-phone (complete with mockups of a touchpad iPod-like click wheel) while Apple denied they were working on such a beast around 2006. Google is pretty useless in finding references to this being thoroughly polluted by "antenna gate" nonsense and the like. Maybe I remembered it wrong, it happens.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Jobs wasn't at Apple when the Newton was created, and it was one of the first things he killed when he got back.