This is basically going to be a pretty expensive device that will do a handful of things much better and a whole lot of things much worse. I honestly think most people who use this after a while are going to say "It's great but..." and look at either a straight up laptop, or look at netbooks like the EEE PC T91
You have a lot of valid points re: weight and touch-fatigue, but I seriously disagree that the T91 is going to succeed where other tablet PCs have failed. It still uses a stylus and runs Windows. Microsoft and PC makers have spent nearly a decade trying to get tablet PCs to sell in notable quantities, without any success.
The iPad is a gamble, and I think it will pay off (I would be much more interested in it if it had a camera of any type)... but will it change the game? Will a 2nd gen version that's lighter (plastic) be needed to make it past the "tipping point" of fluid usability? Who knows.
"Does it honestly need to be anything more beyond a giant iPod Touch?"
For close to a grand, yes it does need to be more.
Uh, how is $499 even close to "a grand"?
The 32gb iPod Touch is $299, while the 32gb iPad (no 3G) is $599, double the price for about 3x the screen size, faster processor.
Too bad scenes of someone typing furiously at a computer are boring as hell.
You know, I think movies like Wargames, Matrix (and to a smaller extent, Sneakers) did this pretty decently. For example, the scene where Neo is first contacted by Trinity is a great example of how powerful text can be, if used properly.
The way they were able to make the switch is all pumps nationwide are made by only two manufacturers, and those manufacturers each have A key design to open their pumps. Two keys can open every modern gas pump in the country.
This is another symptom of what's wrong in this country. Two manufacturers of gas pumps? WTF happened to competition? Imagine how easy it would be for a foreign power or terrorist organization to subvert our gas pumps and literally bring this country to it's knees in a week.
Our car-only transit culture and lack of standardized security models (oh no, government interference!!! socialism!!!) makes our country weak and an easy target.
I can easily imagine the state government, or a progressive leader, using the 3-strike law to silence bloggers/reporters he doesn't like by making false 3-strike claims.
[Emphasis mine] Why'd you have to go and smear progressives? You could have easily made your point by saying "corrupt" or "dictatorial". You do your other valid points in your post a disservice with your partisan flamebait.
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels.
If, by greener, you mean, less polluting, yes, Nuclear is better than Fossil fuels... however, in terms of water usage, Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants are very thirsty power-generation solutions. Do we have any idea of the water usage of these new plants? As we keep hearing these days, fresh water will be the next scarce resource (one of the primary reasons China needs Tibet).
Someone please mod this up! A friend of mine works at Apple, and all her co-workers who are SW developers are from IT contracting outfits in India (yes, they're all Indian, too). She couldn't name a single developer who wasn't a contractor (even the non-Indian was a contractor).
Interstate Commerce + Corporate Personhood + Money as "Speech" (ie, recent SCOTUS ruling that dismantled any campaign finance reform).... will quite quickly lead to a corporatocracy.
Mussolini quote: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
The pieces are already in place. We're about 9/10ths the way there.
Doing B2B sales is completely different (longer attention spans, bigger deals, but much more demand for customization/configuration).
Needless to say, Apple's image and culture is focused completely away from B2B type sales. Furthermore, they are focusing on what they're successful at. I wish other companies would take Apple's lead, and do something *really* well and only venture into other markets when they have aligned their brand with that market audience.
Nothing like calling up China and saying, "Hey that Cold War thing with Russia was real good for the economy. Wanna play the bad guy for a generation or two?"
Amusing, but you forget, unlike the USSR, the P.R. of China owns several trillions of dollars of our collective asses... and you can thank the past four administrations for that situation (especially "W").
If the only thing it ever does is become the way college students use textbooks it will be a huge success. I would kill to have my copy of Warren (Organic Chem) on an iPad. It may be 10" across, but it doesn't weigh 3kg, and is a lot thinner.
Not to mention being able to avoid page-flipping and use search instead.
For the price of 5 textbooks, I could get the cheapest one, and the price is only going to come down.
Here I disagree... you'll still have to buy your textbooks, but you'll be getting a digital download... and what makes you think they'll be any cheaper? The iPad launch has already successfully allowed MacMillan and other publishers to negotiate prices increases on Amazon.
I find Dragon to be much better, simply because they require you to upload your contact list (privacy issue flared up a while back but their new privacy agreement is pretty in-depth and satisfactory for me), so any contacts are not garbled, like they were in GVoice voicemail->text (a feature I love, but is definitely not for the easily confused).
I'm sure if Google used their contacts list (from your google voice or gmail contacts) privacy freaks would rip them a new one... so not sure what they can do other than to walk through that firestorm.
Ultimately, finding context using a particular person's lexicon is a massive privacy breach, but would be required for our computers to really talk with us... noone has the same idiomatic expressions, so a catch-all solution without machine-learning is bound to be lackluster.
As a mac user, I've found it a significantly useful and innovative feature (a friend with Win7 showed me)... so I looked, and there is an app for Mac OSX called Cinch that replicates the feature pretty elegantly.
I guess this is proof that Win7 is a bit more than Vista SP2.
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Great, now just go tell YouTube, Vimeo, etc. to convert all their terabytes (probably exabytes) of H.264 content into Theora... I'm sure they wouldn't mind double the work and storage requirements.
I consistantly look at my iPhone and MyTouch and wonder why no one is making a controller that the phone just slips into.
Wish I could mod you up. Wasn't iPhoneOS 3.0 supposed to bring this about by creating an API that hardware devs could use to access their iPhone apps?
On a related front, I'm pretty disappointed in the state of car-kits for my 3GS... it's been over a half a year, and I still don't have any solution as good as the one that used to work for my old iPhone (it put both power and music through a dock-connector).
In an age when most of us could do with more exercise, not less, and could reduce energy usage not increase it - these seem like a bad idea.
If you had actually read the article, you'll notice that most of the "electric" bikes here in the US are actually pedal/motor hybrids, which turn off and on at will.
For my 5-mile commute into work, I'd love to ride every day, but I can't afford to be arrive sweaty and take a shower there daily (in warmer months I try to go 2-3x a week)... now, if I could use a hybrid and cut down the effort so I only got a light glaze of sweat, I'd try to bike much more often... if I don't bike, I pretty much have to drive as I live in suburbia.
Because if we say "the hardware is like a Ferrari" then you will come back with "no it;s not, its just the same parts as in my PC just costs more!" - which is true.
Tell me where I can find as nice a case and trackpad as on my MacBookPro? I honestly would like to know, as all other trackpads I have tried... sucked (I've had a chance to play with dozens of laptops over the past 2 years and none compares to my MBP).
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You have a lot of valid points re: weight and touch-fatigue, but I seriously disagree that the T91 is going to succeed where other tablet PCs have failed. It still uses a stylus and runs Windows. Microsoft and PC makers have spent nearly a decade trying to get tablet PCs to sell in notable quantities, without any success.
The iPad is a gamble, and I think it will pay off (I would be much more interested in it if it had a camera of any type)... but will it change the game? Will a 2nd gen version that's lighter (plastic) be needed to make it past the "tipping point" of fluid usability? Who knows.
Uh, how is $499 even close to "a grand"?
The 32gb iPod Touch is $299, while the 32gb iPad (no 3G) is $599, double the price for about 3x the screen size, faster processor.
You know, I think movies like Wargames, Matrix (and to a smaller extent, Sneakers) did this pretty decently. For example, the scene where Neo is first contacted by Trinity is a great example of how powerful text can be, if used properly.
This is another symptom of what's wrong in this country. Two manufacturers of gas pumps? WTF happened to competition? Imagine how easy it would be for a foreign power or terrorist organization to subvert our gas pumps and literally bring this country to it's knees in a week.
Our car-only transit culture and lack of standardized security models (oh no, government interference!!! socialism!!!) makes our country weak and an easy target.
[Emphasis mine] Why'd you have to go and smear progressives? You could have easily made your point by saying "corrupt" or "dictatorial". You do your other valid points in your post a disservice with your partisan flamebait.
Do you by chance belong to the organization known as The Family?
Correction: add laywers to that list... they always win. I hope the class-action isn't settled out of court. This needs to set precedent.
If, by greener, you mean, less polluting, yes, Nuclear is better than Fossil fuels... however, in terms of water usage, Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants are very thirsty power-generation solutions. Do we have any idea of the water usage of these new plants? As we keep hearing these days, fresh water will be the next scarce resource (one of the primary reasons China needs Tibet).
HTML5 has client-side storage. Yet another reason why Adobe wants HTML5 to be delayed or blocked altogether.
Someone please mod this up! A friend of mine works at Apple, and all her co-workers who are SW developers are from IT contracting outfits in India (yes, they're all Indian, too). She couldn't name a single developer who wasn't a contractor (even the non-Indian was a contractor).
The pieces are already in place. We're about 9/10ths the way there.
I got a "special SIM tool" with my 3GS. I stored it in case I was going to travel (to use other GSM providers).
Doing B2B sales is completely different (longer attention spans, bigger deals, but much more demand for customization/configuration).
Needless to say, Apple's image and culture is focused completely away from B2B type sales. Furthermore, they are focusing on what they're successful at. I wish other companies would take Apple's lead, and do something *really* well and only venture into other markets when they have aligned their brand with that market audience.
Be careful, fiber will increase the "data" flow.
Amusing, but you forget, unlike the USSR, the P.R. of China owns several trillions of dollars of our collective asses... and you can thank the past four administrations for that situation (especially "W").
Not to mention being able to avoid page-flipping and use search instead.
Here I disagree... you'll still have to buy your textbooks, but you'll be getting a digital download... and what makes you think they'll be any cheaper? The iPad launch has already successfully allowed MacMillan and other publishers to negotiate prices increases on Amazon.
I'm sure if Google used their contacts list (from your google voice or gmail contacts) privacy freaks would rip them a new one... so not sure what they can do other than to walk through that firestorm.
Ultimately, finding context using a particular person's lexicon is a massive privacy breach, but would be required for our computers to really talk with us... noone has the same idiomatic expressions, so a catch-all solution without machine-learning is bound to be lackluster.
I guess this is proof that Win7 is a bit more than Vista SP2.
I don't know about exploits but here's a 16 month old bug that crashes all flash versions (any OS, any browser), and this website has it on display.
Note: warning - click on above link WILL crash your flash-enabled browser unless you have noscript/clicktoflash enabled).
If this is known and unaddressed, just think of how many bus/exploits exist that are unknown?
Great, now just go tell YouTube, Vimeo, etc. to convert all their terabytes (probably exabytes) of H.264 content into Theora... I'm sure they wouldn't mind double the work and storage requirements.
Yes, you are correct, but you may want to upgrade from ROT-13 to ROT-26.
So it's the Windows+crapware tax? Linux/OSX never sounded better.
Wish I could mod you up. Wasn't iPhoneOS 3.0 supposed to bring this about by creating an API that hardware devs could use to access their iPhone apps?
On a related front, I'm pretty disappointed in the state of car-kits for my 3GS... it's been over a half a year, and I still don't have any solution as good as the one that used to work for my old iPhone (it put both power and music through a dock-connector).
If you had actually read the article, you'll notice that most of the "electric" bikes here in the US are actually pedal/motor hybrids, which turn off and on at will.
For my 5-mile commute into work, I'd love to ride every day, but I can't afford to be arrive sweaty and take a shower there daily (in warmer months I try to go 2-3x a week)... now, if I could use a hybrid and cut down the effort so I only got a light glaze of sweat, I'd try to bike much more often... if I don't bike, I pretty much have to drive as I live in suburbia.
Tell me where I can find as nice a case and trackpad as on my MacBookPro? I honestly would like to know, as all other trackpads I have tried... sucked (I've had a chance to play with dozens of laptops over the past 2 years and none compares to my MBP).