Wait...the iPad has half the cores and 1/4 of the RAM as the Xoom, and it 'competes well'?
Yes, because it's a minute fraction of purchasers who even know what those specs are, and really they don't matter. What matters is what you can do with it, and the iPad is significantly more functional than any Android tablet. The only feature that the Xoom has over iPad that matters is the cameras.
Don't get me wrong; the iPad is a nice device and I'm not going to buy a Xoom, but please, give us a break. This RDF shit is getting really old and tired.
Old and tired is thinking your geek values apply to the 99%+ of everyone else out there. It doesn't and it shouldn't.
Apple is about hardware more than any other company on the planet. The thing you are missing is they are about the hardware that normal humans like, not the silly niche market populated by geeks.
Their prices were as low as they were because their prices are higher than the cost to make them. It's very simple economics.
[they have a] cult-like following that tend to buy whatever they come out with regardless of cost or function
You're a fucking idiot if you think this is true. People don't buy iPods, iPhones or iPads in spite of high prices and limited functionality. They buy them because they are fantastic products at a price they are willing to pay for. Just because these products offend your geek-centric view of the world does not make those that think otherwise cult-like. If anything, you're the minority opinion, if you're going to start bandying about a term like "cult".
Apple makes a direct profit on every piece of hardware they sell, including iPads. App Store (and music store) profits are minuscule compared to their hardware profits. There is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining.
Cheers, nothing like some real data so we can make a fair comparison - and what you've given us is nothing like real data. You're a rabid apple fanboy and one of the worst to troll this website - piss off.
Nothing like an actual argument so there's something to discuss, my little AC friend. Apple went from zero percent market share in March 2010, to *way* over 75% market share in December 2010, and that counts the whole year, of which they completely missed out on a third of it, and also includes falsely inflated numbers of the Samsung Galaxy Tab (2 million claimed by Samsung, but more likely to be around 250k).
These are facts, and I've even included the least accurate and most anti-iPad numbers, and they still make the iPad look wildly successful.
Sorry if the facts sound like simple fanboyism to you, but if that's the case, you must ask yourself who is the actual fanboy here? You'd think it would be the one whose argument is not backed by facts, but maybe for you it's just "anyone who disagrees with my opinion"?
McDonald's outsells five star restaurants because five star restaurants are expensive, and take time and effort. The iPad is neither. In fact, it's cheaper than any of its real competitors, and it's easier than all of its competitors. It's like they have all of the benefits of McDonald's, combined with the benefits of a five star restaurant. Just imagine how well a restaurant chain would do if they could do that.
Now ponder why Apple has done so well with their iPods, iPhones and now iPads. It's for this very reason.
Android is the McDonald's in your analogy, but a more expensive, less appealing McDonald's. Unless you are a special kind of geek.
The iPad is more powerful than any other tablet on the market, if you are a normal person. Power isn't "what the hardware can do", it's "what the user can do".
You may not be surprised, but you are not surprised for the wrong reason. Your logic is rather odd. Unless you care to clarify, it implies a causal relationship between "power" and sales, and a negative one at that.
If you look at every category you listed, two things show up as far more prominent than "power". Price and software. Also, with regards to the PC, there's business vs consumers, but it doesn't really apply to the rest of the list.
So the real question you should be asking isn't whether the iPad is the most powerful device or not, but whether the price is too high and whether there is enough software for it, if you want to look at specific indicators.
Apple actually started work on the iPad long before the iPhone. Once the project got to a certain point, they realized it would make for a great phone. They continued work and finished the iPad later. So, if anything, the iPhone is a scaled down iPad.
that is not very esthetic (but that's on the eyes of beholder, I'm just going by the spontaneous reaction of my 10yrs old daughter, ugly sized up iPhone, when she saw it the first time)
Do you get most of your technical opinions from 10 year olds?
with a nonfunctional OS (The stupid thing was single tasking at the UI level, that's so 1980s)
OMG! They released it with one set of features, and added more features afterwards!
non ergonomic (the iPad is rather heavy for it's puny functionality)
I didn't realize there was a weight to functionality ratio to consider.
fixed battery which makes extending the runtime outside a PITA
Yeah, because 9 hours is so anemic.
No Apple just managed to ride it through on their brand, but will get them only to some point.
Yeah, they managed to "ride through" from zero percent to well over three quarters of a market in less than a year. I'm sure that happens all the time.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
Well, numbers are very suspect here, Apple does not release numbers
Yes, they do. Every quarter, in fact.
nobody really does.
I guess Samsung didn't say they sold 2 million Tabs? Then later reiterate that they only shipped 2 million? I suppose you're right that they didn't state how many they actually sold to consumers, so there's that.
Fact is when I walked through a local mall before christmas, basically every relevant shop had iPads in stock and advertised them.
I see, so you asked them if they had iPads in stock? And whether they ever ran low or sold out? Apple was unable to keep up with demand for the iPad. They just managed their retail strategy so well that they minimized the frustration of going into a store and finding it sold out. They did this, in part, by limiting the number of stores it was available in.
My Archos, my wife had to hunt down on Amazon, and the delivery Amazon got was gone in less than 24 hours. All local shops listed them out of stock, will be replenished in 4-6 weeks. Now that proves nothing, but it suggests that vendors overestimated demand for the iPad, and underestimated the demand for Archos tablets.
No, it suggests you do not understand how retail works. The iPad is a guaranteed high-volume item. The Archos is a risky product to stock. Retailers would have gladly overstocked the iPad if they could, because they knew they would sell any left overs. With all non-Apple tablets, they would want to keep inventory deliberately low, because the risk of being stuck with unsold and undesired inventory is much higher.
So where do your reliable numbers for shipped and sold iPads come from? I mean, NOBODY publishes them.
Apple does.
Apple does not even split out the bilance numbers by unit.
Wait, you just said "NOBODY publishes them". Now you say Apple does, but doesn't split out by unit?
So WHERE do you get these reliable numbers? My observation, outside the US, which is a special case anyway, having lived in the communication stone age for a long time, the iPad has been quite in stock
Inventory does not last long. That Apple can generally keep some stores stocked shows that they have an efficient retail model. But there were plenty of stor
I don't know where he got his numbers, but his math is solid. We have no evidence of his "statistics".
An analyst group that monitored stores reported a 16% return rate. Samsung reported 2%.
(examples: 16% and 2%, or just google "galaxy tab return rate" and you'll see headlines of 16% and 2%)
Given Samsung previously giving numbers "shipped", not sold to consumers, and tracking stores is tracking actual sales to consumers, it makes sense to assume Samsung is referring to returns from the 2 million, and the other number is returns from those sold. The rest is simple algebra as you mentioned.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try.
Well, second try. Apple Newton?
Newton wasn't an attempt at a tablet, it was an attempt at a PDA, and they cleaned house there, too. It was canceled not out of failure, but out of a refocusing of Apple after the NeXT acquisition.
Yeah, sorry that people can't be such fantastically nerdy as you are, and instead are just regular people who prefer their technology to cater to them, not the other way around.
Apple sees technology and says, "ok, that's a good start. Now, how do we make this work for people?". Everyone else sees technology and says, "great, let's slap a sticker on it and we're good to go".
I see, I didn't realize the Android bar was set so low. Maybe you should look into your own motives before calling others "fanbois" and using crude metaphors. Seems like everything you said about Apple customers could just as well apply to you. More aptly, in fact, since at least the Apple customers backed a winning product.
The resolution on these tablets is almost as big as my monitor at work, and yet they still don't have windowed apps?
Having windows has nothing to do directly with screen resolution. The first Macintosh had a 640x400 screen. It has to do with how you interact with the system. There is definitely some use for popover windows in a tablet, but not really any use for a full on windowed OS.
I don't think they were released too soon. They were the teething stage of tablets, the infancy where mistakes could be made. Thanks to this Google, Motorola and others have learned valuable lessons.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try. I doubt anyone learned any lessons other than not to run a desktop OS on the tablet. Hell, they even had the iPad itself to look at for inspiration, and still failed to come out with a compelling alternative.
Some of the previous Android tablets are hardly failures. Dell's Streak turned a profit, Samsung's Galaxy Tab sold well with a small return rate not to mention the Archos products which others have pointed out.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
On the Tab specifically, they shipped 2 million, but actually sold very few. Of the 2 million, their return rate may very well have been around 2%, but the actual return rate for Tabs people bought was 16%. That puts the number actually sold more like a quarter of a million, not 2 million.
Basically the demand was there, proven by the 22% of tablets sold that were not made by Apple. So now armed with this knowledge, the multitude of manufacturers can create a truly competitive tablet market.
22% was based on the deliberately misleading numbers put forth by Samsung. And even with those completely false numbers, that puts Apple at 78% (and much higher with the actual numbers).
Personally I'm still not convinced tablets aren't a fad, much like an overpriced Tamigotchi or flares.
Why would they be a fad? Because people bought too many iPads and not enough Android tablets?
iPad is total overkill, Kindle is way way WAY cheaper and does all the same things that they need to do.
How does full-on nonsense like this get modded so high on Slashdot? Oh yeah, that's right, because it puts down Apple in some way...
Kindle makes absolutely no sense. Kindle is a book reader, and flipping through pages is damned slow. With iPad, you can have fast, full-color, networked playbooks that you can edit in real time, draw on, zoom around. The absurdity of your post is not that Kindle isn't an overall better choice, but that it's difficult to even come up with a few ways in which it is. Maybe that the screen is a bit clearer in direct sunlight?
As far as "overkill", the mics that the coaches wear probably cost more than your car. It's absolutely foolish to worry about $199 vs $499, or whatever.
Or put another way, if you went to a team with a best-possible Kindle playbook system, and even a mediocre iPad playbook system, which do you think they'd pick? Let's say the iPad system had a 1000% markup, and you offered to pay them that same amount to use the Kindle system. Can't you see that they'd laugh the Kindle system out of the room? iPad is vastly superior to Kindle that it's not even funny.
But hey, you put down Apple, and putting down Apple is seen as necessary around here to promote Android, so job well done. Here's to your +5, may sanity never rear it's ugly head around here ever again...
Nope, What I am saying and what I did say was that obtrusive warnings and no warnings are roughly the same.
No, you said warnings and no warnings are roughly the same. Specifically, "Prompting always is pretty much the same as never prompting."
Which you agree with in your next paragraph.
No, I said prompting too often can train the user to just click them away. Obtrusiveness is a necessary aspect of security prompts. Prompting for every little thing isn't. If that's what you really meant, or at the very least, what you mean now, than we agree enough on that topic at least.
And I also stated, however, that this is a red herring, because remote app installs aren't going to happen so often as to become automatic responses.
but it's reasonable that there will be some mistakes when rolling something new out like this
No, it's not reasonable. Making security mistakes like this mean that security wasn't included in the architecture design from the beginning. Yes, lots of people treat security as an afterthought, and no, it's not a good thing.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said it was reasonable.
My proof is that people are fallible. What's unreasonable is expecting absolutely no security hitches ever. When something like this happens (and it's wise to always count on something like this happening), what's important is how it's dealt with. This situation only really becomes unreasonable if Google does nothing about it, or takes too long to do so.
This is Security 101. Prompting should be default, and if it's to be allowed to be disabled at all, it should require some level of user acceptance.
This sounds like the Vista security policy. It is really, really wrong. Prompting always is pretty much the same as never prompting. If you prompt for the same action over and over people just accept the prompt as part of the action and stop reading them. It's just the way we work.
What you're really saying is that security is the same as no security. Why lock your door? You're just going to unlock it every time someone comes to it, right?
I can't see how you can reasonably equate prompting with not prompting in this case. Vista is a red herring. We're not talking about prompting every time a user does something remotely admin-like. We're talking about prompting whenever the OS wants to install software from the Internet. This is much more like Windows prompting before installing third-party software. The problem with UAC (in Vista far more than in 7) is that it came up so much that it was essentially something you just learned to click in order to use your computer. That's not what we're talking about here. Software install and update prompts have been normal for a decade now.
This whole argument against prompting is extremely silly. If anyone other than Google was doing this, there'd be an uproar. But since it's Google, I guess we'll let this slide, right?
This is Security 101. You don't let third party binaries on your system that you didn't ask for.
"As a minimum, a dialog should be displayed on the receiving device so that the user must personally accept the application that is being installed." Again, I don't agree. I don't care about that, I want CONVENIENCE.
This seems a bit much. A dialog box saying, "Install: [list of new apps]?", seems convenient enough to me. It's not even saying you need to type in your password, just accept new apps. You can even have a "Don't ask me again." checkbox if you really just want binaries from the Internet to be automatically installed.
This is Security 101. Prompting should be default, and if it's to be allowed to be disabled at all, it should require some level of user acceptance.
You talk about "your password is compromised already, you have worse things to worry about!", what about some guy hacking into a girl's gmail account and remotely installing some stalker malware? Or phishers hacking into your parent's account to do the same, but for banking fraud purposes?
This is a bad default decision, but it's reasonable that there will be some mistakes when rolling something new out like this. It seems to me like you're only defending it because to do otherwise would require admitting a security weakness in Android.
You realize that your resorting to stupid sexual insults demonstrates you have absolutely no substance to your argument, right? That your position is based entirely on ignorance and emotion, or you'd be able to make a cogent argument.
Your last line is especially insane. If you think there are very many people who think Apple is vile, and are waiting for Jobs to die, you are on the far extreme end of madness. People love their Apple products, and think Jobs has done fantastic things with his company. The set of people who fit your last statement are a lunatic fringe.
And yes, I realize responding to you is a waste of time, but what the hell, every now and then someone's got to point out the obvious when someone else is being an idiot.
Now the people telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use
Apple does no such thing.
Ho ho, yes they do. Unless Steve "If you want porn buy android" Jobs doesn't count as people.
Do you know that there's a huge difference between not carrying porn, and "telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use"? I'm telling you this right now, Steve Jobs, nor anyone else, has ever told me "exactly what apps you can and can't use". And I can, in fact, run all the porn I want on my iPhone, including apps, if I so desire. I can do so with Apple's permission by buying a developer key, or I can do so without their permission by jailbreaking.
That the App Store is both curated and the main source for apps is a valid criticism. That that means Apple is controlling its users is not. Every time a nerd goes on a rant like this, it comes across like insane babbling to normal people. You may as well rail against Disney's evil controlling nature for not showing porn on the Disney Channel. No one ever says something like, "Best Buy tells you exactly what you can and can't buy" just because they only carry specific items, or that a museum tells you what are you can and can't see, etc.
In fact, I would wager large amounts of money that most people who say this about Apple actually have non-Apple approved software on their phones. The very people who make this claim are counterexamples that actually disprove their claim!
That's an issue of trademarks, not copyright or patents. But, in case you're wondering, yes I would not call a standard whose trademarks are not freely available "open" either, though in that case the solution would be so simple as to be trivial.
I never said it was patents, nor did I say it was a standard. What I said is that it's something that's called "open", yet not universally legally implementable by others. In fact, with H.264, anyone can buy a license. With Firefox, you can't use their trademark and you can't even use all of their graphics, and it's not openly licensable.
You say the solution is trivial with Firefox (i.e., just relabel it and replace some graphics). The solution is similarly trivial with H.264, just pay the license.
Only due to a particular reading of the GPL2 that allows for a legal loophole in it.
FSF does not define "open". There are multitudes of other open source licenses which allow the very same thing.
The first is "by commitee", the second is also covered by "standard", and the third is irrelevant, the status of a standard is not and should not be determined by the status of the existing implementations.
Basically, what you are saying is that "open" only means what you say it means, and you will pick what it means based on whether or not it applies to H.264. This is a lame ideological argument. H.264 is OPEN, and it's a STANDARD. That's why I'm calling it an open standard. I'm not saying that Open Standard is some specific term. It just means it's a standard and it's open. If you want to call the word "open" superfluous, be my guest, but what you have not been able to do is demonstrate that it's not a valid adjective.
In fact, by calling it superfluous, you've pretty much granted that it is valid.
It is not, however, completely free, although it is completely free in some contexts, so in those contexts, it is also a free standard. But no one calls it that because you can't really do so without qualification. It is a fair point to consider, however.
Now you're just fucking with me. Seriously, that's not even a coherent argument, that's just school-level wordplay.
No, I'm just telling you that you are confusing "open" with "free" because to you, open means it has to be freely implementable by anyone who wants to, no licensing required. That's not what open means, that's what free means. By "fucking with you" and "school-level wordplay", what you mean is I'm using the actual meanings of words as they stand and not using ideology to reinvent their meanings. Sorry that that fucks with you, but I prefer reality to ideology.
Because News Corp and some podunk Android ezine are the same thing.
People always trot out this, "Apple is completely arbitrary! Be afraid, developers, BE AFRAID!" FUD line which has no basis in reality. Apple will never pull The Daily for something silly like an unfavorable article about Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait...the iPad has half the cores and 1/4 of the RAM as the Xoom, and it 'competes well'?
Yes, because it's a minute fraction of purchasers who even know what those specs are, and really they don't matter. What matters is what you can do with it, and the iPad is significantly more functional than any Android tablet. The only feature that the Xoom has over iPad that matters is the cameras.
Don't get me wrong; the iPad is a nice device and I'm not going to buy a Xoom, but please, give us a break. This RDF shit is getting really old and tired.
Old and tired is thinking your geek values apply to the 99%+ of everyone else out there. It doesn't and it shouldn't.
Apple is not about the hardware.
Apple is about hardware more than any other company on the planet. The thing you are missing is they are about the hardware that normal humans like, not the silly niche market populated by geeks.
Their prices were as low as they were because their prices are higher than the cost to make them. It's very simple economics.
[they have a] cult-like following that tend to buy whatever they come out with regardless of cost or function
You're a fucking idiot if you think this is true. People don't buy iPods, iPhones or iPads in spite of high prices and limited functionality. They buy them because they are fantastic products at a price they are willing to pay for. Just because these products offend your geek-centric view of the world does not make those that think otherwise cult-like. If anything, you're the minority opinion, if you're going to start bandying about a term like "cult".
Apple makes a direct profit on every piece of hardware they sell, including iPads. App Store (and music store) profits are minuscule compared to their hardware profits. There is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining.
Cheers, nothing like some real data so we can make a fair comparison - and what you've given us is nothing like real data. You're a rabid apple fanboy and one of the worst to troll this website - piss off.
Nothing like an actual argument so there's something to discuss, my little AC friend. Apple went from zero percent market share in March 2010, to *way* over 75% market share in December 2010, and that counts the whole year, of which they completely missed out on a third of it, and also includes falsely inflated numbers of the Samsung Galaxy Tab (2 million claimed by Samsung, but more likely to be around 250k).
These are facts, and I've even included the least accurate and most anti-iPad numbers, and they still make the iPad look wildly successful.
Sorry if the facts sound like simple fanboyism to you, but if that's the case, you must ask yourself who is the actual fanboy here? You'd think it would be the one whose argument is not backed by facts, but maybe for you it's just "anyone who disagrees with my opinion"?
McDonald's outsells five star restaurants because five star restaurants are expensive, and take time and effort. The iPad is neither. In fact, it's cheaper than any of its real competitors, and it's easier than all of its competitors. It's like they have all of the benefits of McDonald's, combined with the benefits of a five star restaurant. Just imagine how well a restaurant chain would do if they could do that.
Now ponder why Apple has done so well with their iPods, iPhones and now iPads. It's for this very reason.
Android is the McDonald's in your analogy, but a more expensive, less appealing McDonald's. Unless you are a special kind of geek.
The iPad is more powerful than any other tablet on the market, if you are a normal person. Power isn't "what the hardware can do", it's "what the user can do".
You may not be surprised, but you are not surprised for the wrong reason. Your logic is rather odd. Unless you care to clarify, it implies a causal relationship between "power" and sales, and a negative one at that.
If you look at every category you listed, two things show up as far more prominent than "power". Price and software. Also, with regards to the PC, there's business vs consumers, but it doesn't really apply to the rest of the list.
So the real question you should be asking isn't whether the iPad is the most powerful device or not, but whether the price is too high and whether there is enough software for it, if you want to look at specific indicators.
Hardly. Apple release a sized up iPhone
Apple actually started work on the iPad long before the iPhone. Once the project got to a certain point, they realized it would make for a great phone. They continued work and finished the iPad later. So, if anything, the iPhone is a scaled down iPad.
that is not very esthetic (but that's on the eyes of beholder, I'm just going by the spontaneous reaction of my 10yrs old daughter, ugly sized up iPhone, when she saw it the first time)
Do you get most of your technical opinions from 10 year olds?
with a nonfunctional OS (The stupid thing was single tasking at the UI level, that's so 1980s)
OMG! They released it with one set of features, and added more features afterwards!
non ergonomic (the iPad is rather heavy for it's puny functionality)
I didn't realize there was a weight to functionality ratio to consider.
fixed battery which makes extending the runtime outside a PITA
Yeah, because 9 hours is so anemic.
No Apple just managed to ride it through on their brand, but will get them only to some point.
Yeah, they managed to "ride through" from zero percent to well over three quarters of a market in less than a year. I'm sure that happens all the time.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
Well, numbers are very suspect here, Apple does not release numbers
Yes, they do. Every quarter, in fact.
nobody really does.
I guess Samsung didn't say they sold 2 million Tabs? Then later reiterate that they only shipped 2 million? I suppose you're right that they didn't state how many they actually sold to consumers, so there's that.
Fact is when I walked through a local mall before christmas, basically every relevant shop had iPads in stock and advertised them.
I see, so you asked them if they had iPads in stock? And whether they ever ran low or sold out? Apple was unable to keep up with demand for the iPad. They just managed their retail strategy so well that they minimized the frustration of going into a store and finding it sold out. They did this, in part, by limiting the number of stores it was available in.
My Archos, my wife had to hunt down on Amazon, and the delivery Amazon got was gone in less than 24 hours. All local shops listed them out of stock, will be replenished in 4-6 weeks. Now that proves nothing, but it suggests that vendors overestimated demand for the iPad, and underestimated the demand for Archos tablets.
No, it suggests you do not understand how retail works. The iPad is a guaranteed high-volume item. The Archos is a risky product to stock. Retailers would have gladly overstocked the iPad if they could, because they knew they would sell any left overs. With all non-Apple tablets, they would want to keep inventory deliberately low, because the risk of being stuck with unsold and undesired inventory is much higher.
So where do your reliable numbers for shipped and sold iPads come from? I mean, NOBODY publishes them.
Apple does.
Apple does not even split out the bilance numbers by unit.
Wait, you just said "NOBODY publishes them". Now you say Apple does, but doesn't split out by unit?
So WHERE do you get these reliable numbers? My observation, outside the US, which is a special case anyway, having lived in the communication stone age for a long time, the iPad has been quite in stock
Inventory does not last long. That Apple can generally keep some stores stocked shows that they have an efficient retail model. But there were plenty of stor
I don't know where he got his numbers, but his math is solid. We have no evidence of his "statistics".
An analyst group that monitored stores reported a 16% return rate. Samsung reported 2%.
(examples: 16% and 2%, or just google "galaxy tab return rate" and you'll see headlines of 16% and 2%)
Given Samsung previously giving numbers "shipped", not sold to consumers, and tracking stores is tracking actual sales to consumers, it makes sense to assume Samsung is referring to returns from the 2 million, and the other number is returns from those sold. The rest is simple algebra as you mentioned.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try.
Well, second try. Apple Newton?
Newton wasn't an attempt at a tablet, it was an attempt at a PDA, and they cleaned house there, too. It was canceled not out of failure, but out of a refocusing of Apple after the NeXT acquisition.
Yeah, sorry that people can't be such fantastically nerdy as you are, and instead are just regular people who prefer their technology to cater to them, not the other way around.
Apple sees technology and says, "ok, that's a good start. Now, how do we make this work for people?". Everyone else sees technology and says, "great, let's slap a sticker on it and we're good to go".
I see, I didn't realize the Android bar was set so low. Maybe you should look into your own motives before calling others "fanbois" and using crude metaphors. Seems like everything you said about Apple customers could just as well apply to you. More aptly, in fact, since at least the Apple customers backed a winning product.
The resolution on these tablets is almost as big as my monitor at work, and yet they still don't have windowed apps?
Having windows has nothing to do directly with screen resolution. The first Macintosh had a 640x400 screen. It has to do with how you interact with the system. There is definitely some use for popover windows in a tablet, but not really any use for a full on windowed OS.
Um, yeah. The iPad is so awful it only took over the entire market, but those "more powerful" Android tablets only garnered a small percentage.
For example, the Streak and Galaxy Tab you mentioned doing so well? The iPad outsold them both more than ten times over. Combined.
I don't think they were released too soon. They were the teething stage of tablets, the infancy where mistakes could be made. Thanks to this Google, Motorola and others have learned valuable lessons.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try. I doubt anyone learned any lessons other than not to run a desktop OS on the tablet. Hell, they even had the iPad itself to look at for inspiration, and still failed to come out with a compelling alternative.
Some of the previous Android tablets are hardly failures. Dell's Streak turned a profit, Samsung's Galaxy Tab sold well with a small return rate not to mention the Archos products which others have pointed out.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
On the Tab specifically, they shipped 2 million, but actually sold very few. Of the 2 million, their return rate may very well have been around 2%, but the actual return rate for Tabs people bought was 16%. That puts the number actually sold more like a quarter of a million, not 2 million.
Basically the demand was there, proven by the 22% of tablets sold that were not made by Apple. So now armed with this knowledge, the multitude of manufacturers can create a truly competitive tablet market.
22% was based on the deliberately misleading numbers put forth by Samsung. And even with those completely false numbers, that puts Apple at 78% (and much higher with the actual numbers).
Personally I'm still not convinced tablets aren't a fad, much like an overpriced Tamigotchi or flares.
Why would they be a fad? Because people bought too many iPads and not enough Android tablets?
Kindle, on the other hand, makes total sense.
iPad is total overkill, Kindle is way way WAY cheaper and does all the same things that they need to do.
How does full-on nonsense like this get modded so high on Slashdot? Oh yeah, that's right, because it puts down Apple in some way...
Kindle makes absolutely no sense. Kindle is a book reader, and flipping through pages is damned slow. With iPad, you can have fast, full-color, networked playbooks that you can edit in real time, draw on, zoom around. The absurdity of your post is not that Kindle isn't an overall better choice, but that it's difficult to even come up with a few ways in which it is. Maybe that the screen is a bit clearer in direct sunlight?
As far as "overkill", the mics that the coaches wear probably cost more than your car. It's absolutely foolish to worry about $199 vs $499, or whatever.
Or put another way, if you went to a team with a best-possible Kindle playbook system, and even a mediocre iPad playbook system, which do you think they'd pick? Let's say the iPad system had a 1000% markup, and you offered to pay them that same amount to use the Kindle system. Can't you see that they'd laugh the Kindle system out of the room? iPad is vastly superior to Kindle that it's not even funny.
But hey, you put down Apple, and putting down Apple is seen as necessary around here to promote Android, so job well done. Here's to your +5, may sanity never rear it's ugly head around here ever again...
Nope, What I am saying and what I did say was that obtrusive warnings and no warnings are roughly the same.
No, you said warnings and no warnings are roughly the same. Specifically, "Prompting always is pretty much the same as never prompting."
Which you agree with in your next paragraph.
No, I said prompting too often can train the user to just click them away. Obtrusiveness is a necessary aspect of security prompts. Prompting for every little thing isn't. If that's what you really meant, or at the very least, what you mean now, than we agree enough on that topic at least.
And I also stated, however, that this is a red herring, because remote app installs aren't going to happen so often as to become automatic responses.
but it's reasonable that there will be some mistakes when rolling something new out like this
No, it's not reasonable. Making security mistakes like this mean that security wasn't included in the architecture design from the beginning. Yes, lots of people treat security as an afterthought, and no, it's not a good thing.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said it was reasonable.
My proof is that people are fallible. What's unreasonable is expecting absolutely no security hitches ever. When something like this happens (and it's wise to always count on something like this happening), what's important is how it's dealt with. This situation only really becomes unreasonable if Google does nothing about it, or takes too long to do so.
This is Security 101. Prompting should be default, and if it's to be allowed to be disabled at all, it should require some level of user acceptance.
This sounds like the Vista security policy. It is really, really wrong. Prompting always is pretty much the same as never prompting. If you prompt for the same action over and over people just accept the prompt as part of the action and stop reading them. It's just the way we work.
What you're really saying is that security is the same as no security. Why lock your door? You're just going to unlock it every time someone comes to it, right?
I can't see how you can reasonably equate prompting with not prompting in this case. Vista is a red herring. We're not talking about prompting every time a user does something remotely admin-like. We're talking about prompting whenever the OS wants to install software from the Internet. This is much more like Windows prompting before installing third-party software. The problem with UAC (in Vista far more than in 7) is that it came up so much that it was essentially something you just learned to click in order to use your computer. That's not what we're talking about here. Software install and update prompts have been normal for a decade now.
This whole argument against prompting is extremely silly. If anyone other than Google was doing this, there'd be an uproar. But since it's Google, I guess we'll let this slide, right?
This is Security 101. You don't let third party binaries on your system that you didn't ask for.
What malware? The only apps that are installable are the ones on the Android Market, where any malware will be flagged by users right away...
You just said, "What malware? The malware that's on the Android Marketplace?"
Yes, that malware.
"As a minimum, a dialog should be displayed on the receiving device so that the user must personally accept the application that is being installed."
Again, I don't agree. I don't care about that, I want CONVENIENCE.
This seems a bit much. A dialog box saying, "Install: [list of new apps]?", seems convenient enough to me. It's not even saying you need to type in your password, just accept new apps. You can even have a "Don't ask me again." checkbox if you really just want binaries from the Internet to be automatically installed.
This is Security 101. Prompting should be default, and if it's to be allowed to be disabled at all, it should require some level of user acceptance.
You talk about "your password is compromised already, you have worse things to worry about!", what about some guy hacking into a girl's gmail account and remotely installing some stalker malware? Or phishers hacking into your parent's account to do the same, but for banking fraud purposes?
This is a bad default decision, but it's reasonable that there will be some mistakes when rolling something new out like this. It seems to me like you're only defending it because to do otherwise would require admitting a security weakness in Android.
You realize that your resorting to stupid sexual insults demonstrates you have absolutely no substance to your argument, right? That your position is based entirely on ignorance and emotion, or you'd be able to make a cogent argument.
Your last line is especially insane. If you think there are very many people who think Apple is vile, and are waiting for Jobs to die, you are on the far extreme end of madness. People love their Apple products, and think Jobs has done fantastic things with his company. The set of people who fit your last statement are a lunatic fringe.
And yes, I realize responding to you is a waste of time, but what the hell, every now and then someone's got to point out the obvious when someone else is being an idiot.
Now the people telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use
Apple does no such thing.
Ho ho, yes they do. Unless Steve "If you want porn buy android" Jobs doesn't count as people.
Do you know that there's a huge difference between not carrying porn, and "telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use"? I'm telling you this right now, Steve Jobs, nor anyone else, has ever told me "exactly what apps you can and can't use". And I can, in fact, run all the porn I want on my iPhone, including apps, if I so desire. I can do so with Apple's permission by buying a developer key, or I can do so without their permission by jailbreaking.
That the App Store is both curated and the main source for apps is a valid criticism. That that means Apple is controlling its users is not. Every time a nerd goes on a rant like this, it comes across like insane babbling to normal people. You may as well rail against Disney's evil controlling nature for not showing porn on the Disney Channel. No one ever says something like, "Best Buy tells you exactly what you can and can't buy" just because they only carry specific items, or that a museum tells you what are you can and can't see, etc.
In fact, I would wager large amounts of money that most people who say this about Apple actually have non-Apple approved software on their phones. The very people who make this claim are counterexamples that actually disprove their claim!
That's an issue of trademarks, not copyright or patents. But, in case you're wondering, yes I would not call a standard whose trademarks are not freely available "open" either, though in that case the solution would be so simple as to be trivial.
I never said it was patents, nor did I say it was a standard. What I said is that it's something that's called "open", yet not universally legally implementable by others. In fact, with H.264, anyone can buy a license. With Firefox, you can't use their trademark and you can't even use all of their graphics, and it's not openly licensable.
You say the solution is trivial with Firefox (i.e., just relabel it and replace some graphics). The solution is similarly trivial with H.264, just pay the license.
Only due to a particular reading of the GPL2 that allows for a legal loophole in it.
FSF does not define "open". There are multitudes of other open source licenses which allow the very same thing.
The first is "by commitee", the second is also covered by "standard", and the third is irrelevant, the status of a standard is not and should not be determined by the status of the existing implementations.
Basically, what you are saying is that "open" only means what you say it means, and you will pick what it means based on whether or not it applies to H.264. This is a lame ideological argument. H.264 is OPEN, and it's a STANDARD. That's why I'm calling it an open standard. I'm not saying that Open Standard is some specific term. It just means it's a standard and it's open. If you want to call the word "open" superfluous, be my guest, but what you have not been able to do is demonstrate that it's not a valid adjective.
In fact, by calling it superfluous, you've pretty much granted that it is valid.
It is not, however, completely free, although it is completely free in some contexts, so in those contexts, it is also a free standard. But no one calls it that because you can't really do so without qualification. It is a fair point to consider, however.
Now you're just fucking with me. Seriously, that's not even a coherent argument, that's just school-level wordplay.
No, I'm just telling you that you are confusing "open" with "free" because to you, open means it has to be freely implementable by anyone who wants to, no licensing required. That's not what open means, that's what free means. By "fucking with you" and "school-level wordplay", what you mean is I'm using the actual meanings of words as they stand and not using ideology to reinvent their meanings. Sorry that that fucks with you, but I prefer reality to ideology.
Because News Corp and some podunk Android ezine are the same thing.
People always trot out this, "Apple is completely arbitrary! Be afraid, developers, BE AFRAID!" FUD line which has no basis in reality. Apple will never pull The Daily for something silly like an unfavorable article about Apple.