It would be just as buggy and crash-prone as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.
When I looked at that video, at about the 5 minute mark they start to show how I'd be using Flash most of the time, ie: as a part of the web-page rather than just Flash on its own. To me, it didn't look as though it was running at all well. Having Flash on the web-page caused the page-update to be slow-as-molasses, and scrolling to be about 2 fps.
And this is the best they could do, under controlled circumstances, cherry-picking the sites to use ? Give me a break!
But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?
I'm sure they considered that. But take it a bit further... Jane Public enables flash to watch the 'OMG ponies' video-of-the-day. Are you confident that every single user would then think "Oh, now I have to turn Flash back off, otherwise my phone will now suck". I'm not. And then a little while down the road it's not "I take the personal responsibility for making my phone suck because I turned on Flash", it's more like "the iPhone sucks. Apple sucks".
Tell me again how this benefits Apple ?
And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Translating Flash to ObjC and then compiling it doesn't remove any of the bad algorithmic design in Flash unless they rewrite Flash itself. I once wrote a Java->C++ converter which worked pretty well for me until gcj came along. If you wrote bad Java code (say: busy wait on events) you'd get bad C++ code out the other end - there's nothing magical about translating to ObjC that fixes bad code.
Adobe tried to make an end-run around Apple's "we don't want your crappy Flash environment because it sucks" position, by implementing a Flash->C (or ObjC, whatever) translator. Apple either had to capitulate at that point, and accept all of the problems with Flash on their devices, or they could prevent it. If Adobe has a Flash->C translator, I can't see any real way Apple could prevent Flash without doing what they did.
I'd say that if Adobe had done the right thing, and made Flash better (efficient, stable), and ported *that* to Android instead of putting effort into trying to work around Apple's position on Flash, they'd have made a *far* better case for Apple eating humble pie and asking Adobe to implement this mythical excellent Flash environment for the iPhone. But they didn't.
br
Simon
And yes, I know that's not going to sit well with the/. crowd, but it remains a truism. If Apple allowed flash onto the iPhone right tomorrow
It would be just as buggy and crash-prone as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.
Because it's on every darn page on the web - for adverts - it'd be running almost constantly as the user uses Safari; so the other down-side comes into play - it's a huge battery hog. Suddenly Apple's quotes of 10 hours battery life on the iPad are reduced to 5 hours (or whatever). Uninformed users (you know, the 99% majority out there) say Apple is lying about it's battery times. Now every manufacturer lies about it's battery times, right ? Oh, wait, no they don't. Apple's battery-life figures stand alone (as far as I can tell) as a reasonable guide to how long you'll get out of your machine. That's worth a lot, to Apple.
I'm not going to pretend there aren't advantages to Apple in requiring people to use Apple's API to code on Apple's hardware (yeah, yeah, I know you bought it, I know it's *yours*, but you know what I mean). Of course there are. That doesn't invalidate the concerns above. I'm sure 'the Steve' sees it as a bonus.
Knowing people who work at Apple, they're a focussed bunch. They care passionately about making things easy to use, and frankly about making the very best (whatever) possible. There's very little of the jaded cynicism I've found in other companies over the years - they're more willing to "++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start." than anywhere else I've ever seen, and I (personally) can easily see the above being sufficient reason to abandon Flash as a platform if they think it's beyond saving.
Not where I live, it doesn't. In CA, I pay the listed price ($499.99) + local sales tax of 9.25%. It's one of my dislikes about the US that nothing is ever what you actually pay...
Now that's intriguing. What on earth do you mean ? Is it truly the case that there's no import duty because you have to download a calculator app, rather than comes supplied with one ? That seems... bizarre.
I disagree with you. This is a quote from a post I made late last year:
I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there:)
I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.
For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...
Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you over if someone hits your car - an insurance company that has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. After the last few weeks, I'm pretty darn certain which of the two models I prefer.
From our perspective, the good news is that my mother pulled through, both her and my uncle are on medicines for the rest of her life (free, of course) and my mother has just finished the chemotherapy, so she's feeling a little fragile atm, but she made it; anything else is irrelevant.
Up until recently, there was *no* way to get compiled apps on the phone. You were stuck with web "apps". Apparently that was fine, but allowing apps and restricting the development language is not ?
Apple's policy does not (as TFA claims) require the developer to use only Apple's programming tools. It just requires the developer to use C, ObjC, or C++. There's no requirement that those tools originate from Apple.
3rd-parties (like Unity) do (at first glance) appear to be screwed. Apparently, though, Apple are talking to the Unity authors, and continue to approve Unity games - this latter point could be a problem for them in fact. Monotouch were making the point that they are different to Flash, but given point 6 on Steve's creed, I don't see a good future for them either.
Most (not all) antitrust legislation is aimed at preventing monopoly exploitation of alternate markets. There is little evidence that Apple has any sort of monopoly unless the category is defined so narrowly as to be useless.
Users are free to choose another device if they feel that strongly about the situation. My hunch is that/. won't accurately represent the marketplace, however.
I still don't see why Apple aren't allowed to set the terms of participation in their program. If you sign up as an iphone/ipod/ipad developer, you know what you're getting into, and you know they can change their rules at any time. Don't come whining when you don't like it any more
Now normal service can resume, and the anyone-but-Apple brigade can froth gently at the mouth while insisting their rants are somehow not the mirror image of the "fanbois" they detest so much.
From reading the developer agreement, I'm not even sure that's needed.
All the restrictions appear to be on the application, when distributed via the app-store, not on the source-code for the application. Other restrictions apply to Apple software (ie: the SDK), but that's not what you'd be distributing either.
If anyone can point out where it says the source-code is restricted from distribution, I'd appreciate it.
I'm aware that searches must be specific and localised, but to continue your analogy, if said vitamin bottles are on your desk in the room being searched, I'd think it was reasonable to open them up. What's different about a vitamin bottle, compared to a desk-drawer ?
I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on this, but if the cops have persuaded a judge sufficiently to get a warrant, I would have thought anything within the purvey of that warrant would be fair game.
However, if you leave a note pinned to the wall saying "my facebook password is 'kryptonite'", the police are allowed to read that note when they enter the building, having a search warrant. What's the difference in reading a file left on your computer's desktop ?
I recall reading about a mouse that recorded (internally) what it did and could replay it later. Probably not the mouse that Chen owns, but hey, why not include the clause ?:)
I'm also not sure why you think passwords have any greater protection than anything else when the police have a court-granted right to search, but hey, I'm not a lawyer either.
The syntax is different, but using a language is only ~5% syntax, the rest is how it all fits together. I far prefer how ObjC fits together than C++, ObjC seems... elegant, whereas C++ feels more like the kitchen sink actually *did* make the trip, along with the rest of the house, neighbourhood, and probably universe. All packed up into a computer language.
And, it's not *that* different on the surface.... Compare:
Cat *cat = new Cat();
... to...
Cat *cat = [Cat new];
I've just been writing some plugin-management code. Because of the dynamic nature of the language, it took about 20 minutes to write ~40 lines of code that loads, validates as conforming to a protocol, initialises, and registers bundles of code at run-time. My C++ has become rusty since I switched to ObjC, but I think it'd be harder than in ObjC...
Ok, me too. I wonder if it's worth putting a poll somewhere about
I can't believe just how more stable Safari is now that I've installed clickToFlash. Getting rid of flash was a great decision, and apparently I don't miss this "very large and significant portion of contemporary web experience" (by which I assume you mean crappy games, web-bugs, and annoying adverts...)
In the first place, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on mobile phones, or even on smart phones. To invoke anti-trust law, you have to have an actionable monopoly, and be using it to stifle competition (ie: you have to be *competing* with the thing that you're acting against)
In the second place, Apple is not competing with Flash. They're just banning it. That's a different proposition, and one that the courts would probably be convinced was something the market could figure out. "You buy phone A, it does everything. You buy phone I, it doesn't do X,Y,Z".
In the third place, Microsoft *was* doing something - it was telling its 3rd-party vendors to install only IE, or lose financial incentives. Note three things here:
Microsoft was (is ?) a monopoly
Microsoft was competing in the market with its own version of something (the browser, in this case)
Microsoft was using its monopoly power (in the OS area) to leverage effect in a separate competitive area
This case is different, oh yeah, and you don't get to invoke anti-trust law because "company A is doing something I don't like". Doesn't look to me as though Adobe has a leg to stand on, so they're probably just trying to exert some pressure on Apple.
Apple have invested a huge amount of effort in getting UIKit up and running. They think they've got the best interface out there for touch.
If Adobe (or whomever) want to produce cross-platform build tools (ie: write for one platform, target another), they can only target the lowest common denominator of all those platforms or provide spotty coverage.
Even if they do provide coverage for everything in Cocoa-Touch, when will support arrive ?
So, why would Apple want to give up control over the API of the devices they've made, while simultaneously throwing away any competitive advantage they might be able to bring in the native toolkit ?
Seriously, what was Adobe thinking ? A good business relationship is when everyone gains from whatever is being proposed. Apple don't gain. Why are Adobe surprised Apple aren't happy ? This isn't *quite* as bad as Palm lying about their USB id's in order to piggy-back on Apple's success, but it's pretty darn close.
I can see the case for this being good for Adobe. I can't see the case for this being good for Apple; given that Apple are way out ahead in terms of mindshare at the moment, I don't think this is a bad thing for the users - developers are flocking to the platform.
If Adobe want to play, they need to bring something that excites the user-base, and that Apple can't refute. So far they've *not* done that, and childish rants aren't going to persuade me that they can, in fact, do that. I do love the "comments are disabled because someone might disagree with me" as well [grin] - that just smacks of someone firmly convinced they're in the right...
Simon
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
but selling 300k in one day, in one country compares pretty well to the 3G and 3GS phones
You've got to remember that they've had months of vast amounts of free advertising, media coverage and hype. So this isn't really "one day", you've got months' worth of pre-orders and Apple fans waiting up to get it.
... as they did for the 3G and 3GS. Which the iPad outsold...
On an iPad you'll interact with it - that 5x screen-estate isn't a "just", it's a "crucially", IMHO.
So all those years of joking about people with "bricks" for a phone that was slightly too big, but now it's suddenly okay? If you want a larger device, there are netbooks, laptops, and other tablets too of course.
Um, the iPad isn't a phone. Sorry.
Having actually played with one, what makes the difference is the interface - as usual with Apple, it's the software that matters. Everything is zippy and responsive - that's not just a checkbox on a feature-list, it's a different quality of experience. They were right. Until you've played with one, you can't get the feel for why it's so good.
Simon
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I knew it. All along, those gosh-darned-it twinkies(*) were aimed at diabetics!
Lack of archery skill notwithstanding, it's entirely possible to segregate a market for a product or set thereof.
Simon.
(*) Not having ever *seen* a "twinkie", I'm going with my vague impression that it's sugar-filled nutrition-less candy. If not, please feel free to substitute something suitable instead. I'm trying to use terms well-known in the US without the relevant experience here.
CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Considering that the last time he passed comment on an Apple handheld, his prediction was pretty lame
I don't think this is the ultimate device for keyboard-focussed nerds, but (as usual) that's not who Apple is aiming at. I guess we'll have to wait and see how well it really does, but selling 300k in one day, in one country compares pretty well to the 3G and 3GS phones (which sold ~1M in 3 days, in 21 countries worldwide).
[Aside - not directed at the review] perhaps it's just me, but the qualifier "just" in "just a bigger iphone/ipod touch" seems somewhat questionable. Does anyone here want to trade their HDTV for an SD model ? Thought so. With a TV, all you do is view it. On an iPad you'll interact with it - that 5x screen-estate isn't a "just", it's a "crucially", IMHO. [/aside]
Those who insist on using 'fanboi', (or other variants of the word) to describe normal people who are satisfied with what they bought
Those who are envious and/or jealous of Apple's success
Those who are too blinkered in their outlook, who define themselves by adherence to some purist "everything must be open" credo
Those who can't afford the device, and are jealous of those who can
Those with buyers remorse for having paid good money down out on something else
The infants (at least of mind) who like to characterise anyone who buys Apple as gay
Those who, for whatever reason, just dislike Apple as a company, and can safely be categorised as 'haters'
will be out in force in this thread.
There are faults with any device. It's not perfect, and it won't be for everyone. What irks me is the "I don't like/want it therefore it's crap" attitude; the inability to look beyond what *you* find wrong with it, and see that this might just be golden for someone else. My parents, for example [grin].
But what bugs me above all is the anti-apple crowd these days. Apparently if you express even the slightest appreciation for something well-conceived and well-designed, you're a "fanboi" who's taken in by "the shiny" (whatever *that* is!). Sure there are fanboys (and girls, presumably), but not everyone (not even vaguely close - not in the same universe, let alone ballpark) who likes Apple kit should be labelled such.
I swear the anti-Apple crowd are far and away worse than the real fanboys. Even in the worst-possible scenario, with everyone who likes Apple kit being a fan (ahem, including both genders, here) , at least the fans have something they like, appreciate, and enjoy using. The haters just hate. And that's pitiably sad.
Am I the only one who *doesn't* get eye-strain reading text on LCD's hour after hour ?
I'm beginning to wonder whether the difference is actually Mac vs PC and the font rendering technologies. I use a Mac all day, reading text on LCDs, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. Perhaps it's because the fonts look nicer (yeah, I know, it's an opinion, not a fact) to my eye on the Mac. I've lost count of the number of times I've spent days poring over PDFs and somehow managed to not notice this 'eye strain' that LCDs apparently cause. I actually *prefer* to read documents on the screen rather than printed out on paper...
I'm also pretty convinced I'd get a lot more wound up over the slow refresh of the e-ink displays than the supposed eyestrain from LCDs...
Slashdot Mirror
... don't be evil, indeed...
Simon.
Um, fuck you.
the room-mate was the only individual to come out of this with integrity. Good on her, is what I say.
Simon
It would be just as buggy and crash-prone as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.
When I looked at that video, at about the 5 minute mark they start to show how I'd be using Flash most of the time, ie: as a part of the web-page rather than just Flash on its own. To me, it didn't look as though it was running at all well. Having Flash on the web-page caused the page-update to be slow-as-molasses, and scrolling to be about 2 fps.
And this is the best they could do, under controlled circumstances, cherry-picking the sites to use ? Give me a break!
Simon
But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?
I'm sure they considered that. But take it a bit further... Jane Public enables flash to watch the 'OMG ponies' video-of-the-day. Are you confident that every single user would then think "Oh, now I have to turn Flash back off, otherwise my phone will now suck". I'm not. And then a little while down the road it's not "I take the personal responsibility for making my phone suck because I turned on Flash", it's more like "the iPhone sucks. Apple sucks".
Tell me again how this benefits Apple ?
And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Translating Flash to ObjC and then compiling it doesn't remove any of the bad algorithmic design in Flash unless they rewrite Flash itself. I once wrote a Java->C++ converter which worked pretty well for me until gcj came along. If you wrote bad Java code (say: busy wait on events) you'd get bad C++ code out the other end - there's nothing magical about translating to ObjC that fixes bad code.
Adobe tried to make an end-run around Apple's "we don't want your crappy Flash environment because it sucks" position, by implementing a Flash->C (or ObjC, whatever) translator. Apple either had to capitulate at that point, and accept all of the problems with Flash on their devices, or they could prevent it. If Adobe has a Flash->C translator, I can't see any real way Apple could prevent Flash without doing what they did.
I'd say that if Adobe had done the right thing, and made Flash better (efficient, stable), and ported *that* to Android instead of putting effort into trying to work around Apple's position on Flash, they'd have made a *far* better case for Apple eating humble pie and asking Adobe to implement this mythical excellent Flash environment for the iPhone. But they didn't.
br Simon
I'm not going to pretend there aren't advantages to Apple in requiring people to use Apple's API to code on Apple's hardware (yeah, yeah, I know you bought it, I know it's *yours*, but you know what I mean). Of course there are. That doesn't invalidate the concerns above. I'm sure 'the Steve' sees it as a bonus.
Knowing people who work at Apple, they're a focussed bunch. They care passionately about making things easy to use, and frankly about making the very best (whatever) possible. There's very little of the jaded cynicism I've found in other companies over the years - they're more willing to "++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start." than anywhere else I've ever seen, and I (personally) can easily see the above being sufficient reason to abandon Flash as a platform if they think it's beyond saving.
Simon
Not where I live, it doesn't. In CA, I pay the listed price ($499.99) + local sales tax of 9.25%. It's one of my dislikes about the US that nothing is ever what you actually pay...
Simon
Now that's intriguing. What on earth do you mean ? Is it truly the case that there's no import duty because you have to download a calculator app, rather than comes supplied with one ? That seems ... bizarre.
Simon.
UK VAT (the equivalent of sales tax in the USA) is 17.5%
Removing the tax so we can compare fairly: £429 / 1.175 => £365.11
Converting pounds to dollars: £429 = $539.94 (currency rate is 1 GBP = 1.47884 USD)
So, the difference (before taking into account the import duties of ~10%) is $539.94 - $499.99 or ~$40.
Subtracting $53 (estimated) of import duty means Apple is charging less than they do in the USA.
Simon.
From our perspective, the good news is that my mother pulled through, both her and my uncle are on medicines for the rest of her life (free, of course) and my mother has just finished the chemotherapy, so she's feeling a little fragile atm, but she made it; anything else is irrelevant.
Simon.
Now normal service can resume, and the anyone-but-Apple brigade can froth gently at the mouth while insisting their rants are somehow not the mirror image of the "fanbois" they detest so much.
Simon.
I can't see anything in the language of the agreement that prevents that, but the first reply in this forum (by sopssa) states exactly that
Simon
From reading the developer agreement, I'm not even sure that's needed.
All the restrictions appear to be on the application, when distributed via the app-store, not on the source-code for the application. Other restrictions apply to Apple software (ie: the SDK), but that's not what you'd be distributing either.
If anyone can point out where it says the source-code is restricted from distribution, I'd appreciate it.
Simon.
Really ? When they have a search warrant ?
I'm aware that searches must be specific and localised, but to continue your analogy, if said vitamin bottles are on your desk in the room being searched, I'd think it was reasonable to open them up. What's different about a vitamin bottle, compared to a desk-drawer ?
I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on this, but if the cops have persuaded a judge sufficiently to get a warrant, I would have thought anything within the purvey of that warrant would be fair game.
Simon
However, if you leave a note pinned to the wall saying "my facebook password is 'kryptonite'", the police are allowed to read that note when they enter the building, having a search warrant. What's the difference in reading a file left on your computer's desktop ?
Simon.
Some mice have evidence, yes.
:)
I recall reading about a mouse that recorded (internally) what it did and could replay it later. Probably not the mouse that Chen owns, but hey, why not include the clause ?
I'm also not sure why you think passwords have any greater protection than anything else when the police have a court-granted right to search, but hey, I'm not a lawyer either.
Simon
And, it's not *that* different on the surface.... Compare:
I've just been writing some plugin-management code. Because of the dynamic nature of the language, it took about 20 minutes to write ~40 lines of code that loads, validates as conforming to a protocol, initialises, and registers bundles of code at run-time. My C++ has become rusty since I switched to ObjC, but I think it'd be harder than in ObjC...
Simon..
...because Microsoft knows what people will reasonably buy?
Hmm. So what you're saying, is that you need an appealing product before you throw any money at it for advertising ? Makes sense...
Simon.
Ok, me too. I wonder if it's worth putting a poll somewhere about
I can't believe just how more stable Safari is now that I've installed clickToFlash. Getting rid of flash was a great decision, and apparently I don't miss this "very large and significant portion of contemporary web experience" (by which I assume you mean crappy games, web-bugs, and annoying adverts...)
Simon
This case is different, oh yeah, and you don't get to invoke anti-trust law because "company A is doing something I don't like". Doesn't look to me as though Adobe has a leg to stand on, so they're probably just trying to exert some pressure on Apple.
Simon.
Seriously, what was Adobe thinking ? A good business relationship is when everyone gains from whatever is being proposed. Apple don't gain. Why are Adobe surprised Apple aren't happy ? This isn't *quite* as bad as Palm lying about their USB id's in order to piggy-back on Apple's success, but it's pretty darn close.
I can see the case for this being good for Adobe. I can't see the case for this being good for Apple; given that Apple are way out ahead in terms of mindshare at the moment, I don't think this is a bad thing for the users - developers are flocking to the platform.
If Adobe want to play, they need to bring something that excites the user-base, and that Apple can't refute. So far they've *not* done that, and childish rants aren't going to persuade me that they can, in fact, do that. I do love the "comments are disabled because someone might disagree with me" as well [grin] - that just smacks of someone firmly convinced they're in the right...
Simon
but selling 300k in one day, in one country compares pretty well to the 3G and 3GS phones
You've got to remember that they've had months of vast amounts of free advertising, media coverage and hype. So this isn't really "one day", you've got months' worth of pre-orders and Apple fans waiting up to get it.
... as they did for the 3G and 3GS. Which the iPad outsold...
On an iPad you'll interact with it - that 5x screen-estate isn't a "just", it's a "crucially", IMHO.
So all those years of joking about people with "bricks" for a phone that was slightly too big, but now it's suddenly okay? If you want a larger device, there are netbooks, laptops, and other tablets too of course.
Um, the iPad isn't a phone. Sorry.
Having actually played with one, what makes the difference is the interface - as usual with Apple, it's the software that matters. Everything is zippy and responsive - that's not just a checkbox on a feature-list, it's a different quality of experience. They were right. Until you've played with one, you can't get the feel for why it's so good.
Simon
I knew it. All along, those gosh-darned-it twinkies(*) were aimed at diabetics!
Lack of archery skill notwithstanding, it's entirely possible to segregate a market for a product or set thereof.
Simon.
(*) Not having ever *seen* a "twinkie", I'm going with my vague impression that it's sugar-filled nutrition-less candy. If not, please feel free to substitute something suitable instead. I'm trying to use terms well-known in the US without the relevant experience here.
Considering that the last time he passed comment on an Apple handheld, his prediction was pretty lame
I don't think this is the ultimate device for keyboard-focussed nerds, but (as usual) that's not who Apple is aiming at. I guess we'll have to wait and see how well it really does, but selling 300k in one day, in one country compares pretty well to the 3G and 3GS phones (which sold ~1M in 3 days, in 21 countries worldwide).
[Aside - not directed at the review]
perhaps it's just me, but the qualifier "just" in "just a bigger iphone/ipod touch" seems somewhat questionable. Does anyone here want to trade their HDTV for an SD model ? Thought so. With a TV, all you do is view it. On an iPad you'll interact with it - that 5x screen-estate isn't a "just", it's a "crucially", IMHO.
[/aside]
Simon
will be out in force in this thread.
There are faults with any device. It's not perfect, and it won't be for everyone. What irks me is the "I don't like/want it therefore it's crap" attitude; the inability to look beyond what *you* find wrong with it, and see that this might just be golden for someone else. My parents, for example [grin].
But what bugs me above all is the anti-apple crowd these days. Apparently if you express even the slightest appreciation for something well-conceived and well-designed, you're a "fanboi" who's taken in by "the shiny" (whatever *that* is!). Sure there are fanboys (and girls, presumably), but not everyone (not even vaguely close - not in the same universe, let alone ballpark) who likes Apple kit should be labelled such.
I swear the anti-Apple crowd are far and away worse than the real fanboys. Even in the worst-possible scenario, with everyone who likes Apple kit being a fan (ahem, including both genders, here) , at least the fans have something they like, appreciate, and enjoy using. The haters just hate. And that's pitiably sad.
Simon
Am I the only one who *doesn't* get eye-strain reading text on LCD's hour after hour ?
I'm beginning to wonder whether the difference is actually Mac vs PC and the font rendering technologies. I use a Mac all day, reading text on LCDs, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. Perhaps it's because the fonts look nicer (yeah, I know, it's an opinion, not a fact) to my eye on the Mac. I've lost count of the number of times I've spent days poring over PDFs and somehow managed to not notice this 'eye strain' that LCDs apparently cause. I actually *prefer* to read documents on the screen rather than printed out on paper...
I'm also pretty convinced I'd get a lot more wound up over the slow refresh of the e-ink displays than the supposed eyestrain from LCDs...
Simon.