Hate to get in the way of a good Apple-bashing but I wanted to say two things.
> it's hard to imagine a crowd of New Yorkers standing idly by while > someone spends a significant amount of time charging a new tablet.
They come from the factory fully charged, or close to.
And, unrelated to the story in particular, mine arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it so far. Ever since tablets were first on the horizon (post-iPhone and Kindle but pre-everything else) I always wanted one the size of a paperback. When the iPad came out, I thought it was too big. Tried it, didn't care for it much. I bought one to do a bit of testing and development on and figured I'd see if I grew to like it. I didn't, and sold it a few months later. (I bought a refurbished iPad 1 shortly after the 2 came out, so it was cheap, and I sold it for not much of a loss -- basically I rented it for like $8 a month which wasn't bad since it was for work.)
I ordered the Mini as soon as I could and it arrived this morning and it's great. It's a great size and very light. The screen, while not retina, is still good -- we were all happy with our old iPhones before the 4 came along, right?:-)
It's not for everyone but for a lot of people it will be very appealing.
Interesting analysis. Too bad you're exactly wrong.
> The iPad mini's gross margin is "significantly below" the rest of > Apple's product line at $329, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said > on the company's conference call today.
I've never felt comfortable looking into someone's eyes for more than a few moments at a time. I'm just overly conscious of "I'm looking at you, and you're looking at me, and you know I'm looking at you..." It's just weird to me. And once you've started looking into someone's eyes, it seems rude to then not look into them. Instead, I look at people's mouths while talking. Anyone else?
You know how everywhere you (in residential areas, mostly) you see APs with names like '2WIRE123' (to pick just one) all the time? Or out in public, 'attfreewifi' at McDonald's, Starbucks, etc.? AT&T (and the rest) should configure their residential products to have, say, 10% of your total bandwidth optionally made available with a separate standard SSID (like 'Free2WIRE' or something) that is separated from your main network. (So strangers can't print, browse shared resources, play 'Macarena' through your AirPort Express, etc.)
ISPs who are also cell providers (like AT&T) will be happy to save some cellular bandwidth. Yes, they like charging for big plans and overages (and tethering, and everything else they can think of, the greedy bastards) but they really do want to save relatively expensive cellular bandwidth also. As they tell me via text every time I approach my limit for the month, "Tip: Mobile Data is unlimited over WiFi."
It would also save you from having to ask friends with secured APs what their password is. A) it's a bit of a pain, B) it's a bit awkward, C) if they're serious about security they won't want to share it in the first place, and D) if it's long and complex it's REALLY a pain.
How many times do we have to beat this into the ground? You CAN get protection on design. This was not just about "rounded rectangles." All bottles share many characteristics, but try selling a soda in a curvy bottle that looks just like Coke's and see where that gets you. All cars share many characteristics, but Chevy can not make a car that looks just like a Mustang and Ford can not make a car that looks just like a Camaro. There are MANY ways to make a tablet that don't consist primarily of a black rectangle with parallel sides and a bezel of a certain width and with chrome trim.
It may or may not be bullshit but that's the law as it stands. There is a continuum between "totally different" and "virtually identical" and that's where the courts come in. Samsung COULD have played it safe and EASILY made products that look different from Apple's but instead they said "let's copy Apple as much as we can and take our chances."
That title always reminds me of the short-but-great "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" by Norton Juster. (Kids books are worth a mention 'cause hey, why not! They're fun!) Also, "The Phantom Tollbooth", again by the wonderful and talented Mr. Juster. If you like math, you may also like puns and sly humor about math and other subjects. I read "Tollbooth" as a kid (maybe 6th grade or so) and liked it just fine, then I stumbled upon it again in college and re-read it and was *amazed* at all the stuff it had in it.
Not the best quote in the book by far, but math related:
"Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?"
"Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped.
"I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him."
His only philosophical rant is "be a good person and don't waste your life.":-)
Yes! In the "75% off" bin, right next to the TouchPads and Zunes.
Just kidding. I figure they'll do OK -- a bit better than some Android tablets, not as well as all Android tablets combined, and both competing for that fraction of the market that doesn't want iPads.
AFAIK, they used to do it, in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember watching the 12" G4 PowerBook be announced, and seeing the video before coverage was available, so I'm as certain as I can be that it was live -- not even delayed 30 or 60 minutes. Then they got pretty popular and I guess bandwidth was a problem, and now they're starting again. Feel free to chime in and let me know if I'm wrong or right.
Do you need a bigger hint that your OSs have become WORSE in recent years, not better?*
Keep that page as a template -- you'll be saying the same thing about Windows 7 in a decade if you continue in the direction you're going with Windows 8.
* yes, I know -- more stable, more secure. But the parts that people SEE and USE is what's sucking.
I would love to have an iPad and a Surface tablet behind a black board with identically-sized rectangular holes cut in it. (Covering part of the screen so the shape of the display wouldn't give it away.) Then cycle some content: an image, a map, some text--identical content on both screens. Then ask people which looks better. I bet most would say the iPad. I've seen cleartype displays with comparable pixel density before. (Like older high-res Dell laptops.) Yes, I know about how matte and glossy finishes affect perception and the benefits of bonding a display to the screen. You can still see the pixels. Period. A real retina screen just looks like a printed page. Everything just looks perfect. You don't see squares or dots no matter how hard you look. You just see perfect little shapes. Put them side by side and the iPad will blow the surface out of the water.
Go to an Apple store and look at a retina laptop next to a regular one. I'll concede that the new Surface display might be better than a base MacBook but the difference between retina and non- is just night and day.
> "When I hear about 600,000 apps, I'm just in awe. As I've said many > times before, however, I don't think it's the right number for > comparison. Nobody is using more than a couple dozen applications > on their device."
He's right. The App Store should just have the 24 apps that all 500 million iOS device owners use and delete the other 599,976.
ESPECIALLY on a portable device that you use roughly daily, assuming it wakes from sleep quickly. Booting is for a) after software updates or b) when you know you're not going to use it for several days. And personally, I can count on my hands how many times I've done (b) in the seven years I've owned a laptop.
Besides, powering off a machine means I lose all my open windows, apps, etc., and the time it takes to create all that is much more than any boot time.
>> Like it or not, for all it's faults, the iPad is the best enterprise tablet...
> I think the iPad is a terrible enterprise tablet.
Hmm... is it possible, just maybe, that "enterprise" is a continuum?!?!?
At one end, you have the locked-down enterprise who would issue Etch-a-Sketches if they could (with "turn upside down to erase" disabled) and at the other end you have organizations -- which still have employees numbering in the tens of thousands, mind you -- who are happy with Exchange-based email, a decent browser, and maybe some custom enterprise apps. With that, they get an easy to use device with almost no moving parts, light weight, great battery life, etc etc etc. For a lot of companies, yes, tablets are a great solution, and the iPad is the best of the batch.
Now, look at it from Apple's point of view: yes, there are things they could do to make them even more enterprise-y, but they're at (or reaching) the point of diminishing returns. Adding each new feature takes X amount of work, but will only result in Y% more sales. At the same time, it makes the OS take up more room, longer to load, use more resources, and it's more shit to test against. ("OK, now make sure that we can block our new Porn Store with domain policies.") So for them, yes, there are people out there who are saying "We would buy X thousand iPads if you would just ________" but those sales are simply not worth pursuing. Remember, they are not struggling -- they are literally the biggest company in the world. They are no longer like a starving college grad who will take on any scrap of freelance work he can find. They'll gain more sales from "New backgrounds in Photo Booth" than some bogus enterprise feature that hardly anyone cares about and no one actually wants.
The funny thing here is, when you think about it, Apple is really throwing MS a bone here. (My, how the times have changed.) They are leaving the door WIDE FUCKING OPEN for MS to develop a fantastic, world-beating, end-to-end, front-to-back, top-to-bottom Enterprise Solution (tm). It's a freaking GIMME. And how does MS respond? "Well, Windows on ARM can't join a domain..." WTF?
What does MS need? For the ghost of Steve Jobs to deliver it to them on a silver platter? They are BLOWING IT, and for exactly one reason: Steve Ballmer wants MS to be cool like Apple. He is not willing to accept being a boring (but very, very profitable) capital-E-Enterprise company like IBM. If MS would just give up on the toys and focus on being a great enterprise company with a nice sideline of selling solid OSs to OEMs, rather than forcing some ridiculous Fisher Price phone UI onto business desktops, they'd be doing GREAT. (I mean, yeah, they're doing OK at the moment, but they're wasting time and resources, burning up goodwill, and giving themselves a bad name.) Now is the time for them to accept their fate and right their course.
approach to fighting tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(x) Dude, fucking seriously. A checkbox to say "Hi marketers, please don't track me!"? What are you, on crack? You've got better odds walking through a bad neighborhood wearing gold chains and a "Please don't mug me" shirt.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate to get in the way of a good Apple-bashing but I wanted to say two things.
> it's hard to imagine a crowd of New Yorkers standing idly by while
> someone spends a significant amount of time charging a new tablet.
They come from the factory fully charged, or close to.
And, unrelated to the story in particular, mine arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it so far. Ever since tablets were first on the horizon (post-iPhone and Kindle but pre-everything else) I always wanted one the size of a paperback. When the iPad came out, I thought it was too big. Tried it, didn't care for it much. I bought one to do a bit of testing and development on and figured I'd see if I grew to like it. I didn't, and sold it a few months later. (I bought a refurbished iPad 1 shortly after the 2 came out, so it was cheap, and I sold it for not much of a loss -- basically I rented it for like $8 a month which wasn't bad since it was for work.)
I ordered the Mini as soon as I could and it arrived this morning and it's great. It's a great size and very light. The screen, while not retina, is still good -- we were all happy with our old iPhones before the 4 came along, right? :-)
It's not for everyone but for a lot of people it will be very appealing.
Interesting analysis. Too bad you're exactly wrong.
> The iPad mini's gross margin is "significantly below" the rest of
> Apple's product line at $329, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said
> on the company's conference call today.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/apple-says-the-ipad-minis-gross-margin-is-significantly-lower-than-other-products/
Also, it's $530 for the 64 GB model, not 32.
Now that Forstall is gone, they're going to take a couple days to remove the stitched-leather look.
Did he sleep with a hot chick last night who was dressed as Wonder Woman? Sorry buddy, you're #2.
I've never felt comfortable looking into someone's eyes for more than a few moments at a time. I'm just overly conscious of "I'm looking at you, and you're looking at me, and you know I'm looking at you..." It's just weird to me. And once you've started looking into someone's eyes, it seems rude to then not look into them. Instead, I look at people's mouths while talking. Anyone else?
You know how everywhere you (in residential areas, mostly) you see APs with names like '2WIRE123' (to pick just one) all the time? Or out in public, 'attfreewifi' at McDonald's, Starbucks, etc.? AT&T (and the rest) should configure their residential products to have, say, 10% of your total bandwidth optionally made available with a separate standard SSID (like 'Free2WIRE' or something) that is separated from your main network. (So strangers can't print, browse shared resources, play 'Macarena' through your AirPort Express, etc.)
ISPs who are also cell providers (like AT&T) will be happy to save some cellular bandwidth. Yes, they like charging for big plans and overages (and tethering, and everything else they can think of, the greedy bastards) but they really do want to save relatively expensive cellular bandwidth also. As they tell me via text every time I approach my limit for the month, "Tip: Mobile Data is unlimited over WiFi."
It would also save you from having to ask friends with secured APs what their password is. A) it's a bit of a pain, B) it's a bit awkward, C) if they're serious about security they won't want to share it in the first place, and D) if it's long and complex it's REALLY a pain.
Additionally, we quit calling it "Metro" months ago. Please check your shillmail.com account more frequently.
How many times do we have to beat this into the ground? You CAN get protection on design. This was not just about "rounded rectangles." All bottles share many characteristics, but try selling a soda in a curvy bottle that looks just like Coke's and see where that gets you. All cars share many characteristics, but Chevy can not make a car that looks just like a Mustang and Ford can not make a car that looks just like a Camaro. There are MANY ways to make a tablet that don't consist primarily of a black rectangle with parallel sides and a bezel of a certain width and with chrome trim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
It may or may not be bullshit but that's the law as it stands. There is a continuum between "totally different" and "virtually identical" and that's where the courts come in. Samsung COULD have played it safe and EASILY made products that look different from Apple's but instead they said "let's copy Apple as much as we can and take our chances."
http://allthingsd.com/20120806/iphone-caused-crisis-of-design-at-samsung-memo/
After all, they're still flush with cash from Zune sales. :-)
That title always reminds me of the short-but-great "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" by Norton Juster. (Kids books are worth a mention 'cause hey, why not! They're fun!) Also, "The Phantom Tollbooth", again by the wonderful and talented Mr. Juster. If you like math, you may also like puns and sly humor about math and other subjects. I read "Tollbooth" as a kid (maybe 6th grade or so) and liked it just fine, then I stumbled upon it again in college and re-read it and was *amazed* at all the stuff it had in it.
Not the best quote in the book by far, but math related:
"Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?"
"Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped.
"I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him."
His only philosophical rant is "be a good person and don't waste your life." :-)
Yes! In the "75% off" bin, right next to the TouchPads and Zunes.
Just kidding. I figure they'll do OK -- a bit better than some Android tablets, not as well as all Android tablets combined, and both competing for that fraction of the market that doesn't want iPads.
... the new Linksys 802.11x=(-b+/-sqrt(b^2-4ac))/2a router!
AFAIK, they used to do it, in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember watching the 12" G4 PowerBook be announced, and seeing the video before coverage was available, so I'm as certain as I can be that it was live -- not even delayed 30 or 60 minutes. Then they got pretty popular and I guess bandwidth was a problem, and now they're starting again. Feel free to chime in and let me know if I'm wrong or right.
For crowded areas that need lots of logging they have a bigger vehicle: the bing bus. It's not as fun as it sounds.
Do you need a bigger hint that your OSs have become WORSE in recent years, not better?*
Keep that page as a template -- you'll be saying the same thing about Windows 7 in a decade if you continue in the direction you're going with Windows 8.
* yes, I know -- more stable, more secure. But the parts that people SEE and USE is what's sucking.
> But I really think that in this case ***Futureshop***
> is confusing customers, not Microsoft.
Futureshop is just passing along Microsoft's mistake. As the subject of the original post says, it is still called Windows.
I have a program that will run in 8 out of these 9 editions of Windows. Quick, Joe Consumer, guess which one WON'T run your favorite app:
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows RT
I would love to have an iPad and a Surface tablet behind a black board with identically-sized rectangular holes cut in it. (Covering part of the screen so the shape of the display wouldn't give it away.) Then cycle some content: an image, a map, some text--identical content on both screens. Then ask people which looks better. I bet most would say the iPad. I've seen cleartype displays with comparable pixel density before. (Like older high-res Dell laptops.) Yes, I know about how matte and glossy finishes affect perception and the benefits of bonding a display to the screen. You can still see the pixels. Period. A real retina screen just looks like a printed page. Everything just looks perfect. You don't see squares or dots no matter how hard you look. You just see perfect little shapes. Put them side by side and the iPad will blow the surface out of the water.
Go to an Apple store and look at a retina laptop next to a regular one. I'll concede that the new Surface display might be better than a base MacBook but the difference between retina and non- is just night and day.
> "When I hear about 600,000 apps, I'm just in awe. As I've said many
> times before, however, I don't think it's the right number for
> comparison. Nobody is using more than a couple dozen applications
> on their device."
He's right. The App Store should just have the 24 apps that all 500 million iOS device owners use and delete the other 599,976.
ESPECIALLY on a portable device that you use roughly daily, assuming it wakes from sleep quickly. Booting is for a) after software updates or b) when you know you're not going to use it for several days. And personally, I can count on my hands how many times I've done (b) in the seven years I've owned a laptop.
Besides, powering off a machine means I lose all my open windows, apps, etc., and the time it takes to create all that is much more than any boot time.
I thought you were just setting up to link to this.
>> Like it or not, for all it's faults, the iPad is the best enterprise tablet...
> I think the iPad is a terrible enterprise tablet.
Hmm... is it possible, just maybe, that "enterprise" is a continuum?!?!?
At one end, you have the locked-down enterprise who would issue Etch-a-Sketches if they could (with "turn upside down to erase" disabled) and at the other end you have organizations -- which still have employees numbering in the tens of thousands, mind you -- who are happy with Exchange-based email, a decent browser, and maybe some custom enterprise apps. With that, they get an easy to use device with almost no moving parts, light weight, great battery life, etc etc etc. For a lot of companies, yes, tablets are a great solution, and the iPad is the best of the batch.
Now, look at it from Apple's point of view: yes, there are things they could do to make them even more enterprise-y, but they're at (or reaching) the point of diminishing returns. Adding each new feature takes X amount of work, but will only result in Y% more sales. At the same time, it makes the OS take up more room, longer to load, use more resources, and it's more shit to test against. ("OK, now make sure that we can block our new Porn Store with domain policies.") So for them, yes, there are people out there who are saying "We would buy X thousand iPads if you would just ________" but those sales are simply not worth pursuing. Remember, they are not struggling -- they are literally the biggest company in the world. They are no longer like a starving college grad who will take on any scrap of freelance work he can find. They'll gain more sales from "New backgrounds in Photo Booth" than some bogus enterprise feature that hardly anyone cares about and no one actually wants.
The funny thing here is, when you think about it, Apple is really throwing MS a bone here. (My, how the times have changed.) They are leaving the door WIDE FUCKING OPEN for MS to develop a fantastic, world-beating, end-to-end, front-to-back, top-to-bottom Enterprise Solution (tm). It's a freaking GIMME. And how does MS respond? "Well, Windows on ARM can't join a domain..." WTF?
What does MS need? For the ghost of Steve Jobs to deliver it to them on a silver platter? They are BLOWING IT, and for exactly one reason: Steve Ballmer wants MS to be cool like Apple. He is not willing to accept being a boring (but very, very profitable) capital-E-Enterprise company like IBM. If MS would just give up on the toys and focus on being a great enterprise company with a nice sideline of selling solid OSs to OEMs, rather than forcing some ridiculous Fisher Price phone UI onto business desktops, they'd be doing GREAT. (I mean, yeah, they're doing OK at the moment, but they're wasting time and resources, burning up goodwill, and giving themselves a bad name.) Now is the time for them to accept their fate and right their course.
You're a genius! I'm off to the Linus thread to pilfer some more +5 questions. :-)
... if you promise to hire some editors who were awake in school. "The shuttle has arrived at its final home...", not "it's."
It's much shorter. :-)
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(x) Dude, fucking seriously. A checkbox to say "Hi marketers, please don't track me!"? What are you, on crack? You've got better odds walking through a bad neighborhood wearing gold chains and a "Please don't mug me" shirt.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Summary: Advertisers are assholes and do not give a fuck about what you want.
Did I miss anything?