>> Does anyone else sort of get the feeling that they are >> losing money on the sales and making it back in app store?
> No one who knows anything about electronics manufacturing thinks this.
Wow, too bad you don't work for Dell, Motorola, or Samsung, because I guess they're just pricing themselves out of the market for fun, and wasting millions of dollars in design, manufacturing, and marketing along the way. Too bad, they're really doing their shareholders a great disservice with their frivolity.
Or is it possible that maybe, just maybe, the cost of components is not the end of the story? Design? Assembly? Shipping? It all adds up. What do you think?
It does NOT make the UI easier to use. Cleaner looking, yes, but NOT easier. A button sits there, visible, inviting you to click it. You see that the option is exists and if you care to find out what it does you can click it and see what happens if you're adventurous or you can RTFM if you're not. Either way, you know the option exists. Double-clicking the title bar, however, is completely non-discoverable except by accident. Look at the screenshot at the top of the screen. The title bar has the title, a close button, and... NOTHING ELSE. Just a bunch of wasted space. Gnome devs are doing their users--present and future--a great disservice by removing these buttons.
I think they're trying to copy the super-clean look of iOS, but iOS looks super clean because it works differently, not because it is clean for cleanliness' sake. There is no close button because you press the home button to leave the app. There is no minimize/restore because that's not how iOS apps work. There are no scroll bars because you scroll by dragging anywhere. Steve didn't just say "I'm going to throw away all these controls," he said "I'm going to change the UI" and as a result of THAT those controls were no longer needed. Gnome has not changed its underpinnings--it just threw away all those controls.
Double-clicking the title bar to change the window is a great shortcut for power users who know it's there because it's a nice big target and sometimes it's easier to double-click a part of the screen close to where the mouse is, rather than going after a button. But that shouldn't be the ONLY way.
Decades ago, as a kid, I absolutely HATED the original Mario games on the NES because there was all this totally undiscoverable crap where you had to jump in just the right spot to mash your head into an invisible block to get points. I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world--how could you possibly know to do that? I didn't think it was a good way to make a game back then and I'm positive that it's not a good way to make a UI now. Gnome devs are ON CRACK if they think this is a good idea.
>> There are certain advantages to having sealed, fixed memory
> Can you actually name any that are relevant?
The fact that there are several kinds of popular removable solid-state media in the world and will likely be more in the future? The fact that it costs money, takes up space, and has mass? The fact that it's one more place for grime to creep in, unless it is covered with a crappy little door which would also add cost, weight, thickness, and be one more thing that might break? ALL design is compromise. Besides, how would the space it be handled? If you have multiple storage partitions then you have to worry about what goes where and running out of space on one or the other. Unless you're in Android, which dictates what can go where on your removable storage... or Windows, which creates a pool from the two devices, thus negating about 90% of the benefits of using "removable" storage. A card reader is not a magical device with no downsides.
Everyone in the world (or, at least, on Slashdot) says "Ooh, it'd be perfect if it just had..."--STOP. That is not what the iPad is for. Apple wanted to make a stripped-down device and in nine months, fifteen MILLION people have said "wow, that's a great idea."
Attention world: APPLE HAS TO MAKE SOME DECISIONS. They can NOT please all the people all the time. If they tried, the iPad would be a laptop: several pounds and many ports. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT'S FOR. Yes, it has limitations. Accept them. You want an SD card reader. Someone else wants CF or Memory Stick or (God forbid) Smart Media. So they stick in a 6-in-1 reader. Great. Now, everyone who NEVER EVER wanted to stick a card in there is paying for something they don't need and it's heavier and thicker.
Join us next week when we go to a BMW forum and complain that the Z3 doesn't have as much room as a station wagon.
You want a tablet with a card reader? Fine, go buy one. Tablet PCs have been around since 2001. And they've sold almost as many in 10 years as Apple has in nine months. And yet here you are, thinking you have valuable advice for Steve and Jony and Phil. Do I need to explain in detail why they won't listen to you, me, or anyone else here? Look at this graph and see if you can figure out why. Hint: fifteen million x $499 = 7.485 BILLION dollars.
Also, this may come as a shock to the "less space than a Nomad" crowd, but sometimes, 16 GB is enough! I bought a 4 GB iPhone and never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell it a year later for enough to buy an 8 GB 3G and I never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell the 3G a year later for enough to buy a 16 GB 3GS and I never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell the 3GS a year later for enough to buy a 32 GB iPhone 4 (the first time I ever sprung for the upgrade) and I have not yet filled it. I have never had the desire to stick an SD card in any of them for any reason.
Maybe you can go by a Xoom. I think it does everything you want and it's just $170 more than a comparable 3G iPad. Then you can start saving money with your $50 SD cards. Or, if you DON'T NEED cellular networking, then it's $300 -- a mere sixty percent -- more. Hey, why don't you go to a Motorola site and ask why they don't make a cheap WiFi-only Xoom? Oh, right, because in your world, every device should have every feature and everyone should pay for it.
I'm not saying the iPad is perfect. I don't own one and I don't plan to get one on 3/11. But Apple is doing quite well with it, thankyouverymuch, and Abe Lincoln knew 150 years ago that you can't please all the people all the time. Why anyone expects them to be all things to all people is beyond me.
WRONG. All those products in the spam you get or that you see in magazines are just totally useless ripoffs and they'll probably just cause more problems than-- oh, you said DISKS. Sorry, never mind.
> some Android games have adjustable graphics > settings for different hardware, but Apple deems > that to be "fragmentation."
They deem it fragmentation because there are some big popular Android games that don't run on many popular Android handsets. So if by "adjustable" you mean "will not run at all" then yes, adjustable graphics are the answer. (And as anyone who has played it knows, Angry Birds is not even close to the pinnacle of hardware-intensive games.)
"If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one."
So far, 15 million "normal" people have gotten by fine without those things. Apple can barely make them fast enough. I wouldn't be surprised if they sell 30 million more this year.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro that is over 4 years old. It got about 4 hours of battery life when new and it now lasts about 45-60 minutes. So no, an iPad battery that is made with newer technology and has a 10 hour rated life (and LONGER life in most people's experience) will NOT be degraded down to 1-2 hours in 1-2 years, unless you're a retard and leave it plugged in all the time.
Oh really? You've already put this not-yet-available OS onto your iPad? And Apple has learned nothing from what happened last year? And updates are now mandatory? Fascinating. I'm really surprised.
Jeez, I can't believe what gets a +5 around here these days. For fuck's sake, it's not a whole new version (it's just a point release) and doesn't have any major new CPU-intensive features like multitasking.
Apple has sold 100 million iPhones, which are also revised annually, so "alienating" users is not hurting them. 4 years into the game it should be obvious to any potential buyer that this what will happen with iDevices.
> Part of the "problem" with open source is that only us geek types give a > damn about it. Average joe doesn't care about how "open" what he's > buying is, which is why people continue to buy closed systems > without a second thought.
Good point, and another part of the "problem" is that it honestly doesn't matter that much if your program is open or closed, what matters is if you can access your data, now and forever, and people are starting to wake up to that.
Rather than a repository for open apps (though that could be a part of it) I think open.org should be a 100% open cloud service. Something like Apple's MobileMe with some email, some document storage, etc. Start with a few simple things and do them well. SLOWLY grow into offering more features. Start distributing apps (either native or web-based) that can easily store their data in their space in open.org. (Like a menu in OpenOffice that says "Save to open.org") Educate users (I know it's like pissing up a hill but you should always make an effort) on how to back up their data locally (i.e., a pretty wrapper on rsync) and make it easy for them to back up their data locally as well because you just never know.
So you're saying that you're fine with product placement as long as you like the product? Interesting perspective.
Personally, I don't give a shit what the product is, I just think that OBVIOUS or otherwise poorly-done product placement can be annoying but it's not all bad. Like anything else (up to and including special effects and the acting itself) if it's done well, it's natural and invisible; if not, it's not.
I find it a jarring reminder that I'm watching a movie when I see a recognizable product appear but with its name badly and obviously obscured, or fake products that are trying to look real. Unless you live on Mars, you see literally hundreds of brand names every day, and NOT seeing them in a movie or show is as jarring and fake as a green sky. I don't care at all what the product is--when I'm involved in a movie or show, "breaking the spell" is the gravest sin.
I agree that it looks awesome and I'd love to go there, but it's hard to pay $18 per person when there are so many great free things to do in D.C. (I'm not trying to sound snarky here--they're a private group and of course have to charge--I just literally mean that there is so much else to do that's great, that when it comes down to free or not free, free wins. The Air & Space museum is pretty awesome too.)
Actually, what they should do is follow the lead of sites like this and this and teach science by explaining everything that the show gets wrong. They'd never run out of material if they did that.
As for your example about ships passing each other while going from Point A to Point B: space travel isn't like a transatlantic cruise. To get to where you want to be, you need to head for where the planet is going. To pick a simple (and simplified) example, consider two ships flying from Earth to Mars and vice-versa. Imagine you plan your trip for a time when the planets are both pretty close together. Since they both go around the Sun in the same direction, let's simplify and pretend they're on parallel tracks heading in the same direction, like two cars driving down the road next to each other. As you know, it is a multi-month trip, and if both ships leave on the same day, they will have to fly at an angle to reach where their destination will be in a couple months. So their paths would not be two parallel lines--they would actually form an X. (And that's before you factor in elliptical orbits, varying orbital planes, etc., to say nothing of relativity and how really effing big space is.)
In other words, imagine firing a gun in Los Angeles towards Maine at the same time someone in Miami sends a bullet towards Seattle. Calculate the odds of them hitting in mid-air.:-)
You know what else is "too" expensive? Fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy food... basically, anything you don't want to pay that much for is, by definition, too expensive.
And the comparison to silver is just plain dumb. OK, so silver is cheaper, and you know what else? It does FUCKING NOTHING but sit there, displacing its volume in air, and reacting passively to Earth's gravity. Can it show you pictures? Send messages? Play movies and music? Can it do anything at all other than hurt your foot when dropped?
Saying that printer ink costs more than gold is interesting because printing is such a mundane task and ink has been around for centuries. (In fact, homo sapiens were using ink before they ever placed a value on gold.) Saying a ridiculously complex device, packed full of the finest microscopic circuits China can produce in volume, costs roughly the same as the least valuable "precious metal" by weight, isn't quite as interesting.
The one interesting thing is that you can indeed trade twenty pre-1964 silver dollars for a base iPad.:-)
Will do, as soon as you're ready to provide more realistic pricing plans than "Unlimited! (except when we decide it isn't) for just $30! (for one device only.)"
Why limit yourself to fiction? I'd love to do an experiment: - Start with two five-year-old kids - Let one play video games 2 hours per day - Have the other watch 2 hours of national or big-city news every day - Let me know in 15 years how they turned out.
A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests Apple is about to become Samsung's biggest customer in a deal estimated to be worth US$7.8 billion. As part of its purchase, Apple will be securing LCD displays, NAND flash memory and mobile chipsets from the Korean manufacturer. Each of these components will be used to build Apple's popular iPad and iPhone.
Samsung could quit making consumer products tomorrow and do just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Does anyone else sort of get the feeling that they are
>> losing money on the sales and making it back in app store?
> No one who knows anything about electronics manufacturing thinks this.
Wow, too bad you don't work for Dell, Motorola, or Samsung, because I guess they're just pricing themselves out of the market for fun, and wasting millions of dollars in design, manufacturing, and marketing along the way. Too bad, they're really doing their shareholders a great disservice with their frivolity.
Or is it possible that maybe, just maybe, the cost of components is not the end of the story? Design? Assembly? Shipping? It all adds up. What do you think?
It does NOT make the UI easier to use. Cleaner looking, yes, but NOT easier. A button sits there, visible, inviting you to click it. You see that the option is exists and if you care to find out what it does you can click it and see what happens if you're adventurous or you can RTFM if you're not. Either way, you know the option exists. Double-clicking the title bar, however, is completely non-discoverable except by accident. Look at the screenshot at the top of the screen. The title bar has the title, a close button, and... NOTHING ELSE. Just a bunch of wasted space. Gnome devs are doing their users--present and future--a great disservice by removing these buttons.
I think they're trying to copy the super-clean look of iOS, but iOS looks super clean because it works differently, not because it is clean for cleanliness' sake. There is no close button because you press the home button to leave the app. There is no minimize/restore because that's not how iOS apps work. There are no scroll bars because you scroll by dragging anywhere. Steve didn't just say "I'm going to throw away all these controls," he said "I'm going to change the UI" and as a result of THAT those controls were no longer needed. Gnome has not changed its underpinnings--it just threw away all those controls.
Double-clicking the title bar to change the window is a great shortcut for power users who know it's there because it's a nice big target and sometimes it's easier to double-click a part of the screen close to where the mouse is, rather than going after a button. But that shouldn't be the ONLY way.
Decades ago, as a kid, I absolutely HATED the original Mario games on the NES because there was all this totally undiscoverable crap where you had to jump in just the right spot to mash your head into an invisible block to get points. I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world--how could you possibly know to do that? I didn't think it was a good way to make a game back then and I'm positive that it's not a good way to make a UI now. Gnome devs are ON CRACK if they think this is a good idea.
>> There are certain advantages to having sealed, fixed memory
> Can you actually name any that are relevant?
The fact that there are several kinds of popular removable solid-state media in the world and will likely be more in the future? The fact that it costs money, takes up space, and has mass? The fact that it's one more place for grime to creep in, unless it is covered with a crappy little door which would also add cost, weight, thickness, and be one more thing that might break? ALL design is compromise. Besides, how would the space it be handled? If you have multiple storage partitions then you have to worry about what goes where and running out of space on one or the other. Unless you're in Android, which dictates what can go where on your removable storage... or Windows, which creates a pool from the two devices, thus negating about 90% of the benefits of using "removable" storage. A card reader is not a magical device with no downsides.
Everyone in the world (or, at least, on Slashdot) says "Ooh, it'd be perfect if it just had..."--STOP. That is not what the iPad is for. Apple wanted to make a stripped-down device and in nine months, fifteen MILLION people have said "wow, that's a great idea."
Attention world: APPLE HAS TO MAKE SOME DECISIONS. They can NOT please all the people all the time. If they tried, the iPad would be a laptop: several pounds and many ports. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT'S FOR. Yes, it has limitations. Accept them. You want an SD card reader. Someone else wants CF or Memory Stick or (God forbid) Smart Media. So they stick in a 6-in-1 reader. Great. Now, everyone who NEVER EVER wanted to stick a card in there is paying for something they don't need and it's heavier and thicker.
Join us next week when we go to a BMW forum and complain that the Z3 doesn't have as much room as a station wagon.
You want a tablet with a card reader? Fine, go buy one. Tablet PCs have been around since 2001. And they've sold almost as many in 10 years as Apple has in nine months. And yet here you are, thinking you have valuable advice for Steve and Jony and Phil. Do I need to explain in detail why they won't listen to you, me, or anyone else here? Look at this graph and see if you can figure out why. Hint: fifteen million x $499 = 7.485 BILLION dollars.
Also, this may come as a shock to the "less space than a Nomad" crowd, but sometimes, 16 GB is enough! I bought a 4 GB iPhone and never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell it a year later for enough to buy an 8 GB 3G and I never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell the 3G a year later for enough to buy a 16 GB 3GS and I never filled it. Due to AT&T's exclusivity I was able to sell the 3GS a year later for enough to buy a 32 GB iPhone 4 (the first time I ever sprung for the upgrade) and I have not yet filled it. I have never had the desire to stick an SD card in any of them for any reason.
Maybe you can go by a Xoom. I think it does everything you want and it's just $170 more than a comparable 3G iPad. Then you can start saving money with your $50 SD cards. Or, if you DON'T NEED cellular networking, then it's $300 -- a mere sixty percent -- more. Hey, why don't you go to a Motorola site and ask why they don't make a cheap WiFi-only Xoom? Oh, right, because in your world, every device should have every feature and everyone should pay for it.
I'm not saying the iPad is perfect. I don't own one and I don't plan to get one on 3/11. But Apple is doing quite well with it, thankyouverymuch, and Abe Lincoln knew 150 years ago that you can't please all the people all the time. Why anyone expects them to be all things to all people is beyond me.
Good point, but you could of phrased it more politely. Try and be nicer next time. ;-)
> VMware can grow disks.
WRONG. All those products in the spam you get or that you see in magazines are just totally useless ripoffs and they'll probably just cause more problems than-- oh, you said DISKS. Sorry, never mind.
> some Android games have adjustable graphics
> settings for different hardware, but Apple deems
> that to be "fragmentation."
They deem it fragmentation because there are some big popular Android games that don't run on many popular Android handsets. So if by "adjustable" you mean "will not run at all" then yes, adjustable graphics are the answer. (And as anyone who has played it knows, Angry Birds is not even close to the pinnacle of hardware-intensive games.)
If the GP owns any less than 5 Foxconn-manufactured devices I'd be surprised.
"If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one."
So far, 15 million "normal" people have gotten by fine without those things. Apple can barely make them fast enough. I wouldn't be surprised if they sell 30 million more this year.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro that is over 4 years old. It got about 4 hours of battery life when new and it now lasts about 45-60 minutes. So no, an iPad battery that is made with newer technology and has a 10 hour rated life (and LONGER life in most people's experience) will NOT be degraded down to 1-2 hours in 1-2 years, unless you're a retard and leave it plugged in all the time.
Oh really? You've already put this not-yet-available OS onto your iPad? And Apple has learned nothing from what happened last year? And updates are now mandatory? Fascinating. I'm really surprised.
Jeez, I can't believe what gets a +5 around here these days. For fuck's sake, it's not a whole new version (it's just a point release) and doesn't have any major new CPU-intensive features like multitasking.
Apple has sold 100 million iPhones, which are also revised annually, so "alienating" users is not hurting them. 4 years into the game it should be obvious to any potential buyer that this what will happen with iDevices.
Apple has sold more iPads in one year (15 million) than all modern tablet PCs (i.e., "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition" and newer) since 2001 combined.
> Part of the "problem" with open source is that only us geek types give a
> damn about it. Average joe doesn't care about how "open" what he's
> buying is, which is why people continue to buy closed systems
> without a second thought.
Good point, and another part of the "problem" is that it honestly doesn't matter that much if your program is open or closed, what matters is if you can access your data, now and forever, and people are starting to wake up to that.
Rather than a repository for open apps (though that could be a part of it) I think open.org should be a 100% open cloud service. Something like Apple's MobileMe with some email, some document storage, etc. Start with a few simple things and do them well. SLOWLY grow into offering more features. Start distributing apps (either native or web-based) that can easily store their data in their space in open.org. (Like a menu in OpenOffice that says "Save to open.org") Educate users (I know it's like pissing up a hill but you should always make an effort) on how to back up their data locally (i.e., a pretty wrapper on rsync) and make it easy for them to back up their data locally as well because you just never know.
So you're saying that you're fine with product placement as long as you like the product? Interesting perspective.
Personally, I don't give a shit what the product is, I just think that OBVIOUS or otherwise poorly-done product placement can be annoying but it's not all bad. Like anything else (up to and including special effects and the acting itself) if it's done well, it's natural and invisible; if not, it's not.
I find it a jarring reminder that I'm watching a movie when I see a recognizable product appear but with its name badly and obviously obscured, or fake products that are trying to look real. Unless you live on Mars, you see literally hundreds of brand names every day, and NOT seeing them in a movie or show is as jarring and fake as a green sky. I don't care at all what the product is--when I'm involved in a movie or show, "breaking the spell" is the gravest sin.
I agree that it looks awesome and I'd love to go there, but it's hard to pay $18 per person when there are so many great free things to do in D.C. (I'm not trying to sound snarky here--they're a private group and of course have to charge--I just literally mean that there is so much else to do that's great, that when it comes down to free or not free, free wins. The Air & Space museum is pretty awesome too.)
> And we can't have any national secrets reveled either!
Agreed. I hope I live long enough to learn what really happened to JFK.
"is it typical fanboy fickleness, or is Canonical more into serving their own interests than creating a great Linux distro?"
yes. :-)
Actually, what they should do is follow the lead of sites like this and this and teach science by explaining everything that the show gets wrong. They'd never run out of material if they did that.
As for your example about ships passing each other while going from Point A to Point B: space travel isn't like a transatlantic cruise. To get to where you want to be, you need to head for where the planet is going. To pick a simple (and simplified) example, consider two ships flying from Earth to Mars and vice-versa. Imagine you plan your trip for a time when the planets are both pretty close together. Since they both go around the Sun in the same direction, let's simplify and pretend they're on parallel tracks heading in the same direction, like two cars driving down the road next to each other. As you know, it is a multi-month trip, and if both ships leave on the same day, they will have to fly at an angle to reach where their destination will be in a couple months. So their paths would not be two parallel lines--they would actually form an X. (And that's before you factor in elliptical orbits, varying orbital planes, etc., to say nothing of relativity and how really effing big space is.)
In other words, imagine firing a gun in Los Angeles towards Maine at the same time someone in Miami sends a bullet towards Seattle. Calculate the odds of them hitting in mid-air. :-)
You know what else is "too" expensive? Fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy food... basically, anything you don't want to pay that much for is, by definition, too expensive.
And the comparison to silver is just plain dumb. OK, so silver is cheaper, and you know what else? It does FUCKING NOTHING but sit there, displacing its volume in air, and reacting passively to Earth's gravity. Can it show you pictures? Send messages? Play movies and music? Can it do anything at all other than hurt your foot when dropped?
Saying that printer ink costs more than gold is interesting because printing is such a mundane task and ink has been around for centuries. (In fact, homo sapiens were using ink before they ever placed a value on gold.) Saying a ridiculously complex device, packed full of the finest microscopic circuits China can produce in volume, costs roughly the same as the least valuable "precious metal" by weight, isn't quite as interesting.
The one interesting thing is that you can indeed trade twenty pre-1964 silver dollars for a base iPad. :-)
Nice to know the reason that, even if I buy a WiFi-only Kindle, the content will still suck.
Will do, as soon as you're ready to provide more realistic pricing plans than "Unlimited! (except when we decide it isn't) for just $30! (for one device only.)"
You're right. It's terrorism!!!!!11
Wow. Duh. I replied to your comment and somehow missed the parent, which was saying exactly what I said. Ignore me. :-)
Why limit yourself to fiction? I'd love to do an experiment:
- Start with two five-year-old kids
- Let one play video games 2 hours per day
- Have the other watch 2 hours of national or big-city news every day
- Let me know in 15 years how they turned out.
Apple to become Samsung's biggest customer
A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests Apple is about to become Samsung's biggest customer in a deal estimated to be worth US$7.8 billion. As part of its purchase, Apple will be securing LCD displays, NAND flash memory and mobile chipsets from the Korean manufacturer. Each of these components will be used to build Apple's popular iPad and iPhone.
Samsung could quit making consumer products tomorrow and do just fine.