And I'm this case the information they were given was hacked and given to them by Russian intelligence. And, they've made absolutely every possible effort to hurt Hillary's campaign by hyping releases, staggering them, and releasing them at time when they're calculated to do the most potential harm. They are in no way acting like a neutral party.
The only way Wikileaks can have credibility is if they release things on a fully non-partisan basis and that has clearly not happened here.
There were Trump leaks? News to me. It seems like Assange has just been going after Hillary because he knows she won't pardon him. Wikileaks has lost every shred of credibility with me and most people I know, well before this. They're acting as a branch of the Russian intelligence services and only a moron thinks otherwise.
It depends on the kind of benefits you receive. Survivor's benefits for disabled dependents of disabled, then deceased parents, (or of people with a deceased spouse collecting disability at the time) can be much lower. Mine are $800 per month, plus Medicare premiums.
As a condition, I am allowed to earn $900 per month for (I believe) 9 (or 12?) of any 18 (or 24?) month period within a sliding window, but if I earn any more than that for 10/13 months months, I lose everything. No medical, no insurance.
My benefits are under my deceased father's Social Security number, which means they're what he earned during his lifetime and have just been passed on to me. Re-applying if I lose my job after giving up my benefits means qualifying on my own disability from a starting point of zero, and could take several years if successful at all.
As the system works today, I can do a little consulting and pull in just enough to have to file taxes every year, owing a few hundred dollars on tax day due to being paid via 1099. This would be utterly unsustainable, if I were single and living alone. Under a Universal Basic Income system, or at the very least, a reformed/streamlined and more forgiving model that allowed me to keep my medical insurance through Medicare no matter what, I would feel the freedom to try and work more, work harder, and start my own full-scale consulting business. But I can't take that risk now, because it's just too damn high.
I'm not a kid by any stretch, but Rock Band did let me live the rock star lifestyle in a small way. Toward the end of the craze, a local radio station had a contest up at Lake Tahoe where the brand prize was $400 worth of bottle service at one of the fancier nightclubs at Harveys casino. My boyfriend and I went up on stage with two random guys we met that night to fill out the band and won with a rendition of Aqualung. A couple weeks later the four of us went up there and got absolutely blasted. Just like rock stars!
Destroyed. At the end of every season, the CG models for Babylon 5 assets were deleted according to contract requirements with the Prime Time Entertainment Network who distributed the show. Probably as an asset reduction thing for financial BS in the era of protoCG-era production.
I think the missing key in current smart home options that most people can actually afford to purchase, is reliable voice control. I know Google's acquisition of Nest (and whatever Apple gets around to doing) will make a big difference here, but I can already say that I'd be a lot happier with my "smart" lighting if I had:
A: More money for more components such as light switches and socket replacements. B: Voice controls that were as responsive and reasonably reliable as the Amazon Echo, which gets it right a surprisingly large amount of the time.
Last year, I picked up a Wink Hub and four "TCP Connected" brand (which is a horrible name for obvious reasons) daylight LED bulbs to see how dipping my toes into home automation would work out, and it really has been a seriously mixed result just like the author of the the original article says. I'm using a very simple setup, two lights in my home office, and one light in the rear of the living room. The only "smart" part I have set up, is a group to let me control the office lights all at once.
And it's really not all that stable. The TCP Connected bulbs actually require the use of a home gateway and online service to control, and Wink ties into that. When that service is glitchy, things will either work or not work. There's no apparent reliable activity confirmation set up in the protocols from what I can tell, so the software never knows if a device is on or off. A fairly simple schedule I have set up dims my lights for a period before bed, and then turns them off later. This usually works, but not always. It's also supposed to turn them back on, and it doesn't appear to do that about half the time.
Is the problem the TCP bulb integration? Is it Wink? Is it the signal in my house? Is it a bug? There's no way to tell for sure, and systems just aren't bulletproof enough to rely on just yet. But is it a nice step? Absolutely.
The big thing I feel that I should do in my personal case though, is replace the light switches so I don't always have to pull out a smartphone or tablet. Is it a pain to do that? Yes and no. It's more of a pain than it should be for something advertised as super simple, because of the article's mentioned process of unlocking a device, loading app, swiping to control you need, and then hitting said control.
The prices can definitely be appealing, but once you realize that a light switch is going to be $50, it adds up.
This isn't a testing fault. I'm sure they tested the hell out of it. Dozens if not hundreds of QA people sat in cubes for months, maybe years, testing bits of this game as it got produced. And I'm sure that many of them wrote up really detailed, well reasoned explanations of just how broken it was in every single way that people are counting today.
And nobody cared because the game had to launch before the holiday season of 2014, Thousands of jobs and millions upon millions of dollars were at stake.
It isn't that nobody tested, it's that nobody really cared.
That is pretty much the only resource people have. And it won't work until lots of people try and do it, loudly, repeatedly, but politely. The fact that Ubisoft is already making excuses actually makes it seem like people might have a better case this time than in most, because it's not just going into a cone of silence.
It's a case where the developers looked at the raw numbers for the system that was coming, and said "Wow! We're going to have almost three times the cores, sixteen times the RAM and so much GPU!" and then went on ahead and jacked the engine demands up to a level that probably shouldn't have been reached until a few more years into the life cycle for the platform. It took years and years for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to be understood well enough to be able to create things like the GTAV engine, and possibly in part because of the switch to essentially PC hardware they now find themselves having to work with the hardware that was until recently considered second-tier to console hardware in general, but then in addition, they used AMD parts that have always been second-tier in the PC market.
This really should not have been that bad. They're overreaching, and that's basically the fundamental problem. Wait a few years, and games that try and pull off what Unity does will be successful and well optimized, but right now they're still working out just what's capable. It's just too bad for the customers that get screwed while inadvertently helping Ubisoft and other developers learn just how this hardware can be put to use.
This is a side effect of what happens when game franchises become more profitable than movie franchises. Once the flow of money starts on a game with a budget in the tens of millions like the Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or Grand Theft Auto franchises to name just a few - there comes a point of no return where you finish what you started, because you've sunk millions upon millions into something that just turned out *wrong*, like this. Just like Warner Brothers couldn't put the Green Lantern movie on hold and rewrite it to not suck, Ubisoft backed themselves into a corner.
Nobody had the balls or the power to say "Wait a minute, we're overreaching. Let's scale this back to something that will actually run." Instead, they launch a buggy, bad game because they're into just the marketing campaign for tens of millions of dollars. It's so much worse for consumers than a flop of a movie, because you're spending $60+ on the cost of entry, and when the reviewers are embargoed there's just no way to tell if you're going to get screwed. Thank the big budget productions and stock market demands for this kind of disaster.
Every time I see something like this, or a botched Call of Duty release, I get a *little* less annoyed with Valve for not saying a word about Half-Life 3/Ep. 3. They're private. They can take the time without investors freaking out.
Let's also take into account that Ubisoft had to know something was up, because the pre-release copies they gave game reviewers came with an embargo that lasted 17 hours into the release date. I'm not surprised at all to see this, though I'm admittedly surprised it's quite as large a problem as it is. When they announced the system requirements, I winced. I know that the horsepower demand for a game engine designed for a modern console is finally going to be a lot more demanding than last year's titles, but a GTX 680 as minimum specification? Someone screwed up engine design, plain and simple.
As of last night, I actually have a license from IBM to run V5R2 on an older AS/400 system I purchased through Craigslist. I prodded the giant, it woke up just a little tiny bit and managed to decide that giving a hobbyist a license for an obsolete version of the OS/400 platform wasn't going to kill anyone.
It's my hope that I'll be able to help prove that there are more people like me, and indeed, far more talented and curious than me, to show IBM that there's some value to be had for them in opening up access to at least older platforms to enthusiastic hobbyists. The AS/400 platform is an incredibly neat system, and it shows that IBM really does have a niche that nobody else can touch. I've never used AIX, but would love to check that out as well. I hope that some time in the future, I'm not a one-off case when it comes to hobbyists getting an actual license.
But your comment was well timed for me, because I wonder if IBM might be coming around as an institution and realizing that the mindshare gap they have is a problem that it's worth investing a little bit of time and effort in fixing.
Gah, I really wish this article had come up after I had been awake for a while at least. Time for coffee and letting the page refresh in case I can organize my thoughts just a little tiny bit more coherently.
Numbers that you can't even comprehend. Any system that uses Windows software on non-upgradeable hardware. Medical devices that require specific levels of precision and predictability.
Have you ever looked closely at medical devices? I work with some systems less than five years old that cost close to $100,000 and they run Windows XP. Should they be replaced? No, not just because the OS beneath the application layer is old. I'm probably the only person in the office that knows it's an XP machine, which helps with security. Sometimes you can't just upgrade.
I'll go on the record saying that as a technology follower and early adopter on a budget, the release strategy for Google Glass has seemed positively elitist. For a product that doesn't cost much to make, and seems suited to a wide variety of use cases, Google did a good job of locking down availability to the degree where only wealthier, "social media" active types or developers were able to get one. The restriction to developers isn't a problem, but the whole "Let's hand these out to people with a lot of followers." thing seems to be an even more advanced play from Apple's book on hanging out items to celebrities likely to show them off in public.
Say whatever you will about the economy and "economic divide", but when technology like this seems to be filtered to a whole new type of "elites" based on likes, tweets and fans... People can get resentful in a hurry. And yes, this probably is some pretty serious projecting.
Granted, contacting them may not actually help you in the short term, but bringing attention to this kind of nonsense is the best way there is to try and put a stop to it. Better yet, find someplace to publish a fully fledged and documented story with relevant emails and the like and THEN start getting some attention to it. This is something there certainly should be standards for, and the government needs a kick in the pants to realize that.
Never before have I had as much of a love/hate relationship with a company, and this includes Apple. Razer makes some great peripherals, that usually all have some crazy, simple, fixable flaw that they ignore for months before finally getting around to in a half-assed way. Why do I love them so much? I'm a left-handed gamer, and the pickings are pretty slim for me. So I'm stuck with them for a good left-handed gaming mouse.
Examples in the past: The Lycosa keyboards, which had a defect where the touch panel for volume and LED control would stop working after a month or less. It took over a month to get them to acknowledge a problem. Another, the drivers for the Death Adder mouse line. For four months, it was impossible to get a combination of working drivers that allowed you to rebind the left and right buttons to one another (because Razer defaulted to the primary click being on the right, for the LH models).
Razer takes forever to respond to anything, and when they do, it's typically poorly communicated and badly handled. This is a company that is just mindblowingly TERRIBLE at customer relations.
Let's see, what do most users do with computers? Browse the web, read and reply to email, shop, manage photos and maybe videos if they've got kids, and maybe do some light office and bookkeeping work.
Okay, tell me how the iPad isn't enough for that.
Yes, it's a controlled and curated experience. But Apple has sold more of those controlled, curated, locked down experiences in just the last 4 years than they have ever sold in Macintosh computers. Don't forget that you are not the market Apple is aiming for. You're the market that WISHES Apple was aiming for it, because if they were, then we'd see some pretty astounding products on the shelf. Instead, we get products priced to move by the tens of millions to the people who don't know RAM from storage space. And they are _selling_.
One thing people keep forgetting, which amazes me considering the number of Slashdotters that have complained about the amount of non-technical user support they've had to do since the day the site first came online, is that the VAST majority of people really don't give a single shit about performance and speed as long as they can get Required Task Of The Moment done without it pissing them off.
My mom just replaced her 17" 2006 iMac. Did she think it was too slow? Not necessarily, she just knows from my experiences that a computer that old is likely to crap out and die -eventually-, and she might as well get a new one when she can do it, before that happens. She sure loves the speed of her new 27" iMac (which I suggested, mainly for the screen and her eyesight) but she really doesn't need it for more than managing photos, email, web browsing, and other "Mom" stuff.
Average users do not care about speed, they don't know a G5 from an i7, and many actively don't even want to be told. They want a device of some kind, traditionally called a "computer", that does a few things and does them with the least intrusion. Business uses, academic uses, and geek or gamer uses are completely different (and largely Windows PC based) - and they're a far, far smaller market than "Moms" are, even combined. If they're told that there's a new iDevice that lets them do email, photos, Facebook, web browsing and watch videos from the kids for only $1000 and it comes with a 20 hour battery they'll be whipping out the plastic.
Nothing available today, of course. But Apple has a lot of pull with manufacturers, as well as a pretty talented in-house chip development team, as has been well demonstrated by the AX series of silicon. I also don't see any successor to the MBA running ARM being sold as directly comparable to the ones that are on the market today, either. I see it more as an evolution/extension of the iPad market into something with a more robust OS (but still largely oriented around the iOS interface guidelines) and fitting as a sort of new market segment that Apple would be introducing.
Imagine a subnote with a 20 hour battery, retina touch display, more than 8x the processor and GPU power of the currrent iPad, selling at the entry level MBA's price tag, running a locked-down ARM variant of OSX that gives users all the iOS apps they want in addition to a whole new "exciting" slate of productivity and presentation apps. Not to mention a slew of new casual games derived from iOS staples - which also work just fine.
That device would sell like *crazy*, and it's easily imagined given existing technologies and Apple's pricing margin preferences. Fundamentally, all the Hard stuff is being done with the iPad already. The rest is largely just battery size and silicon speed bumping. People don't care about how fast a machine is, *especially* if they think of it as a device and not a computer.
For the tasks most people want a computer for (or think they want a computer for) an ARM-based solution could work just as well as an x86 based one. Keep in mind that even if Apple made the switch, they wouldn't be making it to the same silicon they're producing today, because they wouldn't need all of the power saving mechanisms that they've had to use for the mobile device markets they're in now. Instead, envision something along the lines of a hybrid machine with one high-end mobile core designed for lower-power usage, and then additional cores that can be brought online as needed with the associated power draw. There are dozens of ways this kind of arrangement could be managed, and people seem to be quick to forget that Apple made some of the big early strides when it came to getting multiprocessor development under control. (Grand Central, for example)
Additionally, who's to say that they won't have a 16+ core ARM chip running at 3GHz in the next couple years? If die size and power management are less of a premium, that's a lot of raw power that could be thrown at things.
I think they'll start with something like the MBA, and move up the line from there.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm this case the information they were given was hacked and given to them by Russian intelligence. And, they've made absolutely every possible effort to hurt Hillary's campaign by hyping releases, staggering them, and releasing them at time when they're calculated to do the most potential harm. They are in no way acting like a neutral party.
The only way Wikileaks can have credibility is if they release things on a fully non-partisan basis and that has clearly not happened here.
There were Trump leaks? News to me. It seems like Assange has just been going after Hillary because he knows she won't pardon him. Wikileaks has lost every shred of credibility with me and most people I know, well before this. They're acting as a branch of the Russian intelligence services and only a moron thinks otherwise.
It depends on the kind of benefits you receive. Survivor's benefits for disabled dependents of disabled, then deceased parents, (or of people with a deceased spouse collecting disability at the time) can be much lower. Mine are $800 per month, plus Medicare premiums.
As a condition, I am allowed to earn $900 per month for (I believe) 9 (or 12?) of any 18 (or 24?) month period within a sliding window, but if I earn any more than that for 10/13 months months, I lose everything. No medical, no insurance.
My benefits are under my deceased father's Social Security number, which means they're what he earned during his lifetime and have just been passed on to me. Re-applying if I lose my job after giving up my benefits means qualifying on my own disability from a starting point of zero, and could take several years if successful at all.
As the system works today, I can do a little consulting and pull in just enough to have to file taxes every year, owing a few hundred dollars on tax day due to being paid via 1099. This would be utterly unsustainable, if I were single and living alone. Under a Universal Basic Income system, or at the very least, a reformed/streamlined and more forgiving model that allowed me to keep my medical insurance through Medicare no matter what, I would feel the freedom to try and work more, work harder, and start my own full-scale consulting business. But I can't take that risk now, because it's just too damn high.
I'm not a kid by any stretch, but Rock Band did let me live the rock star lifestyle in a small way. Toward the end of the craze, a local radio station had a contest up at Lake Tahoe where the brand prize was $400 worth of bottle service at one of the fancier nightclubs at Harveys casino. My boyfriend and I went up on stage with two random guys we met that night to fill out the band and won with a rendition of Aqualung. A couple weeks later the four of us went up there and got absolutely blasted. Just like rock stars!
First step? Don't call them clueless right off the bat.
Destroyed. At the end of every season, the CG models for Babylon 5 assets were deleted according to contract requirements with the Prime Time Entertainment Network who distributed the show. Probably as an asset reduction thing for financial BS in the era of protoCG-era production.
I think the missing key in current smart home options that most people can actually afford to purchase, is reliable voice control. I know Google's acquisition of Nest (and whatever Apple gets around to doing) will make a big difference here, but I can already say that I'd be a lot happier with my "smart" lighting if I had:
A: More money for more components such as light switches and socket replacements.
B: Voice controls that were as responsive and reasonably reliable as the Amazon Echo, which gets it right a surprisingly large amount of the time.
Last year, I picked up a Wink Hub and four "TCP Connected" brand (which is a horrible name for obvious reasons) daylight LED bulbs to see how dipping my toes into home automation would work out, and it really has been a seriously mixed result just like the author of the the original article says. I'm using a very simple setup, two lights in my home office, and one light in the rear of the living room. The only "smart" part I have set up, is a group to let me control the office lights all at once.
And it's really not all that stable. The TCP Connected bulbs actually require the use of a home gateway and online service to control, and Wink ties into that. When that service is glitchy, things will either work or not work. There's no apparent reliable activity confirmation set up in the protocols from what I can tell, so the software never knows if a device is on or off. A fairly simple schedule I have set up dims my lights for a period before bed, and then turns them off later. This usually works, but not always. It's also supposed to turn them back on, and it doesn't appear to do that about half the time.
Is the problem the TCP bulb integration? Is it Wink? Is it the signal in my house? Is it a bug? There's no way to tell for sure, and systems just aren't bulletproof enough to rely on just yet. But is it a nice step? Absolutely.
The big thing I feel that I should do in my personal case though, is replace the light switches so I don't always have to pull out a smartphone or tablet. Is it a pain to do that? Yes and no. It's more of a pain than it should be for something advertised as super simple, because of the article's mentioned process of unlocking a device, loading app, swiping to control you need, and then hitting said control.
The prices can definitely be appealing, but once you realize that a light switch is going to be $50, it adds up.
This isn't a testing fault. I'm sure they tested the hell out of it. Dozens if not hundreds of QA people sat in cubes for months, maybe years, testing bits of this game as it got produced. And I'm sure that many of them wrote up really detailed, well reasoned explanations of just how broken it was in every single way that people are counting today.
And nobody cared because the game had to launch before the holiday season of 2014, Thousands of jobs and millions upon millions of dollars were at stake.
It isn't that nobody tested, it's that nobody really cared.
That is pretty much the only resource people have. And it won't work until lots of people try and do it, loudly, repeatedly, but politely. The fact that Ubisoft is already making excuses actually makes it seem like people might have a better case this time than in most, because it's not just going into a cone of silence.
It's a case where the developers looked at the raw numbers for the system that was coming, and said "Wow! We're going to have almost three times the cores, sixteen times the RAM and so much GPU!" and then went on ahead and jacked the engine demands up to a level that probably shouldn't have been reached until a few more years into the life cycle for the platform. It took years and years for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to be understood well enough to be able to create things like the GTAV engine, and possibly in part because of the switch to essentially PC hardware they now find themselves having to work with the hardware that was until recently considered second-tier to console hardware in general, but then in addition, they used AMD parts that have always been second-tier in the PC market.
This really should not have been that bad. They're overreaching, and that's basically the fundamental problem. Wait a few years, and games that try and pull off what Unity does will be successful and well optimized, but right now they're still working out just what's capable. It's just too bad for the customers that get screwed while inadvertently helping Ubisoft and other developers learn just how this hardware can be put to use.
Anyone that still pre-orders anything that has a launch day review embargo, after the "Aliens: Colonial Marines" disaster, that's who.
This is a side effect of what happens when game franchises become more profitable than movie franchises. Once the flow of money starts on a game with a budget in the tens of millions like the Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or Grand Theft Auto franchises to name just a few - there comes a point of no return where you finish what you started, because you've sunk millions upon millions into something that just turned out *wrong*, like this. Just like Warner Brothers couldn't put the Green Lantern movie on hold and rewrite it to not suck, Ubisoft backed themselves into a corner.
Nobody had the balls or the power to say "Wait a minute, we're overreaching. Let's scale this back to something that will actually run." Instead, they launch a buggy, bad game because they're into just the marketing campaign for tens of millions of dollars. It's so much worse for consumers than a flop of a movie, because you're spending $60+ on the cost of entry, and when the reviewers are embargoed there's just no way to tell if you're going to get screwed. Thank the big budget productions and stock market demands for this kind of disaster.
Every time I see something like this, or a botched Call of Duty release, I get a *little* less annoyed with Valve for not saying a word about Half-Life 3/Ep. 3. They're private. They can take the time without investors freaking out.
Let's also take into account that Ubisoft had to know something was up, because the pre-release copies they gave game reviewers came with an embargo that lasted 17 hours into the release date. I'm not surprised at all to see this, though I'm admittedly surprised it's quite as large a problem as it is. When they announced the system requirements, I winced. I know that the horsepower demand for a game engine designed for a modern console is finally going to be a lot more demanding than last year's titles, but a GTX 680 as minimum specification? Someone screwed up engine design, plain and simple.
As of last night, I actually have a license from IBM to run V5R2 on an older AS/400 system I purchased through Craigslist. I prodded the giant, it woke up just a little tiny bit and managed to decide that giving a hobbyist a license for an obsolete version of the OS/400 platform wasn't going to kill anyone.
It's my hope that I'll be able to help prove that there are more people like me, and indeed, far more talented and curious than me, to show IBM that there's some value to be had for them in opening up access to at least older platforms to enthusiastic hobbyists. The AS/400 platform is an incredibly neat system, and it shows that IBM really does have a niche that nobody else can touch. I've never used AIX, but would love to check that out as well. I hope that some time in the future, I'm not a one-off case when it comes to hobbyists getting an actual license.
But your comment was well timed for me, because I wonder if IBM might be coming around as an institution and realizing that the mindshare gap they have is a problem that it's worth investing a little bit of time and effort in fixing.
Gah, I really wish this article had come up after I had been awake for a while at least. Time for coffee and letting the page refresh in case I can organize my thoughts just a little tiny bit more coherently.
Numbers that you can't even comprehend. Any system that uses Windows software on non-upgradeable hardware. Medical devices that require specific levels of precision and predictability.
Have you ever looked closely at medical devices? I work with some systems less than five years old that cost close to $100,000 and they run Windows XP. Should they be replaced? No, not just because the OS beneath the application layer is old. I'm probably the only person in the office that knows it's an XP machine, which helps with security. Sometimes you can't just upgrade.
I'll go on the record saying that as a technology follower and early adopter on a budget, the release strategy for Google Glass has seemed positively elitist. For a product that doesn't cost much to make, and seems suited to a wide variety of use cases, Google did a good job of locking down availability to the degree where only wealthier, "social media" active types or developers were able to get one. The restriction to developers isn't a problem, but the whole "Let's hand these out to people with a lot of followers." thing seems to be an even more advanced play from Apple's book on hanging out items to celebrities likely to show them off in public.
Say whatever you will about the economy and "economic divide", but when technology like this seems to be filtered to a whole new type of "elites" based on likes, tweets and fans... People can get resentful in a hurry. And yes, this probably is some pretty serious projecting.
Granted, contacting them may not actually help you in the short term, but bringing attention to this kind of nonsense is the best way there is to try and put a stop to it. Better yet, find someplace to publish a fully fledged and documented story with relevant emails and the like and THEN start getting some attention to it. This is something there certainly should be standards for, and the government needs a kick in the pants to realize that.
Never before have I had as much of a love/hate relationship with a company, and this includes Apple. Razer makes some great peripherals, that usually all have some crazy, simple, fixable flaw that they ignore for months before finally getting around to in a half-assed way. Why do I love them so much? I'm a left-handed gamer, and the pickings are pretty slim for me. So I'm stuck with them for a good left-handed gaming mouse.
Examples in the past: The Lycosa keyboards, which had a defect where the touch panel for volume and LED control would stop working after a month or less. It took over a month to get them to acknowledge a problem. Another, the drivers for the Death Adder mouse line. For four months, it was impossible to get a combination of working drivers that allowed you to rebind the left and right buttons to one another (because Razer defaulted to the primary click being on the right, for the LH models).
Razer takes forever to respond to anything, and when they do, it's typically poorly communicated and badly handled. This is a company that is just mindblowingly TERRIBLE at customer relations.
Slightly offtopic: I bet your laptop is a Clevo, with that description. ;)
Let's see, what do most users do with computers? Browse the web, read and reply to email, shop, manage photos and maybe videos if they've got kids, and maybe do some light office and bookkeeping work.
Okay, tell me how the iPad isn't enough for that.
Yes, it's a controlled and curated experience. But Apple has sold more of those controlled, curated, locked down experiences in just the last 4 years than they have ever sold in Macintosh computers. Don't forget that you are not the market Apple is aiming for. You're the market that WISHES Apple was aiming for it, because if they were, then we'd see some pretty astounding products on the shelf. Instead, we get products priced to move by the tens of millions to the people who don't know RAM from storage space. And they are _selling_.
One thing people keep forgetting, which amazes me considering the number of Slashdotters that have complained about the amount of non-technical user support they've had to do since the day the site first came online, is that the VAST majority of people really don't give a single shit about performance and speed as long as they can get Required Task Of The Moment done without it pissing them off.
My mom just replaced her 17" 2006 iMac. Did she think it was too slow? Not necessarily, she just knows from my experiences that a computer that old is likely to crap out and die -eventually-, and she might as well get a new one when she can do it, before that happens. She sure loves the speed of her new 27" iMac (which I suggested, mainly for the screen and her eyesight) but she really doesn't need it for more than managing photos, email, web browsing, and other "Mom" stuff.
Average users do not care about speed, they don't know a G5 from an i7, and many actively don't even want to be told. They want a device of some kind, traditionally called a "computer", that does a few things and does them with the least intrusion. Business uses, academic uses, and geek or gamer uses are completely different (and largely Windows PC based) - and they're a far, far smaller market than "Moms" are, even combined. If they're told that there's a new iDevice that lets them do email, photos, Facebook, web browsing and watch videos from the kids for only $1000 and it comes with a 20 hour battery they'll be whipping out the plastic.
Nothing available today, of course. But Apple has a lot of pull with manufacturers, as well as a pretty talented in-house chip development team, as has been well demonstrated by the AX series of silicon. I also don't see any successor to the MBA running ARM being sold as directly comparable to the ones that are on the market today, either. I see it more as an evolution/extension of the iPad market into something with a more robust OS (but still largely oriented around the iOS interface guidelines) and fitting as a sort of new market segment that Apple would be introducing.
Imagine a subnote with a 20 hour battery, retina touch display, more than 8x the processor and GPU power of the currrent iPad, selling at the entry level MBA's price tag, running a locked-down ARM variant of OSX that gives users all the iOS apps they want in addition to a whole new "exciting" slate of productivity and presentation apps. Not to mention a slew of new casual games derived from iOS staples - which also work just fine.
That device would sell like *crazy*, and it's easily imagined given existing technologies and Apple's pricing margin preferences. Fundamentally, all the Hard stuff is being done with the iPad already. The rest is largely just battery size and silicon speed bumping. People don't care about how fast a machine is, *especially* if they think of it as a device and not a computer.
For the tasks most people want a computer for (or think they want a computer for) an ARM-based solution could work just as well as an x86 based one. Keep in mind that even if Apple made the switch, they wouldn't be making it to the same silicon they're producing today, because they wouldn't need all of the power saving mechanisms that they've had to use for the mobile device markets they're in now. Instead, envision something along the lines of a hybrid machine with one high-end mobile core designed for lower-power usage, and then additional cores that can be brought online as needed with the associated power draw. There are dozens of ways this kind of arrangement could be managed, and people seem to be quick to forget that Apple made some of the big early strides when it came to getting multiprocessor development under control. (Grand Central, for example)
Additionally, who's to say that they won't have a 16+ core ARM chip running at 3GHz in the next couple years? If die size and power management are less of a premium, that's a lot of raw power that could be thrown at things.
I think they'll start with something like the MBA, and move up the line from there.