This will play out like the PC clone wars. The vertically integrated and expensive manufacturer will be buried by the clones and their common OS.
"Expensive"? Apple has the best economies of scale in the industry. No one can make an iPhone, iPod Touch or an iPad as cheaply as Apple. They managed to transition their component supplier pipelines nicely from iPods to iPhones, and have long-term contracts for flash memory, LCD screens, batteries, and the myriad other components that make up one of these things. Apple is in the driver's seat and is selling everything their manufacturing partners can make at a nice markup.
As for this survey, it's a very skewed sample and even so it says that iOS is the best way to make money and has the best short-term prospects. As long as Apple keeps always having the best short-term prospects and Android the long-term prospects, year after year, Apple will be okay.
It's the opposite here, since NJ gas taxes are very low. It can easily be 10% cheaper to buy gas in NJ than in NY, NJ, or MD. (NJ would rather fund the roads using tolls than gas taxes.)
When did we become a country when it has been decided you have too much, you don't deserve what you earned
When did contributing 5% of the personal income above $200K to the running of a civilized society become too burdensome and greedy? You certainly deserve most of that money, but to say that 1-2% of your total income is too big a price to pay is pretty selfish and counter-productive.
My company's internal web sites use Flash all over the place. In our workflow system, our annual review system, etc. If the iPad is really going to go corporate in a big way, it will eventually need Flash for these kinds of uses. Internal corporate systems are not going to be rewritten in HTML5 anytime soon.
No one seems to be able to explain why the upcoming Android tablets will be better than an iPad without using the word "open" or listing hardware technical specifications. That's kind of a sure sign of mass-market failure, in my book, although I suspect these devices will do well with a sub-set of the population. I kind of see them as SanDisk was to the iPod... always hanging in there in 2nd place for people who read speclists but never breaking out into mass-market adoption.
My parents don't shop for the most open computer. They don't know an ARM Cortex A8 from a Core2 Duo or Atom. They WOULD respond to the videoconferencing aspect if there was some assurance it would be phonecall-simple and they wouldn't have to learn any new software to do it. (Which gives the Android tablets a few months before iPad2 brings that to market.) But that doesn't seem to be the focus of these announcements, so I think they're missing the point.
I'm looking forward to using that Android app that puts anything on screen (everything, not just video) and pipes it out the HDMI to another device, like an HDTV. I could see this being a truly useful device.
I'm curious as to what you'd use that functionality for besides movies, photo slide shows, and Keynote (PowerPoint) presentations like you can do on the iPad. Any developer can add video-out on the iPad for those with the connector cables, and besides the listed apps some games support it. But overall having the thing anchored to a TV kind of defeats the primary purpose of the device. So instead of just leaving this hanging, enlighten us as to why this converts the device from useless to useful.
I'd also check out GameSalad, which offers a GUI for attaching artwork to objects, then setting properties/events across objects to build a game out of it. It's really easy to create a basic platformer or simple touch game mechanics, and you can focus on how the artwork contributes to the game.
You can also generate web, Mac, PC, and iOS output (the latter which can be submitted to the App Store, which might be a fun reward for your students.)
It's probably the other way round. Nice troll though.
Yeah, yeah, is guy's a genius and did a lot of pioneering work in multi-touch. Now back to the original poster's point instead if pulling things out of context to start a flame war. Apple's been working on LCD-as-a-sensor for awhile, as has been published by Slashdot in the past. This entire story is kind of a "me too" response to the Apple one. Apple has gotten so far aged of Microsoft in the touch interface arena that, regardless of how pedigreed the scientists Microsoft keeps locked away, it's completely reasonable to ask how much influence Apple's published work has on Microsoft's research today.
Basically it means if I'm trying to watch channel 45, and some person turns-on their Wireless whitespace gadget on 44 or 46, the "spillover" of his six megahertz signal can interfere and block my TV from receiving channel 45.
In this case, the proposal is not for the wi-fi to use 44 or 46 (which might already be allocated), it's for them to use the space BETWEEN 44 and 45, and between 45 and 46. The bits of "padding" frequency could be allocated to wi-fi if the tuners and transmitters are precise enough. The FCC just has to mandate the specificity sufficient to prevent "spillover" and enforce it in their device compliance tests.
When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king, then all of a sudden big corporate money was poured into JS performance and now FOSS is lagging behind.
Last I checked both WebKitCore and V8 were faster than IE9 and were both open source (the former LGPL and the latter NewBSD). I don't think this is a FOSS vs. Proprietary thing, just a Mozilla vs. Everyone Else thing.
I'm also interested in what other languages this opens up. The new rules explicitly ALLOW interpreters as long as the interpreter and all interpreted code are included in the original app bundle.
This could open the way for: * erlang : A few people have ported erlang to the iPhone before but since Apple disallowed interpreters no serious work was done on this front. I think this could change. Especially with the iPad becoming more of an enterprise system, I could imagine embedded erlang services being available in the back-end library of some of these systems. * Java : Nothing I'm seeing in the current agreement precludes Java anymore. Of course, JIT would be problematic, but interpreted and/or compiled-to-native Java is completely feasible now. * JavaScript/HTML5 : One could imagine a pretty rich app written in a mixture of HTML5 and native code.
They do care about running Windows software though which the iPad and Android cannot do.
I think you have to get a little more specific. Most people don't understand that there's such a thing as "Windows software" that doesn't work on other platforms. They want to be able to open their Office files and work with them, which you can do on an iPad.
If you want to get all technical, you can download an RDC or VNC client for iPad that lets you bring up a desktop to work with. "Most people" really don't care about that.
Yes they do. All "Obamacare" is is a requirement to have insurance, which they do. You can't "go on" Obamacare because the public option was shot down by the insurance industry special interests.
Well, from the article they're now about "3 years away", which in marketing speak is probably less than a decade! At least they're not "5 years away", which never comes.
You are not the target audience for AppleTV. You are part of the tiny fraction of the country who knows what "xvid" and "divx" are. You are the type who would rather spend a weekend hacking an old PC to do something than spend $99, stay within the "ecosystem" and just enjoy what the device can do. That's great. You're not Apple's customer. We get it. That doesn't mean Apple failed.
Seriously... the number one requested feature is a frick'n DVR!!!
What they've given you instead is a way to cancel the DVR service ($10/mo) and cable service ($60/mo) and instead get the 10-20 episodes you actually watch for $0.99 each without missing anything or getting overwritten by a President's speech. It's a la carte television! If Comcast let us pay for only what we watched you'd be dancing in the streets. Instead people love to find a way to hate Apple.
TiVo already does DVR pretty well. What could Apple really have added there?
I'm guessing this must be the front cam spec, and the article reported it incorrectly.
Apple is reporting the same thing on their Tech Specs site. It looks like that camera is primarily for video (it has just enough resolution to call itself a 720p HD camera.) If that's really the still photo resolution then this is pretty much a "show friends what I'm doing on Facebook" camera. Which, considering the market (teenagers looking for a cheap gadget), is probably reasonable.
But it doesn't rival point-and-shoot cameras.
Now the iPhone 4's 5Mp camera with HDR is going to rock.
They invented the term, which I think gives them the right. If you don't like it, invent your own term like "visible source" or "available source". The term "open" is already too overloaded for you to go add yet another definition.
and iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, WebOS, ChromeOS, Playstation/XBox custom OSes, and a few others. And clumping all "Linux" into one (from Ubuntu to Red Hat's Enterprise) is a bit of over-generalization.
In short, if you like playing around with new and interesting programmable systems, it may not be a Cambrian explosion, but we've certainly come out of the temporary bottleneck of the late 90's.
I realize commercial Solaris is still around, but it seems like every year we have less choices. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like that's a good thing.
I kind of felt the same way in the late 90's when BeOS was dying and the MacOS's future looked bleak. Linux had extremely weak driver support, and OS/2 had finally given up the ghost. It looked like Windows might become the only survivor of the 90's. But today there is a new diaspora of OS distributions and platforms. These things ebb and flow. My advice is to not worry so much about choice in general and just try to find something you like and contribute to it.
A lot of the folks thinking about iPad competitors seem to be overlooking two things: 1. The iPad of today running iOS 3.2 is virtually yesterday's news. All iPad owners are going to get a huge upgrade in functionality when iOS 4.x comes out for it later this fall. That will, essentially, make it a "new" product again. 2. Many of the competitors aren't slated to come out until late in Q1 2011 anyway. They won't be competing against the current iPad hardware, they'll be competing against iPad2 or whatever Apple calls next year's model. With a 2011 release date, the specs better not be in any way comparable to what the iPad has today or they'll be a year behind.
As for sales of the iPad... I don't know anyone who owns one who isn't thinking of buying another one. It is so insanely useful to have a 1.5 pound computer that fits in any flat satchel and whose battery lasts all day. If you have kids and you don't have an iPad you don't know what you're missing.
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"Expensive"? Apple has the best economies of scale in the industry. No one can make an iPhone, iPod Touch or an iPad as cheaply as Apple. They managed to transition their component supplier pipelines nicely from iPods to iPhones, and have long-term contracts for flash memory, LCD screens, batteries, and the myriad other components that make up one of these things. Apple is in the driver's seat and is selling everything their manufacturing partners can make at a nice markup.
As for this survey, it's a very skewed sample and even so it says that iOS is the best way to make money and has the best short-term prospects. As long as Apple keeps always having the best short-term prospects and Android the long-term prospects, year after year, Apple will be okay.
It's the opposite here, since NJ gas taxes are very low. It can easily be 10% cheaper to buy gas in NJ than in NY, NJ, or MD. (NJ would rather fund the roads using tolls than gas taxes.)
When did contributing 5% of the personal income above $200K to the running of a civilized society become too burdensome and greedy? You certainly deserve most of that money, but to say that 1-2% of your total income is too big a price to pay is pretty selfish and counter-productive.
My company's internal web sites use Flash all over the place. In our workflow system, our annual review system, etc. If the iPad is really going to go corporate in a big way, it will eventually need Flash for these kinds of uses. Internal corporate systems are not going to be rewritten in HTML5 anytime soon.
No one seems to be able to explain why the upcoming Android tablets will be better than an iPad without using the word "open" or listing hardware technical specifications. That's kind of a sure sign of mass-market failure, in my book, although I suspect these devices will do well with a sub-set of the population. I kind of see them as SanDisk was to the iPod... always hanging in there in 2nd place for people who read speclists but never breaking out into mass-market adoption.
My parents don't shop for the most open computer. They don't know an ARM Cortex A8 from a Core2 Duo or Atom. They WOULD respond to the videoconferencing aspect if there was some assurance it would be phonecall-simple and they wouldn't have to learn any new software to do it. (Which gives the Android tablets a few months before iPad2 brings that to market.) But that doesn't seem to be the focus of these announcements, so I think they're missing the point.
I'm curious as to what you'd use that functionality for besides movies, photo slide shows, and Keynote (PowerPoint) presentations like you can do on the iPad. Any developer can add video-out on the iPad for those with the connector cables, and besides the listed apps some games support it. But overall having the thing anchored to a TV kind of defeats the primary purpose of the device. So instead of just leaving this hanging, enlighten us as to why this converts the device from useless to useful.
I'd also check out GameSalad, which offers a GUI for attaching artwork to objects, then setting properties/events across objects to build a game out of it. It's really easy to create a basic platformer or simple touch game mechanics, and you can focus on how the artwork contributes to the game.
You can also generate web, Mac, PC, and iOS output (the latter which can be submitted to the App Store, which might be a fun reward for your students.)
Yeah, yeah, is guy's a genius and did a lot of pioneering work in multi-touch. Now back to the original poster's point instead if pulling things out of context to start a flame war. Apple's been working on LCD-as-a-sensor for awhile, as has been published by Slashdot in the past. This entire story is kind of a "me too" response to the Apple one. Apple has gotten so far aged of Microsoft in the touch interface arena that, regardless of how pedigreed the scientists Microsoft keeps locked away, it's completely reasonable to ask how much influence Apple's published work has on Microsoft's research today.
In this case, the proposal is not for the wi-fi to use 44 or 46 (which might already be allocated), it's for them to use the space BETWEEN 44 and 45, and between 45 and 46. The bits of "padding" frequency could be allocated to wi-fi if the tuners and transmitters are precise enough. The FCC just has to mandate the specificity sufficient to prevent "spillover" and enforce it in their device compliance tests.
Last I checked both WebKitCore and V8 were faster than IE9 and were both open source (the former LGPL and the latter NewBSD). I don't think this is a FOSS vs. Proprietary thing, just a Mozilla vs. Everyone Else thing.
Now that Apple publishes their app acceptance criteria, we can look this one up:
Oh well.
I'm also interested in what other languages this opens up. The new rules explicitly ALLOW interpreters as long as the interpreter and all interpreted code are included in the original app bundle.
This could open the way for:
* erlang : A few people have ported erlang to the iPhone before but since Apple disallowed interpreters no serious work was done on this front. I think this could change. Especially with the iPad becoming more of an enterprise system, I could imagine embedded erlang services being available in the back-end library of some of these systems.
* Java : Nothing I'm seeing in the current agreement precludes Java anymore. Of course, JIT would be problematic, but interpreted and/or compiled-to-native Java is completely feasible now.
* JavaScript/HTML5 : One could imagine a pretty rich app written in a mixture of HTML5 and native code.
When I was at Disney World none of the interactive computer kiosks in Epcot would mail me my son's certificates because our last name is Kass.
Wasn't that Google Wave? And haven't they added that feature to Google Docs?
I think you have to get a little more specific. Most people don't understand that there's such a thing as "Windows software" that doesn't work on other platforms. They want to be able to open their Office files and work with them, which you can do on an iPad.
If you want to get all technical, you can download an RDC or VNC client for iPad that lets you bring up a desktop to work with. "Most people" really don't care about that.
Yes they do. All "Obamacare" is is a requirement to have insurance, which they do. You can't "go on" Obamacare because the public option was shot down by the insurance industry special interests.
Well, from the article they're now about "3 years away", which in marketing speak is probably less than a decade! At least they're not "5 years away", which never comes.
You are not the target audience for AppleTV. You are part of the tiny fraction of the country who knows what "xvid" and "divx" are. You are the type who would rather spend a weekend hacking an old PC to do something than spend $99, stay within the "ecosystem" and just enjoy what the device can do. That's great. You're not Apple's customer. We get it. That doesn't mean Apple failed.
What they've given you instead is a way to cancel the DVR service ($10/mo) and cable service ($60/mo) and instead get the 10-20 episodes you actually watch for $0.99 each without missing anything or getting overwritten by a President's speech. It's a la carte television! If Comcast let us pay for only what we watched you'd be dancing in the streets. Instead people love to find a way to hate Apple.
TiVo already does DVR pretty well. What could Apple really have added there?
Apple is reporting the same thing on their Tech Specs site. It looks like that camera is primarily for video (it has just enough resolution to call itself a 720p HD camera.) If that's really the still photo resolution then this is pretty much a "show friends what I'm doing on Facebook" camera. Which, considering the market (teenagers looking for a cheap gadget), is probably reasonable.
But it doesn't rival point-and-shoot cameras.
Now the iPhone 4's 5Mp camera with HDR is going to rock.
They invented the term, which I think gives them the right. If you don't like it, invent your own term like "visible source" or "available source". The term "open" is already too overloaded for you to go add yet another definition.
and iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, WebOS, ChromeOS, Playstation/XBox custom OSes, and a few others. And clumping all "Linux" into one (from Ubuntu to Red Hat's Enterprise) is a bit of over-generalization.
In short, if you like playing around with new and interesting programmable systems, it may not be a Cambrian explosion, but we've certainly come out of the temporary bottleneck of the late 90's.
I kind of felt the same way in the late 90's when BeOS was dying and the MacOS's future looked bleak. Linux had extremely weak driver support, and OS/2 had finally given up the ghost. It looked like Windows might become the only survivor of the 90's. But today there is a new diaspora of OS distributions and platforms. These things ebb and flow. My advice is to not worry so much about choice in general and just try to find something you like and contribute to it.
A lot of the folks thinking about iPad competitors seem to be overlooking two things:
1. The iPad of today running iOS 3.2 is virtually yesterday's news. All iPad owners are going to get a huge upgrade in functionality when iOS 4.x comes out for it later this fall. That will, essentially, make it a "new" product again.
2. Many of the competitors aren't slated to come out until late in Q1 2011 anyway. They won't be competing against the current iPad hardware, they'll be competing against iPad2 or whatever Apple calls next year's model. With a 2011 release date, the specs better not be in any way comparable to what the iPad has today or they'll be a year behind.
As for sales of the iPad... I don't know anyone who owns one who isn't thinking of buying another one. It is so insanely useful to have a 1.5 pound computer that fits in any flat satchel and whose battery lasts all day. If you have kids and you don't have an iPad you don't know what you're missing.