I'm an iPhone user (but not a Mac OS or Mac user) that posted to Slashdot around the time of announcement that I probably wouldn't buy an iPad. The more I've learned, however, the more I'm inclined to get one. My iPhone is the central informational appliance in my life and has been since I got it a year ago; I only turn on the PC when I absolutely have to for content creation (I'm a writer/editor). But the PC now seems so inconvenient, slow, and encumbered by a lousy user interface.
When at home, I often find myself wishing I had the iPhone user interface on a larger device. I now think I'll get an iPad as well sometime in the next 6 months. iPad = home computing, iPhone = mobile computing, PC = serious work. Each has a role. But I can totally see myself tied to the iPad after 5:00 PM. Only complexity is that I also have an investment in e-readers, which I love, and I don't know that the iPad can compete with e-ink for serious reading... yet it seems like overkill to own both e-readers and an iPad. If only someone would come up with a fast-refresh color e-ink touchscreen and build it into the iPad, I'd die a happy user.
The flash, I mean. I have used flash blocking for years. I do a lot of stuff online, and I rarely, if ever, actually open any of the flash apps. They're about 99.95 percent advertisements. The video that I want to view is mostly available in HTML 5 these days. I think it's been several months since i opened a flash app. My wife, who knows nothing about computers apart from how to apply stickers to them, also uses flash blocking (my suggestion in response to browser slowdowns and inconveniences she was complaining about), and she misses nothing. I don't think she even realizes you can click on them to view them.
to contribute a little royalty to the authors? And because I suspect brand new releases aren't on that "nice bay place," and I have better things to do than trudge all over the internet looking for something to read when I can just drop a few bucks and not waste my time?
I buy ebooks and I'll buy them at this price, too.
Yes, I prefer (by far) reading using ebook readers with eink displays. Since the first Kindle emerged I've probably read 10,000 pages or so using ebook readers. Love them.
Also, tools exist to unDRM and convert between just about every ebook format, including Mobi, Azw, Topaz, ePub, PDF, Lit, PDB, and others, so books can in fact travel with you as you upgrade devices in the future, should you choose to go this route.
1. Regular people like Apple products. 2. But Apple products have nice user interfaces and can be used by most anyone. 3. Therefore they are like a totalitarian dictator marching the unwashed masses to their graves. 4. Plus they're just sexy, not real. 5. Therefore, anything Apple does is evil. 6. And anyone that doesn't think so is a blinded member of the politburo or a metrosexual fashionista. 7. Plus, OSX sucks and is just like Windows, iPod sucks and is just like Zune, iPhone sucks and is just like Blackberry, and iPad sucks and is just like Microsoft tablet PC. 8. 1337 H4x0rs Ru13!
I think I covered everything.
Seriously, the walled garden property sucks and I'd love to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone without unlocking it. But the Apple hate around the online tech world is truly a sphere of irrationality to behold right now, out of any proportion to anything anyone has done; Microsoft and Microsoft users were never even talked about this way.
I owned other phones with touch screens for years before buying an iPhone. The user interface makes it substantively different.
I owned a Creative MuVo2 and a Diamond Rio before an iPod (which I no longer own, replacing it with my iPhone). The user interface made it substantively different.
I keep an installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a ThinkPad partition for cases when I need to run Mac apps for compatibility with someone's files. The user interface makes it substantially different.
I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Vadem Clio, an Asus R2H, and most recently a Toshiba M200, all tablet PCs. Having seen the iPad demoed and used the iPhone for some time, it is clear that the user interface will make the iPad substantively different.
The user interface is perhaps the single most important substantive component of the computing experience, yet posters like you routinely pretend as if it isn't even there.
I see. Anyone at Slashdot that doesn't believe that Apple is the new Microsoft (despite marketshare, history, and product differences) and that doesn't find Apple's products to be mediocre is a Koolaid drinker and fanboi.
Just about the most irrational and blinkered topic on Slashdot in years, this Apple emergence. A broad swath of Slashdotters (presumably the last/youngest wave of those that felt special just for being well-versed in technoesoterics) clearly feels their identities and statuses deeply threatened by the (relative) success of Apple, who is having influence out of all proportion to their marketshare as a result of the fact that much of the public finds them to be a tremendous innovative and specifically NON-Microsoft-alike company.
with the potential someday either to totally suck (if Apple becomes the dominant player in a DRM universe of internet users and producers) or to suck much less (if Apple takes a more iTunes-like path and opens things up eventually).
One of the most interesting possible effects of iPhone/iPad to my eye is its discursive effects on computing. Users develop their understandings of the computationally possible based on what they understand of the user interface ("what it lets me do"). That which it doesn't offer they often don't imagine.
So there is a way in which Apple is indeed shaping the future of computing by shaping users' understandings of what computing is for and can and can't do, and this of course affects the structure of the internet and its content since the primary purpose of computing amongst the planet's population right now is as a mediator for the network.
Right now like so many other things iPhonePadPod is indeed a closed garden, and that sucks. At the same time, it enables a whole universe of tasks achievable with computing that hadn't really existed before (most of the ways in which I use my iPhone that tie social media/participation to location tracking to the characteristics of urban space). People can say "this existed before" or "this would have happened without Apple," but it didn't, not in ways that people actually wanted to use. It happened through the iPhone and at the moment nobody else is doing it nearly as well. Some of this success may inhere in closedness and its relationship to order, predictability, and the ability to realize a strong, focused vision that actually represents a field of practice that people want to engage in (a task where Microsoft fails but apple routinely succeeds).
So, on balance, mixed bag. Closedness sucks. On the other hand, this may be an instance in which closedness made possible an interesting kind of progress. Even if you don't buy that, it's an instance in which closedness right now embodies a certain kind of progress that many (myself included) like and are willing to pay for. Others are trying to shift this progress onto more open "tracks" (i.e. Android) but are meeting with limited success, largely because the devices and ecosystems are proving not equivalent for the task (largely as a matter of the user interface issues that are so controversial here, including in this story).
In the meantime, we have handset hacking and we can DeDRM every known eBook and music format, so I don't feel as though I'm living in a totalitarian information state yet.
So that's my comment on the subject.;-)
P.S. You're no doubt right, too, that many Slashdotters are being unfairly characterized by my use of "Slashdotters" in my posts. So, those of you that aren't busy engaging in irrational Apple-hatred and regular-user-hatred, my apologies to you.
Let me rephrase, since I was clearly unclear before.
Geeks posit that user interfaces are useful, but at the same time they routinely assume that user interfaces are essentially (in the philosophical sense) aesthetic quantities.
When the public finds a user interface to be useful, Geeks therefore assume that users' preferences are aesthetic ones. "The public has been fooled by teh sexxy!" In fact, the public is often responding to the user interfaces usefulness with respect to their desired ends and the knowledge and ability that they possess.
So what geeks take to be an aesthetic judgment about a useful tool (the user interface), is for the public a matter of utility maximization with respect to that useful tool.
This stems from the fact that geeks equally grok all user interfaces, so it's true that the primary mode of differentiation between them is often aesthetic. The public, on the other hand, does not equally grok all user interfaces, so the primary mode of differentiation between them for the public is inherently a matter of utility: can I use it or not?
Apple excels in making user interfaces that non-geeks are able to use. Geeks mistake the preferences of non-geeks to be aesthetic decisions because they see the user interface as inherently aesthetic in nature with respect to computing tasks.
I said that what geeks (i.e. you) call sexiness is actually for regular users (i.e. someone else) basic intelligibility and the possibility of use.
I was not equating the two, I was suggesting that in what you misunderstand to be a single aesthetic quantity (the sexy user interface), regular users actually identify a distinct quantity that geeks do not, the quantity of usability.
economically speaking people find things desirable because they find them useful.
Status, for example, is not an easy thing to achieve, and it is a thing with real benefits for outcomes like job quality and access to social networks able to enhance life quality in various ways (friends with sailboats, prettier dates, etc.)
To suggest that something "merely" offers status but no usefulness is thus to ignore a significant form of utility.
In fact, I'd suggest that anyone who looks around society and says "status, symbols, power, money - those do not tell you anything really important and do not say anything useful about the persons involved" is seriously ideologically blinkered.
I certainly want to know where my competitors (for a job, in business, for a date) or bureaucrats (in politics or beyond) fall in relation to status, symbols, power, and money. And whether I'm looking for a research grant or venture capital or a simple white collar job, my ability to show literacy in using status, symbols, power, and money is critical to success.
I can't get over the ways that people often dismiss these as though they're nothing. "Oh, Obama only won because of his symbolic power. Pish, posh." Um, yeah, maybe, but (1) he's president, and (2) you try to get elected president, it's not so easy, and if symbolic power is what led to the accomplishment of this rather difficult task, then it proved to have a significant utility for him.
And despite your lifetime of deep reflection, there is a significant connection between quality, ingenuity, creativity, and usefulness. Your problem is that you want to lump these in with fairness, i.e. the notion that "my opinion and work is as good as yours."
If you're upset at the previous poster, perhaps that's your problem--it isn't. Certainly not as good as Apple's, which people find useful enough to pay a premium for, whether that use is as a matter of informational utility, social utility through things like status, or some combination of both.
talking about. You conflate aesthetics and user interface unjustifiably.
They are not.
I'm saying that the user interface is precisely the steering wheel. Slashdotters are busy worrying about the size of the engine, the presence of a winch, and the friction performance on the skid pad. They say "I can install my own steering wheel, what I care about is what this baby will do!"
The public wants to buy the car with the steering wheel, period, even if the engine is smaller, there's no winch, and you have to slow down to corner.
To which the Slashdotter responds, "You're purchasing based on a totally superficial quantity! Pure cosmetics! Any idiot can install a steering wheel! Look at the engine, winch, and cornering characteristics!"
The public will continue to buy the cars with steering wheels, even if they are "cosmetic."
that a very significant of the 1.7 billion internet users in the world are either animators/renderers or architects, and thus, will sink the iPad because you can't do animation or blueprints on it?
Or did you mean something else beside "have you been out there in the world?"
FYI, I haven't been in CS since before 2000. I used to hang around with coders. When I stopped is when I went "out there in the world" and realized that for the average person technology and features are in no way intrinsically cool and exciting.
What geeks call "sexiness" and "slick gloss" are for regular users actually "basic intelligibility" and "the possibility of use."
Geeks routinely dismiss the user interface as epiphenomenal to the computing experience. The computer is real, the user is real, and the user interface is this accidental/interchangeable quantity that may be more or less cumbersome, but that is at the end of the day just a minor detail. No user interface actively prevents or determines use for a geek.
NOT SO for the general public. For the general public, the user interface is the computer, full stop. There are no "features" apart from those they can immediately understand and use. There are no "capabilities" apart from those that they can see how to access.
Contrary to Slashdotian opinion, the user interface is the thing of greatest substance in computing for most people, and that is why Apple has been a wild success since Steve Jobs came back, much to Slashdotters' chagrin.
There has not yet been a tablet PC with this user interface. Despite Slashdotters assertions that the identity of a device is all about "features," the fact is that this is a substantively new device by virtue of its user interface, a user interface that has already been proven to be one of the most successful and highly regarded in all of technology and that will likely be the determining factor in the iPad's success... all while Slashdotters dance around saying "the stoopid public, they've been fooled by teh glossiness!"
I meant to suggest precisely that hours-long use will now happen on the iPad.
And you're wrong about the desk; it's not a better choice. People want to integrate networks into their regular and social lives (carry it with them into the living room, sit on the sofa, etc.), not sequester themselves away so that they can connect.
The latter is the geek dream, but for most people, sitting at a desk for hours is the LAST thing they want to do when they get home. Right now they use the 'net in spite of the desk, not because of it.
technical criteria. But what is passing over geek sites in waves the last six months is not:
"I really want different features. I wouldn't buy this."
But rather:
"Nobody will want this device. Apple is off base. The iPad will flop."
My point is to suggest that geeks stick to the former, which is justified (certainly it's easy to see how this device might not satisfy the desire for a general-purpose tinker-and-project machine), and steer away from the latter, which tends to increase the all too common marginalization and mockery of said geeks.
Literally nobody. A statistically insignificant portion of the global internet-using public.
I completely agree that people doing development, rendering, engineering, physics, authoring, or whatever other kind of creation you want to talk about will not do it on an iPad or other similar device. They will continue to have heavy, cumbersome, hot, unfriendly, complex devices somewhere in their office/workplace/house for accomplishing these tasks.
Slashdot's record on understanding technology and society is embarrassingly bad and getting worse.
Linux is going to storm the desktop and Dean Kamen is a genius so Segway will revolutionize society, just wait, but the iPod is a lame device that nobody will buy, the iPhone is an undesirable, locked down, me-too phone with no important features and a lousy touchscreen, and iPad is just another crappy tablet that nobody will buy.
Forgive me for thinking that all of this iPad hate on Slashdot ought to be heard as "BUY APPLE STOCK."
The opposite will happen. They'll find their laptops and computer languishing in disuse, and their iPads carried with them around the house all the time. The era of the heavy, stationary computer needing a desk for hours-long use (whether you mean desktop or laptop) is over.
The moment Linux can be installed on the iPad,
on
Apple iPad Reviewed
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· Score: 1
you'll suddenly find it in demand amongst the Slashdot crowd, and there will be a proliferation of sad little pages here and there across the web hosted on an iPad running iPad Linux + Apache and containing nothing more than a few lonely screenshots and photos of Linux on iPad with just a penguin image and an xterm (because most of the libraries haven't been ported due to various as-of-yet unsurmounted constraints).
And there will be a smattering of Slashdot stories about iPad hacking and iPad Linux in which Slashdot users will post that iPad Linux will soon "finally make the iPad usable for real work."
Meanwhile, as those iPads are gathering dust waiting for further Linux development or being booted into Linux every couple of weeks or so just so a starry-eyed geek can watch an xclock run on an iPad, the world of regular iPad users will be doing useless, sandboxed, Apple fanboi things like browsing the web, reading books, and working on MS Office files.
Point:
Slashdot "ideal mobile productivity device" = a case-modded Sparcbook with the bottom cover off, hotwired to use some particular and obscure iteration of the TNT Quadro series from Nvidia that you can find every now and then on eBay, with unstable but mostly working drivers connected to a wirewrapped display made out of 15,000 $0.39 red LEDs with no X support yet but a working minimal webserver, enough to host a page about the project.
Real world "ideal mobile productivity device" = no customization or settings to worry about, Web+Office, super light weight, with a really long battery life. Basically: iPad.
As the "computer guy" for a large circle of people
on
Apple iPad Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
despite not being in technology for the last decade any longer, I can tell you anecdotally that I can count at least 20-30 iPad purchases from the people that have called me to combined rave about how much they want one and ask if they'd be somehow stupid for buying it.
You would tell them they are.
I told them it's probably the best thing for them. Joe Consumer that you mentioned wans a few things:
1. Facebook 2. Twitter 3. World Wide Web 4. Email 5. YouTube
That's pretty damned much it for most of the people that I help with their PCs at home. Yes, many of them use computers to do this or that work, but this stuff they do at work generally comes down either to web browsing or the use of Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
At home all they way is a way to do #'s 1-5 above. That's it. Yes, they CAN do this on their phone already in many cases, and a lot of them do, but they want a big screen.
Yes, they really DO want a "bigger iPod Touch." That's exactly what they're hoping it is when they ask me about it. Because the iPod Touch/iPhone does everything they want right now at home, only the screen is too small for extended use while sitting on the couch or eating microwave dinners.
Slashdot users are so ridiculously out of touch with nontechnical people it's amazing. They imagine "nontechnical people" to be any friends they have that don't case mod and don't game. In fact, there's a whole universe of people out there that is going online every night with a 7-year-old computer that hasn't been upgraded and has never been backed up and that contains a whole bunch of completely random saved images and spyware, and all they do is Facebook+World Wide Web/eShop/YouTube, and that's all they really care to do with their computers.
The iPad gets them all of this, and it gets them this in a fast, reliable, portable, and much safer way.
Mod parent up. This is all a semantic game about where significant portions of functionality are stored (and thus counted or not). After all, back in the "pre bloatware" days, you'd have had to manage all of the complexities of machine management and I/O yourself. The assembly would have been much larger to achieve the same effect.
Yes, you can make the argument that Linux comes with screen I/O, a scheduler, memory management, etc. already, so that's just overhead, but as others have pointed out, you can say the same thing about bash. It comes everywhere and is just overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an iPhone user (but not a Mac OS or Mac user) that posted to Slashdot around the time of announcement that I probably wouldn't buy an iPad. The more I've learned, however, the more I'm inclined to get one. My iPhone is the central informational appliance in my life and has been since I got it a year ago; I only turn on the PC when I absolutely have to for content creation (I'm a writer/editor). But the PC now seems so inconvenient, slow, and encumbered by a lousy user interface.
When at home, I often find myself wishing I had the iPhone user interface on a larger device. I now think I'll get an iPad as well sometime in the next 6 months. iPad = home computing, iPhone = mobile computing, PC = serious work. Each has a role. But I can totally see myself tied to the iPad after 5:00 PM. Only complexity is that I also have an investment in e-readers, which I love, and I don't know that the iPad can compete with e-ink for serious reading... yet it seems like overkill to own both e-readers and an iPad. If only someone would come up with a fast-refresh color e-ink touchscreen and build it into the iPad, I'd die a happy user.
The flash, I mean. I have used flash blocking for years. I do a lot of stuff online, and I rarely, if ever, actually open any of the flash apps. They're about 99.95 percent advertisements. The video that I want to view is mostly available in HTML 5 these days. I think it's been several months since i opened a flash app. My wife, who knows nothing about computers apart from how to apply stickers to them, also uses flash blocking (my suggestion in response to browser slowdowns and inconveniences she was complaining about), and she misses nothing. I don't think she even realizes you can click on them to view them.
to contribute a little royalty to the authors? And because I suspect brand new releases aren't on that "nice bay place," and I have better things to do than trudge all over the internet looking for something to read when I can just drop a few bucks and not waste my time?
let me just give a preemptive counterperspective.
I buy ebooks and I'll buy them at this price, too.
Yes, I prefer (by far) reading using ebook readers with eink displays. Since the first Kindle emerged I've probably read 10,000 pages or so using ebook readers. Love them.
Also, tools exist to unDRM and convert between just about every ebook format, including Mobi, Azw, Topaz, ePub, PDF, Lit, PDB, and others, so books can in fact travel with you as you upgrade devices in the future, should you choose to go this route.
1. Regular people like Apple products.
2. But Apple products have nice user interfaces and can be used by most anyone.
3. Therefore they are like a totalitarian dictator marching the unwashed masses to their graves.
4. Plus they're just sexy, not real.
5. Therefore, anything Apple does is evil.
6. And anyone that doesn't think so is a blinded member of the politburo or a metrosexual fashionista.
7. Plus, OSX sucks and is just like Windows, iPod sucks and is just like Zune, iPhone sucks and is just like Blackberry, and iPad sucks and is just like Microsoft tablet PC.
8. 1337 H4x0rs Ru13!
I think I covered everything.
Seriously, the walled garden property sucks and I'd love to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone without unlocking it. But the Apple hate around the online tech world is truly a sphere of irrationality to behold right now, out of any proportion to anything anyone has done; Microsoft and Microsoft users were never even talked about this way.
Please see my post in yesterday's anti-Apple party for a discussion of why your'e wrong.
I owned other phones with touch screens for years before buying an iPhone. The user interface makes it substantively different.
I owned a Creative MuVo2 and a Diamond Rio before an iPod (which I no longer own, replacing it with my iPhone). The user interface made it substantively different.
I keep an installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a ThinkPad partition for cases when I need to run Mac apps for compatibility with someone's files. The user interface makes it substantially different.
I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Vadem Clio, an Asus R2H, and most recently a Toshiba M200, all tablet PCs. Having seen the iPad demoed and used the iPhone for some time, it is clear that the user interface will make the iPad substantively different.
The user interface is perhaps the single most important substantive component of the computing experience, yet posters like you routinely pretend as if it isn't even there.
I see. Anyone at Slashdot that doesn't believe that Apple is the new Microsoft (despite marketshare, history, and product differences) and that doesn't find Apple's products to be mediocre is a Koolaid drinker and fanboi.
Just about the most irrational and blinkered topic on Slashdot in years, this Apple emergence. A broad swath of Slashdotters (presumably the last/youngest wave of those that felt special just for being well-versed in technoesoterics) clearly feels their identities and statuses deeply threatened by the (relative) success of Apple, who is having influence out of all proportion to their marketshare as a result of the fact that much of the public finds them to be a tremendous innovative and specifically NON-Microsoft-alike company.
with the potential someday either to totally suck (if Apple becomes the dominant player in a DRM universe of internet users and producers) or to suck much less (if Apple takes a more iTunes-like path and opens things up eventually).
One of the most interesting possible effects of iPhone/iPad to my eye is its discursive effects on computing. Users develop their understandings of the computationally possible based on what they understand of the user interface ("what it lets me do"). That which it doesn't offer they often don't imagine.
So there is a way in which Apple is indeed shaping the future of computing by shaping users' understandings of what computing is for and can and can't do, and this of course affects the structure of the internet and its content since the primary purpose of computing amongst the planet's population right now is as a mediator for the network.
Right now like so many other things iPhonePadPod is indeed a closed garden, and that sucks. At the same time, it enables a whole universe of tasks achievable with computing that hadn't really existed before (most of the ways in which I use my iPhone that tie social media/participation to location tracking to the characteristics of urban space). People can say "this existed before" or "this would have happened without Apple," but it didn't, not in ways that people actually wanted to use. It happened through the iPhone and at the moment nobody else is doing it nearly as well. Some of this success may inhere in closedness and its relationship to order, predictability, and the ability to realize a strong, focused vision that actually represents a field of practice that people want to engage in (a task where Microsoft fails but apple routinely succeeds).
So, on balance, mixed bag. Closedness sucks. On the other hand, this may be an instance in which closedness made possible an interesting kind of progress. Even if you don't buy that, it's an instance in which closedness right now embodies a certain kind of progress that many (myself included) like and are willing to pay for. Others are trying to shift this progress onto more open "tracks" (i.e. Android) but are meeting with limited success, largely because the devices and ecosystems are proving not equivalent for the task (largely as a matter of the user interface issues that are so controversial here, including in this story).
In the meantime, we have handset hacking and we can DeDRM every known eBook and music format, so I don't feel as though I'm living in a totalitarian information state yet.
So that's my comment on the subject. ;-)
P.S. You're no doubt right, too, that many Slashdotters are being unfairly characterized by my use of "Slashdotters" in my posts. So, those of you that aren't busy engaging in irrational Apple-hatred and regular-user-hatred, my apologies to you.
Let me rephrase, since I was clearly unclear before.
Geeks posit that user interfaces are useful, but at the same time they routinely assume that user interfaces are essentially (in the philosophical sense) aesthetic quantities.
When the public finds a user interface to be useful, Geeks therefore assume that users' preferences are aesthetic ones. "The public has been fooled by teh sexxy!" In fact, the public is often responding to the user interfaces usefulness with respect to their desired ends and the knowledge and ability that they possess.
So what geeks take to be an aesthetic judgment about a useful tool (the user interface), is for the public a matter of utility maximization with respect to that useful tool.
This stems from the fact that geeks equally grok all user interfaces, so it's true that the primary mode of differentiation between them is often aesthetic. The public, on the other hand, does not equally grok all user interfaces, so the primary mode of differentiation between them for the public is inherently a matter of utility: can I use it or not?
Apple excels in making user interfaces that non-geeks are able to use. Geeks mistake the preferences of non-geeks to be aesthetic decisions because they see the user interface as inherently aesthetic in nature with respect to computing tasks.
I said that what geeks (i.e. you) call sexiness is actually for regular users (i.e. someone else) basic intelligibility and the possibility of use.
I was not equating the two, I was suggesting that in what you misunderstand to be a single aesthetic quantity (the sexy user interface), regular users actually identify a distinct quantity that geeks do not, the quantity of usability.
economically speaking people find things desirable because they find them useful.
Status, for example, is not an easy thing to achieve, and it is a thing with real benefits for outcomes like job quality and access to social networks able to enhance life quality in various ways (friends with sailboats, prettier dates, etc.)
To suggest that something "merely" offers status but no usefulness is thus to ignore a significant form of utility.
In fact, I'd suggest that anyone who looks around society and says "status, symbols, power, money - those do not tell you anything really important and do not say anything useful about the persons involved" is seriously ideologically blinkered.
I certainly want to know where my competitors (for a job, in business, for a date) or bureaucrats (in politics or beyond) fall in relation to status, symbols, power, and money. And whether I'm looking for a research grant or venture capital or a simple white collar job, my ability to show literacy in using status, symbols, power, and money is critical to success.
I can't get over the ways that people often dismiss these as though they're nothing. "Oh, Obama only won because of his symbolic power. Pish, posh." Um, yeah, maybe, but (1) he's president, and (2) you try to get elected president, it's not so easy, and if symbolic power is what led to the accomplishment of this rather difficult task, then it proved to have a significant utility for him.
And despite your lifetime of deep reflection, there is a significant connection between quality, ingenuity, creativity, and usefulness. Your problem is that you want to lump these in with fairness, i.e. the notion that "my opinion and work is as good as yours."
If you're upset at the previous poster, perhaps that's your problem--it isn't. Certainly not as good as Apple's, which people find useful enough to pay a premium for, whether that use is as a matter of informational utility, social utility through things like status, or some combination of both.
of the parent post, which specifically argued the iPad to be inappropriate for "serious content creation."
A point that I fully concede.
asdf
body of message
and so on.
talking about. You conflate aesthetics and user interface unjustifiably.
They are not.
I'm saying that the user interface is precisely the steering wheel. Slashdotters are busy worrying about the size of the engine, the presence of a winch, and the friction performance on the skid pad. They say "I can install my own steering wheel, what I care about is what this baby will do!"
The public wants to buy the car with the steering wheel, period, even if the engine is smaller, there's no winch, and you have to slow down to corner.
To which the Slashdotter responds, "You're purchasing based on a totally superficial quantity! Pure cosmetics! Any idiot can install a steering wheel! Look at the engine, winch, and cornering characteristics!"
The public will continue to buy the cars with steering wheels, even if they are "cosmetic."
that a very significant of the 1.7 billion internet users in the world are either animators/renderers or architects, and thus, will sink the iPad because you can't do animation or blueprints on it?
Or did you mean something else beside "have you been out there in the world?"
FYI, I haven't been in CS since before 2000. I used to hang around with coders. When I stopped is when I went "out there in the world" and realized that for the average person technology and features are in no way intrinsically cool and exciting.
What geeks call "sexiness" and "slick gloss" are for regular users actually "basic intelligibility" and "the possibility of use."
Geeks routinely dismiss the user interface as epiphenomenal to the computing experience. The computer is real, the user is real, and the user interface is this accidental/interchangeable quantity that may be more or less cumbersome, but that is at the end of the day just a minor detail. No user interface actively prevents or determines use for a geek.
NOT SO for the general public. For the general public, the user interface is the computer, full stop. There are no "features" apart from those they can immediately understand and use. There are no "capabilities" apart from those that they can see how to access.
Contrary to Slashdotian opinion, the user interface is the thing of greatest substance in computing for most people, and that is why Apple has been a wild success since Steve Jobs came back, much to Slashdotters' chagrin.
There has not yet been a tablet PC with this user interface. Despite Slashdotters assertions that the identity of a device is all about "features," the fact is that this is a substantively new device by virtue of its user interface, a user interface that has already been proven to be one of the most successful and highly regarded in all of technology and that will likely be the determining factor in the iPad's success... all while Slashdotters dance around saying "the stoopid public, they've been fooled by teh glossiness!"
I meant to suggest precisely that hours-long use will now happen on the iPad.
And you're wrong about the desk; it's not a better choice. People want to integrate networks into their regular and social lives (carry it with them into the living room, sit on the sofa, etc.), not sequester themselves away so that they can connect.
The latter is the geek dream, but for most people, sitting at a desk for hours is the LAST thing they want to do when they get home. Right now they use the 'net in spite of the desk, not because of it.
technical criteria. But what is passing over geek sites in waves the last six months is not:
"I really want different features. I wouldn't buy this."
But rather:
"Nobody will want this device. Apple is off base. The iPad will flop."
My point is to suggest that geeks stick to the former, which is justified (certainly it's easy to see how this device might not satisfy the desire for a general-purpose tinker-and-project machine), and steer away from the latter, which tends to increase the all too common marginalization and mockery of said geeks.
NOBODY does "serious content creation."
Literally nobody. A statistically insignificant portion of the global internet-using public.
I completely agree that people doing development, rendering, engineering, physics, authoring, or whatever other kind of creation you want to talk about will not do it on an iPad or other similar device. They will continue to have heavy, cumbersome, hot, unfriendly, complex devices somewhere in their office/workplace/house for accomplishing these tasks.
I concede that point.
And it absolutely nothing to do with mine.
Slashdot's record on understanding technology and society is embarrassingly bad and getting worse.
Linux is going to storm the desktop and Dean Kamen is a genius so Segway will revolutionize society, just wait, but the iPod is a lame device that nobody will buy, the iPhone is an undesirable, locked down, me-too phone with no important features and a lousy touchscreen, and iPad is just another crappy tablet that nobody will buy.
Forgive me for thinking that all of this iPad hate on Slashdot ought to be heard as "BUY APPLE STOCK."
The opposite will happen. They'll find their laptops and computer languishing in disuse, and their iPads carried with them around the house all the time. The era of the heavy, stationary computer needing a desk for hours-long use (whether you mean desktop or laptop) is over.
you'll suddenly find it in demand amongst the Slashdot crowd, and there will be a proliferation of sad little pages here and there across the web hosted on an iPad running iPad Linux + Apache and containing nothing more than a few lonely screenshots and photos of Linux on iPad with just a penguin image and an xterm (because most of the libraries haven't been ported due to various as-of-yet unsurmounted constraints).
And there will be a smattering of Slashdot stories about iPad hacking and iPad Linux in which Slashdot users will post that iPad Linux will soon "finally make the iPad usable for real work."
Meanwhile, as those iPads are gathering dust waiting for further Linux development or being booted into Linux every couple of weeks or so just so a starry-eyed geek can watch an xclock run on an iPad, the world of regular iPad users will be doing useless, sandboxed, Apple fanboi things like browsing the web, reading books, and working on MS Office files.
Point:
Slashdot "ideal mobile productivity device" = a case-modded Sparcbook with the bottom cover off, hotwired to use some particular and obscure iteration of the TNT Quadro series from Nvidia that you can find every now and then on eBay, with unstable but mostly working drivers connected to a wirewrapped display made out of 15,000 $0.39 red LEDs with no X support yet but a working minimal webserver, enough to host a page about the project.
Real world "ideal mobile productivity device" = no customization or settings to worry about, Web+Office, super light weight, with a really long battery life. Basically: iPad.
despite not being in technology for the last decade any longer, I can tell you anecdotally that I can count at least 20-30 iPad purchases from the people that have called me to combined rave about how much they want one and ask if they'd be somehow stupid for buying it.
You would tell them they are.
I told them it's probably the best thing for them. Joe Consumer that you mentioned wans a few things:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. World Wide Web
4. Email
5. YouTube
That's pretty damned much it for most of the people that I help with their PCs at home. Yes, many of them use computers to do this or that work, but this stuff they do at work generally comes down either to web browsing or the use of Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
At home all they way is a way to do #'s 1-5 above. That's it. Yes, they CAN do this on their phone already in many cases, and a lot of them do, but they want a big screen.
Yes, they really DO want a "bigger iPod Touch." That's exactly what they're hoping it is when they ask me about it. Because the iPod Touch/iPhone does everything they want right now at home, only the screen is too small for extended use while sitting on the couch or eating microwave dinners.
Slashdot users are so ridiculously out of touch with nontechnical people it's amazing. They imagine "nontechnical people" to be any friends they have that don't case mod and don't game. In fact, there's a whole universe of people out there that is going online every night with a 7-year-old computer that hasn't been upgraded and has never been backed up and that contains a whole bunch of completely random saved images and spyware, and all they do is Facebook+World Wide Web/eShop/YouTube, and that's all they really care to do with their computers.
The iPad gets them all of this, and it gets them this in a fast, reliable, portable, and much safer way.
But it probably is useful primarily in highly dense urban areas like NYC (where I, too, live, using Yelp almost continuously).
Mod parent up. This is all a semantic game about where significant portions of functionality are stored (and thus counted or not). After all, back in the "pre bloatware" days, you'd have had to manage all of the complexities of machine management and I/O yourself. The assembly would have been much larger to achieve the same effect.
Yes, you can make the argument that Linux comes with screen I/O, a scheduler, memory management, etc. already, so that's just overhead, but as others have pointed out, you can say the same thing about bash. It comes everywhere and is just overhead.