The iPad wasn't a revolution, it was an evolution of the iPhone.
Actually, the iPad was the project out of which came the iPhone. The iPhone was simpler, so it was ready first. And as you point out, the iPad followed on what the iPhone built, but it's not like Apple just thought "hey, the iPhone is doing well, let's see if we can just make a *bigger* one, scrap the phone part, and go with that!" like so many Slashdotters (including you, it seems) seem to think.
And even if that's what happened, it sure as hell is a revolution. Just look at the market before and after the iPad. The iPad has severely wounded the netbook market (which was (and for some, still is) the ordained device by many Slashdotters), and has even had a notable impact in the PC market as a whole.
And it utterly decimated the tablet market (outselling all PC tablets *ever* in less than a year!). How is that not a revolution?
Slashdotters seem to think that "revolutionary" means "comes from 100 years or more in the future". And even someone invented a holographic AI neural interface device, with a subspace network and string theory n-th dimension data storage and retrieval, Slashdot nerds would claim "not revolutionary, prior art!" all day long.
Unless maybe Google buys the company and releases the product as Open Source...
On Windows, in practice, using a screen with such an extreme increase in resolution is not going to play out as well as it does on iOS.
What problems are there, specifically? My mom has pretty bad eyesight and I have it running at 200% for her, and it works surprisingly well.
Yes, "surprisingly well", if that's how you want to refer to it. The way iOS does it is much better than that. It's wholly seamless.
Linux does have many WMs and DEs, but pretty much all of them handle DPI variability just fine. At least both Gtk and Qt can be made to scale arbitrarily, which immediately covers all the most popular DEs, and vast majority of apps.
Still not up to the level of iOS, which is "every app". There are still plenty of non-DE apps, and "alternative" WMs that people commonly run which are completely in the dark here.
However, I'm interested to see how well Gnome and KDE handle these things today. I'll fire up the current Ubuntu beta and give it a go here sometime soon. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but given how this things inevitably go, I'm not going to expect too much (geeks are prone to ignore huge warts, and make claims like, "Linux works perfectly with sound" or "WiFi problems? What, are you still in 2003?", then you try it and find out they're full of shit.).
I'll outline three issues that all variable resolution UIs tend to run into, and which I expect to run into on Ubuntu. They are:
1. Mismatching between fonts, geometrical shapes (i.e., outline boxes, divider lines, etc.) and interactive UI elements (buttons, sliders, etc.). 2. Overall UI reflowing on resizes (the button that was on the far right is now shifted down or on the left, or text is cut off, etc.) 3. Certain elements don't resize at all (for example, a Flash element in a web page, because the Flash element is set to a fixed absolute resolution).
None of these happen on iOS, but variably afflict other systems. Something like how it works on Windows 7 can be "surprisingly well", but it's slight praise.
It's fundamental to computer hardware that it depends on computer software, except at a *very* basic level (for example, one of those flexible USB LED lights doesn't need software, but I hope it's clear that that's far outside of the scope of what we're discussing).
Also, a thin line is not an individual pixel. And just because you can see a pixel does not mean you can discern it. For example, if there were one only one pixel lit on an iPhone 4S, you should be able to see that there is a pixel lit, even from a large distance (if it's bright enough and has sufficient contrast with the surrounding portion of the screen and ambient light, etc.), but you can't actually resolve the pixel itself.
A good analogy would be a star. It's not only impossible to resolve a star (other than the sun) with your eyes, it's impossible to do with most telescopes! They are dots that are smaller than the imaging capabilities of our eyes.
So, just because you can read text at 1-pixel width fonts does not mean you can actually see the individual pixels.
Then it's likely that you're using resolutions that are simply too high for your preferred viewing distance and eyesight. Move closer or get less pixel dense displays:).
No, because I'd never use a product that required me to use non-native resolutions, or alter my comfortable viewing habits. And my eyesight is fantastic.
That's why the iPad works for something like this, and products like Sony's micro-sized displays don't. I'm not going to hunch over a screen. That completely defeats the primary benefit of a higher resolution display (if you have to move uncomfortably close to it to use it, then you are just making the relative resolution the same as a larger, lower resolution display!).
To be honest, on most displays, I wish that Windows allowed scaling down below 100%. I already have my browsers set to 80% zoom...
Yes, there are many displays that are very low resolution for their size. But that's far away from going with a "retina" display on a netbook (it's the exact opposite end of the spectrum, in fact).
But yes, scaling on Windows is a bit kludgy, especially on the higher settings. 125% seems to work well for the most part, though - set my mother in law's 1600x900 15.6" Win7 machine to that and it looks fine...
Yes, 125% on Windows 7 isn't atrocious. But you still end up with a lot of rough edges. If it's a matter of choosing between "I can't even fucking read it" and "it's sub-optimal, but at least I can use it this way", then 125% is probably the better trade-off.
But my point here is that on iOS, there's no such trade-off, due to the way it implements this. No other OS does this, so no other OS avoids all these issues out of hand. If they did (or if they implemented seamless resolution independence, and it worked across all apps seamlessly, which again, no other OS does), then it would be a different matter.
Unfortunately, this only works on iOS, and that isn't likely to change very soon, except *maybe* on Windows 8, in the Metro UI. I don't even think Google is going to make any headway here on Android, even though they should have done so by now.
Those are dimensions, not resolutions. I'm being specific in my terminology.
To be fair, "2048x1536" etc have all been referred to as "resolution" in monitor-speak for as long as I can recall.
Misapplied, but also to be fair, the context was about a high DPI display.
With iOS, you can have small, sharp things, that are supposed to be small and sharp, and things that you wouldn't want to shrink to 1/4 the size (like buttons and text) don't.
No, that's not what I want. I want to take the as-is visual computing experience and put the entire thing on smaller pixels. Smaller text, smaller icons, smaller buttons, smaller everything; so that I can have more information in the same physical space. I do not want the OS "compensating" for small pixels by rendering bigger graphics to match some arbitrary physical size. Therefore, current OS support is great, but nobody's been delivering on high-DPI high-pixel-count monitors until now.
The problem is that this then puts the onus on the application developers to design usable UIs for a variety of resolutions *or* designing their UI to be more widely resizable/scalable.
That just isn't the case today, and there's no mechanism in place for that to be practical in the near term. Right now, you can already choose from a range of resolutions, some which will lead to smaller UI elements, and some with larger UI elements. But to go with one that shrinks things down to 1/4 the area is pushing the limits of existing software.
A "retina display" netbook would be hobbled by the OS and software available for it. I doubt it would have much appeal. Netbooks are already being overshadowed by the iPad, this would make the netbook even *less* appealing in the market.
Senior citizens with failing eyesight would find such small text unreadable.
I do not have failing eyesight. I am a power user, and I want a good high-DPI power-user monitor to view lots of things in a small space.
You're also also not a cyborg who can see each pixel. With a more capable scaling system, you can have both the sharpness and the usable UI size, but such a system only really exists on iOS (due to a shortcut they've implemented via specifically doubling the resolution, which quadruples the dimension in pixels).
The iPad display has non-discernible pixels at 15". We aren't talking about 55 year old eyes, but perfectly normals eyes.
The technology clearly exists, and this sentiment is growing among other power-users, yet the market offers nothing for this prosumer segment.
That's because the technology only clearly exists on iOS. Maybe Windows 8, using only the Metro UI, can work here. I'm not completely familiar with how it deals with different resolutions.
This "Oh no, not everybody can handle it, can't release it without mitigation" mindset seems to be the only thing keeping back the technology. Hopefully with this display in the hands of many, things will change.
It's not about "oh no, some half-blind pensioner can't use it, so everyone must conform to that lowest common denominator", this is, "it just really doesn't work well with most people, and the software (which is *absolutely* and *inextricably* part of the technology needed for this to work) is not up to the task".
Why should display makers make a product that no one can use? Perhaps Windows 8 will correct this. I wouldn't hold your breath though, but I'd be ecstatic to be shown to be wrong here. I'm very much in favor of higher resolution displays, but as usual, MS's, Google's, and the Open Source community's lack of competence are what's holding the technology back, not old people with bad eyesight.
Linux can scale everything great. Windows 7 does DPI scaling pretty decently (it's app dependent - if app can't handle it properly itself, the OS does bitmap upscaling). Really, OS X is the only major desktop OS that can't scale its UI well to suit different resolutions.
None of the OS's you've listed can handle a doubling in resolution (quadrupling in dimensions) as well as iOS does. This is hands-down no contest whatsoever.
On Windows, in practice, using a screen with such an extreme increase in resolution is not going to play out as well as it does on iOS. Linux does not have anything of the sort inherently, so you have to discuss specific window managers and desktop environments, which immediately means no matter how wonderful one of these implements it, it's not going to be seamless or universal without limiting yourself to just a very small subset of Linux and Linux apps.
iOS's superiority on this specific aspect is due to the fact that it takes a shortcut of specifically doubling the resolution. This makes scaling much more easily to implement without even having to worry about all sorts of issues that arise in more flexible resolution independence, and *all* apps work automatically with the new resolution, either by upping each pixel to four pixels, or using each of the four pixel individually. No usability issues whatsoever.
All the major OSes today support that res and higher. Ubuntu even supported my >200dpi 3840x2400 monitors via goofy single-link DVI connections right out of the box (though something won't let the total desktop get wider than 8192). Windows 98 had no problem driving 2048x1536 on my old 21" CRTs.
Those are dimensions, not resolutions. I'm being specific in my terminology.
If you mean the OS should scale things, many people itching for more pixels want the individual pixels used for more information onscreen, not to conglomerate them into the same low information density. I *want* things to be clear at 1/4th the size onscreen!
And that's exactly what iOS does, and what no other OS does quite as well yet. With iOS, you can have small, sharp things, that are supposed to be small and sharp, and things that you wouldn't want to shrink to 1/4 the size (like buttons and text) don't.
Windows, OS X, and Linux, etc., have some mechanisms for resolutions independence, but they aren't as deft, in actual implementation, as iOS is. Scaling on Windows is clunkier.
Pfff, 2048x1536 on 10" is only 256ppi. 221ppi (the Sony Vaio P with 1600x768 @ 8") at 100% scalling is great with XP and Windows 7... on this thing I might increase the scaling to 125%, but I'm relatively sure I'd be fine without it:)
Actually, both are pretty horrible (100% and 125%). Scaling on Windows is kludgy, and running at 100% things are far too small. They *look* great, but much more difficult to use.
I do realize some people will be fine with it, but I'm 100% certain if you were to do a study having people sit down and use something like they, most will prefer a lower resolution display for actual usage. If Windows had better resolution independence, then this would be different.
Yes, like all the other Apple products, which don't have a numeral in their name.
So it will be iPad Pro?;)
No, iPad.
The point is, the name is something Steve would never have forgotten...
No one forgot anything. They called it what it's called.
it's the heart of the marketing ploy... Steve would use it in many sentences.
They called it the new iPad over and over.
A linguistic analysis of the past Steve performances would have been a ood idea for Tim.
He's not Steve Jobs. Trying to be a copy would be silly. Phil Schiller has his own style and is far more comfortable on stage. Tim Cook isn't as good, but he's way better than most CEOs. Maybe he'll get better or maybe not, either way, it would be a huge mistake to try to ape Jobs.
You are over thinking things. Names are what they are. They don't have to be perfectly consistent across different lines from different eras. There might be an iPad Pro, or iPad mini later, but there isn't today, and there never needs to be. They could keep using numbers for the iPhone, or move away from numbers (I suspect they will move away from numbers eventually).
Who wants to start up their PC and use it to actually work?
Only a minority of PC owners.
Slashdotters are always harping on about "working" on computers. The iPad isn't for "real work", now Metro isn't for using to "actually work". By that metric alone, I'd expect Windows 8 to be a smashing success.
Though that's just one metric, but although I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters do work on their PCs, most people just want to communicate, play, create (not work), and the like. And for the "create" in that list, very little in terms of text or numerical projects (some writing, short newsletters at most), but heavy on creative projects like photos, invites, and videos.
And I don't see how Metro in any way hinders any of those, other than being different. If the iPad has shown us anything, it's that Slashdot-type geeks are the *last* people to consult regarding the preferences of the average person.
The mistake both you and the OP are making is in mistaking Kodak for a camera company - it wasn't.
It's possible to look at Kodak as a film camera that sold cameras in order to sell more film and film processing equipment and services, but that doesn't mean in the slightest that they couldn't have built up their existing camera brand, which they did in fact try to do.
Which is, in fact, what they tried to do.
But, one by one, each of things went digital (in one form or another) or Kodak's marketshare fell to cheaper imports. (Fuji for consumer 35mm notably.) With 90% of their business gone, they were hardly in a position to retool around the 2% that consumer cameras represented. (The remaining 8% is various support services, consulting, etc...)
Exactly, "one by one". They could have seen the writing on the wall and made the transition before 90% of their business fell out from under them.
Which is, in fact, what they tried to do.
They tried, and failed/are failing. That doesn't mean failure was inevitable. The mistake you (and many others) are making is in thinking that companies can't change and refocus. "Kodak is a film company, so when film dies, so must they". Well, look at what sort of companies Nintendo and Toyota where. Look at Apple. Look at IBM over the years.
Not at all. They were about cameras and film and digital.
Kodak didn't really make cameras.
That's exceptionally misinformed. Kodak has made cameras for over 120 years.
Fuji clings to it a bit, with disposable cameras, but was able to get some foothold in the consumer digital camera space. Kodak? They tried, belatedly, but failed.
Kodak has made digital cameras for longer than most people even knew what a digital camera was.
The cool stuff was made by the companies already making cool consumer-level gadgets (e.g., Sony).
By "(e.g., Sony)", you really mean "(the only example I can think of is Sony)". "I.e." would have been a better choice than "e.g.".
The cool stuff was made by Sony, and... Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, um... oh, Panasonic, that's another electronics company (though with a partnership with Leica, but I'll still count it).
And the "better" consumer cameras were being made/sold by the "real" camera companies, Olympus, Canon, Nikon, who were also able to bring in their existing film camera expertise into the "pro" level cameras, and we all benefit from the trickle-down from there.
They've all been making great consumer digital cameras for over a decade now, and non-digital consumer cameras for many decades.
Kodak had no chance, really.
Can't see why not. Why couldn't they have made nice, cool, compact digital cameras? Oh, that's right, they did. They just failed to execute successfully.
The people who see dollar signs in locking down computers by taxing all programs that run on the computers that they make, taxing all works that are viewed on computers that they make, and taxing the production of computers that they don't make. The first two are done using mandatory verification of the device manufacturer's digital signature, as video game console makers have done since the NES and Atari 7800. The last is done with patents, as Microsoft and Apple have lately been doing to Android device manufacturers.
What does Android have to do with general purpose computing?
As you point out, this has existed for decades now, and things are just fine. No one is trying to kill of general purpose computing. NO ONE. They are just trying to make *THEIR OWN* products (to varying degrees) locked down. Even Android is more locked down than your Linux PC. There are grades on a scale, and no one is going to remove the "totally open" end from that scale. It's both impossible, and financially foolish. There will always be some company that will make DIY kits, hacker boards, etc.
You are worrying about the impossible. That makes you foolish.
The iPad 3 will quadruple the number of pixels. A 10" Kindle Fire will absolutely not.
The only appeal to the mass market of the Kindle Fire is the price. It's essentially a netbook iPad. The summary misses the #1 reason Amazon made the Kindle Fire the size it did was in order to be able to undercut the iPad on price. The idea that it was a "beta test" is bullshit, as is the idea that there is some significant portion of people who won't buy a 10" tablet.
If Amazon matched the iPad roughly feature for feature, it can't undercut on price. If they made a 10" Kindle equivalent of the iPad 3, and had roughly the same price, no one would buy the Kindle. Why?
Why would anyone buy a knock-off for the same price as the original? There are certainly some geeks who will want an Android tablet, but they haven't been keeping the other Android tablets afloat, and they're not going to all of a sudden decide to jump onto the Kindle bandwagon.
Amazon's only chance is to keep their bargain pricing, which means keeping their bargain hardware, and that's a dynamic that Apple is fine with. I really don't think they mind people choosing a Fire based on price, knowing that a large number of them will be dissatisfied with it, and Apple will have a nice iPad for them to upgrade to later on.
Not being locked into the Apple ecosystem is worth something to many. It gives the option to buy your hardware from a variety of manufacturers, and the same for your software. You decide the features you want and the software you want to run.
And it's not worth anything to orders of magnitude more than the "many" you are referring to.
I'm not saying that those that want options are wrong, just putting your statement in context.
But this assumes that the natural lifespan of a company is infinite.
No, it doesn't. It assumes the lifetime is indefinite, which is different.
Unlike, for example, humans who live to around 60-125 tops, companies don't have a built-in expiration date (they used to in the US, but haven't for over a century).
What I think Geoffrey is saying is that when Kodak went out of business, the answer to "what exactly went wrong?" is that nothing went wrong.
Nothing went wrong with the market. It did what it's "supposed" to do. The question is what went wrong with Kodak. They didn't do what they are supposed to do.
What if labor was part of the equation, though? What if I gave you a choice between the beautiful cathedral and the chaotic rubble, with the stipulation that, after you chose, it was your job to build a bridge.
With business, labor is always part of the equation. Digital photography and film photography aren't like a building and a bridge. It's like a building and a building. Would you rather have a pile of rubble to turn into a restaurant, or a cathedral to turn into a restaurant?
And stone is much more difficult to rearrange than a company, in terms of labor. It's only harder, potentially, in the mental task of coming up with a solution.
Now imagine I offered you one of two things: You have to build a digital photography business, and you can start with Sony, or Kodak. Which would you choose?
Or Nikon or Canon?
The problem Kodak faced wasn't that they couldn't have become a digital photography business. The problem Kodak faced was that the digital business was so different from what they are good at that the restructuring costs were crippling, *precisely because they were perfectly adapted to the previous era.*
Nonsense. The problem wasn't that they couldn't change, but that they didn't change. Nikon and Canon (and Olympus and Fuji and countless other film-era companies) made the switch just fine.
Just because Kodak failed (or, "is failing" might be more appropriate) doesn't mean failure was the only possible outcome for Kodak. The *film* side of Kodak must fail, but the *camera* side of Kodak was under no such restriction.
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Because most people think fondly of Kodak. I'm not sure why you think people should be cold and calloused about things they like.
Kodak's strenght was film photography.
So were Nikon's and Canon's, but they both jumped into digital with both feet.
There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
No, there isn't. But there's also no reason a company can't go from one market to another. Look at Nintendo, Sega, IBM, Apple, etc. The key is the ability to change with the markets.
Kodak failed in this regard. And sure, that does mean the company itself "deserves" to fail in the market, but that doesn't mean people can't miss them. Polaroid did the same thing, and now lives on essentially as a brand, the original company no longer really exists.
By your logic, nothing is good, since everything has limits that people will hit at one point or another.
Nothing is good in excess. Some things are fine in moderation
That's a tautology, and means nothing.
You worry too much about things that don't even effect you.
1. Affect. 2. "First they came for the Communists." I just fear that opponents of general-purpose computing will end up coming for the micro-ISVs. This has already happened in a couple cases, where big businesses have access to entire classes of computing platforms to which micro-ISVs have no access.
Who is an opponent of general purpose computing? No one. General purpose computers will exist forever (for as long as digital computational technology exists).
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead...
Yeah, but modern day wizards and vampires, and long ago elves and dragons, *those* things have all panned out as real!
The problem is you're playing the greater fool game. If you intend to make money by selling a stock at a later date, then what you're saying is that you think you can find someone willing to buy AFTER you got the value out of it. Your buying strategy is also then based on inside information, "intuition" or some other divine insight, otherwise people would have already known and driven the price up. Another downside is that you have to actually SELL your assets to get any money from them.
This is based on the mistaken assumption that stock prices should never change, which is based on the false assumption that businesses never change.
AAPL today is worth many times more than AAPL in 1997 because Apple today is worth many times more than Apple in 1997. You aren't buying while it's valued at less than it should be in the hopes of selling when it's valued at more than it should be (well, you can do that, but that's just minute daily fluctuations), you're buying a chunk of a company that is generally valued roughly what it's worth, hoping that the company itself will grow in value.
You are completely ignoring the work of the people at the company. Their work provides value.
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The iPad wasn't a revolution, it was an evolution of the iPhone.
Actually, the iPad was the project out of which came the iPhone. The iPhone was simpler, so it was ready first. And as you point out, the iPad followed on what the iPhone built, but it's not like Apple just thought "hey, the iPhone is doing well, let's see if we can just make a *bigger* one, scrap the phone part, and go with that!" like so many Slashdotters (including you, it seems) seem to think.
And even if that's what happened, it sure as hell is a revolution. Just look at the market before and after the iPad. The iPad has severely wounded the netbook market (which was (and for some, still is) the ordained device by many Slashdotters), and has even had a notable impact in the PC market as a whole.
And it utterly decimated the tablet market (outselling all PC tablets *ever* in less than a year!). How is that not a revolution?
Slashdotters seem to think that "revolutionary" means "comes from 100 years or more in the future". And even someone invented a holographic AI neural interface device, with a subspace network and string theory n-th dimension data storage and retrieval, Slashdot nerds would claim "not revolutionary, prior art!" all day long.
Unless maybe Google buys the company and releases the product as Open Source...
Apple already does this with the iPod touch, without issue.
What sort of confusion are you expecting?
On Windows, in practice, using a screen with such an extreme increase in resolution is not going to play out as well as it does on iOS.
What problems are there, specifically? My mom has pretty bad eyesight and I have it running at 200% for her, and it works surprisingly well.
Yes, "surprisingly well", if that's how you want to refer to it. The way iOS does it is much better than that. It's wholly seamless.
Linux does have many WMs and DEs, but pretty much all of them handle DPI variability just fine. At least both Gtk and Qt can be made to scale arbitrarily, which immediately covers all the most popular DEs, and vast majority of apps.
Still not up to the level of iOS, which is "every app". There are still plenty of non-DE apps, and "alternative" WMs that people commonly run which are completely in the dark here.
However, I'm interested to see how well Gnome and KDE handle these things today. I'll fire up the current Ubuntu beta and give it a go here sometime soon. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but given how this things inevitably go, I'm not going to expect too much (geeks are prone to ignore huge warts, and make claims like, "Linux works perfectly with sound" or "WiFi problems? What, are you still in 2003?", then you try it and find out they're full of shit.).
I'll outline three issues that all variable resolution UIs tend to run into, and which I expect to run into on Ubuntu. They are:
1. Mismatching between fonts, geometrical shapes (i.e., outline boxes, divider lines, etc.) and interactive UI elements (buttons, sliders, etc.).
2. Overall UI reflowing on resizes (the button that was on the far right is now shifted down or on the left, or text is cut off, etc.)
3. Certain elements don't resize at all (for example, a Flash element in a web page, because the Flash element is set to a fixed absolute resolution).
None of these happen on iOS, but variably afflict other systems. Something like how it works on Windows 7 can be "surprisingly well", but it's slight praise.
It's fundamental to computer hardware that it depends on computer software, except at a *very* basic level (for example, one of those flexible USB LED lights doesn't need software, but I hope it's clear that that's far outside of the scope of what we're discussing).
Also, a thin line is not an individual pixel. And just because you can see a pixel does not mean you can discern it. For example, if there were one only one pixel lit on an iPhone 4S, you should be able to see that there is a pixel lit, even from a large distance (if it's bright enough and has sufficient contrast with the surrounding portion of the screen and ambient light, etc.), but you can't actually resolve the pixel itself.
A good analogy would be a star. It's not only impossible to resolve a star (other than the sun) with your eyes, it's impossible to do with most telescopes! They are dots that are smaller than the imaging capabilities of our eyes.
So, just because you can read text at 1-pixel width fonts does not mean you can actually see the individual pixels.
Then it's likely that you're using resolutions that are simply too high for your preferred viewing distance and eyesight. Move closer or get less pixel dense displays :).
No, because I'd never use a product that required me to use non-native resolutions, or alter my comfortable viewing habits. And my eyesight is fantastic.
That's why the iPad works for something like this, and products like Sony's micro-sized displays don't. I'm not going to hunch over a screen. That completely defeats the primary benefit of a higher resolution display (if you have to move uncomfortably close to it to use it, then you are just making the relative resolution the same as a larger, lower resolution display!).
To be honest, on most displays, I wish that Windows allowed scaling down below 100%. I already have my browsers set to 80% zoom...
Yes, there are many displays that are very low resolution for their size. But that's far away from going with a "retina" display on a netbook (it's the exact opposite end of the spectrum, in fact).
But yes, scaling on Windows is a bit kludgy, especially on the higher settings. 125% seems to work well for the most part, though - set my mother in law's 1600x900 15.6" Win7 machine to that and it looks fine...
Yes, 125% on Windows 7 isn't atrocious. But you still end up with a lot of rough edges. If it's a matter of choosing between "I can't even fucking read it" and "it's sub-optimal, but at least I can use it this way", then 125% is probably the better trade-off.
But my point here is that on iOS, there's no such trade-off, due to the way it implements this. No other OS does this, so no other OS avoids all these issues out of hand. If they did (or if they implemented seamless resolution independence, and it worked across all apps seamlessly, which again, no other OS does), then it would be a different matter.
Unfortunately, this only works on iOS, and that isn't likely to change very soon, except *maybe* on Windows 8, in the Metro UI. I don't even think Google is going to make any headway here on Android, even though they should have done so by now.
Those are dimensions, not resolutions. I'm being specific in my terminology.
To be fair, "2048x1536" etc have all been referred to as "resolution" in monitor-speak for as long as I can recall.
Misapplied, but also to be fair, the context was about a high DPI display.
With iOS, you can have small, sharp things, that are supposed to be small and sharp, and things that you wouldn't want to shrink to 1/4 the size (like buttons and text) don't.
No, that's not what I want. I want to take the as-is visual computing experience and put the entire thing on smaller pixels. Smaller text, smaller icons, smaller buttons, smaller everything; so that I can have more information in the same physical space. I do not want the OS "compensating" for small pixels by rendering bigger graphics to match some arbitrary physical size. Therefore, current OS support is great, but nobody's been delivering on high-DPI high-pixel-count monitors until now.
The problem is that this then puts the onus on the application developers to design usable UIs for a variety of resolutions *or* designing their UI to be more widely resizable/scalable.
That just isn't the case today, and there's no mechanism in place for that to be practical in the near term. Right now, you can already choose from a range of resolutions, some which will lead to smaller UI elements, and some with larger UI elements. But to go with one that shrinks things down to 1/4 the area is pushing the limits of existing software.
A "retina display" netbook would be hobbled by the OS and software available for it. I doubt it would have much appeal. Netbooks are already being overshadowed by the iPad, this would make the netbook even *less* appealing in the market.
Senior citizens with failing eyesight would find such small text unreadable.
I do not have failing eyesight. I am a power user, and I want a good high-DPI power-user monitor to view lots of things in a small space.
You're also also not a cyborg who can see each pixel. With a more capable scaling system, you can have both the sharpness and the usable UI size, but such a system only really exists on iOS (due to a shortcut they've implemented via specifically doubling the resolution, which quadruples the dimension in pixels).
The iPad display has non-discernible pixels at 15". We aren't talking about 55 year old eyes, but perfectly normals eyes.
The technology clearly exists, and this sentiment is growing among other power-users, yet the market offers nothing for this prosumer segment.
That's because the technology only clearly exists on iOS. Maybe Windows 8, using only the Metro UI, can work here. I'm not completely familiar with how it deals with different resolutions.
This "Oh no, not everybody can handle it, can't release it without mitigation" mindset seems to be the only thing keeping back the technology. Hopefully with this display in the hands of many, things will change.
It's not about "oh no, some half-blind pensioner can't use it, so everyone must conform to that lowest common denominator", this is, "it just really doesn't work well with most people, and the software (which is *absolutely* and *inextricably* part of the technology needed for this to work) is not up to the task".
Why should display makers make a product that no one can use? Perhaps Windows 8 will correct this. I wouldn't hold your breath though, but I'd be ecstatic to be shown to be wrong here. I'm very much in favor of higher resolution displays, but as usual, MS's, Google's, and the Open Source community's lack of competence are what's holding the technology back, not old people with bad eyesight.
Linux can scale everything great. Windows 7 does DPI scaling pretty decently (it's app dependent - if app can't handle it properly itself, the OS does bitmap upscaling). Really, OS X is the only major desktop OS that can't scale its UI well to suit different resolutions.
None of the OS's you've listed can handle a doubling in resolution (quadrupling in dimensions) as well as iOS does. This is hands-down no contest whatsoever.
On Windows, in practice, using a screen with such an extreme increase in resolution is not going to play out as well as it does on iOS. Linux does not have anything of the sort inherently, so you have to discuss specific window managers and desktop environments, which immediately means no matter how wonderful one of these implements it, it's not going to be seamless or universal without limiting yourself to just a very small subset of Linux and Linux apps.
iOS's superiority on this specific aspect is due to the fact that it takes a shortcut of specifically doubling the resolution. This makes scaling much more easily to implement without even having to worry about all sorts of issues that arise in more flexible resolution independence, and *all* apps work automatically with the new resolution, either by upping each pixel to four pixels, or using each of the four pixel individually. No usability issues whatsoever.
All the major OSes today support that res and higher. Ubuntu even supported my >200dpi 3840x2400 monitors via goofy single-link DVI connections right out of the box (though something won't let the total desktop get wider than 8192). Windows 98 had no problem driving 2048x1536 on my old 21" CRTs.
Those are dimensions, not resolutions. I'm being specific in my terminology.
If you mean the OS should scale things, many people itching for more pixels want the individual pixels used for more information onscreen, not to conglomerate them into the same low information density. I *want* things to be clear at 1/4th the size onscreen!
And that's exactly what iOS does, and what no other OS does quite as well yet. With iOS, you can have small, sharp things, that are supposed to be small and sharp, and things that you wouldn't want to shrink to 1/4 the size (like buttons and text) don't.
Windows, OS X, and Linux, etc., have some mechanisms for resolutions independence, but they aren't as deft, in actual implementation, as iOS is. Scaling on Windows is clunkier.
Pfff, 2048x1536 on 10" is only 256ppi. 221ppi (the Sony Vaio P with 1600x768 @ 8") at 100% scalling is great with XP and Windows 7... on this thing I might increase the scaling to 125%, but I'm relatively sure I'd be fine without it :)
Actually, both are pretty horrible (100% and 125%). Scaling on Windows is kludgy, and running at 100% things are far too small. They *look* great, but much more difficult to use.
I do realize some people will be fine with it, but I'm 100% certain if you were to do a study having people sit down and use something like they, most will prefer a lower resolution display for actual usage. If Windows had better resolution independence, then this would be different.
You mean as in MacBook Pro?
Yes, like all the other Apple products, which don't have a numeral in their name.
So it will be iPad Pro? ;)
No, iPad.
The point is, the name is something Steve would never have forgotten...
No one forgot anything. They called it what it's called.
it's the heart of the marketing ploy... Steve would use it in many sentences.
They called it the new iPad over and over.
A linguistic analysis of the past Steve performances would have been a ood idea for Tim.
He's not Steve Jobs. Trying to be a copy would be silly. Phil Schiller has his own style and is far more comfortable on stage. Tim Cook isn't as good, but he's way better than most CEOs. Maybe he'll get better or maybe not, either way, it would be a huge mistake to try to ape Jobs.
You are over thinking things. Names are what they are. They don't have to be perfectly consistent across different lines from different eras. There might be an iPad Pro, or iPad mini later, but there isn't today, and there never needs to be. They could keep using numbers for the iPhone, or move away from numbers (I suspect they will move away from numbers eventually).
It's just iPad now. Like MacBook, iMac, etc, iPod, etc.
What OS are you going to use it with that supports such a high resolution display? Everything will be 1/4 the size on an already tiny netbook screen!
Exactly right. It's strange how technologically conservative so-called geeks can often be.
Who wants to start up their PC and use it to actually work?
Only a minority of PC owners.
Slashdotters are always harping on about "working" on computers. The iPad isn't for "real work", now Metro isn't for using to "actually work". By that metric alone, I'd expect Windows 8 to be a smashing success.
Though that's just one metric, but although I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters do work on their PCs, most people just want to communicate, play, create (not work), and the like. And for the "create" in that list, very little in terms of text or numerical projects (some writing, short newsletters at most), but heavy on creative projects like photos, invites, and videos.
And I don't see how Metro in any way hinders any of those, other than being different. If the iPad has shown us anything, it's that Slashdot-type geeks are the *last* people to consult regarding the preferences of the average person.
The mistake both you and the OP are making is in mistaking Kodak for a camera company - it wasn't.
It's possible to look at Kodak as a film camera that sold cameras in order to sell more film and film processing equipment and services, but that doesn't mean in the slightest that they couldn't have built up their existing camera brand, which they did in fact try to do.
Which is, in fact, what they tried to do.
But, one by one, each of things went digital (in one form or another) or Kodak's marketshare fell to cheaper imports. (Fuji for consumer 35mm notably.) With 90% of their business gone, they were hardly in a position to retool around the 2% that consumer cameras represented. (The remaining 8% is various support services, consulting, etc...)
Exactly, "one by one". They could have seen the writing on the wall and made the transition before 90% of their business fell out from under them.
Which is, in fact, what they tried to do.
They tried, and failed/are failing. That doesn't mean failure was inevitable. The mistake you (and many others) are making is in thinking that companies can't change and refocus. "Kodak is a film company, so when film dies, so must they". Well, look at what sort of companies Nintendo and Toyota where. Look at Apple. Look at IBM over the years.
Kodak was all about film and film processing.
Not at all. They were about cameras and film and digital.
Kodak didn't really make cameras.
That's exceptionally misinformed. Kodak has made cameras for over 120 years.
Fuji clings to it a bit, with disposable cameras, but was able to get some foothold in the consumer digital camera space. Kodak? They tried, belatedly, but failed.
Kodak has made digital cameras for longer than most people even knew what a digital camera was.
The cool stuff was made by the companies already making cool consumer-level gadgets (e.g., Sony).
By "(e.g., Sony)", you really mean "(the only example I can think of is Sony)". "I.e." would have been a better choice than "e.g.".
The cool stuff was made by Sony, and... Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, um... oh, Panasonic, that's another electronics company (though with a partnership with Leica, but I'll still count it).
And the "better" consumer cameras were being made/sold by the "real" camera companies, Olympus, Canon, Nikon, who were also able to bring in their existing film camera expertise into the "pro" level cameras, and we all benefit from the trickle-down from there.
They've all been making great consumer digital cameras for over a decade now, and non-digital consumer cameras for many decades.
Kodak had no chance, really.
Can't see why not. Why couldn't they have made nice, cool, compact digital cameras? Oh, that's right, they did. They just failed to execute successfully.
Who is an opponent of general purpose computing?
The people who see dollar signs in locking down computers by taxing all programs that run on the computers that they make, taxing all works that are viewed on computers that they make, and taxing the production of computers that they don't make. The first two are done using mandatory verification of the device manufacturer's digital signature, as video game console makers have done since the NES and Atari 7800. The last is done with patents, as Microsoft and Apple have lately been doing to Android device manufacturers.
What does Android have to do with general purpose computing?
As you point out, this has existed for decades now, and things are just fine. No one is trying to kill of general purpose computing. NO ONE. They are just trying to make *THEIR OWN* products (to varying degrees) locked down. Even Android is more locked down than your Linux PC. There are grades on a scale, and no one is going to remove the "totally open" end from that scale. It's both impossible, and financially foolish. There will always be some company that will make DIY kits, hacker boards, etc.
You are worrying about the impossible. That makes you foolish.
The iPad 3 will quadruple the number of pixels. A 10" Kindle Fire will absolutely not.
The only appeal to the mass market of the Kindle Fire is the price. It's essentially a netbook iPad. The summary misses the #1 reason Amazon made the Kindle Fire the size it did was in order to be able to undercut the iPad on price. The idea that it was a "beta test" is bullshit, as is the idea that there is some significant portion of people who won't buy a 10" tablet.
If Amazon matched the iPad roughly feature for feature, it can't undercut on price. If they made a 10" Kindle equivalent of the iPad 3, and had roughly the same price, no one would buy the Kindle. Why?
Why would anyone buy a knock-off for the same price as the original? There are certainly some geeks who will want an Android tablet, but they haven't been keeping the other Android tablets afloat, and they're not going to all of a sudden decide to jump onto the Kindle bandwagon.
Amazon's only chance is to keep their bargain pricing, which means keeping their bargain hardware, and that's a dynamic that Apple is fine with. I really don't think they mind people choosing a Fire based on price, knowing that a large number of them will be dissatisfied with it, and Apple will have a nice iPad for them to upgrade to later on.
Not being locked into the Apple ecosystem is worth something to many. It gives the option to buy your hardware from a variety of manufacturers, and the same for your software. You decide the features you want and the software you want to run.
And it's not worth anything to orders of magnitude more than the "many" you are referring to.
I'm not saying that those that want options are wrong, just putting your statement in context.
But this assumes that the natural lifespan of a company is infinite.
No, it doesn't. It assumes the lifetime is indefinite, which is different.
Unlike, for example, humans who live to around 60-125 tops, companies don't have a built-in expiration date (they used to in the US, but haven't for over a century).
What I think Geoffrey is saying is that when Kodak went out of business, the answer to "what exactly went wrong?" is that nothing went wrong.
Nothing went wrong with the market. It did what it's "supposed" to do. The question is what went wrong with Kodak. They didn't do what they are supposed to do.
What if labor was part of the equation, though? What if I gave you a choice between the beautiful cathedral and the chaotic rubble, with the stipulation that, after you chose, it was your job to build a bridge.
With business, labor is always part of the equation. Digital photography and film photography aren't like a building and a bridge. It's like a building and a building. Would you rather have a pile of rubble to turn into a restaurant, or a cathedral to turn into a restaurant?
And stone is much more difficult to rearrange than a company, in terms of labor. It's only harder, potentially, in the mental task of coming up with a solution.
Now imagine I offered you one of two things: You have to build a digital photography business, and you can start with Sony, or Kodak. Which would you choose?
Or Nikon or Canon?
The problem Kodak faced wasn't that they couldn't have become a digital photography business. The problem Kodak faced was that the digital business was so different from what they are good at that the restructuring costs were crippling, *precisely because they were perfectly adapted to the previous era.*
Nonsense. The problem wasn't that they couldn't change, but that they didn't change. Nikon and Canon (and Olympus and Fuji and countless other film-era companies) made the switch just fine.
Just because Kodak failed (or, "is failing" might be more appropriate) doesn't mean failure was the only possible outcome for Kodak. The *film* side of Kodak must fail, but the *camera* side of Kodak was under no such restriction.
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Because most people think fondly of Kodak. I'm not sure why you think people should be cold and calloused about things they like.
Kodak's strenght was film photography.
So were Nikon's and Canon's, but they both jumped into digital with both feet.
There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
No, there isn't. But there's also no reason a company can't go from one market to another. Look at Nintendo, Sega, IBM, Apple, etc. The key is the ability to change with the markets.
Kodak failed in this regard. And sure, that does mean the company itself "deserves" to fail in the market, but that doesn't mean people can't miss them. Polaroid did the same thing, and now lives on essentially as a brand, the original company no longer really exists.
By your logic, nothing is good, since everything has limits that people will hit at one point or another.
Nothing is good in excess. Some things are fine in moderation
That's a tautology, and means nothing.
You worry too much about things that don't even effect you.
1. Affect. 2. "First they came for the Communists." I just fear that opponents of general-purpose computing will end up coming for the micro-ISVs. This has already happened in a couple cases, where big businesses have access to entire classes of computing platforms to which micro-ISVs have no access.
Who is an opponent of general purpose computing? No one. General purpose computers will exist forever (for as long as digital computational technology exists).
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead...
Yeah, but modern day wizards and vampires, and long ago elves and dragons, *those* things have all panned out as real!
The problem is you're playing the greater fool game. If you intend to make money by selling a stock at a later date, then what you're saying is that you think you can find someone willing to buy AFTER you got the value out of it. Your buying strategy is also then based on inside information, "intuition" or some other divine insight, otherwise people would have already known and driven the price up. Another downside is that you have to actually SELL your assets to get any money from them.
This is based on the mistaken assumption that stock prices should never change, which is based on the false assumption that businesses never change.
AAPL today is worth many times more than AAPL in 1997 because Apple today is worth many times more than Apple in 1997. You aren't buying while it's valued at less than it should be in the hopes of selling when it's valued at more than it should be (well, you can do that, but that's just minute daily fluctuations), you're buying a chunk of a company that is generally valued roughly what it's worth, hoping that the company itself will grow in value.
You are completely ignoring the work of the people at the company. Their work provides value.