You keep repeating this claim, but aside from having a larger screen real estate (which is hardware rather than software anyway), can you tell us just exactly what you can do with the iPad that you can't do on an iPod that justifies the claim "order of magnitude more capable"?
Like I said elsewhere, take a look at the iWork-demo. Would ANY of that work on an iPhone? Seriously? How would you make it work? Are you going to claim that iWork running on the iPad would be only marginally better than iWork running on an iPhone?
As far as I can see, there's very little difference beyond the hardware. WikiAnswers claims the difference is that you can "browse the web and read ebooks" - I haven't used an iPod but I assumed you could already do those things
Sure, and iPhone is pretty good at both of them. But I think that it's safe to say that iPad will be better at those tasks. OR do you also think that browsing the web on an iPhone is nothing special, since you could browse the web on a Windows Mobile phone long before iPhone was released?
my GF can certainly do both on her iPhone and I read that the iPad uses the same OS and will likely run all the same apps.
There will be specific iPad-apps (like iWork). iPad will run all iPhone-software, but iPhone will not run iPad-software. And that's just logical, since iPad-software will be designed for the bigger screen, and they would not work on the iPhone.
You may be right here, I can't say having not used one but I can say two things. Firstly there are as many people singing the praises of the iPad as there are people complaining, and the vast majority of both sections haven't had a chance to use one
But the people who have used it, seem to be very impressed by it.
You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch.
Like what?
Did you watch the keynote? Where they demoed iWork? How exactly would you make any of that work in a screen as small as iPhones? Seriously? Answer me that please.
The iPod Touch supports audio and video playback, it has a keyboard for input, WiFi / 3G (if you get the iPhone) connectivity and it runs basically the same exact software as the iPad.
What things will the iPad do that are simply not possible on an iPod Touch?
Are you being serious? Did you see any of the apps they demoed? Hello, iWork?! Are you seriously going to claim that the software they demoed in the keynote would work just as well on an iPhone?
You are doing the elementary mistake of listing a bunch of hardware-specs, and using them to determine that the iPad is just "big iPod touch".
It feels like you guys are looking, but you are not seeing.
Simple way to fix this problem? Give the user a choice when they turn the bloody thing on.
Here is how i envision it would work. When u boot up, OS-X starts up
You mean Mac OS X? That OS would not work on this device. It's too underpowered, clumsy (Mac OS X is not designed for touchscreen) and it's the wrong CPU-architecture. Even if you managed to get Mac OS X running on the iPad, none of the third-party apps would work!
When you want to go to FULL OS mode you simple close the IPhoneOS app. Then you're back at a full OS-X desktop. I am sure Apple can do this in an elegant way.
That sounds like crap. It would be sluggish and error-prone. Imagine Joe Sixpack accidentally closing the iPhone-UI, and then being confused? Confusion and complexity are the things Apple wanted to avoid!
This is not that hard for a company like Apple. They really dropped the ball here.
I'm glad you are not the one deciding these things. What you suggested sounds like a fucking train-wreck.
Look, jut because you don't know that it's already been done doesn't mean that it hasn't been done.
Have a look at Maemo. It's been done. For years.
I bought a Nokia 770 as soon as it became available. I dropped that thing as soon as I bought my iPod touch and never regretted doing so. The later Maemo-devices don't seem that much better to be honest. Even N900 seems unsmooth and complicated.
I used the word "minimize" when I mean "make the app run in the background".
You can still leave them all full screen. Just add a taskbar/notification area at the bottom to allow you to switch between them.
That adds complexity. To you and me handling that complexity might be dead simple and easy. But there are LOTS of people who do NOT understand things like that. Fact is that such multitasking would make the device more complicated, and one thing Apple wanted to avoid, was complexity.
It seems to me that what you want is a more or less regular computer. But that's not what this device is. If you want a computer, buy a netbook. Hell, Apple isn't even calling this device a computer, they are calling it an iPad.
A friend of mine said to me that she wants a little machine that she can use in bed to read her email, browse the web and chat to her friends with and was thinking about getting the iPad. But as soon as I told her that it can do all that, but not at the same time she instantly changed her mind and decided to get another eeepc.
That's her choice, and eeePC might be better fit for her needs.
It could be a great device, but what is the point if you can only do one thing at a time?
We all do just one thing at a time, even when we are supposedly "multitasking". And you can multitask on the iPad, it's jut not extended to app store apps.
This is a slippery slope. Everyone seems to have the one "if they did this, it would rock!"-feature they would like to see. Multitasking. USB-ports, card-readers etc. etc.... If Apple added all of that, they would end up with a TabletPC.
I can't quickly pause a game and switch to the chat program, I have to shut down the game, start the chat program, reply to the message and then reverse the whole process.
So, you would prefer a scenario where the game keeps on running in the background? When you switch back to the game, you would notice that it had been living a life of it's own, and you car/plane/whatever has been killed while you were chatting?
so it's not like the iPad is going to be a step back when it comes to capacity
So it offers the same storage, for more money, and takes up more space. The improvement is?
Um, bigger screen? Better performance? Seriously, did you see what kind of apps you can have on that device, as opposed to apps on the iPhone?
And anyone wanting something larger than a portable media player or their phone can get a netbook/tablet/etc at a fraction of the price, with vastly more storage.
Netbook is just a slow, cheap laptop running generic software.
Wrong. The Ipad isn't built for Apple's customers, it's built for Apple.
When you say it "doesn't carry the drawbacks of a computer", you're simply being dishonest: it would cost nothing in user experience to allow multitasking or free installation of software.
Wrong. Let's take multitasking:
How do you "minimize" an app in iPad? How would you close an app? How do you manage the apps that are running in the background? How do you bring an app to the foreground? How do you determine which of the apps is slowing the machine down?
You might have an answer to each of those questions, but fact is that it still adds complexity. And that complexity is something that lots and lots of people are not interested in dealing with. Fact is that computers are too complicated for lots of people. Yes, that includes Macs, which supposedly "just work".
What about free installation of apps? What if the user installs an app that screws the machine up? Tough luck? The app store might have it's share of problems, but it does give the user a safety-blanket. They can freely install apps from the app-store without having to worry that it's going to cause the machine to spontaneously combust.
A full OS X with the iPhone GUI would be fantastic, and relatively easily accomplishable.
says the armchair-technologist.
It would come with no extra draw-backs for the user whatsoever.
uh-huh.
The question is: why are you being dishonest?
Why are YOU being dishonest?
Apple probably doesn't pay you a cent for your work as a freelance advertising agent. And why is this bullshit so prevalent among Apple fanboys? There's a reason why you guys are called a cult: you are one.
Oh cut the bullsit. Whenever someone says something that somehow defends Apple and/or some of their product, some idiots start waving the fanboy-cultist card....
That's what I've been asking. What is it for? Seems like a simple enough question, but I see no answers.
You obviously haven't been looking hard. It's for
- websurfing - email - movies - photos - gaming - music - all those zillion apps that will be written for it
Now you are probably going to say "I can do those on a laptop/iPod touch, how exactly is iPad different?"... And that's a fair question which I'll try to answer now:
iPad is obviously quite different from a laptop. The UI is totally different and a lot more direct. It's smaller, has longer battery-life and is a lot simpler to use. What would it been like if Stepehen Colbert had whipped out a netbook as opposed to an iPad at the Grammys? Could you see someone using a netbook (or any other netbook) for something like that? Me neither. It would be awkward and clumsy.
And I bet that iPad is better at many key things than a laptop is. Things like watching movies or surfing the web. iPod touch is already my websurfer of choice, and iPad would be even better.
And the thing iPad has that a laptop does not have is simplicity. You can't hide one app-window behind another app-window. You do not have to worry about which app has focus when you try using keyboard-shortcuts. YOu do not have to worry which app is slowing the system down. You just have one app right in front of you. It's easy and it's simple. Some might find that too simple and too limiting, but fact remains that iPad offers simplicity and ease of use that does not exist in a laptop running traditional OS. And there are lots of people who will find that appealing. People want to do things with their computers, they shouldn't have to worry about cleaning up the filesystem or other crap like that.
Well, what about iPod touch/iPhone? It should be quite obvious that iPad offers possibilities that simply do not exist on those devices. Like iWork. Running an app like that is simply impossible on an iPhone. You could view a document, but editing a document would be very hard indeed. On the iPad it's perfectly doable. And that's just one example. The level of sophistication in the apps is simply a lot better on the iPad-apps than what is possible on the iPhone-apps. The big screen really changes things.
I bet that the device Apple introduced is just the tip of the iceberg. The key is the software. When we start getting news of iPad-apps that would simply not be possible on the iPhone, it will start making more and more sense. I mean stuff like this: http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/01/29/ipad-or-bust/
We can't simply think that "I can do XXXX on my laptop, wo why would I want an iPad?", we need to think more about HOW we do those things. In theory I could surf the web with my Nokia-phone, so someone could say that iPhone has no advantage over Nokia when it comes to mobile websurfing. But anyone with any experience with websurfing on the two would say that Nokia is next to useless for web-browsing, whereas iPhone is perfectly capable websurfer.
With the iPad we are still stuck at the point where we stare at paper-specs and use them to determine the value and use of the device.
"You're right about this one. Why was this even a question to begin with?"
Because 64gb isn't enough for everybody.
Particularly on a device which I'd imagine many people would want to use for watching movies.
You can store quite a lot of movies in 64GB. If one movie takes about 2GB, you can have about 30 movies with you. Or is this the case that the user needs to have every single movie he owns with him all the time? We had this same discussion when Apple started moving from HD-based iPods to flash-based iPods, and capacities went down. And some people whined because their entire library could no longer fit the device. Well, it doesn't seem that the move to smaller capacities has harmed Apple much. People complained, but they adapted and life went on. And people have grown accusotmed to carrying handful of movies with them on their iPhones/touches, so it's not like the iPad is going to be a step back when it comes to capacity (unlike how it was with iPod touch vs. iPod classic).
Would it really hurt apple to put a usb or sd card slot on to the ipad. I mean seriously people like to take photo's and the iPad screen is a useful size.
Well, the iPod-connector is USB plus other bits and pieces. And they have a camera connection kit which does allow you to hook the iPad to a camera or plug in a SD-card.
there has to be i/o someway of connecting to a printer at least.
I have heard rumours that iPad will support printing to networked printers.
I'm struggling to see why the iPad has any potential to be a popular product if its going to be so limited.
iPod touch is very succesfull product, and iPad is order of magnitude more capable than the touch is.And quite often offering the user maximum amount of flexibility and adaptability usually increases the amount of complexity and opportunities of failure. Apple wanted iPad to be a simple device. Hell, it's so simple that I could see my mother using one, even though she has never used a computer!
The mistake people are doing is staring at the hardware-specs, and proclaiming the iPad as "nothing but oversized iPod touch", when the key thing is the software. You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch. It's no surprise that the people who complain about the iPad are people who haven't used one. The ones that have used one, seem to have an opposite opinion. And that's because you can complain about the specs even if you just saw them listed on a piece of paper, but in order to have an opinion regarding the software and actual use of the device, you have to actually USE the device, as opposed to stare at a bunch of specs in a website.
I bet that when people actually use the iPad, it becomes quite obvious that it's a lot more than just "oversized iPod touch".
I think Lynch is a lot like Kuberick. You either love his stuff or hate hate it, there is little in between.
I like David Lynch's works , but I still think that Dune sucked. And yes, I love the book, but I read it AFTER I watched the movie. Hell, Lynch himself thought that his movie sucked!
This reminds me of what happened to Rober Ebert. He lost his voice, and this is what happened:
"I am one of those you write about who uses a computer voice after losing the power of speech as a result of cancer surgery. After trying an $8,000 custom device with little computing power and a small, dim screen, I tried the built-in speech software on my MacBook and found it much more practical.".
Not only was the "official" solution crap, it was also a lot more expensive than the consumer-device was, which was not even designed for this particular task.
As for your baseball bat analogy, there are a few problems with this. Firstly, the primary purpose of a baseball bat is not to kill another human being, it is to hit a ball in the game of baseball.
Irrelevant. Hey, maybe you could comfort the victims of Rwandan Genocide by saying "Machete is not designed for killing people, is designed for other things!".
Now if we change your analogy to a rocket launcher, and you knew that I would be using it to shoot down a plain because I said I was part of Al Qaeda yet you still sold it to me and I then went out and did this, then yes you would be complicit in the murder of those who died in the plane crash.
Your attempts to blame someone else for actions of the killers is futile. People are responsible for their own actions, period. And that includes the people in Africa. Like I said, you don't need advanced weapons to kill people. Rwandan Genocide was done mostly with machetes and the like.
Surely you aren't telling me that Africans need to be sterilized or forced into abortions if they have more than one or two children, as routinely happens in China?
No I'm not. They are free to do whatever pleases them. But they should expect the West to constantly come to their rescue whenever they screw things up.
And how do you equate large families with reliance on handouts?
I'm not. I'm saying that multiplying exponentally makes the problem worse. The underlying cause of starvation and the like is overpopulation. So pumping more and more children to the world isn't really helpful, now is it?
Secondly, the fact that people want to have children should not be seen as such a bad thing that if they and their children are dying of disease and hunger that they deserve to die.
Yes, it could be said that bringing children to a society that is poor and starving IS selfish. Remember all those pictures of starving children? There wouldn't be starving children if there were no children.
You sir, live in a cruel and selfish world. I'm glad that most of the world doesn't think as you do!
And you live in a world where you give handouts to Africa so you could feel superior to others, while you have done very little (if anything) to actually fix the problem. Thanks to people like you, the situation in Africa has been prolonged over and over again.
That makes little difference to the people if a famine is occurring because crops have failed or because war has prevented those crops from being planted. What do you suppose the populace does in this case?
Frankly: suck it up. While food-aid might help in the short-term, it makes the problem worse in the long-term. Stopping food-aid would force them to focus on their agriculture. Maybe there wouldn't be that many wars there if they realized that constant warring will ruin their agriculture? But they are free to wage wars, since they know that we will give them food for free when their crops fails.
And seriously, those failed crops and the like are usually caused by the locals themselves! Just look at Mozambique! They utterly screwed everything up, and now we should clean up the mess they caused in the first place? At what point are we allowed to say "screw it! You caused this, you fix it!"? How long are we supposed to keep these failed states and societies on life-support?
Besides this, providing food and medical supplies to countries that do not have their own supplies of agricultural food is not the only form of aid provided by Western nations. The Obama administration, for instance, has committed to providing 3.5 billion dollars in agricultural aid - in other words, aid that allows nations to stand on their own two feet. Obviously this sort of thing takes time, so other more short term aid is also provided.
And that is the sort of aid that ruins local agriculture. Denying that aid might sting in the short-term, but it would be beneficial in the long-term.
Actually, that's not true. Those who sell arms to foreign countries bare some responsibility for enabling the actions of those who use the weapons.
Yeah, maybe like 0.1%, rest of the responsibility being squarely at the people who decide to kill each other. But apparently that is politically incorrect in this case, since the people who sell the weapons are rich westerners, and the killers are poor Africans. And blaming the Africans for anything is not allowed if there is a convenient rich white scapegoat available.
Seriously, if I decide to assault a complete stranger with a baseball-bat, who is responsible for it? I say that I would be responsible. You say that its the maker of the baseball-bat.
This is all a moot point, however, because the argument here is that most poor, starving and dispossessed people are somehow the cause of their own misfortune. This is patently false
How so? Who is to blame then? No, don't tell me: the people in the West, of course!
The famines in Ethiopia were largely caused by incompetent administration. Situation in Mozambique is caused by their utterly corrupt and incompetent government. If there's one thing Africa has a surplus on, it's incompetent and corrupt administrators.
there are those out there who, through no fault of their own, are simply unable to provide for themselves.
Yep. And what do those people do? have metric assload of children which makes the problem even worse. And our help makes them reliant on handouts, as opposed to them providing for themselves.
That there are people in richer, first world nations think that letting them perish through starvation and disease is an excellent way of resolving conflict, poverty and famine is a sad indictment on the corrupted thinking that has permeated our western culture.
Well, fact is that pumping billions in aid to Africa has done very little to help the problem. If anything, it has prolonged it. Maybe we should try something different for a change?
Thankfully, there are also many, many who disagree with this viewpoint and who continue providing to the sick and starving.
And then those sick and starving multiply beyond control, and you end up with even more sick and starving.... Good job everybody!
If you are equating feeding the starving with setting them on fire, then that is wrong. Have you considered what happens when you don't provide aid? Millions would starve, and there would be absolutely no hope for them to help themselves. Often aid is required because of war, not because the population is too lazy to fend for themselves.
Your cold heartedness is disgusting, especially when it is obvious that you live in a western society that does not suffer from civil war. I wonder what your response would be if you were caught in a society racked by civil war with a starving child, all for reasons not within your control?
Dumbing food in to poor countries might give us a nice feeling in the short term, but it just makes the underlying problem worse in the long term.
When we dumb food in to those countries, what we are in effect doing is saturating the market with dirt-cheap food. What does that mean? It means that the local farmers can't compete. They are supposed to sell their products while there are people handing out free food to the people. End result is that farming is not worth the effort anymore, and those farmers start feeding themselves with that aid-food as well, making the problem worse. By dumbing our surplus food to Africa we are just making sure that they stay poor, as opposed to allowing them to invest in their own agriculture.
Instead of pouring in food to those countries, we should educate them. But apparently that's not acceptable, since that is a olng-term solution to the problem, as opposed to short-term bandaid (that only makes the problem worse).
Well, have you ever wondered who arms the combatants?
Irrelevant. It's still them who are doing the fighting. If they didn't get weapons from the industrialized countries, they would be killing each other with spears and machetes. And as Rwandan Genocide showed us, those can be very effective tools for killing.
Fact is that they are responsible for their own actions. It's getting fucking tiresome when people claim that we, people in the west, are somehow responsible when bunch of Africans decide to kill each other.
To be perfectly honest, murder is probably a lesser crime. You can kill someone in a fit of rage, or by accident. You can be defending yourself. You can't accidentally rape your kids, even foster kids.
You can't accidentally murder anyone. That would be manslaughter, and it carries lower penalties. Murder is premeditated killing of a person.
To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
References to losses in WW2 in my comment above are obviously about WW1....
Yes, it is a bit strong for americans to say that... But the British say the same thing, you know that small country that fought in the same war and that hitler turned his attention to after beating the french?
It's easy to be brave when you have 30-240 kilometers of sea between you and your enemy.... And wasn't it the British Army who ran for their lives in Dunkerque?
The French believed they could acquiesce to Hitler's demands, and thus avoid a conflict. The reasons are that they really, really did not want to fight. The reasons for that included that at that time, Hitler was the hero, both of French Nazi's and of the French lefties, including socialists and communists, and even (quite large) parts of "center" parties
Cut the crap. The reason why France did not want to fight was because they fought an extremely bitter war with Germany few decades earlier and they hadn't yet recovered from it. To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
But still they went to war. And they were defeated (together with UK) by the most powerful military force in the world. Should they feel ashamed by that? Hardly. Only thing that saved UK from the same fate was the Channel. And in the end it took the combined force of UK, USA, USSR, France and Canada to ultimately defeat Germany. Yet France is supposed to feel ashamed because Germany defeated them?
For comparison, USA lost whopping 0.13% of it's population in WW1.... In fact, USA has had it amazingly easy in it's wars. Look at Winter War. Had USA suffered similar casualties as Finland did, it would have meant losses of over 1 million men in a war that lasted 105 days.
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Like what? There's light rails and monorails, but those are both types of trains.
Um, bus?
Yep, a single diesel bus pollutes as much as 600 modern cars.
Well that's a load of bullshit.
when you factor in the fact that it stops at every single bus stop along the way
At least in here they only stop if there are people waving at the stop or if a passenger wants to leave at that stop....
and the bus stop you stop at isn't anywhere near where you need to go
By that logic, the only suitable means of transportation is either bike, walking or car. Mass.transit is absolutely unsuitable. And the two former are unacceptable because they are too inconvenient, am I right?
Like I said, this is about will and mentality.
With the current economy and gas prices in past few years, if buses made any sense at all in America, they would have seen a resurgence of ridership, and they haven't.
That's because of the mentality. cities in USA aren't that different when compared to cities elsewhere. I fail to see why buses work just fine just about everywhere else, but in USA they wouldn't work because......?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Many of our cities are sprawled in all directions.
And even those "sprawled" cities seem to have a lot higher population-densities than cities in Finland do.
There's no way to make an effective mass-transit system using current technologies that operates in a grid; it's just too expensive. Mass-transit only works in cities that are built in a line, such as along a river, or on a long, narrow island (like Manhattan).
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Even if you had trains connecting the major centers of town, how would you get from there to your destination?
At this point I would like to mention city of Espoo in Finland:
Population-density: 778/km2, second largest city in Finland. And the interesting thing about Espoo is that it does not have a singular "downtown", but rather, it has five (seven, if you include the two smaller centers as well). And it has working mass-transit-system. Of course many residents commute to Helsinki as well.
The main thing preventing mass-transit from being implemented is the will to do so. I really don't see any indications that cities in USA are so totally different than all other cities in the world. This is mostly about will. Gasoline and cars are cheap in USA and there is no interest in mass-transit.
Of course, you could use buses, but those are extremely polluting and inefficient
Are they more polluting, inefficient and slow than a gridlock in a highway?
Um, large reason why those governments were so corrupt was because CIA organized their elected leaders to be ousted and replaced by juntas at the behest of UFC.... The juntas and the like were the corrupt governments. Your complaint about corrupt governments was caused by UFC!
And large part of the success of USA is the success of American companies. And one of those companies was UFC.
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You keep repeating this claim, but aside from having a larger screen real estate (which is hardware rather than software anyway), can you tell us just exactly what you can do with the iPad that you can't do on an iPod that justifies the claim "order of magnitude more capable"?
Like I said elsewhere, take a look at the iWork-demo. Would ANY of that work on an iPhone? Seriously? How would you make it work? Are you going to claim that iWork running on the iPad would be only marginally better than iWork running on an iPhone?
As far as I can see, there's very little difference beyond the hardware. WikiAnswers claims the difference is that you can "browse the web and read ebooks" - I haven't used an iPod but I assumed you could already do those things
Sure, and iPhone is pretty good at both of them. But I think that it's safe to say that iPad will be better at those tasks. OR do you also think that browsing the web on an iPhone is nothing special, since you could browse the web on a Windows Mobile phone long before iPhone was released?
my GF can certainly do both on her iPhone and I read that the iPad uses the same OS and will likely run all the same apps.
There will be specific iPad-apps (like iWork). iPad will run all iPhone-software, but iPhone will not run iPad-software. And that's just logical, since iPad-software will be designed for the bigger screen, and they would not work on the iPhone.
You may be right here, I can't say having not used one but I can say two things. Firstly there are as many people singing the praises of the iPad as there are people complaining, and the vast majority of both sections haven't had a chance to use one
But the people who have used it, seem to be very impressed by it.
You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch.
Like what?
Did you watch the keynote? Where they demoed iWork? How exactly would you make any of that work in a screen as small as iPhones? Seriously? Answer me that please.
The iPod Touch supports audio and video playback, it has a keyboard for input, WiFi / 3G (if you get the iPhone) connectivity and it runs basically the same exact software as the iPad.
What things will the iPad do that are simply not possible on an iPod Touch?
Are you being serious? Did you see any of the apps they demoed? Hello, iWork?! Are you seriously going to claim that the software they demoed in the keynote would work just as well on an iPhone?
You are doing the elementary mistake of listing a bunch of hardware-specs, and using them to determine that the iPad is just "big iPod touch".
It feels like you guys are looking, but you are not seeing.
Simple way to fix this problem? Give the user a choice when they turn the bloody thing on.
Here is how i envision it would work.
When u boot up, OS-X starts up
You mean Mac OS X? That OS would not work on this device. It's too underpowered, clumsy (Mac OS X is not designed for touchscreen) and it's the wrong CPU-architecture. Even if you managed to get Mac OS X running on the iPad, none of the third-party apps would work!
When you want to go to FULL OS mode you simple close the IPhoneOS app. Then
you're back at a full OS-X desktop. I am sure Apple can do this in an elegant way.
That sounds like crap. It would be sluggish and error-prone. Imagine Joe Sixpack accidentally closing the iPhone-UI, and then being confused? Confusion and complexity are the things Apple wanted to avoid!
This is not that hard for a company like Apple. They really dropped the ball here.
I'm glad you are not the one deciding these things. What you suggested sounds like a fucking train-wreck.
Look, jut because you don't know that it's already been done doesn't mean that it hasn't been done.
Have a look at Maemo. It's been done. For years.
I bought a Nokia 770 as soon as it became available. I dropped that thing as soon as I bought my iPod touch and never regretted doing so. The later Maemo-devices don't seem that much better to be honest. Even N900 seems unsmooth and complicated.
Why do you need to minimise an app?
I used the word "minimize" when I mean "make the app run in the background".
You can still leave them all full screen. Just add a taskbar/notification area at the bottom to allow you to switch between them.
That adds complexity. To you and me handling that complexity might be dead simple and easy. But there are LOTS of people who do NOT understand things like that. Fact is that such multitasking would make the device more complicated, and one thing Apple wanted to avoid, was complexity.
It seems to me that what you want is a more or less regular computer. But that's not what this device is. If you want a computer, buy a netbook. Hell, Apple isn't even calling this device a computer, they are calling it an iPad.
A friend of mine said to me that she wants a little machine that she can use in bed to read her email, browse the web and chat to her friends with and was thinking about getting the iPad. But as soon as I told her that it can do all that, but not at the same time she instantly changed her mind and decided to get another eeepc.
That's her choice, and eeePC might be better fit for her needs.
It could be a great device, but what is the point if you can only do one thing at a time?
We all do just one thing at a time, even when we are supposedly "multitasking". And you can multitask on the iPad, it's jut not extended to app store apps.
This is a slippery slope. Everyone seems to have the one "if they did this, it would rock!"-feature they would like to see. Multitasking. USB-ports, card-readers etc. etc.... If Apple added all of that, they would end up with a TabletPC.
I can't quickly pause a game and switch to the chat program, I have to shut down the game, start the chat program, reply to the message and then reverse the whole process.
So, you would prefer a scenario where the game keeps on running in the background? When you switch back to the game, you would notice that it had been living a life of it's own, and you car/plane/whatever has been killed while you were chatting?
"apps" take the place of generic device independent webpages. It's like the 80s all over again, except Apple is the monopoly this time.
Last time I checked, you can view webpages just fine on the iPad.... The thing that apps have over webpages is that they are.... well, better.
so it's not like the iPad is going to be a step back when it comes to capacity
So it offers the same storage, for more money, and takes up more space. The improvement is?
Um, bigger screen? Better performance? Seriously, did you see what kind of apps you can have on that device, as opposed to apps on the iPhone?
And anyone wanting something larger than a portable media player or their phone can get a netbook/tablet/etc at a fraction of the price, with vastly more storage.
Netbook is just a slow, cheap laptop running generic software.
Wrong. The Ipad isn't built for Apple's customers, it's built for Apple.
When you say it "doesn't carry the drawbacks of a computer", you're simply being dishonest: it would cost nothing in user experience to allow multitasking or free installation of software.
Wrong. Let's take multitasking:
How do you "minimize" an app in iPad? How would you close an app? How do you manage the apps that are running in the background? How do you bring an app to the foreground? How do you determine which of the apps is slowing the machine down?
You might have an answer to each of those questions, but fact is that it still adds complexity. And that complexity is something that lots and lots of people are not interested in dealing with. Fact is that computers are too complicated for lots of people. Yes, that includes Macs, which supposedly "just work".
What about free installation of apps? What if the user installs an app that screws the machine up? Tough luck? The app store might have it's share of problems, but it does give the user a safety-blanket. They can freely install apps from the app-store without having to worry that it's going to cause the machine to spontaneously combust.
A full OS X with the iPhone GUI would be fantastic, and relatively easily accomplishable.
says the armchair-technologist.
It would come with no extra draw-backs for the user whatsoever.
uh-huh.
The question is: why are you being dishonest?
Why are YOU being dishonest?
Apple probably doesn't pay you a cent for your work as a freelance advertising agent. And why is this bullshit so prevalent among Apple fanboys? There's a reason why you guys are called a cult: you are one.
Oh cut the bullsit. Whenever someone says something that somehow defends Apple and/or some of their product, some idiots start waving the fanboy-cultist card....
That's what I've been asking. What is it for? Seems like a simple enough question, but I see no answers.
You obviously haven't been looking hard. It's for
- websurfing
- email
- movies
- photos
- gaming
- music
- all those zillion apps that will be written for it
Now you are probably going to say "I can do those on a laptop/iPod touch, how exactly is iPad different?"... And that's a fair question which I'll try to answer now:
iPad is obviously quite different from a laptop. The UI is totally different and a lot more direct. It's smaller, has longer battery-life and is a lot simpler to use. What would it been like if Stepehen Colbert had whipped out a netbook as opposed to an iPad at the Grammys? Could you see someone using a netbook (or any other netbook) for something like that? Me neither. It would be awkward and clumsy.
And I bet that iPad is better at many key things than a laptop is. Things like watching movies or surfing the web. iPod touch is already my websurfer of choice, and iPad would be even better.
And the thing iPad has that a laptop does not have is simplicity. You can't hide one app-window behind another app-window. You do not have to worry about which app has focus when you try using keyboard-shortcuts. YOu do not have to worry which app is slowing the system down. You just have one app right in front of you. It's easy and it's simple. Some might find that too simple and too limiting, but fact remains that iPad offers simplicity and ease of use that does not exist in a laptop running traditional OS. And there are lots of people who will find that appealing. People want to do things with their computers, they shouldn't have to worry about cleaning up the filesystem or other crap like that.
Well, what about iPod touch/iPhone? It should be quite obvious that iPad offers possibilities that simply do not exist on those devices. Like iWork. Running an app like that is simply impossible on an iPhone. You could view a document, but editing a document would be very hard indeed. On the iPad it's perfectly doable. And that's just one example. The level of sophistication in the apps is simply a lot better on the iPad-apps than what is possible on the iPhone-apps. The big screen really changes things.
I bet that the device Apple introduced is just the tip of the iceberg. The key is the software. When we start getting news of iPad-apps that would simply not be possible on the iPhone, it will start making more and more sense. I mean stuff like this: http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/01/29/ipad-or-bust/
We can't simply think that "I can do XXXX on my laptop, wo why would I want an iPad?", we need to think more about HOW we do those things. In theory I could surf the web with my Nokia-phone, so someone could say that iPhone has no advantage over Nokia when it comes to mobile websurfing. But anyone with any experience with websurfing on the two would say that Nokia is next to useless for web-browsing, whereas iPhone is perfectly capable websurfer.
With the iPad we are still stuck at the point where we stare at paper-specs and use them to determine the value and use of the device.
"You're right about this one. Why was this even a question to begin with?"
Because 64gb isn't enough for everybody.
Particularly on a device which I'd imagine many people would want to use for watching movies.
You can store quite a lot of movies in 64GB. If one movie takes about 2GB, you can have about 30 movies with you. Or is this the case that the user needs to have every single movie he owns with him all the time? We had this same discussion when Apple started moving from HD-based iPods to flash-based iPods, and capacities went down. And some people whined because their entire library could no longer fit the device. Well, it doesn't seem that the move to smaller capacities has harmed Apple much. People complained, but they adapted and life went on. And people have grown accusotmed to carrying handful of movies with them on their iPhones/touches, so it's not like the iPad is going to be a step back when it comes to capacity (unlike how it was with iPod touch vs. iPod classic).
Would it really hurt apple to put a usb or sd card slot on to the ipad. I mean seriously people like to take photo's and the iPad screen is a useful size.
Well, the iPod-connector is USB plus other bits and pieces. And they have a camera connection kit which does allow you to hook the iPad to a camera or plug in a SD-card.
there has to be i/o someway of connecting to a printer at least.
I have heard rumours that iPad will support printing to networked printers.
I'm struggling to see why the iPad has any potential to be a popular product if its going to be so limited.
iPod touch is very succesfull product, and iPad is order of magnitude more capable than the touch is.And quite often offering the user maximum amount of flexibility and adaptability usually increases the amount of complexity and opportunities of failure. Apple wanted iPad to be a simple device. Hell, it's so simple that I could see my mother using one, even though she has never used a computer!
The mistake people are doing is staring at the hardware-specs, and proclaiming the iPad as "nothing but oversized iPod touch", when the key thing is the software. You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch. It's no surprise that the people who complain about the iPad are people who haven't used one. The ones that have used one, seem to have an opposite opinion. And that's because you can complain about the specs even if you just saw them listed on a piece of paper, but in order to have an opinion regarding the software and actual use of the device, you have to actually USE the device, as opposed to stare at a bunch of specs in a website.
I bet that when people actually use the iPad, it becomes quite obvious that it's a lot more than just "oversized iPod touch".
I think Lynch is a lot like Kuberick. You either love his stuff or hate hate it, there is little in between.
I like David Lynch's works , but I still think that Dune sucked. And yes, I love the book, but I read it AFTER I watched the movie. Hell, Lynch himself thought that his movie sucked!
This reminds me of what happened to Rober Ebert. He lost his voice, and this is what happened:
"I am one of those you write about who uses a computer voice after losing the power of speech as a result of cancer surgery. After trying an $8,000 custom device with little computing power and a small, dim screen, I tried the built-in speech software on my MacBook and found it much more practical.".
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/opinion/l19speech.html?_r=3
Not only was the "official" solution crap, it was also a lot more expensive than the consumer-device was, which was not even designed for this particular task.
As for your baseball bat analogy, there are a few problems with this. Firstly, the primary purpose of a baseball bat is not to kill another human being, it is to hit a ball in the game of baseball.
Irrelevant. Hey, maybe you could comfort the victims of Rwandan Genocide by saying "Machete is not designed for killing people, is designed for other things!".
Now if we change your analogy to a rocket launcher, and you knew that I would be using it to shoot down a plain because I said I was part of Al Qaeda yet you still sold it to me and I then went out and did this, then yes you would be complicit in the murder of those who died in the plane crash.
Your attempts to blame someone else for actions of the killers is futile. People are responsible for their own actions, period. And that includes the people in Africa. Like I said, you don't need advanced weapons to kill people. Rwandan Genocide was done mostly with machetes and the like.
Surely you aren't telling me that Africans need to be sterilized or forced into abortions if they have more than one or two children, as routinely happens in China?
No I'm not. They are free to do whatever pleases them. But they should expect the West to constantly come to their rescue whenever they screw things up.
And how do you equate large families with reliance on handouts?
I'm not. I'm saying that multiplying exponentally makes the problem worse. The underlying cause of starvation and the like is overpopulation. So pumping more and more children to the world isn't really helpful, now is it?
Secondly, the fact that people want to have children should not be seen as such a bad thing that if they and their children are dying of disease and hunger that they deserve to die.
Yes, it could be said that bringing children to a society that is poor and starving IS selfish. Remember all those pictures of starving children? There wouldn't be starving children if there were no children.
You sir, live in a cruel and selfish world. I'm glad that most of the world doesn't think as you do!
And you live in a world where you give handouts to Africa so you could feel superior to others, while you have done very little (if anything) to actually fix the problem. Thanks to people like you, the situation in Africa has been prolonged over and over again.
That makes little difference to the people if a famine is occurring because crops have failed or because war has prevented those crops from being planted. What do you suppose the populace does in this case?
Frankly: suck it up. While food-aid might help in the short-term, it makes the problem worse in the long-term. Stopping food-aid would force them to focus on their agriculture. Maybe there wouldn't be that many wars there if they realized that constant warring will ruin their agriculture? But they are free to wage wars, since they know that we will give them food for free when their crops fails.
And seriously, those failed crops and the like are usually caused by the locals themselves! Just look at Mozambique! They utterly screwed everything up, and now we should clean up the mess they caused in the first place? At what point are we allowed to say "screw it! You caused this, you fix it!"? How long are we supposed to keep these failed states and societies on life-support?
Besides this, providing food and medical supplies to countries that do not have their own supplies of agricultural food is not the only form of aid provided by Western nations. The Obama administration, for instance, has committed to providing 3.5 billion dollars in agricultural aid - in other words, aid that allows nations to stand on their own two feet. Obviously this sort of thing takes time, so other more short term aid is also provided.
And that is the sort of aid that ruins local agriculture. Denying that aid might sting in the short-term, but it would be beneficial in the long-term.
Actually, that's not true. Those who sell arms to foreign countries bare some responsibility for enabling the actions of those who use the weapons.
Yeah, maybe like 0.1%, rest of the responsibility being squarely at the people who decide to kill each other. But apparently that is politically incorrect in this case, since the people who sell the weapons are rich westerners, and the killers are poor Africans. And blaming the Africans for anything is not allowed if there is a convenient rich white scapegoat available.
Seriously, if I decide to assault a complete stranger with a baseball-bat, who is responsible for it? I say that I would be responsible. You say that its the maker of the baseball-bat.
This is all a moot point, however, because the argument here is that most poor, starving and dispossessed people are somehow the cause of their own misfortune. This is patently false
How so? Who is to blame then? No, don't tell me: the people in the West, of course!
The famines in Ethiopia were largely caused by incompetent administration. Situation in Mozambique is caused by their utterly corrupt and incompetent government. If there's one thing Africa has a surplus on, it's incompetent and corrupt administrators.
there are those out there who, through no fault of their own, are simply unable to provide for themselves.
Yep. And what do those people do? have metric assload of children which makes the problem even worse. And our help makes them reliant on handouts, as opposed to them providing for themselves.
That there are people in richer, first world nations think that letting them perish through starvation and disease is an excellent way of resolving conflict, poverty and famine is a sad indictment on the corrupted thinking that has permeated our western culture.
Well, fact is that pumping billions in aid to Africa has done very little to help the problem. If anything, it has prolonged it. Maybe we should try something different for a change?
Thankfully, there are also many, many who disagree with this viewpoint and who continue providing to the sick and starving.
And then those sick and starving multiply beyond control, and you end up with even more sick and starving.... Good job everybody!
Uh, no, while amusing it's obviously wrong.
If you are equating feeding the starving with setting them on fire, then that is wrong. Have you considered what happens when you don't provide aid? Millions would starve, and there would be absolutely no hope for them to help themselves. Often aid is required because of war, not because the population is too lazy to fend for themselves.
Your cold heartedness is disgusting, especially when it is obvious that you live in a western society that does not suffer from civil war. I wonder what your response would be if you were caught in a society racked by civil war with a starving child, all for reasons not within your control?
Dumbing food in to poor countries might give us a nice feeling in the short term, but it just makes the underlying problem worse in the long term.
When we dumb food in to those countries, what we are in effect doing is saturating the market with dirt-cheap food. What does that mean? It means that the local farmers can't compete. They are supposed to sell their products while there are people handing out free food to the people. End result is that farming is not worth the effort anymore, and those farmers start feeding themselves with that aid-food as well, making the problem worse. By dumbing our surplus food to Africa we are just making sure that they stay poor, as opposed to allowing them to invest in their own agriculture.
Instead of pouring in food to those countries, we should educate them. But apparently that's not acceptable, since that is a olng-term solution to the problem, as opposed to short-term bandaid (that only makes the problem worse).
Well, have you ever wondered who arms the combatants?
Irrelevant. It's still them who are doing the fighting. If they didn't get weapons from the industrialized countries, they would be killing each other with spears and machetes. And as Rwandan Genocide showed us, those can be very effective tools for killing.
Fact is that they are responsible for their own actions. It's getting fucking tiresome when people claim that we, people in the west, are somehow responsible when bunch of Africans decide to kill each other.
To be perfectly honest, murder is probably a lesser crime. You can kill someone in a fit of rage, or by accident. You can be defending yourself. You can't accidentally rape your kids, even foster kids.
You can't accidentally murder anyone. That would be manslaughter, and it carries lower penalties. Murder is premeditated killing of a person.
To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
References to losses in WW2 in my comment above are obviously about WW1....
Yes, it is a bit strong for americans to say that...
But the British say the same thing, you know that small country that fought in the same war and that hitler turned his attention to after beating the french?
It's easy to be brave when you have 30-240 kilometers of sea between you and your enemy.... And wasn't it the British Army who ran for their lives in Dunkerque?
The French believed they could acquiesce to Hitler's demands, and thus avoid a conflict. The reasons are that they really, really did not want to fight. The reasons for that included that at that time, Hitler was the hero, both of French Nazi's and of the French lefties, including socialists and communists, and even (quite large) parts of "center" parties
Cut the crap. The reason why France did not want to fight was because they fought an extremely bitter war with Germany few decades earlier and they hadn't yet recovered from it. To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
But still they went to war. And they were defeated (together with UK) by the most powerful military force in the world. Should they feel ashamed by that? Hardly. Only thing that saved UK from the same fate was the Channel. And in the end it took the combined force of UK, USA, USSR, France and Canada to ultimately defeat Germany. Yet France is supposed to feel ashamed because Germany defeated them?
For comparison, USA lost whopping 0.13% of it's population in WW1.... In fact, USA has had it amazingly easy in it's wars. Look at Winter War. Had USA suffered similar casualties as Finland did, it would have meant losses of over 1 million men in a war that lasted 105 days.
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Like what? There's light rails and monorails, but those are both types of trains.
Um, bus?
Yep, a single diesel bus pollutes as much as 600 modern cars.
Well that's a load of bullshit.
when you factor in the fact that it stops at every single bus stop along the way
At least in here they only stop if there are people waving at the stop or if a passenger wants to leave at that stop....
and the bus stop you stop at isn't anywhere near where you need to go
By that logic, the only suitable means of transportation is either bike, walking or car. Mass.transit is absolutely unsuitable. And the two former are unacceptable because they are too inconvenient, am I right?
Like I said, this is about will and mentality.
With the current economy and gas prices in past few years, if buses made any sense at all in America, they would have seen a resurgence of ridership, and they haven't.
That's because of the mentality. cities in USA aren't that different when compared to cities elsewhere. I fail to see why buses work just fine just about everywhere else, but in USA they wouldn't work because......?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Many of our cities are sprawled in all directions.
And even those "sprawled" cities seem to have a lot higher population-densities than cities in Finland do.
There's no way to make an effective mass-transit system using current technologies that operates in a grid; it's just too expensive. Mass-transit only works in cities that are built in a line, such as along a river, or on a long, narrow island (like Manhattan).
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Even if you had trains connecting the major centers of town, how would you get from there to your destination?
At this point I would like to mention city of Espoo in Finland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espoo
Population-density: 778/km2, second largest city in Finland. And the interesting thing about Espoo is that it does not have a singular "downtown", but rather, it has five (seven, if you include the two smaller centers as well). And it has working mass-transit-system. Of course many residents commute to Helsinki as well.
The main thing preventing mass-transit from being implemented is the will to do so. I really don't see any indications that cities in USA are so totally different than all other cities in the world. This is mostly about will. Gasoline and cars are cheap in USA and there is no interest in mass-transit.
Of course, you could use buses, but those are extremely polluting and inefficient
Are they more polluting, inefficient and slow than a gridlock in a highway?
Um, large reason why those governments were so corrupt was because CIA organized their elected leaders to be ousted and replaced by juntas at the behest of UFC.... The juntas and the like were the corrupt governments. Your complaint about corrupt governments was caused by UFC!
And large part of the success of USA is the success of American companies. And one of those companies was UFC.