Yeah. Barely selling tens upon tens of millions of phones, racking up billions upon billions in profit, earning more in profit than the #1 phone maker earns in gross sales. Sucks to be Apple.
You don't get it, do you? It sucks to be Apple in 2012 in the same way as it sucked to be Nokia in 2007, or RIM in 2009: short-term profits are nothing if you can't maintain your position as the market leader. Or do you want Apple to end up back in the position it was in before the iPod?
Bullshit. Apple is not "losing market share hand over fist".
Well, that was possibly a little hyperbolic on my part... but they're certainly not gaining any, and have been steadily losing it for the last year: see this graphic from the Wikipedia mobile OS page, market share section. Of course, the iPhone5 sales may increase this in Q4 (note the big jump in Q4 2011, presumably reflecting the iPhone 4S release); but Apple's market share in Q3 2012 is lower than it was in Q3 2011, suggesting an overall loss even if this is taken into account.
In terms of what-might-have-been, though, the last two years have been disastrous for Apple. During that time, every other major mobile OS lost customers, and they all seem to have gone over to Android rather than iOS. Amazingly, somewhere between Q1 and Q2 2010, Android and iOS both had about 15% of the total smartphone market share. Apple could have easily become the dominant platform from this point, but instead they stagnated (they're now have slightly less than what they were two years ago); whereas Android gobbled up everything else to get 73% of the market. And given all that, I'm not sure that ditching Google's maps for their own in-house product was one of Apple's smartest ideas.
You could probably argue that they had already missed the boat by two years by the time they dropped Google and it wouldn't have made much difference regardless. But I'm not convinced that the Android user base has the same loyalty as the iOS user base, and I would have thought that a compelling phone and OS package from Apple could have still turned things around, or at least stopped the decline.
There was no way to get key features (turn-by-turn directions) without meeting google's demands (for more user data).
No, but they could have met Google's demands in the short-term easily enough until they had an alternative ready for release, rather than rushing out something prematurely. When you're already losing market share hand over fist, why give people another reason to switch to Android?
This "hack" gets around one of the bigger drawbacks that people were complaining about, albeit for a small segment of phone owners.
Personally, I wish people would keep on complaining about it -- that way I stand a better chance of getting one myself if it ever comes back into stock:( Given how quickly the phone sold out around the world, I'm not sure too many people cared about the LTE thing in the first place (well, either that or Google had ridiculously low stock levels...)
Well, I think this is one of the reasons Google likes to spread the love around with their Nexus contracts -- right now they're bolstering the coffers and reputations of Asus and LG, after giving Samsung the kick that got them to the top of the pile several years ago.
I agree it's not great, though. If Nokia had been smart and adopted Android, things might have been more interesting. And who knows, maybe Apple will bring out an Android phone one of these days...:)
Technically, according to TFA, they're also in the US -- Android is still leading the market share results there too, just not by as much as in the rest of the world. Clearly they're not in your train carriage, though!
But the Android device I have, is not something I would ever buy apps for. The screen is too small, the touch screen too annoying. I'd use maps on it and that's about it.
I have no idea what sore of Android device you've got, but I would have thought that there were very few phones today being sold with a screen size of less than 3.5" and a resolution of less than 320x480... and that, of course, was the spec of the 3GS (and previous iphones). Going by Google's most recent figures, there's only 2.7% of Android phones out there that have a screen size of less than 320x480 (which is the "small" classification of the screen data -- Google defines "normal" to be at least 320x470) Most should really have a 1ghz processor in them too, which is fine for running most things (it's all that's in my Nexus S, and that handles most everything I throw at it with aplomb).
So, I dunno... a year or more ago, I'd say you've got a point, but not anymore. Even the dirt cheap Android phones are pretty damn good these days. They're not going to handle Asphalt 7, of course, but for doing smart phone things they should be fine.
(As to how many people buy apps in the Android world, that's another matter. Google is at least trying to make piracy harder than it used to be, which is a good thing... but there's definitely a problem. Which means it sucks to be a developer, really, right now.)
Not an oversight. They chose to give up on that 47%. They will never buy Apple stuff anyway.
... and that's exactly the thinking that lost Apple the PC market back in the day. You'd think "once bitten, twice shy"... but no, not with Apple. Massive profit margins can work fine when you're leading at the forefront of technology; they don't work so well when you've got nothing to offer over your competitors. (And they work especially badly when your competitors are ahead of you -- i.e. the 7" tablet space).
Note that I'm not saying Apple is doing badly now... but you can't just be thinking of now, you have to be thinking of the future. And Apple's future looks bleak if they keep on losing ground to Android; hell, at the rate they're losing it they'll be back to a niche 5-10% market share in two years.
What's really interesting, though, is that Apple was awake to the pitfalls of being swamped by cheap alternatives back in the day with their ipod line. They made sure that the price of ipods fell immensely once they'd captured the market, and even produced low-priced loss-leaders like the shuffle to ensure that everyone was locked into the Apple ecosystem. If they'd introduced some budget iphone models even two years ago, I suspect they'd be utterly dominant still. Conversely, it's also worth noting that this is exactly what Google's doing exactly with Android, and now that they've captured the market they've released three astonishingly cheap, high end devices to secure the victory.
Well, nobody was buying the Galaxy Tab 2 to begin with, so it probably makes little difference...:)
In all seriousness, though, I think manufacturers like Samsung have decided to sit back and play the long game with Android. They know that if Android gets a hold on the tablet market the way it's got a hold on the phone market, there'll always be people willing to pay for their "premium" tabs. After all, Samsung is charging top dollar for the S III and they're absolutely raking it in with that phone.
But remember also that Google hasn't been doing this in a vacuum -- Amazon had already decided to go down the undercut-prices route with their Kindle tabs, and Google's merely responding to this. Amazon's probably a greater threat to Google than Apple right now; I think Google is fairly sure that Android is going to win (this round of) the OS wars, but they'd very much like to ensure it's a Google-branded rather than an Amazon-branded form of Android that comes out on top. (It's worth noting that the Nexus 7 was released five months ahead of the Nexus 10 -- it was the Kindle Fire that had Google scared, not the ipad.)
Personally, I don't care about the USB port, but I do care about the SD card slot. I bought one anyway, and I don't really need the storage right now... but still, I suspect that I will eventually need it and it wouldn't have been a problem with an SD card slot. Google clearly realises that storage is important to people, too, since they're about to double the storage on the Nexus 7 this Monday (unfortunately, I bought mine a month too early!)
No-one has ever clearly stated why these devices are so locked-down out of the factory. Why is it? Why?
Well, the Nexus 7 (which is what TFA is about) isn't locked down at all, and neither is any other Nexus-banded hardware. Unlocking is simply a matter of attaching the device to the computer and typing "fastboot oem unlock", at which point the device will prompt you with a screen asking you to confirm. It really is as simple and as easy as that.
It's 100% safe as it's functionality that's intentionally built into the device -- being able to unlock and root is one of the selling points of the Nexus line, and Google makes a big deal of it. (It's also one of several reasons why I only buy Nexus devices.)
[The only thing to remember with the above is that all data will be wiped during the unlock process -- that's to preserve the security of your data on a locked device should it be stolen, as unlocking the boot loader without wiping would give unfettered access to all your data otherwise. You can actually unlock, root, and then re-lock the bootloader should you wish in order to make it secure once more. You'll be warned about this on the unlock confirmation screen, of course, but always remember to backup any user data externally before unlocking...]
Uh, you taken a look at the Australian inflation rate? Looks pretty much the same as the US inflation rate to me...
The difference is that Australia has higher growth and lower unemployment, and an economy that's way healthier. The GFC didn't hit us, remember? Hence the interest rate differences...
You're right about the side bezels -- I just picked up my Nexus 7 in portrait and noticed that I do hold it exactly as you describe (and it also has the wider top/bottom bezels for landscape holding). There's just something... odd... about the proportions of the mini that makes it look uncomfortable and awkward (at least to my mind). Maybe I'm just too used to widescreen devices...
I'm not convinced that any laptop commanded a price premium by being 3mm thinner than another one, though. The price premium for ultrabooks comes from being centimetres thinner, not millimetres. And the weight difference between an ipad mini and a Nexus 7 is 32g -- admittedly in the mini's favour, but again, it's a negligible difference at 10% of the total mass.
I guess I'm mostly just surprised Apple didn't at least match their competitors' screen resolution -- a 1280x960 screen surely would have made sense. And I'm likewise surprised they didn't keep the price to the $250 entry point. I mean, Apple's dominated the tablet market for so long; why risk throwing away that dominance for a bit of temporary profit?
Do you honestly think 3mm of depth in a tablet makes a significant difference in portability? When people are thinking in terms of portability, it's the width and height dimensions that will count here (i.e. what will fit into a backpack/handbag/purse). And it's not like the Nexus either looks or feels thick (it's slightly thinner than a normal iPad).
As regards the bezel, I'm not suggesting it won't be comfortable, but I do wonder about how easy it will be to hold without touching the screen in portrait mode as there's precious little thumb space that isn't touchscreen. You'll notice that the Fire HD went for an even wider bezel than the Nexus 7, presumably for ergonomic reasons (there's a lot of free space inside a Fire HD -- it didn't need to be that wide).
You're a brave individual to suggest that Apple's in the ascendancy (no, sorry, "hammering" Android!) right now. Android's market share of new units shipped in Q2 this year was a massive 68% vs 17% for iOS. I really wonder what you're basing this on...
Coming back to topic, I'm really surprised Apple released an ipad mini with those specs. It justifies the existence of the 7" Android tablet market, and almost pushes people into buying a Nexus 7 or Fire HD instead -- why would anyone other than an Apple zealot choose to pay more for a tablet with a lower-resolution screen? Surely they had to at the very least have a retina display, or extra battery life, or something in there to justify the price premium. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that people will still pay extra bucks simply for that magical "i" in the name... it will be interesting to see.
On a more practical note, this is the first time I've seen Apple offer a product of noticably worse quality than their competitors since 2007. Apple used to do this all the time in the 1990s, and that didn't work out so well for them...
Nexus 7 16 GB is priced at $250, $80 less. For that price you'll get a device that has a smaller screen (although higher-resolution), yet still manages to be 30% bigger, and is missing the 5 MP rear camera. When it comes to portables, smaller size always demands a premium.
Where do you get 30% bigger from? The ipad mini is 200mm x 134mm; Nexus 7 is 198.5mm x 120mm. That's less space taken up by the Nexus, as far as I can see, if you really wanted to count it. The ipad mini is 30% thinner, but I don't see 3mm making a substantial difference for anyone. It's the width and height dimensions that matter.
I'm a little surprised by the small size of the ipad mini screen bezel, though. It's going to be pretty hard to hold that thing without accidentally touching the screen, especially in portrait mode. Plus it looks really cramped. Not really up to Apple's usual design standards (in fact, I'd argue the Nexus 7 looks substantially better; not that looks matter, but I'm a little surprised).
Middle-clicking the icon also works, FWIW. But seriously, doesn't everyone use tabs with their terminals these days? What's with the multiple-separate-terminal-windows thing??
Makes silly presumptions about the features of graphics hardware, gobbles resources like an amphetamine junkie, adds unnecessary steps to get to a fucking console prompt, and is generally now what I am looking for in a UI.
It sounds like you haven't used Unity in a long time. Unity's currently using ~30 Mb of RAM (and essentially no processor time) on my 4Gb laptop as I write this, so I'm not sure how that equates to resource hogging. And as for getting to a terminal, either pin it to the dock or set a hotkey combo with compiz, or both. And if you pin the app in the first ten spots in the dock, then Super+[spot number] will immediately work as a hotkey combo. What's really nice about this last option is that if you've already got a terminal open, it'll switch to the open window rather than opening a new one. I'd really be interested in knowing how any WM or DE could launch a terminal faster than this...
I spend on average half my working day coding, am constantly in a terminal or a text editor, and Unity works great for me in this context. Ultimately what I want from a WM/DE is something that lets me work as fast and efficiently as possible and doesn't get in my way, and Unity does this (for my disorganised mind, at least) with aplomb.
Different strokes for different folks, of course... but I don't find anything about Unity that warrants the amount of/. haters. If nothing else, at least Ubuntu's given us a third viable DE option, and surely more choice is a good thing, not a bad thing.
you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless
Ok, I'm completely lost here -- how did Unity render "any concept of multi-task workflow useless"? You surely can't mean that you can't multitask with Unity, as there's a dock with all your running apps (and unopened favourite apps) sitting right there on the left-hand side of your screen. The dock shows you which apps are running, and the number of instances of each app. If there are multiple instances/windows for an app, clicking on the app icon raises and focuses the last-used window of that app; clicking again does an expose of all open windows for that app. Everyone's different of course, but I personally find that works one hell of a lot better than a Windows-esque taskbar for multitasking. And since you're also running compiz when using Unity, you've got all the inbuilt compiz goodness for desktop expose/window expose too.
I can't say I much like the idea of Amazon ads, incidentally, but I feel safe in the knowledge that I could always sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping (as noted in TFA) and get rid of that functionality if I wanted to. It's not like it's hard-coded into the system or anything.
You know, I totally get people having favourite distros; what I don't get is the fiery hate some people here seem to have for Ubuntu. It's not like the Ubuntu dev team ran over your dog; it's not even like they shipped their distro with a dysfunctional version of gcc. Live and let live, peeps...
Um... if you're not interested in coding or care about open source software, why on earth would you be even considering using linux?
Linux is made by the programming community, for the programming community. It's never been hugely popular on the desktop and most likely it never will be.
I haven't seen any huge RAM usage from Unity on my system -- the various processes are barely using 20-30Mb right now.
As for my GPU, I'm not a gamer and I'm quite happy to see my GPU used for something occasionally, thanks all the same. But, you know, if you don't like Ubuntu, don't use it. Linux wouldn't be linux if there was only one way to do things, you know...
Sorry, but another vote for Unity here, FWIW, and I used to be a huge Unity nay-sayer (I even switched to linux mint for half a year out of protest) until I actually tried it and was pleasantly surprised. I find it's an excellent power-user interface with an emphasis on the minimal, and that suits me just fine -- any interface that provides more vertical screen realestate gets my vote. The dash panel works great for me, too -- I find typing much faster than hierarchical GUI menus, and Unity makes it possible to do everything via the keyboard if you want.
I should add that I've only used the incarnation of Unity present in 12.04 -- it's quite possible it wasn't always as polished as it is now. But personally, now, I would hate to switch back to any other interface. I've used a hell of a lot of WMs and DEs over the years, and Unity's very much my favourite so far.
But at 13, I would have loved to been "raped" by a 30 year old. I know there are other 13 year olds out there who would like that opportunity. I still don't see any reason to deny them that.
How about the fact that there are any number of 13 year olds who most certainly would not like that opportunity? What a truly bizarre attitude to take!
I suspect that if you'd ever experienced an assault you wouldn't make such a statement. You're imagining some ridiculous fantasy in which a 30yo babe gently "forced" herself upon your younger pubescent self, probably involving sun lounges, body lotion and whipped cream. Real life isn't like that.
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Yeah. Barely selling tens upon tens of millions of phones, racking up billions upon billions in profit, earning more in profit than the #1 phone maker earns in gross sales. Sucks to be Apple.
You don't get it, do you? It sucks to be Apple in 2012 in the same way as it sucked to be Nokia in 2007, or RIM in 2009: short-term profits are nothing if you can't maintain your position as the market leader. Or do you want Apple to end up back in the position it was in before the iPod?
Bullshit. Apple is not "losing market share hand over fist".
Well, that was possibly a little hyperbolic on my part ... but they're certainly not gaining any, and have been steadily losing it for the last year: see this graphic from the Wikipedia mobile OS page, market share section. Of course, the iPhone5 sales may increase this in Q4 (note the big jump in Q4 2011, presumably reflecting the iPhone 4S release); but Apple's market share in Q3 2012 is lower than it was in Q3 2011, suggesting an overall loss even if this is taken into account.
In terms of what-might-have-been, though, the last two years have been disastrous for Apple. During that time, every other major mobile OS lost customers, and they all seem to have gone over to Android rather than iOS. Amazingly, somewhere between Q1 and Q2 2010, Android and iOS both had about 15% of the total smartphone market share. Apple could have easily become the dominant platform from this point, but instead they stagnated (they're now have slightly less than what they were two years ago); whereas Android gobbled up everything else to get 73% of the market. And given all that, I'm not sure that ditching Google's maps for their own in-house product was one of Apple's smartest ideas.
You could probably argue that they had already missed the boat by two years by the time they dropped Google and it wouldn't have made much difference regardless. But I'm not convinced that the Android user base has the same loyalty as the iOS user base, and I would have thought that a compelling phone and OS package from Apple could have still turned things around, or at least stopped the decline.
There was no way to get key features (turn-by-turn directions) without meeting google's demands (for more user data).
No, but they could have met Google's demands in the short-term easily enough until they had an alternative ready for release, rather than rushing out something prematurely. When you're already losing market share hand over fist, why give people another reason to switch to Android?
This "hack" gets around one of the bigger drawbacks that people were complaining about, albeit for a small segment of phone owners.
Personally, I wish people would keep on complaining about it -- that way I stand a better chance of getting one myself if it ever comes back into stock :( Given how quickly the phone sold out around the world, I'm not sure too many people cared about the LTE thing in the first place (well, either that or Google had ridiculously low stock levels ...)
Well, I think this is one of the reasons Google likes to spread the love around with their Nexus contracts -- right now they're bolstering the coffers and reputations of Asus and LG, after giving Samsung the kick that got them to the top of the pile several years ago.
I agree it's not great, though. If Nokia had been smart and adopted Android, things might have been more interesting. And who knows, maybe Apple will bring out an Android phone one of these days ... :)
Technically, according to TFA, they're also in the US -- Android is still leading the market share results there too, just not by as much as in the rest of the world. Clearly they're not in your train carriage, though!
But the Android device I have, is not something I would ever buy apps for. The screen is too small, the touch screen too annoying. I'd use maps on it and that's about it.
I have no idea what sore of Android device you've got, but I would have thought that there were very few phones today being sold with a screen size of less than 3.5" and a resolution of less than 320x480 ... and that, of course, was the spec of the 3GS (and previous iphones). Going by Google's most recent figures, there's only 2.7% of Android phones out there that have a screen size of less than 320x480 (which is the "small" classification of the screen data -- Google defines "normal" to be at least 320x470) Most should really have a 1ghz processor in them too, which is fine for running most things (it's all that's in my Nexus S, and that handles most everything I throw at it with aplomb).
So, I dunno ... a year or more ago, I'd say you've got a point, but not anymore. Even the dirt cheap Android phones are pretty damn good these days. They're not going to handle Asphalt 7, of course, but for doing smart phone things they should be fine.
(As to how many people buy apps in the Android world, that's another matter. Google is at least trying to make piracy harder than it used to be, which is a good thing ... but there's definitely a problem. Which means it sucks to be a developer, really, right now.)
Not an oversight. They chose to give up on that 47%. They will never buy Apple stuff anyway.
... and that's exactly the thinking that lost Apple the PC market back in the day. You'd think "once bitten, twice shy" ... but no, not with Apple. Massive profit margins can work fine when you're leading at the forefront of technology; they don't work so well when you've got nothing to offer over your competitors. (And they work especially badly when your competitors are ahead of you -- i.e. the 7" tablet space).
Note that I'm not saying Apple is doing badly now ... but you can't just be thinking of now, you have to be thinking of the future. And Apple's future looks bleak if they keep on losing ground to Android; hell, at the rate they're losing it they'll be back to a niche 5-10% market share in two years.
What's really interesting, though, is that Apple was awake to the pitfalls of being swamped by cheap alternatives back in the day with their ipod line. They made sure that the price of ipods fell immensely once they'd captured the market, and even produced low-priced loss-leaders like the shuffle to ensure that everyone was locked into the Apple ecosystem. If they'd introduced some budget iphone models even two years ago, I suspect they'd be utterly dominant still. Conversely, it's also worth noting that this is exactly what Google's doing exactly with Android, and now that they've captured the market they've released three astonishingly cheap, high end devices to secure the victory.
Interestingly, the push for 48 Hz doesn't seem to be going too well -- turns out people like the 24 fps look.
Personally I'm with the majority here and hate the high-fps "video camera" effect. 24fps 70mm film ftw ... :)
Well, nobody was buying the Galaxy Tab 2 to begin with, so it probably makes little difference ... :)
In all seriousness, though, I think manufacturers like Samsung have decided to sit back and play the long game with Android. They know that if Android gets a hold on the tablet market the way it's got a hold on the phone market, there'll always be people willing to pay for their "premium" tabs. After all, Samsung is charging top dollar for the S III and they're absolutely raking it in with that phone.
But remember also that Google hasn't been doing this in a vacuum -- Amazon had already decided to go down the undercut-prices route with their Kindle tabs, and Google's merely responding to this. Amazon's probably a greater threat to Google than Apple right now; I think Google is fairly sure that Android is going to win (this round of) the OS wars, but they'd very much like to ensure it's a Google-branded rather than an Amazon-branded form of Android that comes out on top. (It's worth noting that the Nexus 7 was released five months ahead of the Nexus 10 -- it was the Kindle Fire that had Google scared, not the ipad.)
Guess you don't go to the cinema much if you think 24hz is barbaric... but then, why would you, with all those high quality youtube features to watch?
Personally, I don't care about the USB port, but I do care about the SD card slot. I bought one anyway, and I don't really need the storage right now ... but still, I suspect that I will eventually need it and it wouldn't have been a problem with an SD card slot. Google clearly realises that storage is important to people, too, since they're about to double the storage on the Nexus 7 this Monday (unfortunately, I bought mine a month too early!)
No-one has ever clearly stated why these devices are so locked-down out of the factory. Why is it? Why?
Well, the Nexus 7 (which is what TFA is about) isn't locked down at all, and neither is any other Nexus-banded hardware. Unlocking is simply a matter of attaching the device to the computer and typing "fastboot oem unlock", at which point the device will prompt you with a screen asking you to confirm. It really is as simple and as easy as that.
It's 100% safe as it's functionality that's intentionally built into the device -- being able to unlock and root is one of the selling points of the Nexus line, and Google makes a big deal of it. (It's also one of several reasons why I only buy Nexus devices.)
[The only thing to remember with the above is that all data will be wiped during the unlock process -- that's to preserve the security of your data on a locked device should it be stolen, as unlocking the boot loader without wiping would give unfettered access to all your data otherwise. You can actually unlock, root, and then re-lock the bootloader should you wish in order to make it secure once more. You'll be warned about this on the unlock confirmation screen, of course, but always remember to backup any user data externally before unlocking ...]
Uh, you taken a look at the Australian inflation rate? Looks pretty much the same as the US inflation rate to me ...
The difference is that Australia has higher growth and lower unemployment, and an economy that's way healthier. The GFC didn't hit us, remember? Hence the interest rate differences ...
You're right about the side bezels -- I just picked up my Nexus 7 in portrait and noticed that I do hold it exactly as you describe (and it also has the wider top/bottom bezels for landscape holding). There's just something ... odd ... about the proportions of the mini that makes it look uncomfortable and awkward (at least to my mind). Maybe I'm just too used to widescreen devices ...
I'm not convinced that any laptop commanded a price premium by being 3mm thinner than another one, though. The price premium for ultrabooks comes from being centimetres thinner, not millimetres. And the weight difference between an ipad mini and a Nexus 7 is 32g -- admittedly in the mini's favour, but again, it's a negligible difference at 10% of the total mass.
I guess I'm mostly just surprised Apple didn't at least match their competitors' screen resolution -- a 1280x960 screen surely would have made sense. And I'm likewise surprised they didn't keep the price to the $250 entry point. I mean, Apple's dominated the tablet market for so long; why risk throwing away that dominance for a bit of temporary profit?
Do you honestly think 3mm of depth in a tablet makes a significant difference in portability? When people are thinking in terms of portability, it's the width and height dimensions that will count here (i.e. what will fit into a backpack/handbag/purse). And it's not like the Nexus either looks or feels thick (it's slightly thinner than a normal iPad).
As regards the bezel, I'm not suggesting it won't be comfortable, but I do wonder about how easy it will be to hold without touching the screen in portrait mode as there's precious little thumb space that isn't touchscreen. You'll notice that the Fire HD went for an even wider bezel than the Nexus 7, presumably for ergonomic reasons (there's a lot of free space inside a Fire HD -- it didn't need to be that wide).
Android activations are no longer increasing
Um ... really???
You're a brave individual to suggest that Apple's in the ascendancy (no, sorry, "hammering" Android!) right now. Android's market share of new units shipped in Q2 this year was a massive 68% vs 17% for iOS. I really wonder what you're basing this on ...
Coming back to topic, I'm really surprised Apple released an ipad mini with those specs. It justifies the existence of the 7" Android tablet market, and almost pushes people into buying a Nexus 7 or Fire HD instead -- why would anyone other than an Apple zealot choose to pay more for a tablet with a lower-resolution screen? Surely they had to at the very least have a retina display, or extra battery life, or something in there to justify the price premium. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that people will still pay extra bucks simply for that magical "i" in the name ... it will be interesting to see.
On a more practical note, this is the first time I've seen Apple offer a product of noticably worse quality than their competitors since 2007. Apple used to do this all the time in the 1990s, and that didn't work out so well for them ...
Nexus 7 16 GB is priced at $250, $80 less. For that price you'll get a device that has a smaller screen (although higher-resolution), yet still manages to be 30% bigger, and is missing the 5 MP rear camera. When it comes to portables, smaller size always demands a premium.
Where do you get 30% bigger from? The ipad mini is 200mm x 134mm; Nexus 7 is 198.5mm x 120mm. That's less space taken up by the Nexus, as far as I can see, if you really wanted to count it. The ipad mini is 30% thinner, but I don't see 3mm making a substantial difference for anyone. It's the width and height dimensions that matter.
I'm a little surprised by the small size of the ipad mini screen bezel, though. It's going to be pretty hard to hold that thing without accidentally touching the screen, especially in portrait mode. Plus it looks really cramped. Not really up to Apple's usual design standards (in fact, I'd argue the Nexus 7 looks substantially better; not that looks matter, but I'm a little surprised).
Middle-clicking the icon also works, FWIW. But seriously, doesn't everyone use tabs with their terminals these days? What's with the multiple-separate-terminal-windows thing??
Makes silly presumptions about the features of graphics hardware, gobbles resources like an amphetamine junkie, adds unnecessary steps to get to a fucking console prompt, and is generally now what I am looking for in a UI.
It sounds like you haven't used Unity in a long time. Unity's currently using ~30 Mb of RAM (and essentially no processor time) on my 4Gb laptop as I write this, so I'm not sure how that equates to resource hogging. And as for getting to a terminal, either pin it to the dock or set a hotkey combo with compiz, or both. And if you pin the app in the first ten spots in the dock, then Super+[spot number] will immediately work as a hotkey combo. What's really nice about this last option is that if you've already got a terminal open, it'll switch to the open window rather than opening a new one. I'd really be interested in knowing how any WM or DE could launch a terminal faster than this ...
I spend on average half my working day coding, am constantly in a terminal or a text editor, and Unity works great for me in this context. Ultimately what I want from a WM/DE is something that lets me work as fast and efficiently as possible and doesn't get in my way, and Unity does this (for my disorganised mind, at least) with aplomb.
Different strokes for different folks, of course ... but I don't find anything about Unity that warrants the amount of /. haters. If nothing else, at least Ubuntu's given us a third viable DE option, and surely more choice is a good thing, not a bad thing.
you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless
Ok, I'm completely lost here -- how did Unity render "any concept of multi-task workflow useless"? You surely can't mean that you can't multitask with Unity, as there's a dock with all your running apps (and unopened favourite apps) sitting right there on the left-hand side of your screen. The dock shows you which apps are running, and the number of instances of each app. If there are multiple instances/windows for an app, clicking on the app icon raises and focuses the last-used window of that app; clicking again does an expose of all open windows for that app. Everyone's different of course, but I personally find that works one hell of a lot better than a Windows-esque taskbar for multitasking. And since you're also running compiz when using Unity, you've got all the inbuilt compiz goodness for desktop expose/window expose too.
I can't say I much like the idea of Amazon ads, incidentally, but I feel safe in the knowledge that I could always sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping (as noted in TFA) and get rid of that functionality if I wanted to. It's not like it's hard-coded into the system or anything.
You know, I totally get people having favourite distros; what I don't get is the fiery hate some people here seem to have for Ubuntu. It's not like the Ubuntu dev team ran over your dog; it's not even like they shipped their distro with a dysfunctional version of gcc. Live and let live, peeps ...
Um ... if you're not interested in coding or care about open source software, why on earth would you be even considering using linux?
Linux is made by the programming community, for the programming community. It's never been hugely popular on the desktop and most likely it never will be.
I haven't seen any huge RAM usage from Unity on my system -- the various processes are barely using 20-30Mb right now.
As for my GPU, I'm not a gamer and I'm quite happy to see my GPU used for something occasionally, thanks all the same. But, you know, if you don't like Ubuntu, don't use it. Linux wouldn't be linux if there was only one way to do things, you know ...
Sorry, but another vote for Unity here, FWIW, and I used to be a huge Unity nay-sayer (I even switched to linux mint for half a year out of protest) until I actually tried it and was pleasantly surprised. I find it's an excellent power-user interface with an emphasis on the minimal, and that suits me just fine -- any interface that provides more vertical screen realestate gets my vote. The dash panel works great for me, too -- I find typing much faster than hierarchical GUI menus, and Unity makes it possible to do everything via the keyboard if you want.
I should add that I've only used the incarnation of Unity present in 12.04 -- it's quite possible it wasn't always as polished as it is now. But personally, now, I would hate to switch back to any other interface. I've used a hell of a lot of WMs and DEs over the years, and Unity's very much my favourite so far.
But at 13, I would have loved to been "raped" by a 30 year old. I know there are other 13 year olds out there who would like that opportunity. I still don't see any reason to deny them that.
How about the fact that there are any number of 13 year olds who most certainly would not like that opportunity? What a truly bizarre attitude to take!
I suspect that if you'd ever experienced an assault you wouldn't make such a statement. You're imagining some ridiculous fantasy in which a 30yo babe gently "forced" herself upon your younger pubescent self, probably involving sun lounges, body lotion and whipped cream. Real life isn't like that.