I'm of the opinion that Apple could market human waste, and we'd all hail it as revolutionary.
And I think that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple could, but they wouldn't. Microsoft can and does, and everyone hates it, but somehow finds themselves buying round after round their fecus.
I agree that competition is good, but although I like Apple products, extending their closed ecosystem to search makes me raise one eyebrow at least a fraction of an inch.
All of this however doesn't change the fact that Apple has declared war on tinkering and as more and more consumers adopt the "appliance computing" model that Apple spearheads, the future of computing looks less and less bright.
Hopefully all alternatives will not perish.
I don't get this sentiment. They still do a brisk business selling desktop and notebook Macs, and that's not likely to end soon. Tinker all you like on devices meant for tinkering.
Hopefully all alternatives will not perish.
I agree with this sentiment completely, in both directions. There is plenty of room in this world for devices that are more open for tinkering and ones that are more limited, to be used as appliances.
Let's put it this way: I'm glad they still sell sponges so that I can hand-wash my dishes if I need to, but I have no desire to throw my automatic dishwasher out.
It's not a war on tinkering; it's a different product. If you don't want it, don't buy it. It doesn't need to be any more philosophical than that.
Wow. It's like the Internet. I wonder if there was a period where basically anyone who could scrape together enough money to buy a gun could start their own business. Were the Wells Fargo money courriers the Web 2.0 bubble of their time?
Less than 4% of Beijing's rubbish is recycled – the UK recycles 35% – but is still near the bottom of the EU recycling league. Two per cent of Beijing's rubbish is burned but the rest is dumped in landfill sites, which cover an area of 333,000 sq m. Cities throughout the country face a similar problem.
Seems like they could make a serious dent in their landfill problems with just a little work.
Good points, all. I guess I should point out that the applications which seem to have the worst stalls, and which affect each other the worst are Outlook, Word, Excel, and IE. If one's locked, then I pretty much can't do anything with the others.
...I do a lot more waiting on my XP machine than on my Mac. Almost identical hardware, but when I'm opening an XLS file, Outlook and Word grind to a halt on the PC. Sometimes, closing a window locks up the whole system for 30 seconds. Shutting down takes an eternity, but the only thing worse than that is how slow the system gets after I leave it running for more than 4 days straight.
My Mac, on the other hand, can stay running for months at a time, and maybe once a month I have to force quit an application. But even then, it's to access that application, not anything else.
There are rumors that limited third-party multi-tasking support is coming, but if Apple's level of dick-i-tude is over your threshold of acceptability, that's not likely to change in the near future.
I'm not saying I agree that they're dicks, nor that I disagree. I understand and respect that this metric is pretty subjective. If you had published an app that was accepted, for instance, and sold a million copies, I'm sure you'd feel somewhat different. But love them or hate them, there's not going to be a fundamental shift in their corporate "personality", so based on what you said, don't buy their shit.
There's niches and there's niches. It would be possible to create a device that's useful for only one task, and if only a few million people in the world are interested in that task, then you've got a really limited market.
Tablet devices have long been billed as fully functional computes with a new form-factor, but in some ways, they've been the worst of both worlds. As others have pointed out, the form-factor is typically tacked onto the OS, rather than both being designed to work flawlessly together. And they've historically been underpowered systems which would never replace a desktop.
What's interesting about the iPad is that it answers a different question than other tablets have. Rather than asking, "what sort of device would computer users want to buy?", it seems to me that Apple has asked, "What sort of device would appeal to people who hate computers?"
That question leads to others, like, "What tasks do people want to do without having to boot up a computer?" Reading, watching movies, web browsing, playing games. Sure, there are more things you can do with an iPad--they wouldn't have migrated iWork to the platform if they didn't think some people would want to use it for work--but I think the main thing they've done is build something that is indeed a computer, but that a lot of people who don't like computers don't have to see as one.
Like Apple or not, they've done a great job with interface design on the iPhone, and the lessons learned there transfer well to the iPad. Will it succeed or fail? I don't know; it depends on your definition, I guess. I doubt iPad sales will ever quite catch up with the iPhone's, but of course, that's a pretty high bar to shoot for. They've set their target at 10 million this year. Again, like Apple or not, it's been a while since they fell short of sales estimates, even on completely new products.
In fact, they've made some big wins on products which everyone thought would fail. The original iPod was going to be just another MP3 player. They killed the iPod Mini, their most successful model, at its sales peak and replaced it with the Nano, a complete redesign, and got a huge sales bump. They made the screen-less shuffle, providing fewer features than the competitors that Jobs referred to as crap, and outselling those competitors by a mile. They released the iPhone for $599, no SDK, no MMS, no cut and paste, and all sorts of other things wrong with it according to the chatter on the Internet, and yet, here we are.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot of new tablets released in short order, some of which might be even better than Apple's in some ways or others. But I'm not sure it's time to bet against Apple in terms of long term success for the product.
I read an interesting article in Wired a few years back--gee, maybe more than a decade ago--that put an interesting spin on the decision not to drop CD prices.
The idea is that as the cost to produce the new medium dropped, they could take that overhead and invest it in riskier artists. Where they used to only risk a contract with a band that might sell 100,000 LPs, they could now act like indy labels and take on bands that might only sell 10,000 CDs.
Doing so, according to the article, led in part to the explosion of options in music in the 90s. Rap/Hip-hop, grunge, etc., all would have been relegated to minor labels with minor distribution channels. Green Day would have stayed on local college radio. Snoop Dog would still be rapping in his parents' garage. Etc.
As such, even with the much higher prices, album sales soared. You can argue about where the value is, but clearly the buyers were interested in having the music that *they* wanted being available on the shelves.
Take with appropriate amounts of salt. It may be that without the majors seeing this opportunities, some of the minors would have become bigger, faster. But it's an interesting take.
That having been said, they also made a bazillion dollars of those risky investments, so it's time for them to stop living off yesteryear's biz model. I'm sure they'll come up with some new way to stay rich after the CDs get cheaper.
Apple never wanted Fairplay. It was a requirement to get the music industry to sign on. Jobs made that clear, and after just a few years, he got all DRM dropped from all tunes on the iTMS. This is not RDF, it's fact.
And that Palm silliness is ridiculous. They didn't have any brilliant technology, they had their device identify itself as an iPod, which is in violation of USB standards. Apple's updates just helped enforce the standards. It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
Your other points are reasonable enough, but again, Apple is not Microsoft. They may become that bad one day. It's always possible. But there is, as of yet, no comparison.
I think this is one of my favorite comments on this topic. iPhone detractors describe what they see as a problem. iPhone users say it's not a problem because they don't care. The detractors describe the situation accurately, but their judgement of it as a problem is contextual. If you don't care, it's not a problem.
This isn't like global warming, where a relatively small group can fuck it up for everyone; if people didn't like the iPhone, they just wouldn't buy it. And it's great that there are other options out there.
This is actually an excellent point. If MS is going to charge $600 for an OS upgrade, why can't they burn it to a ROM chip that you could stick into a socket? Then the only RW stuff at the system level would be configurations. That could still leave some significant holes open, but at least--for example--you could potentially ensure that only system programs launch at start-up.
Application-level infections could still be a problem, but this might be one way to make the OS more secure.
I think that mouse-based apps should support flicking as well. I mean, there's no reason why, when I'm using the scroll wheel, I shouldn't be able to do slow, fine control and quick flips which reproduce inertia.
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I'm of the opinion that Apple could market human waste, and we'd all hail it as revolutionary.
And I think that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple could, but they wouldn't. Microsoft can and does, and everyone hates it, but somehow finds themselves buying round after round their fecus.
I agree that competition is good, but although I like Apple products, extending their closed ecosystem to search makes me raise one eyebrow at least a fraction of an inch.
Microsoft's internet division is currently losing about $2 billion a year. Sure looks like failure to me.
Makes me think of that line from Citizen Kane.
Kane's bookkeeper: But we're losing a million dollars a year!
Kane: Then in 60 years, when I am out of money, we will close our doors!!
What a sensible, reasonable remark. WTF are you doing here in /.? ;)
All of this however doesn't change the fact that Apple has declared war on tinkering and as more and more consumers adopt the "appliance computing" model that Apple spearheads, the future of computing looks less and less bright.
Hopefully all alternatives will not perish.
I don't get this sentiment. They still do a brisk business selling desktop and notebook Macs, and that's not likely to end soon. Tinker all you like on devices meant for tinkering.
Hopefully all alternatives will not perish.
I agree with this sentiment completely, in both directions. There is plenty of room in this world for devices that are more open for tinkering and ones that are more limited, to be used as appliances.
Let's put it this way: I'm glad they still sell sponges so that I can hand-wash my dishes if I need to, but I have no desire to throw my automatic dishwasher out.
It's not a war on tinkering; it's a different product. If you don't want it, don't buy it. It doesn't need to be any more philosophical than that.
Yeah, a Corvette is just a Chevette with a small passenger area, a big, fast engine, firmer suspension, wider tires.
Sigh. I think I just killed that joke.
Did you try 'sudo rm -rf /'? It doesn't say anything when it runs, but all commands stop working afterwards. It's brilliant.
And they level the playing field.
Wow. It's like the Internet. I wonder if there was a period where basically anyone who could scrape together enough money to buy a gun could start their own business. Were the Wells Fargo money courriers the Web 2.0 bubble of their time?
I am sticking with my abacus.
Feeding trolls or not, there are probably some very technical, nerdy solutions to this problem which are way better than "big perfume guns".
Less than 4% of Beijing's rubbish is recycled – the UK recycles 35% – but is still near the bottom of the EU recycling league. Two per cent of Beijing's rubbish is burned but the rest is dumped in landfill sites, which cover an area of 333,000 sq m. Cities throughout the country face a similar problem.
Seems like they could make a serious dent in their landfill problems with just a little work.
Now it will smell like rubbish and perfume! Two great scents that go great together!
Good points, all. I guess I should point out that the applications which seem to have the worst stalls, and which affect each other the worst are Outlook, Word, Excel, and IE. If one's locked, then I pretty much can't do anything with the others.
...I do a lot more waiting on my XP machine than on my Mac. Almost identical hardware, but when I'm opening an XLS file, Outlook and Word grind to a halt on the PC. Sometimes, closing a window locks up the whole system for 30 seconds. Shutting down takes an eternity, but the only thing worse than that is how slow the system gets after I leave it running for more than 4 days straight.
My Mac, on the other hand, can stay running for months at a time, and maybe once a month I have to force quit an application. But even then, it's to access that application, not anything else.
But the network, and main hub are called Tweedle Dee. The slave hub (repeater, where the printer hooks up) is called Tweedle Dum.
How cheap is cheap, enough for you to buy it? What form factor do you want? Do you need 3G? Want multitouch? Flash support?
Don't buy an iPad!
There are rumors that limited third-party multi-tasking support is coming, but if Apple's level of dick-i-tude is over your threshold of acceptability, that's not likely to change in the near future.
I'm not saying I agree that they're dicks, nor that I disagree. I understand and respect that this metric is pretty subjective. If you had published an app that was accepted, for instance, and sold a million copies, I'm sure you'd feel somewhat different. But love them or hate them, there's not going to be a fundamental shift in their corporate "personality", so based on what you said, don't buy their shit.
Problem solved. Next?
There's niches and there's niches. It would be possible to create a device that's useful for only one task, and if only a few million people in the world are interested in that task, then you've got a really limited market.
Tablet devices have long been billed as fully functional computes with a new form-factor, but in some ways, they've been the worst of both worlds. As others have pointed out, the form-factor is typically tacked onto the OS, rather than both being designed to work flawlessly together. And they've historically been underpowered systems which would never replace a desktop.
What's interesting about the iPad is that it answers a different question than other tablets have. Rather than asking, "what sort of device would computer users want to buy?", it seems to me that Apple has asked, "What sort of device would appeal to people who hate computers?"
That question leads to others, like, "What tasks do people want to do without having to boot up a computer?" Reading, watching movies, web browsing, playing games. Sure, there are more things you can do with an iPad--they wouldn't have migrated iWork to the platform if they didn't think some people would want to use it for work--but I think the main thing they've done is build something that is indeed a computer, but that a lot of people who don't like computers don't have to see as one.
Like Apple or not, they've done a great job with interface design on the iPhone, and the lessons learned there transfer well to the iPad. Will it succeed or fail? I don't know; it depends on your definition, I guess. I doubt iPad sales will ever quite catch up with the iPhone's, but of course, that's a pretty high bar to shoot for. They've set their target at 10 million this year. Again, like Apple or not, it's been a while since they fell short of sales estimates, even on completely new products.
In fact, they've made some big wins on products which everyone thought would fail. The original iPod was going to be just another MP3 player. They killed the iPod Mini, their most successful model, at its sales peak and replaced it with the Nano, a complete redesign, and got a huge sales bump. They made the screen-less shuffle, providing fewer features than the competitors that Jobs referred to as crap, and outselling those competitors by a mile. They released the iPhone for $599, no SDK, no MMS, no cut and paste, and all sorts of other things wrong with it according to the chatter on the Internet, and yet, here we are.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot of new tablets released in short order, some of which might be even better than Apple's in some ways or others. But I'm not sure it's time to bet against Apple in terms of long term success for the product.
I read an interesting article in Wired a few years back--gee, maybe more than a decade ago--that put an interesting spin on the decision not to drop CD prices.
The idea is that as the cost to produce the new medium dropped, they could take that overhead and invest it in riskier artists. Where they used to only risk a contract with a band that might sell 100,000 LPs, they could now act like indy labels and take on bands that might only sell 10,000 CDs.
Doing so, according to the article, led in part to the explosion of options in music in the 90s. Rap/Hip-hop, grunge, etc., all would have been relegated to minor labels with minor distribution channels. Green Day would have stayed on local college radio. Snoop Dog would still be rapping in his parents' garage. Etc.
As such, even with the much higher prices, album sales soared. You can argue about where the value is, but clearly the buyers were interested in having the music that *they* wanted being available on the shelves.
Take with appropriate amounts of salt. It may be that without the majors seeing this opportunities, some of the minors would have become bigger, faster. But it's an interesting take.
That having been said, they also made a bazillion dollars of those risky investments, so it's time for them to stop living off yesteryear's biz model. I'm sure they'll come up with some new way to stay rich after the CDs get cheaper.
Apple never wanted Fairplay. It was a requirement to get the music industry to sign on. Jobs made that clear, and after just a few years, he got all DRM dropped from all tunes on the iTMS. This is not RDF, it's fact.
And that Palm silliness is ridiculous. They didn't have any brilliant technology, they had their device identify itself as an iPod, which is in violation of USB standards. Apple's updates just helped enforce the standards. It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
Your other points are reasonable enough, but again, Apple is not Microsoft. They may become that bad one day. It's always possible. But there is, as of yet, no comparison.
iPad schmiPad. I want my Atari 400.
I think this is one of my favorite comments on this topic. iPhone detractors describe what they see as a problem. iPhone users say it's not a problem because they don't care. The detractors describe the situation accurately, but their judgement of it as a problem is contextual. If you don't care, it's not a problem.
This isn't like global warming, where a relatively small group can fuck it up for everyone; if people didn't like the iPhone, they just wouldn't buy it. And it's great that there are other options out there.
This is actually an excellent point. If MS is going to charge $600 for an OS upgrade, why can't they burn it to a ROM chip that you could stick into a socket? Then the only RW stuff at the system level would be configurations. That could still leave some significant holes open, but at least--for example--you could potentially ensure that only system programs launch at start-up.
Application-level infections could still be a problem, but this might be one way to make the OS more secure.
20-30 seconds is a long time when we're talking about my iPod Touch with the calculator app.
I think that mouse-based apps should support flicking as well. I mean, there's no reason why, when I'm using the scroll wheel, I shouldn't be able to do slow, fine control and quick flips which reproduce inertia.