Honestly, just STFU about something you know absolutely nothing about, you tired fucking PC nerd.
> No. What's stupid is having a stupid little dongle instead of an integrated port.
The fucking ports don't fit on an iPad you dick. It is thinner than a fucking iPhone. If you don't even know that, why the fuck are you talking?
And it is not a dongle, it is a docking connector. Look the term up. It is a standard thing to do when you device is smaller than the ports you want to put on. It has been done hundreds of times by dozens of vendors over the history of computing. It was done in the 1990's when notebooks were too small for the giant PC plugs of the day. It was done in 2003 when iPod got too thin for its FireWire port (which is smaller than USB). It has been a necessity for iPhone and iPad which not only do not have space around the side for ports, their insides are mostly battery, there is no extra room.
Also, The iPad docking connector has 30 cables in it. That is way, way more cables than any other ARM device. That is MORE connectivity than a fucking desktop USB port. Thunderbolt is being added to those 30 cables right now. It used to have FireWire also. There is audio line in and out. There is DVI there, VGA, and HDMI. That is more cables.
When iPad is too thin to support even micro-USB ports, how the fuck do you expect Apple to fit fucking USB, Thunderbolt, DVI, VGA, HDMI, and audio line in out all around the fucking iPad?
What makes your tirade even stupider is you can buy a $29 accessory that breaks out SD card and desktop USB from the dock connector, and you can then HOOK MORE USB DEVICES ONTO iPAD THAN ANY OTHER ARM DEVICE. And less than 1% of users care to do this.
> Now I have an expensive little doo dad to lose rather than just being able to depend on my main device being up to the tasks I put it to.
No. That is bullshit. What you have is a way to hook iPad onto a TV, computer display, overhead projector, audio system, computer, USB charger of any kind, and likely Thunderbolt and other things later that you would not have had if it did not have a docking connector. Those ports will not fit any other way.
Instead of having zero ports, or just one USB port (which in many cases you would need an adapter anyway, since there are 3 USB connectors), you have an array of wired ports AND an array of wireless. But you are too stupid to use it.
> Your post is nothing more then mental gymnastics mean to justify a particular vendor's limitations post factum. > Twist yourself however much it takes to make it seem like your pet vendor never made a mistake.
This is just the sound an asshole makes when it can't shit right.
You don't have to like Apple at all to use Apple products today. They are the best. The people who are rocking Windows XP in 2011 are the fanboys today.
Even Apple's biggest detractors admit they put on a clinic over the past few years. You sound like an idiot.
> Suggesting wireless is just retarded. It's slow, unreliable, and insecure.
Asshole, this is a WIRELESS device. If you don't like wireless, you fucking don't buy iPad.
There is a ton of reliable wireless in iPad. It can join either GSM or CDMA networks, it can join Wi-Fi n and hop from network to network automatically, you can join wireless MIDI networks in music studios, it can sync wirelessly with the cloud, it can talk to GPS satellites, it can act as a Bonjour/WebDAV Wi-Fi file server for any other computer to easily put files on and off, it can send audio streams wirelessly to speakers, it can send video streams to set-top boxes and TV's, it can remote control things via Bluetooth, and many more things.
> It's also ultimately MORE USER HOSTILE than a nice simple wired connection. You remember the user? (perhaps not)
No, wired is always more user hostile. WTF rationale would you have for the opposite?
Fucking consumers can't hook up a fucking TV and you want them to have to what? Plug iPad into Gigabit Ether
This dude was going on and on about the fucking Amiga the other day and I was like, "if you were sitting in front of an Amiga right now, you'd run out of things to do within 5 minutes and you'd be on your fucking iPhone." I was 1000% right.
And again, the "tablet" (iPad) has an awesome browsing and email experience. I don't know WTF Google's problem is, but that has nothing to do with tablets.
Yes, Honeycomb has lag. Nobody is talking about Honeycomb when they say "tablet." That is like 0.001% of tablet sales. There is no reason some random shit that gets pooped out of Google in 2010 should have any relation at all to the Windows 95 that Microsoft pooped out for you in the 1990's. And neither of them have any relation to "tablets" in 2011. iPad does not have any lag at all, and is a joy to use. It is better than a PC at a lot of things.
For example: Web browsing. It is far, far better for the "buttons" on the Web to be actual buttons you tap with a finger than for you to push a mouse cursor around like an egg with a spoon. It is far, far better to scroll by flicking the page up and down than by using a scroller. It is far, far better to zoom with a pinch than with Command+plus or Command+minus.
iPad is better at GPS navigation than a PC. It's better at playing Scrabble. It's better at emulating an audio mixer, because it gives you 8 faders you can slide around and a set of transport controls. It's better at sketching than a PC. It's better at book reading than a PC. It's a better photo album. It's a better presentation device, you can drag your slides into a different order very intuitively as you talk, you can tap anywhere on the iPad screen and a virtual laser pointer appears on the presentation screen, and iPad has a higher-quality presentation app and iPad doesn't crash. iPad is a better computer than a PC to take to a meeting, especially lunch meeting. It's better for showing work to clients, pitching clients, than a PC the clients get a better look at the work and buy more often. iPad is a better car computer than any PC. iPad is a better computer for a new computer user who needs to be productive right away than a PC. iPad is cheaper than a PC if you include the cost of 3rd party software, which is much cheaper on iOS, and administration, which is much cheaper on iOS. And iPad is more reliable and more secure than a PC. Has no viruses at all, no native malware. If those are priorities for you, then it is better than a PC. For example, some banks give iPads away to their high-value customers and ask them to do all their money transfers only on the iPad, not on a Windows PC which may have malware that will hijack the transfer. The US government warns US citizens not to bank on Windows. So iPad is better at banking than a Windows PC. With an accessory Bluetooth keyboard, it's a better writing tool than a PC: 10 hour battery, auto save, auto sync to cloud, size of a magazine, instant on, no crashes, no distractions, and hundreds of professional writing tools used by thousands of top professional writers. iPad is a better HD video camera than a PC, and a better consumer video editor than a PC. iPad is a better consumer music and audio platform than a PC, and many of its apps are better pro music and audio apps than what you find on a PC.
I could go on and on.
The saddest part of what you said is that Microsoft has pretty much eaten its own young on Windows, there is very little good software on there. It all comes down to the apps. iOS and Mac OS are famous for having the very best client apps in the world. The most popular Windows apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel they are Mac apps. Those are Mac apps from the 1980's and Mac/Windows apps from the 1990's. The software on Windows just does not jibe with your idea that it is the only way to be productive. Not to mention, its sheer lack of quality measured in every conceivable metric.
> It's so odd how the people that want a tablet with the functionality of a real computer are looked at like they're bizarro.
That is because there are so few of you. Literally, less than 1% of the tablet market.
> What is so strange about wanting a fully featured device?
If by fully-featured, you mean Wintel, then what is strange about wanting that in a tablet is it increases the size of your tablet by double, the weight by double, the price by 3 times, and reduces the battery life by half. Most people do not want any of those things in a tablet, which is why there are 20 years of failed tablets before iPad.
Wintel has not even been able to make a computer as small as MacBook Air, let alone as small as iPad. People want small and light. I have women friends who don't carry their notebook PC's because they are simply too heavy. And you are saying "your electronic book should be a Wintel PC." It makes no sense.
Also, Wintel tablets do not have instant on, they do not have mobile-optimized apps, they are not malware-free, they are not reliable, they require IT/CS skills to use and manage even an iPod is better in every respect than that.
> It's like the people that were going off about how iPad's don't need USB functionality > insinuating that there is no point to having USB on the tablet. Uh, what?
1) iPads need USB
2) iPads have USB
3) iPads cannot charge their f'ing batteries without USB
4) what iPads do not have is a standard USB port, because the body of the iPad is too thin to support them, therefore it has a docking connector that breaks out into 30 different cables, many, many more cables than any other device has, docking connectors are a very valid engineering solution to a device that is too small to have ports on it
5) the standard USB port not being there is no big deal at all because iPad is a WIRELESS device, and USB is not wireless you don't hook up a USB printer to iPad, you print over Wi-Fi you don't attach a USB MIDI interface, iPad can send MIDI over Wi-Fi, I use this all the time you don't attach iPad to a PC via USB mass storage to put files on or off via your desktop, you mount a WebDAV volume off the iPad onto any other machine on the network and drag files on and off via your desktop, and starting in about a month, you won't even attach iPad via USB to a Mac/PC to sync, the syncing happens wirelessly also, with the cloud
6) if you are really that much of an iconoclast, you can pay all of $29 for an Apple-made iPad accessory that has a desktop USB port and an SD card reader in one package (far less than 1% of iPad users bought this accessory), and you can plug yourself silly with your USB peripherals, because iPad supports far, far, far more USB peripherals than any other ARM device: dozens if not hundreds of audio interfaces, MIDI interfaces, MIDI instruments, keyboards, speakers, all still cameras, all camcorders, iPod accessories, and more.
So you are laboring under a lot of delusions about iPads.
> Who could possibly see more connectivity or functionality as a bad thing?
It is NOT more connectivity or functionality.
All the things you want to do by plugging in USB, iPad does them WIRELESSLY. That is MORE connectivity and functionality than a typical PC. It is a wireless device, it does not hook up to peripherals like a desktop PC. And if you do use wires, iPad again supports more devices than any other ARM system, it has MORE functionality.
And even if adding a standard USB port to iPad would have added functionality, consumers do not want their tablet to be 25% thicker so that it can support a USB port. How do we know this? 95% of tablet sales are iPads, the one device that prioritized thinness and wirelessness over USB. And less than 1% of those users bought the standard USB adapter.
There is more USB outrage in the mind of nerds who are offended that iPad is bringing computing to people without requiring CS/IT skills than there is in the mind of iPad users about anything. iPad users are like 94% overwhelmingly satisfied. You can get 6% of people to tell you the earth is flat.
Bad battery life has always been an option. You've had hundreds or thousands of choices of devices with bad battery life. Then along came one device with good battery life and in its first year, it outsold all other devices that were even remotely like it throughout the entire history of computing. Microsoft is now saying, we want to offer the second such device. You can choose to buy an iPad or a Microsoft clone of it or not. That is up to you. Or, choose to buy a PC if that is better for you. But imagining some funky device that is between an iPad and a PC is not actually an option. We have big PC CPU's running big PC apps that assume you're running on AC all the time, and we have small mobile SoC's running small mobile apps that assume you're running on batteries all the time.
Also: why on earth do you need just one computer? I had 1 in the 1990's, 2 in the 2000's, and 3 in the 2010's, not including phones and iPods. The number is going up. The number of things they replace is going up. The number of apps is going up. Microsoft gave away $1500 Samsung Windows tablets at BUILD, but you can get an iPad and a MacBook Air for $1498. That is a better setup. You can have the browser on your iPad doing research while you write a book on the Mac, with your book writing tool frontmost 100% of the time. You can read a Photoshop book on iPad while running Photoshop on the Mac. You can watch a Netflix movie on the iPad while writing a review of it on the Mac. Why have one device that is a bad PC and bad tablet when it is so easy to have either a good PC or good tablet or both?
> But to live on an iPad/Android style tablet, whether its x86 or ARM powered, you have some issues
You're not getting it. An iPad is a pad of paper. You don't "live on it." Nobody wants to take away your PC and force you to use an iPad instead. Steve Jobs did not get up at the iPad introduction and say, "get rid of your PC, we have something to replace it." He actually put up a slide with an iPhone on the left and MacBook Pro on the right, and he said "maybe iPad fits in the middle there." Survey says yes.
In 1950, the fact that you purchased a pad of paper at the stationery store did not mean you should throw your typewriter out of the window. However, the fact that typewriters exist does not mean that every user should have one, or that all writing should be done only on typewriters. For some people, a pad of paper meets their writing needs just fine. Today, it is the same thing. The people who had typewriters in 1950 have PC's today (1 in 6.) The people who did not have typewriters in 1950 are iPad customers today (everybody else.) The best part is, the typewriter/PC people are such writing/computing maniacs that they also have pads and iPads in addition to their typewriters and PC's, and that is very productive also.
A key thing to understand is that most iPad buyers say they bought it because it does MORE than a PC. If you can't understand that, then you are going to be scratching your head and cursing over the next 10 years. ARM devices already outnumber Intel. iPads already sell 2x Macs. At some point in 2015 or so, iPad-class computers will outsell PC-class computers. But the thing is, you are safe because there will still be pro computing systems (at least from Apple) and that market will be bigger than ever, even though it is only a fraction of the overall market. Notice that Mac sales increased every quarter since iPad shipped. These 2 devices are like a video editing studio and a TV. One does not replace the other. They build on each other.
But yes, the PC has to have touch. It couldn't be any other way. There are "buttons" on your screen that need to be turned into buttons. And once people have used an iPad, they look down on the mouse as last-generation. It does not have any redeeming features except it was technologically possible to ship it in 1984. If you need accuracy, get a pen. If you need to push a button, get touch.
And by the way, in spite of how you may choose to academically measure the processor performance of an iPad versus a PC, an iPad feels faster than a PC. It is more responsive and fluid. Many tasks can be accomplished much, much more quickly than with a PC. Instant on by itself embarrasses the PC as far as speed. And a 64GB iPad can feel very roomy. The OS takes less than 1GB, and typically all of the files that get on or off of there are compressed in some way: MPEG4 audio video, PNG and JPEG images, app binaries, eBooks (they are zip files), PDF documents. And all apps are optimized to fit into the smallest space, unlike PC apps which will go ahead and put many gigabytes of support files and such on there in case you need them. On iPad, those things are in the cloud, you get them from there over the network if you need them. How big are all the app installers in App Store put together? All the music in iTunes Store? How big is Netflix? That is there "in your iPad" even though you have only 63GB cached locally at a time. PC content assumes a big disk and no network, while iPad stuff assumes a small disk and always-on network. It works out to the same thing, basically: you're always running out of space.
Microsoft already told us Windows 8 would run on phones. Did people think Win32 would be there in Nokia phones? No. They will be Metro only.
Of course on iPads, they are also going to give you Metro only. How could it be any other way? More than 99% of all tablets sold were mobile-optimized. The software on them was built 100% for mobile use, which is the use case of a tablet, and as such, enables iPads to be 1/3rd the price of a Wintel tablet, 1/2 the size and weight, 2x the battery life, and 100x more popular.
If your device has an Intel chip, you will have the "Desktop" Metro app in your Metro. Only difference. In a sense, Microsoft is committing even more to mobile, they are making all of their devices mobile, all Metro, all-new apps, and Wintel Desktop is now an app you can get on the more expensive, bulkier devices that have Intel chips.
What this misunderstanding comes down to is that Microsoft can't Osborne Windows while they get Metro up and running. They just shipped Metro development tools a couple of days ago. The false impression that legacy Windows will be on ARM is beneficial to Microsoft right now because 100% of Microsoft apps are legacy Windows apps. But their Windows 8 Store does not even sell legacy Windows apps. Only Metro apps. And their ARM devices will only run Metro and Metro apps.
Their pitch that you could have the same (Metro) interface on your phone, tablet, PC, and so on is essentially true. But the phone will have a dialer app and the tablet will not, and the PC will have a Desktop app and the tablet will not. But they will all have Metro.
It's not at all about binaries or architectures. It's about batteries and use cases. The full-time batteries of an iPad or phone versus part-time of a PC. The use case of a PC versus the use case of an iPad. They are radically different. Everybody involved has to dramatically update their work to move it from PC to iPad. Including application developers. The user is always on batteries. You cannot do enough computation to heat up the device, never mind so much that you need to run a fan. You can't do a lot of cheats that you didn't even think of as cheats before. And the user may be standing up or walking, their computing session may last only 5 seconds, all that is not generally true of PC computing sessions. They may need to make a 911 call on the device, which is not true generally of PC computing sessions. The developer has to ensure their app does its business consistent with the new reality that the app finds itself in when it goes from a PC to an iPad or phone. Or users won't use your app.
Not just different builds. Different apps. It's not just the chips, it's the way the apps themselves are built, the assumptions that desktop apps make, that are incompatible with running inside what is essentially a computerized book. Apple did not just port OS X from Intel to ARM, they also had to shut down all but the most essential services, they had to introduce new kernel behaviors that were 100% about extending battery life to the extreme in order to run on a handheld device, even when that device is 75% battery, and they introduced a new user interface and a new developer interface so that users could use the device while standing, and developers could build apps that also started from the fundamental principal that you have almost no AC power. Desktop app developers were essentially thinking "the user is running on AC, and if they are not, well, too bad for them." Mobile app developers have to think, "the user is never on AC." It results in very different apps being made. Many different design decisions.
Fucking Apple Stores are not cut off from the world! Fully 1/3rd of all Apple employees work at an Apple Store with the actual consumers of the products. Every Apple Store is like a public entrance to the mothership. The Apple Store is like "onstage," and the mothership is like "backstage."
Yes, creative people need to seclude themselves away while they work their shit out. They need a refuge that is outside of time and space, and they need it to be distraction-free, which it very often is not in an office, with fucking business criminals running around having meetings and and figuring out new ways to fuck the customer over.
And if you work in front of a Mac, iPad, and iPhone all day, with your browser, email, Twitter, IM, 3 fucking FaceTime cameras, and so on, you are anything but cut off from the world.
And when someone is working at Apple, that *is* a kind of community service. I don't care that the company somehow figured out how to take a 40% profit margin on an iPad, I care that they are selling the best $499 computer ever, and in many cases to people who have never used computers before. In other cases, to people who have had many computers, but never one that didn't crash, didn't get viruses, didn't demand they learn I-T, and can show accurate color and render HTML5 correctly. In other cases, they brought computing to a location or task it wasn't in before. For example, they made a phone that runs a Mac-class native C multitrack recorder called FourTrack that I have used to write hundreds of songs over the past 3 years, wherever I was, whatever I was doing when inspiration struck. Thousands of other songwriters also, FourTrack is very popular. You have almost certainly heard songs that were written using it without knowing it, which might not have even been written otherwise. There is one song that the writer said he wrote while halfway up a rock face, and he stopped and recorded the song in his head in FourTrack on iPhone. He could have forgotten it otherwise.
With all the corporate malfeasance going on, a bought US government deliberately bankrupting the country to reduce corporate taxes by even more, the only reason you would be knocking Apple is you are starfucking. Everybody has a fucking opinion on Apple these days, most of them totally fucking misinformed. So tiresome.
Obviously, you plug the Gigabit Ethernet into a router and serve multiple computers with Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Then you can run Netflix all day in the living room and still have fast access from other systems.
And all Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet since the turn of the century, with the exception of older MacBook Air models that don't have Thunderbolt. That is a lot of data heavy users, video people and so on.
And any machine with Thunderbolt or PCI-Express has a faster connection than Gigabit, so the idea that Gigabit is too big for today's computers is not right.
If they are going back to the original film and they have to redo all the edits, can't that be done in 4K yet? It seems like a shame to be doing HD right at the end of the HD era.
The obsession with mountable files is about preserving the volume format. So you store an image of an entire DVD so that it can be either mounted as a DVD or burned to DVD as required. If you only stored the files off the DVD, then in order to burn a copy to DVD, you would have to re-author the DVD from scratch. If you don't have a specific reason to preserve the volume format, then of course you should manage the files as files, and transfer in a zip.
Another reason to use a disk image is encryption. On the Mac, it is fairly common to create an encrypted disk image, put some work on there, Eject it, and send or store the file, knowing it is just an AES-256 blob. The next user just has to double-click the file and enter the passphrase and a disk mounts, full of Photoshop files or an unedited novel or whatever.
iPad user: so tell me about these new Windows 8 tablets.
Microsoft Store salesperson: We didn't leave anything out! We're the only ones who consider a tablet to be a Full PC. So, for example, instead of just tapping a button on your iPad to install a pre-audited, virus-free, self-updating app onto all of your devices at once, you can install unaudited, virus-laden Windows apps by inserting a USB key into the side of Windows 8 Tablet PC, navigating to the icon that represents the USB key in your device tree, identify and mount the ISO disk image, close all other applications, identify and run the setup application, follow the 8-9 step install process, type in your 32 character hexadecimal license key, type in your personal information, authorize with the server (this may take a few minutes), reboot your device (this may take a few minutes). To update your software, navigate to the developer's website, download an updated ISO disk image, copy it to your USB key, and repeat the above installation process! It's the full PC Xperience!
We split the day into 24 parts, and with microtunings we also split the octave into 24 parts so quite obviously, the replacement for our archaic time systems is to sing the time in microtunings. Midnight? 440 Hz. 8 PM? 784 Hz. It's so SIMPLE!
Your idea about US times zones would never work. Central Standard is the least populous time zone, so you would be putting most of the US population way out of sync with the sun, including both coasts where all the action happens. The "correct" sun would be falling on big empty most of the time.
Also, people in Eastern Time Zone do not know that time zones exist. They just think that people in California and Asia get up late, and people in Europe and Africa get up early. When it is noon in New York City, it is noon, period, for people in Eastern Time, you are not going to break them of that, especially not when they have DC.
I don't think you're going to convince Californians that they have to stay up to 23:00 to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, either, and then skip surfing in the morning because it is dark and watch the sunrise out their office window.
I don't think it matters how many time zones we have. What matters is that they are set and don't change, so that we can make sure our software does the right calculations to make time zones transparent, so that a person in California sees "Meeting: 13:00" and a person in New York sees "Meeting: 16:00" and they both show up at the same time.
To move from what we have now to something else, there would have to be a huge payoff. I don't see it.
Yeah, standardizing the kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes and so on in 1000's was essential and brilliant. If you need to work in 1024's, then you can go ahead and do that, but very, very few people do.
I also think we should always use just one of the above measurements when doing a comparison. That is, express 2 gigabytes versus 500 megabytes as 2 gigabytes versus 0.5 gigabytes, if you want to make it understandable for the vast majority of readers.
I have a kind of affection for this idea, because I love the idea of 100 minutes in an hour.
However, it is a totally bogus idea. If you fall too much in love with the idea of bases of 10, you lose the idea of basing measurements on the real world, and the ultimate point of the whole exercise, which is to standardize each measurement. You can't standardize something that is so hard to use or to move to that nobody uses it or moves to it. Going from feet and inches to meters and centimeters makes things much easier, but going from 24 hour days to 10 hour days is not going to make anything easier. The day is still the fundamental unit of measurement in both cases. It doesn't matter if we split it into 10 or 24 parts, as long as we all split it into either 10 or 24 parts, not some doing 10 and some doing 24. The standardization of 24 is much easier to achieve.
10 hour days is sort of like how the HTML4 specification described how the Web ought to be in some glorious, academically-pure, future perfect time that never came, and 24 hour days is like how the HTML5 specification describes the Web as it is right now, it says "everybody is already using 24 days, let's make that the standard and achieve standardization overnight." Then we move to a debate of should we change the standard from 24 to 10, and what are the pros (very few) and cons (very many) of that?
The standard system of measurement is not US or Imperial, it is called International System of Units aka SI aka metric. All arguments against it have been exhausted long ago. Using any other kind of measurement is like using an AOL email address or a Windows computer you might as well get a hat that says "World's Greatest Grandpa."
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Honestly, just STFU about something you know absolutely nothing about, you tired fucking PC nerd.
> No. What's stupid is having a stupid little dongle instead of an integrated port.
The fucking ports don't fit on an iPad you dick. It is thinner than a fucking iPhone. If you don't even know that, why the fuck are you talking?
And it is not a dongle, it is a docking connector. Look the term up. It is a standard thing to do when you device is smaller than the ports you want to put on. It has been done hundreds of times by dozens of vendors over the history of computing. It was done in the 1990's when notebooks were too small for the giant PC plugs of the day. It was done in 2003 when iPod got too thin for its FireWire port (which is smaller than USB). It has been a necessity for iPhone and iPad which not only do not have space around the side for ports, their insides are mostly battery, there is no extra room.
Also, The iPad docking connector has 30 cables in it. That is way, way more cables than any other ARM device. That is MORE connectivity than a fucking desktop USB port. Thunderbolt is being added to those 30 cables right now. It used to have FireWire also. There is audio line in and out. There is DVI there, VGA, and HDMI. That is more cables.
When iPad is too thin to support even micro-USB ports, how the fuck do you expect Apple to fit fucking USB, Thunderbolt, DVI, VGA, HDMI, and audio line in out all around the fucking iPad?
What makes your tirade even stupider is you can buy a $29 accessory that breaks out SD card and desktop USB from the dock connector, and you can then HOOK MORE USB DEVICES ONTO iPAD THAN ANY OTHER ARM DEVICE. And less than 1% of users care to do this.
> Now I have an expensive little doo dad to lose rather than just being able to depend on my main device being up to the tasks I put it to.
No. That is bullshit. What you have is a way to hook iPad onto a TV, computer display, overhead projector, audio system, computer, USB charger of any kind, and likely Thunderbolt and other things later that you would not have had if it did not have a docking connector. Those ports will not fit any other way.
Instead of having zero ports, or just one USB port (which in many cases you would need an adapter anyway, since there are 3 USB connectors), you have an array of wired ports AND an array of wireless. But you are too stupid to use it.
> Your post is nothing more then mental gymnastics mean to justify a particular vendor's limitations post factum.
> Twist yourself however much it takes to make it seem like your pet vendor never made a mistake.
This is just the sound an asshole makes when it can't shit right.
You don't have to like Apple at all to use Apple products today. They are the best. The people who are rocking Windows XP in 2011 are the fanboys today.
Even Apple's biggest detractors admit they put on a clinic over the past few years. You sound like an idiot.
> Suggesting wireless is just retarded. It's slow, unreliable, and insecure.
Asshole, this is a WIRELESS device. If you don't like wireless, you fucking don't buy iPad.
There is a ton of reliable wireless in iPad. It can join either GSM or CDMA networks, it can join Wi-Fi n and hop from network to network automatically, you can join wireless MIDI networks in music studios, it can sync wirelessly with the cloud, it can talk to GPS satellites, it can act as a Bonjour/WebDAV Wi-Fi file server for any other computer to easily put files on and off, it can send audio streams wirelessly to speakers, it can send video streams to set-top boxes and TV's, it can remote control things via Bluetooth, and many more things.
> It's also ultimately MORE USER HOSTILE than a nice simple wired connection. You remember the user? (perhaps not)
No, wired is always more user hostile. WTF rationale would you have for the opposite?
Fucking consumers can't hook up a fucking TV and you want them to have to what? Plug iPad into Gigabit Ether
How fucking dumb do you have to be not to know that iPad has USB? Same as every fucking iPhone and every iPod back to about 2003.
Goddam you can get your head firmly lodged in your ass after 10 years of rocking Windows XP.
It is your nostalgia that is running at 5000 MHz.
This dude was going on and on about the fucking Amiga the other day and I was like, "if you were sitting in front of an Amiga right now, you'd run out of things to do within 5 minutes and you'd be on your fucking iPhone." I was 1000% right.
And again, the "tablet" (iPad) has an awesome browsing and email experience. I don't know WTF Google's problem is, but that has nothing to do with tablets.
Yes, Honeycomb has lag. Nobody is talking about Honeycomb when they say "tablet." That is like 0.001% of tablet sales. There is no reason some random shit that gets pooped out of Google in 2010 should have any relation at all to the Windows 95 that Microsoft pooped out for you in the 1990's. And neither of them have any relation to "tablets" in 2011. iPad does not have any lag at all, and is a joy to use. It is better than a PC at a lot of things.
For example: Web browsing. It is far, far better for the "buttons" on the Web to be actual buttons you tap with a finger than for you to push a mouse cursor around like an egg with a spoon. It is far, far better to scroll by flicking the page up and down than by using a scroller. It is far, far better to zoom with a pinch than with Command+plus or Command+minus.
iPad is better at GPS navigation than a PC. It's better at playing Scrabble. It's better at emulating an audio mixer, because it gives you 8 faders you can slide around and a set of transport controls. It's better at sketching than a PC. It's better at book reading than a PC. It's a better photo album. It's a better presentation device, you can drag your slides into a different order very intuitively as you talk, you can tap anywhere on the iPad screen and a virtual laser pointer appears on the presentation screen, and iPad has a higher-quality presentation app and iPad doesn't crash. iPad is a better computer than a PC to take to a meeting, especially lunch meeting. It's better for showing work to clients, pitching clients, than a PC the clients get a better look at the work and buy more often. iPad is a better car computer than any PC. iPad is a better computer for a new computer user who needs to be productive right away than a PC. iPad is cheaper than a PC if you include the cost of 3rd party software, which is much cheaper on iOS, and administration, which is much cheaper on iOS. And iPad is more reliable and more secure than a PC. Has no viruses at all, no native malware. If those are priorities for you, then it is better than a PC. For example, some banks give iPads away to their high-value customers and ask them to do all their money transfers only on the iPad, not on a Windows PC which may have malware that will hijack the transfer. The US government warns US citizens not to bank on Windows. So iPad is better at banking than a Windows PC. With an accessory Bluetooth keyboard, it's a better writing tool than a PC: 10 hour battery, auto save, auto sync to cloud, size of a magazine, instant on, no crashes, no distractions, and hundreds of professional writing tools used by thousands of top professional writers. iPad is a better HD video camera than a PC, and a better consumer video editor than a PC. iPad is a better consumer music and audio platform than a PC, and many of its apps are better pro music and audio apps than what you find on a PC.
I could go on and on.
The saddest part of what you said is that Microsoft has pretty much eaten its own young on Windows, there is very little good software on there. It all comes down to the apps. iOS and Mac OS are famous for having the very best client apps in the world. The most popular Windows apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel they are Mac apps. Those are Mac apps from the 1980's and Mac/Windows apps from the 1990's. The software on Windows just does not jibe with your idea that it is the only way to be productive. Not to mention, its sheer lack of quality measured in every conceivable metric.
> It's so odd how the people that want a tablet with the functionality of a real computer are looked at like they're bizarro.
That is because there are so few of you. Literally, less than 1% of the tablet market.
> What is so strange about wanting a fully featured device?
If by fully-featured, you mean Wintel, then what is strange about wanting that in a tablet is it increases the size of your tablet by double, the weight by double, the price by 3 times, and reduces the battery life by half. Most people do not want any of those things in a tablet, which is why there are 20 years of failed tablets before iPad.
Wintel has not even been able to make a computer as small as MacBook Air, let alone as small as iPad. People want small and light. I have women friends who don't carry their notebook PC's because they are simply too heavy. And you are saying "your electronic book should be a Wintel PC." It makes no sense.
Also, Wintel tablets do not have instant on, they do not have mobile-optimized apps, they are not malware-free, they are not reliable, they require IT/CS skills to use and manage even an iPod is better in every respect than that.
> It's like the people that were going off about how iPad's don't need USB functionality
> insinuating that there is no point to having USB on the tablet. Uh, what?
1) iPads need USB
2) iPads have USB
3) iPads cannot charge their f'ing batteries without USB
4) what iPads do not have is a standard USB port, because the body of the iPad is too thin to support them, therefore it has a docking connector that breaks out into 30 different cables, many, many more cables than any other device has, docking connectors are a very valid engineering solution to a device that is too small to have ports on it
5) the standard USB port not being there is no big deal at all because iPad is a WIRELESS device, and USB is not wireless you don't hook up a USB printer to iPad, you print over Wi-Fi you don't attach a USB MIDI interface, iPad can send MIDI over Wi-Fi, I use this all the time you don't attach iPad to a PC via USB mass storage to put files on or off via your desktop, you mount a WebDAV volume off the iPad onto any other machine on the network and drag files on and off via your desktop, and starting in about a month, you won't even attach iPad via USB to a Mac/PC to sync, the syncing happens wirelessly also, with the cloud
6) if you are really that much of an iconoclast, you can pay all of $29 for an Apple-made iPad accessory that has a desktop USB port and an SD card reader in one package (far less than 1% of iPad users bought this accessory), and you can plug yourself silly with your USB peripherals, because iPad supports far, far, far more USB peripherals than any other ARM device: dozens if not hundreds of audio interfaces, MIDI interfaces, MIDI instruments, keyboards, speakers, all still cameras, all camcorders, iPod accessories, and more.
So you are laboring under a lot of delusions about iPads.
> Who could possibly see more connectivity or functionality as a bad thing?
It is NOT more connectivity or functionality.
All the things you want to do by plugging in USB, iPad does them WIRELESSLY. That is MORE connectivity and functionality than a typical PC. It is a wireless device, it does not hook up to peripherals like a desktop PC. And if you do use wires, iPad again supports more devices than any other ARM system, it has MORE functionality.
And even if adding a standard USB port to iPad would have added functionality, consumers do not want their tablet to be 25% thicker so that it can support a USB port. How do we know this? 95% of tablet sales are iPads, the one device that prioritized thinness and wirelessness over USB. And less than 1% of those users bought the standard USB adapter.
There is more USB outrage in the mind of nerds who are offended that iPad is bringing computing to people without requiring CS/IT skills than there is in the mind of iPad users about anything. iPad users are like 94% overwhelmingly satisfied. You can get 6% of people to tell you the earth is flat.
Bad battery life has always been an option. You've had hundreds or thousands of choices of devices with bad battery life. Then along came one device with good battery life and in its first year, it outsold all other devices that were even remotely like it throughout the entire history of computing. Microsoft is now saying, we want to offer the second such device. You can choose to buy an iPad or a Microsoft clone of it or not. That is up to you. Or, choose to buy a PC if that is better for you. But imagining some funky device that is between an iPad and a PC is not actually an option. We have big PC CPU's running big PC apps that assume you're running on AC all the time, and we have small mobile SoC's running small mobile apps that assume you're running on batteries all the time.
Also: why on earth do you need just one computer? I had 1 in the 1990's, 2 in the 2000's, and 3 in the 2010's, not including phones and iPods. The number is going up. The number of things they replace is going up. The number of apps is going up. Microsoft gave away $1500 Samsung Windows tablets at BUILD, but you can get an iPad and a MacBook Air for $1498. That is a better setup. You can have the browser on your iPad doing research while you write a book on the Mac, with your book writing tool frontmost 100% of the time. You can read a Photoshop book on iPad while running Photoshop on the Mac. You can watch a Netflix movie on the iPad while writing a review of it on the Mac. Why have one device that is a bad PC and bad tablet when it is so easy to have either a good PC or good tablet or both?
> But to live on an iPad/Android style tablet, whether its x86 or ARM powered, you have some issues
You're not getting it. An iPad is a pad of paper. You don't "live on it." Nobody wants to take away your PC and force you to use an iPad instead. Steve Jobs did not get up at the iPad introduction and say, "get rid of your PC, we have something to replace it." He actually put up a slide with an iPhone on the left and MacBook Pro on the right, and he said "maybe iPad fits in the middle there." Survey says yes.
In 1950, the fact that you purchased a pad of paper at the stationery store did not mean you should throw your typewriter out of the window. However, the fact that typewriters exist does not mean that every user should have one, or that all writing should be done only on typewriters. For some people, a pad of paper meets their writing needs just fine. Today, it is the same thing. The people who had typewriters in 1950 have PC's today (1 in 6.) The people who did not have typewriters in 1950 are iPad customers today (everybody else.) The best part is, the typewriter/PC people are such writing/computing maniacs that they also have pads and iPads in addition to their typewriters and PC's, and that is very productive also.
A key thing to understand is that most iPad buyers say they bought it because it does MORE than a PC. If you can't understand that, then you are going to be scratching your head and cursing over the next 10 years. ARM devices already outnumber Intel. iPads already sell 2x Macs. At some point in 2015 or so, iPad-class computers will outsell PC-class computers. But the thing is, you are safe because there will still be pro computing systems (at least from Apple) and that market will be bigger than ever, even though it is only a fraction of the overall market. Notice that Mac sales increased every quarter since iPad shipped. These 2 devices are like a video editing studio and a TV. One does not replace the other. They build on each other.
But yes, the PC has to have touch. It couldn't be any other way. There are "buttons" on your screen that need to be turned into buttons. And once people have used an iPad, they look down on the mouse as last-generation. It does not have any redeeming features except it was technologically possible to ship it in 1984. If you need accuracy, get a pen. If you need to push a button, get touch.
And by the way, in spite of how you may choose to academically measure the processor performance of an iPad versus a PC, an iPad feels faster than a PC. It is more responsive and fluid. Many tasks can be accomplished much, much more quickly than with a PC. Instant on by itself embarrasses the PC as far as speed. And a 64GB iPad can feel very roomy. The OS takes less than 1GB, and typically all of the files that get on or off of there are compressed in some way: MPEG4 audio video, PNG and JPEG images, app binaries, eBooks (they are zip files), PDF documents. And all apps are optimized to fit into the smallest space, unlike PC apps which will go ahead and put many gigabytes of support files and such on there in case you need them. On iPad, those things are in the cloud, you get them from there over the network if you need them. How big are all the app installers in App Store put together? All the music in iTunes Store? How big is Netflix? That is there "in your iPad" even though you have only 63GB cached locally at a time. PC content assumes a big disk and no network, while iPad stuff assumes a small disk and always-on network. It works out to the same thing, basically: you're always running out of space.
Microsoft already told us Windows 8 would run on phones. Did people think Win32 would be there in Nokia phones? No. They will be Metro only.
Of course on iPads, they are also going to give you Metro only. How could it be any other way? More than 99% of all tablets sold were mobile-optimized. The software on them was built 100% for mobile use, which is the use case of a tablet, and as such, enables iPads to be 1/3rd the price of a Wintel tablet, 1/2 the size and weight, 2x the battery life, and 100x more popular.
If your device has an Intel chip, you will have the "Desktop" Metro app in your Metro. Only difference. In a sense, Microsoft is committing even more to mobile, they are making all of their devices mobile, all Metro, all-new apps, and Wintel Desktop is now an app you can get on the more expensive, bulkier devices that have Intel chips.
What this misunderstanding comes down to is that Microsoft can't Osborne Windows while they get Metro up and running. They just shipped Metro development tools a couple of days ago. The false impression that legacy Windows will be on ARM is beneficial to Microsoft right now because 100% of Microsoft apps are legacy Windows apps. But their Windows 8 Store does not even sell legacy Windows apps. Only Metro apps. And their ARM devices will only run Metro and Metro apps.
Their pitch that you could have the same (Metro) interface on your phone, tablet, PC, and so on is essentially true. But the phone will have a dialer app and the tablet will not, and the PC will have a Desktop app and the tablet will not. But they will all have Metro.
It's not at all about binaries or architectures. It's about batteries and use cases. The full-time batteries of an iPad or phone versus part-time of a PC. The use case of a PC versus the use case of an iPad. They are radically different. Everybody involved has to dramatically update their work to move it from PC to iPad. Including application developers. The user is always on batteries. You cannot do enough computation to heat up the device, never mind so much that you need to run a fan. You can't do a lot of cheats that you didn't even think of as cheats before. And the user may be standing up or walking, their computing session may last only 5 seconds, all that is not generally true of PC computing sessions. They may need to make a 911 call on the device, which is not true generally of PC computing sessions. The developer has to ensure their app does its business consistent with the new reality that the app finds itself in when it goes from a PC to an iPad or phone. Or users won't use your app.
Not just different builds. Different apps. It's not just the chips, it's the way the apps themselves are built, the assumptions that desktop apps make, that are incompatible with running inside what is essentially a computerized book. Apple did not just port OS X from Intel to ARM, they also had to shut down all but the most essential services, they had to introduce new kernel behaviors that were 100% about extending battery life to the extreme in order to run on a handheld device, even when that device is 75% battery, and they introduced a new user interface and a new developer interface so that users could use the device while standing, and developers could build apps that also started from the fundamental principal that you have almost no AC power. Desktop app developers were essentially thinking "the user is running on AC, and if they are not, well, too bad for them." Mobile app developers have to think, "the user is never on AC." It results in very different apps being made. Many different design decisions.
Everyone knows there are no civilians in US military actions.
Fucking Apple Stores are not cut off from the world! Fully 1/3rd of all Apple employees work at an Apple Store with the actual consumers of the products. Every Apple Store is like a public entrance to the mothership. The Apple Store is like "onstage," and the mothership is like "backstage."
Yes, creative people need to seclude themselves away while they work their shit out. They need a refuge that is outside of time and space, and they need it to be distraction-free, which it very often is not in an office, with fucking business criminals running around having meetings and and figuring out new ways to fuck the customer over.
And if you work in front of a Mac, iPad, and iPhone all day, with your browser, email, Twitter, IM, 3 fucking FaceTime cameras, and so on, you are anything but cut off from the world.
And when someone is working at Apple, that *is* a kind of community service. I don't care that the company somehow figured out how to take a 40% profit margin on an iPad, I care that they are selling the best $499 computer ever, and in many cases to people who have never used computers before. In other cases, to people who have had many computers, but never one that didn't crash, didn't get viruses, didn't demand they learn I-T, and can show accurate color and render HTML5 correctly. In other cases, they brought computing to a location or task it wasn't in before. For example, they made a phone that runs a Mac-class native C multitrack recorder called FourTrack that I have used to write hundreds of songs over the past 3 years, wherever I was, whatever I was doing when inspiration struck. Thousands of other songwriters also, FourTrack is very popular. You have almost certainly heard songs that were written using it without knowing it, which might not have even been written otherwise. There is one song that the writer said he wrote while halfway up a rock face, and he stopped and recorded the song in his head in FourTrack on iPhone. He could have forgotten it otherwise.
With all the corporate malfeasance going on, a bought US government deliberately bankrupting the country to reduce corporate taxes by even more, the only reason you would be knocking Apple is you are starfucking. Everybody has a fucking opinion on Apple these days, most of them totally fucking misinformed. So tiresome.
Bill Gates, 1999: "I don't understand why Jobs is back at Apple. He must know he can't win."
Obviously, you plug the Gigabit Ethernet into a router and serve multiple computers with Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Then you can run Netflix all day in the living room and still have fast access from other systems.
And all Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet since the turn of the century, with the exception of older MacBook Air models that don't have Thunderbolt. That is a lot of data heavy users, video people and so on.
And any machine with Thunderbolt or PCI-Express has a faster connection than Gigabit, so the idea that Gigabit is too big for today's computers is not right.
If they are going back to the original film and they have to redo all the edits, can't that be done in 4K yet? It seems like a shame to be doing HD right at the end of the HD era.
If anybody did, it would have been Microsoft.
Pretty sure Zip has a checksum.
The obsession with mountable files is about preserving the volume format. So you store an image of an entire DVD so that it can be either mounted as a DVD or burned to DVD as required. If you only stored the files off the DVD, then in order to burn a copy to DVD, you would have to re-author the DVD from scratch. If you don't have a specific reason to preserve the volume format, then of course you should manage the files as files, and transfer in a zip.
Another reason to use a disk image is encryption. On the Mac, it is fairly common to create an encrypted disk image, put some work on there, Eject it, and send or store the file, knowing it is just an AES-256 blob. The next user just has to double-click the file and enter the passphrase and a disk mounts, full of Photoshop files or an unedited novel or whatever.
No, but all Macs can do that.
All Mac and iOS systems use HFS+J.
Sometime in 2013 (2012 on the Microsoft calendar)
iPad user: so tell me about these new Windows 8 tablets.
Microsoft Store salesperson: We didn't leave anything out! We're the only ones who consider a tablet to be a Full PC. So, for example, instead of just tapping a button on your iPad to install a pre-audited, virus-free, self-updating app onto all of your devices at once, you can install unaudited, virus-laden Windows apps by inserting a USB key into the side of Windows 8 Tablet PC, navigating to the icon that represents the USB key in your device tree, identify and mount the ISO disk image, close all other applications, identify and run the setup application, follow the 8-9 step install process, type in your 32 character hexadecimal license key, type in your personal information, authorize with the server (this may take a few minutes), reboot your device (this may take a few minutes). To update your software, navigate to the developer's website, download an updated ISO disk image, copy it to your USB key, and repeat the above installation process! It's the full PC Xperience!
We split the day into 24 parts, and with microtunings we also split the octave into 24 parts so quite obviously, the replacement for our archaic time systems is to sing the time in microtunings. Midnight? 440 Hz. 8 PM? 784 Hz. It's so SIMPLE!
Your idea about US times zones would never work. Central Standard is the least populous time zone, so you would be putting most of the US population way out of sync with the sun, including both coasts where all the action happens. The "correct" sun would be falling on big empty most of the time.
Also, people in Eastern Time Zone do not know that time zones exist. They just think that people in California and Asia get up late, and people in Europe and Africa get up early. When it is noon in New York City, it is noon, period, for people in Eastern Time, you are not going to break them of that, especially not when they have DC.
I don't think you're going to convince Californians that they have to stay up to 23:00 to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, either, and then skip surfing in the morning because it is dark and watch the sunrise out their office window.
I don't think it matters how many time zones we have. What matters is that they are set and don't change, so that we can make sure our software does the right calculations to make time zones transparent, so that a person in California sees "Meeting: 13:00" and a person in New York sees "Meeting: 16:00" and they both show up at the same time.
To move from what we have now to something else, there would have to be a huge payoff. I don't see it.
Yeah, standardizing the kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes and so on in 1000's was essential and brilliant. If you need to work in 1024's, then you can go ahead and do that, but very, very few people do.
I also think we should always use just one of the above measurements when doing a comparison. That is, express 2 gigabytes versus 500 megabytes as 2 gigabytes versus 0.5 gigabytes, if you want to make it understandable for the vast majority of readers.
I have a kind of affection for this idea, because I love the idea of 100 minutes in an hour.
However, it is a totally bogus idea. If you fall too much in love with the idea of bases of 10, you lose the idea of basing measurements on the real world, and the ultimate point of the whole exercise, which is to standardize each measurement. You can't standardize something that is so hard to use or to move to that nobody uses it or moves to it. Going from feet and inches to meters and centimeters makes things much easier, but going from 24 hour days to 10 hour days is not going to make anything easier. The day is still the fundamental unit of measurement in both cases. It doesn't matter if we split it into 10 or 24 parts, as long as we all split it into either 10 or 24 parts, not some doing 10 and some doing 24. The standardization of 24 is much easier to achieve.
10 hour days is sort of like how the HTML4 specification described how the Web ought to be in some glorious, academically-pure, future perfect time that never came, and 24 hour days is like how the HTML5 specification describes the Web as it is right now, it says "everybody is already using 24 days, let's make that the standard and achieve standardization overnight." Then we move to a debate of should we change the standard from 24 to 10, and what are the pros (very few) and cons (very many) of that?
The standard system of measurement is not US or Imperial, it is called International System of Units aka SI aka metric. All arguments against it have been exhausted long ago. Using any other kind of measurement is like using an AOL email address or a Windows computer you might as well get a hat that says "World's Greatest Grandpa."