> I'm unsure why you'd allocate the luggage or pocket space to an iPad during a business trip, exactly the same space would transport a Mac Book Air.
I have both and they're not the same size at all.
MacBook Air is twice the weight of iPad (1.3 vs 0.7 kilos) and has half the battery life (5 vs 10 hours). MacBook Air is extremely thin, but in other dimensions, it is a full-size PC, big enough that it just barely fits on my lap on a train or plane. I can't open it all the way, in fact. iPad fits everywhere, and can even be used standing up. iPad has built-in 3G. MacBook Air does not. iPad is faster and easier to use for most tasks.
The thing is, you might as well say, "I don't know why you'd use a screwdriver when you could use a hammer." If you put the MacBook Air and the iPad on a table together, that is 1 computer. The Web browser and email and video playback and some other things are on the iPad, and the Web development and similar production tools are on the MacBook Air. I carry both all the time. I use the iPad 100% of the time, and about 50% of the time, I use the MacBook Air as well. The MacBook Air is an iPad accessory. I never use the MacBook Air alone. The Web browser on iPad is better than on MacBook Air. When I'm making Web content, I'm editing on the Mac and viewing it on iPad.
And it isn't really about luggage space. Both iPad and MacBook Air fit into a tiny little briefcase that most people don't even think has a computer in it, let alone 2. It's about times when all you want to do is surf the Web or watch a video or play a game and you just have something the size of a piece of paper in your lap and it's instant-on and the battery lasts forever. It comes out of the bag and you're using it literally a few seconds later, and it goes back just as easily, and it's always connected to 3G.
Nokia's high-end phones are also more expensive than an iPad, clunkier, slower, have worse battery life, and although they're smaller, the screen is smaller too. I wouldn't consider an N900 in place of my iPad, even if you bought the iPad from me and gave me the N900 for free.
> Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device.
Citrix Receiver was one of the first iPad apps. You can remote into any PC with it. iPad is a great dumb client for any PC.
If you want to run "applications meant for PCs" you are better to run them on a full-size PC rather than a netbook and use them remotely from a tiny iPad. Running them on a struggling netbook with half or less the CPU the apps want and the battery lasting 3 hours is not a better solution. Plus, you have to do all the complicated Windows/Linux admin and app installation again on the netbook. Better to just run them on your existing full-size system.
We're talking about iPad versus netbook here, not iPad versus laptop or desktop. We're assuming you already have a full-size PC with all your apps on it, and you're choosing an iPad or a netbook as a middle system between laptop and smartphone.
So when we're talking iPad apps, we're really talking about:
- native iPad apps - native iPhone apps - W3C HTML5 apps running locally or over the network - any app from any PC running any OS which you have access to over the network... all running in a device that's half the size and weight of a netbook, has 10 hour battery life, and unlimited 3G for a dollar a day.
Every app morphs the entire iPad into something else. It has a full OS X under there. There's not really any limit to what it can do. By comparison, PC apps are like one app that has interchangeable tools. You can edit a spreadsheet in Excel or a photo in Photoshop and it's essentially still the same device just with a different set of tools. The mouse and cursor and menus and keyboard and windows are always there. On iPad, it changes into an entirely different device easily, including content creation devices, like musical instruments or art tools or writing tools.
You have to be careful about saying it's only for consuming stuff. I write songs on an iPhone constantly, and many songwriters do. Being able to take your phone out of your pocket, push one button, and it turns into a 4-track recorder/mixer is very, very appropriate for songwriting. Later, you take those songs over to a Mac and open them in Logic Pro and start a production phase. So I don't really make music on the Mac anymore, I make it on iPhone, then I produce it on the Mac. There is even a remote on iPad that controls Logic Pro on a Mac, that replaces a $800 device.
Also, consider how much sketching is used in even very computer heavy tasks like software development. User interface designers often draw on a pad of paper for a few hours before starting to work on an interface in Photoshop. Sketching on a virtual pad of paper on iPad can be just as good or better. It's easy to take the sketches into Photoshop and continue.
Apple is only just now putting in the file sharing features for iPhone OS, but even so, every time you sync an iPhone OS device, it's entire contents are backed up to your Mac, and there is a tool called iPhone Backup Extractor on the Mac that pulls any app's data out of your backup. So data is very easy to get off an iPhone. Of course, most apps have Wi-Fi sharing as well or some other method. But starting work on iPhone and continuing on a Mac is easy.
The 199,800 apps you don't use also don't affect your use of iPad. The fact that it has content creation apps doesn't affect your use for consumption.
>> With an iPad, you can not only do what netbooks can do...
> Stop right there. The iPad is a cool device, but as a long-time Apple zealot, even I can't argue that it can do everything > a netbook can do. I currently use a real laptop, but if I did have a netbook, I could still run Finale or Sibelius (clumsily); > I could still run Apache, PHP, and a web browser to prototype a web site; I could still compile and debug software; > I could still run Photoshop (slowly); and so on.
The first problem is you're essentially expanding the conversation to iPad versus laptop. People who buy a $300 netbook to run $600 Photoshop are pretty much out of their minds. Netbooks are generally about Web, email, and watching video. A single Atom chip is not a modern PC. Adobe's Photoshop system requirements for some time now say "Pentium 4" or better. Does that include an Atom 1.6GHz? I don't know.
But even if I take you at face value, and you want to run full-size professional PC apps while on-the-go, you would still be better off on an iPad running Citrix Receiver and remoting in to your laptop or desktop PC. You would get 10 hours of use over 3G, you would get the advantage of the Core 2 Duo in your full-size systems, you wouldn't have to install all that software on a netbook, and you would also have access to multiple disks and various accessories you may have on the full-size system. The experience would likely feel faster also.
> Clearly when people say "real" keyboards, they are talking about something with more than > haptic touch response. Everybody knows this.
Keyboards a non-issue in iPad versus netbook. iPad supports standard Bluetooth and USB keyboards. My iPad plus 100% scale full Bluetooth keyboard is still much smaller and more portable than your netbook with its 89% scale keyboard with missing keys. Netbooks are universally reviled for their keyboards.
Whether a keyboard is important to you or not, that just doesn't enter into iPad versus notebook buying decisions. If you want a mechanical keyboard, you can get either device. Both support accessory keyboards. However, with iPad you have a choice of using only the onscreen keyboard when that's convenient that you don't have with a netbook.
> I own a netbook. My in-laws own a netbook. I've worked on probably 15 others, and they've all run Flash video > just fine with the exception of two that are old.
You have to run Windows to get even barely acceptable performance, because that's the only system where Flash can access the GPU. Even so, what you're calling "fine" is not fine compared to iPad. You're ignoring battery life. These are systems that are supposed to be run 100% of the time away from wall power. iPad is half the size and weight of your netbook, yet can run YouTube over 3G for 10 hours. So your netbook's Flash is not "fine". And you even admit that 2 of them can't run it. Video runs great on a 5 year old iPod. What is your netbook's excuse?
> Your issue with pricing goes the other way. If I want more features, I can buy a better netbook or laptop.
There is no netbook with the small size and weight of iPad, or the touch, or the ease of use, or the 10 hours of battery. If you're buying a laptop, now you're talking 3-4 times the size of iPad.
> My point was that even a bottom of the barrel netbook does way more than the nicest iPad
No, your netbook does much less than iPad. Your netbook does not have a multitouch screen. It cannot morph into thousands of other devices like iPad can. For example, when running StudioTrack, iPad is a multichannel audio mixer and recorder with real-time effects, which would be a $400 device on its own. Your netbook cannot turn sideways to have a portrait orientation for reading or for photos. Your netbook cannot become a board game that 4 people can play, sitting around a table. You can't draw and paint on your netbook with your fingers or a stylus. You can't watch unlimited Netflix movies on your netbook over 3G for $29.99 a month.
> So what's not cool about being able to browse Facebook normally
NORMALLY!?
What is normal about pushing a cursor around a screen like carrying an egg on a spoon?
Browsing is unparalleled on iPad. The Web has *buttons* and *scrolling* and *zooming*. Those are the 3 primary interactions you do with it. On iPad you press the buttons with your fingers, flick to scroll, pinch to zoom. It is *normal* to browse the Web on iPad. It's PC browsing that is strange.
> (for the nerdier among us) play videos from a home server or the internet that's not YouTube?
Go right ahead. That works great on iPad. All you need is an Apache server, you don't even need a streaming server because the iPad browser plays videos natively using HTTP streaming, so you can scrub an hour into a video you haven't downloaded yet. It is painless to watch a server full of videos on iPad. And there is also an app for that.
You're not going to win the argument based on video. iPad is a consumer electronics device made by a vendor with the largest online video store and the most popular video editing suite who make the dominant computer in creative fields and whose CEO is the largest shareholder in Disney and used to be the CEO and owner of an Oscar-winning movie studio. It's a video iPod with full-size screen. If your priority is video, you get an iPad.
> Netflix, Unbox, and Hulu are really big forces in the netbook market.
> Netbooks may not have a large keyboard, but it is physical, and it has keys.
I have an Apple Bluetooth keyboard I use with my iPad. It is physical, it has keys. The keys are 100% scale, not 89% as on a netbook. It is so small and light, that even when combined with iPad, the whole thing is half he weight and size of a netbook.
> Flash runs fine on every netbook I've tested it on. FUD.
No, Flash runs like shit. Unless you are using Windows, it can't access the GPU, which means it can't play full screen video on an Atom chip. Even on a Core 2 Duo, it will run the fan just to run an SD movie full screen.
Even under the best circumstances, Flash pegs the CPU, it reduces your battery life considerably. You can watch YouTube for 10 hours on a single charge on iPad. Next time you are using a netbook, go to youtube.com and see how many hours you get. That is Flash running like shit.
And Flash is the worst security risk of any software, and crashes more than any software. That is Flash running like shit.
Maybe you have the one fucking machine on the planet on which Flash actually runs well. I don't think so though. I think Flash has just trained you to have low expectations.
> Obviously every machine has limitations, but the iPad's are stupid limitations that don't serve much of a purpose other than vendor lockin or stupid pricing strategies.
I think that's ridiculous. There is no vendor lock-in on iPad, while there is on netbooks. The Web apps on iPad are W3C standard, not IE as on netbooks. The audio video is ISO standard on iPad, not Windows Media and Flash as on netbooks. Yes, the native apps only exist on iPhone OS, but Windows apps only exist on Windows, Linux apps only on Linux, we are pretty used to native apps being *native*. That's hardly vendor lock-in. Especially when you also have native-style HTML5 apps that run on all platforms.
> You can buy a $400 netbook and a $50 Sprint 4G card if you want to replace that $600 3G iPad
$400 netbook, plus $50 4G card, plus $60 per month for 5GB of data on contract for 2 years is $1890. $629 iPad 3G, plus $29.99 per month unlimited data with no contract is $1348.76.
So you save almost $550 with iPad compared to your netbook idea and you get unlimited data and no contract, not a contract for 5GB per month. That means you could buy the high-end $829 iPad and still save $350, enough to get a netbook as an iPad accessory for when you're in Wi-Fi.
> and you can do all sorts of cool things
Until you hit 5GB of bandwidth that month and the meter starts. With iPad, you can watch unlimited Netflix videos, unlimited YouTube, unlimited ABC or CBS TV shows, unlimited Skype, unlimited Pandora, all over 3G with no meter running. With your netbook you can only do a small amount of Web and email or you'll go over your 5GB and start being bled.
> such as type like a normal person
Any Bluetooth keyboard or USB keyboard works on iPad. Again, still smaller than a netbook even with an accessory keyboard.
> video chat
There will be a dock accessory for this for iPad soon, no doubt. Or USB webcams may be supported soon.
> do things in Flash
Like crash, or have your machine pwned, or burn out your battery in 2 hours. Flash only runs on Intel, which means 2x the size and weight and half the battery life for your Flash device. Flash is not worth that.
> listen to music in stereo
I have no idea why you think iPad can't play stereo music? It's an iPod. The headphone output has been described as having great sound, and same with the Bluetooth audio output, and both are stereo of course. It works with iPod accessories.
Are you talking about the built-in speaker? That has also been described as being great. Yes, it's mono, but it's 2 speakers, one for low, one for high. iPad is too small to have stereo separation from the speakers, same as a netbook. The idea that you would buy an iPad or netbook based on their built-in speakers, though
It has a real onscreen keyboard, and supports real Bluetooth keyboards, and supports real USB keyboards.
An iPad plus Apple Bluetooth keyboard is still half the size and weight of a netbook.
And netbook keyboards are garbage, 89% scale, missing keys. I wouldn't qualify a netbook keyboard as "real". A friend of mine who is a writer always carried a Bluetooth keyboard with his netbook, and now uses the same one with iPad.
> has crap multimedia format support
No, it's you who has crap multimedia format support. iPad supports vendor-neutral ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC, the "online DVD" that is standard in consumer electronics and built-into the hardware of everything, even NVIDIA GPU's. If you are using nonstandard audio video, that is your fault, not Apple's. The audio video on iPad is what music and movie publishers make, what consumer electronics companies support, and not some PC hobbyist junk.
To support Flash, Apple would have had to use an Intel chip (that's all Flash runs on) which would have meant doubling the size and weight of iPad. Not worth it. Most Flash sites already provide ISO media alternatives to mobiles such as iPad, and more and more provide them every day.
> and a crap web browser
The open source WebKit browser on iPad is gorgeous. It gets 100/100 on Acid, it's has hardware-accelerated graphics, and it's much faster than Firefox and exponentially faster than IE. It's a beautiful Web browser. The touch UI is meant for the Web. Every Web page is like a custom onscreen keyboard, an arbitrary set of buttons, and scrolling and zooming are integral to the Web also. With iPad, you press buttons, you easily flick to scroll, you easily pinch to zoom. The Web has never, ever been better.
Saying an iPad is "intentionally crippled" is hilarious when you consider a typical PC has a 20 year old BIOS and a virus-prone DOS successor that can't even wake and sleep right. And to make it "mobile" they shrunk it in the wash.
Fact is, you can install any open HTML5 application to local storage on any Apple device, and there are 200,000 native apps for iPad that are available with a 1-click install as a kind of bonus. Many are free. You can recommend them to your non-nerd friends (if you have any) and they can install them themselves as well, without I-T help, and without knowing what "malware" is.
Yes, there are a very small percentage of native apps that don't get approved, but there are also hundreds of thousands of blacklisted Windows apps, and about 10% of the Web is not visible in Google. You don't get 100% of any app platform. The only difference with Apple is they bolted the gate before the horses got out. Managed app platforms are the norm in consumer electronics, and Apple's is by far the most open. There are little kids who are iPhone developers.
So your complaint amounts to "get off my lawn you kids with your crazy rock 'n' roll... mutter mutter mutter!"
So what you're saying is: iPads are no good for having access to the net and email while on the go? Uh, right.
I guess what you're also saying is that people who value mobility won't pay 30% more to get something that is half the size, half the weight, and has double the battery life? And doubles as a reader?
You can't knock the iPad keyboard in a context of a netbook because netbook keyboards SUCK. They are 89% scale. I have a friend who carried a Bluetooth keyboard with his netbook for the past year and replaced the netbook with an iPad and continued to use the same Bluetooth keyboard. You can also hook a USB keyboard to iPad, and there are many people saying they're getting 50 wpm on the onscreen keys.
The other use you missed is video. On an iPad, you have 10 hours of stutter-free video with no heat and no fan. And it's overflowing with video, with Netflix, YouTube, ABC, iTunes.
A netbook has a plastic screen (easy to scratch) and plastic body (easy to scratch). iPad is glass (you need a diamond to scratch it) and aluminum. There is a rubber case for $39 as well as hundreds of other options.
iPad is also about 1000 times more reliable than a netbook, which requires PC admin. And iPad is instant-on and can sleep a month without the battery draining.
And the 3G plan on iPad is so cheap that over 2 years, a high-end $829 iPad with totally unlimited built-in 3G is cheaper than a $300 netbook plus USB 3G modem and standard $55/month 5GB plan.
I don't find your defense of the netbook convincing at all.
Macs since about 2007 can netboot wirelessly. Before that, you had to connect via Ethernet. But MacBook Air has no Ethernet, or optical drive. The way you install an OS is to boot from the DVD in another machine on the Wi-Fi network. Optionally, you can use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to speed things up, or a USB DVD drive. But a Wi-Fi netboot is the default way.
The Mac firmware is savvy about all of the system's hardware. It can also connect to Bluetooth devices, so your keyboard and mouse continue to function whether the computer is booted into an OS or not.
My understanding is this all works with Windows and Linux as well, although I only use Mac OS so I don't know from experience. The firmware is EFI so in theory it should work. I did see a Linux disk with a cute penguin icon on the boot screen of a Mac once, but it may have been attached via USB or FireWire, and that may have been the old Mac firmware on a PowerPC Mac.
Apple makes just 1 of each product for the whole world in almost every case. The only difference between an iPhone bought in San Francisco and one bought anywhere else is the government in question. There are not "US editions" and "international editions." Apple does not even make proprietary Verizon or Sprint iPhones to serve the US cell market of 3 overlapping monopolies, they run on AT&T only in the US because it's the only US carrier that is compatible with the world. So not only are these criticisms of Apple misguided, they're entirely opposite. International customers should be praising Apple for providing them with the exact same product.
Apple even sells power adapters that are worldwide-compatible. They have a "World Travel Adapter Kit" which is simply a set of various international plugs. You simply pull the US plug off your MacBook, iPad, iPhone, or iPod adapter and plug on the correct plug for where you are and it just works.
Is there any other US corporation that is so internationally-minded?
The numbers look pretty grim for netbooks since the pre-iPad hype that dominated CES, and they get worse after the iPad introduction and worse again after the iPad shipped. But even so, I wasn't really sure that iPad was killing the netbook until Thurrott said it's not.
Thurrott was pro-tablet right up until Apple reinvented the tablet. Now he will be anti-tablet right up until Microsoft has an iPad copy for him to promote.
The guy is paid by Microsoft and Dell and has no credibility.
He whined and whined and whined about iPhone v1 and v2 not having "such a basic feature" as Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications. Then when Microsoft announced they were killing Windows Mobile in 2009 and would be back in 2011 with "Windows Phone 7" which would lack both Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications, Thurrott cheered them. So, keeping score: not having Copy/Paste in 2007-2008 during your first 2 years in the phone market is just totally inexcusable, while removing Copy/Paste in 2011 in your 10th year in the phone market is just fine, no biggie.
He also said of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" that "he can't disagree more" with it. That shows Thurrott knows nothing about mobiles, where there is no FlashPlayer at all, and nothing about the consumer market, where vendor neutral standardized audio video is not just the norm, it's a religion.
To the actual issue of tablet versus netbook: it's clear that perceptions of the tablet and netbook have been changed, same as iPhone versus the smartphones of 2007. A month ago, HP released an HP Slate teaser video, then just recently they bought Palm and we hear the Slate has been canceled because Windows 7 is apparently not a mobile OS. (You don't say!?) Compared to a netbook, iPad is half the size, half the weight, double the battery life, and 1000 times sexier. It makes a netbook look like a pocket protector. Half the size and weight and double the battery life... that just can't be argued with. Even with a small Bluetooth keyboard added, iPad is still much more mobile than a netbook. And you can use a 100% scale Bluetooth keyboard and get real typing done.
The netbook had fatal flaws anyway. If you're going to have a keyboard, make it 100% scale. Every PC maker CEO spoke out against netbooks, even when they were most popular. So it would actually be surprising if we could have this Year Of The Tablet in 2010 and not see the netbook be very much affected. Walt Mossberg said iPad replaced 80% of his notebook use in the first week, so where does that leave a netbook? He's a techie. For consumers it is even worse, they are finding iPad replaces 95% of their Mac/PC use.
> Why doesn't the iPad support future AND current technologies (HTML5 and Flash).
The funny thing here is I bet you meant Flash is "current" and HTML5 is "future".
On mobiles -- like iPad -- HTML5 is 3 years old and universal, while Flash has not yet shipped and is of course therefore completely non-existent. In other words, on mobiles, HTML5 is "current" and Flash is "future".
Adobe has not yet shipped a FlashPlayer for ARM architecture at all. Here are the system requirements for FlashPlayer according to Adobe, as of today, May, 2010: Intel P4 2GHz or better with 2GB RAM. That's multiple times more power than any mobile will have for years.
If you read Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" at apple.com you will notice he says that Apple has been asking Adobe to demo FlashPlayer for Mobiles for 3 years now, on any mobile they choose, and Adobe has failed to do that.
In February 2009, Adobe announced that FlashPlayer for Mobiles would be on half of all smartphones by 2010. It's mid-2010 now and it has yet to ship. It is on 0 smartphones.
Recently, Adobe announced that FlashPlayer for Mobiles will ship with Android v2.2 "later this year [2010]". Android v2.2 only supports about 25% of existing Android phones. It takes 6 months to upgrade those phones, going by past experience. So we are looking at FlashPlayer for Mobiles being on 25% of Android phones by mid-2011. That's less than 1% of smartphones.
THERE IS NO FLASH ON MOBILES. STOP BLAMING APPLE. END OF STORY.
The HTML5 Web has been on mobiles for 3 years. There is still no FlashPlayer for Mobiles (aka FlashPlayer Forever.)
According to Adobe's current best-case estimate, by this time next year (mid-2011) FlashPlayer will be on 25% of Android phones (new and existing phones that can run Android v2.2). That's best-case. So features that you develop in Flash are exclusively PC-only right now and will be almost exclusively PC-only for the foreseeable future. There's no growth in PC's. Users are not putting down mobiles to go to a PC and use the Web. It's the other way around. If you're building Web content that doesn't run on a mobile in 2007 forward, what are you thinking?
HTML5 is on 100% of smartphones that are under active development. It's on about 50% of PC's (every Mac plus PC's with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera). It's in IE9, so it's coming soon to all PC's, either because users upgrade their IE to 9 or continue to switch away from IE to Chrome and Firefox and Safari and Opera. This is happening much faster than Flash is coming to mobiles. It's not hard to develop in a backwards-compatible way so that your HTML5 works universally, just losing some fidelity on IE6-IE8, which we can consider to be an end-of-life browser with the IE9 HTML5+H.264 rewrite.
At the same time, Flash blockers are hip. On the Mac, the Click-to-Flash Flash blocker won a design award in 2009. Tim Bray is Google's Android developer evangelist, and even with Android's recent embracing of Flash, Tim Bray runs a Flash blocker. Even though I have the Flash developer tool on my Mac, I run Safari with plug-ins and Java turned off for security and speed and stability. So Flash is losing presence on PC's, not gaining, even as HTML5 gains.
So even if HTML5 cannot provide as much flash (small F) as Flash in the near term, the deployment matters much more. The long-term prospects matter much more. The mobile penetration matters most of all.
And using HTML5 does not prevent you from adding a little Flash for PC users. But making these bullshit Flash-only presentations, which should never have been done, it was always supposed to be optional, that is a thing of the past. Even people who aren't Web developers are blaming publishers for blue legos now, which is where the blame always belonged.
I do both HTML5 and Flash development. I haven't made any new Flash stuff since iPhone shipped, because nobody wants it. "Make it work in IE" changed to "make it work on iPhone" overnight, without publishers knowing HTML5 or Flash or what. Now they want it to work on iPad. The bulk of my Flash work now is converting older Flash stuff to HTML5+H.264, though. The existing Flash apps are prototypes, mockups, for new HTML5 apps now. I haven't heard of anybody converting the other way, for example converting something made for mobiles over the past 3 years to Flash so it can run in FlashPlayer for Mobiles, if and when it ships.
So whether HTML5 is ready or not, it's all that we have going forward. Adobe failed to bring Flash to Mobiles in any kind of reasonable time frame. They blamed Apple in 2007 but then did not deliver for Android in 2008, and now it is just way, way too late. The transition is over, we are in the hairy early stages of the new era now. You just have to build using progressive enhancement and let the browsers catch up.
It's not an Apple Tax, it's a UK Tax. It pays for all kinds of things you take for granted in the UK that simply don't exist here in the US.
Here is an example of how it works for the terminally stupid:
* in the US, Joe walks down to his local Apple Store and buys an iPad for US$499, then on his way back home, while stepping over a family of homeless people who are dying on the sidewalk, Joe falls and breaks his leg. A passerby calls 911 and Joe is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, who refuses to treat him because he doesn't have insurance, even though he works 40 hours per week at a profitable multinational company for 3 years, he is still considered a temp and he cannot afford the cost of buying his own healthcare, which is 50% of his annual salary. So back in the ambulance and over to the worst hospital in town, still without so much as a pain killer to ease his suffering, where his leg is set by a disinterested doctor and he is billed $15,000. Total cost of iPad: US$15,499.
* In the UK, Simon walks down to his local Apple Store and buys an iPad for £429, then on his way back home, while stepping over a government surveillance camera that has fallen onto the sidewalk, Simon falls and breaks his leg. A passerby calls 999 and Simon is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, who treat him and bill him nothing. Total cost of iPad: £429.
This has already happened. iPod touch is a solid-state game cartridge with game console built-in. The answer to "game cartridge or cloud" is "both". The iPod touch is rewritable and you load more games onto it over the Internet.
iPod nano is a solid-state CD/DVD with a CD/DVD player built-in.
Similarly, whereas you buy Windows 7 Ultimate on a DVD, you buy "Mac OS X Ultimate" on a Mac mini for $200 more. The packages are even about the same size. A Mac mini is not quite solid state yet, but will be soon. The principle is right though: instead of a "dead" DVD, you're getting a "live" disk with the rest of the components it needs built-in. Instead of "requirements: Intel Core 2 Duo" you get an actual Intel Core 2 Duo.
It's not just that solid-state storage got cheaper and higher-capacity, the rest of the device got much smaller and much more portable as well.
Microsoft Research is a nerd-fest only. It's a hobbyist fair. Entertainment for geeks. It has nothing to do with actual product development.
Microsoft's product development is all done outside the company:
- Windows is a clone of Mac - MS Office is a Mac app - DOS was a clone of CP/M - XBox is a clone of PlayStation - Zune is a clone of iPod - Bing is a clone of Google
None of this stuff came out of Microsoft Research.
So yes, zero chance that this latest nerd-fest produces any products.
There is nothing stopping Adobe from creating an HTML5 export for Flash so that Flash developers can create apps that run on iPhone. Why did they put a proprietary Cocoa export on their Web app tool instead of open HTML5 export? Because Adobe is currently run by people with their heads up their asses.
Flash apps are made with ECMAScript, HTML, CSS, and MPEG-4. All of that runs in the iPhone browser without a proprietary Adobe runtime.
Either make Flash export HTML5, or make an HTML5 runtime for Flash, like Gordon, which one guy made and it runs Flash on iPhone.
It's not healthy to have one $16 billion company monopolizing online video. In a few years, websites will look more like TV stations. You lose the open Web entirely if you can't publish video without a $599 tool that only runs on Mac and Windows. All devices have hardware H.264 decoders now, even PC's. HTML5 has an API for controlling audio video, there is no need for Flash anymore. If no need, then it is just a toll booth.
If you want to port an iPhone app to another phone, Palm is the only one who have made that possible so far. They only just got started, but nobody else has a C API... other platforms expect you to rewrite your app in Java. So Palm OS has the best chance of being Pepsi to iPhone's Coke. Android has no chance. Not to mention less than 30% of Android runs v2. There's just no user see for developers.
Arguing over closed and open is a good way to kill time while Apple takes over the whole world. After a decade of XP malware, iPhone OS is bug-free for 3 years and that has spoiled corporate for the unprofessional bullshit the PC industry passes off as product. If you aren't malware-free (and Android has malware not to mention no encryption, remote wipe, and other problems) then you have no fucking hope. The world has changed.
Laughing at HP for buying Palm is asinine. The whole PC market has been pushed down to low-end crap. A smartphone or iPad sells for more than a PC. Putting Palm OS on a tablet enables HP to sell it for more than a Windows tablet, and to sell much more of them.
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> I'm unsure why you'd allocate the luggage or pocket space to an iPad during a business trip, exactly the same space would transport a Mac Book Air.
I have both and they're not the same size at all.
MacBook Air is twice the weight of iPad (1.3 vs 0.7 kilos) and has half the battery life (5 vs 10 hours). MacBook Air is extremely thin, but in other dimensions, it is a full-size PC, big enough that it just barely fits on my lap on a train or plane. I can't open it all the way, in fact. iPad fits everywhere, and can even be used standing up. iPad has built-in 3G. MacBook Air does not. iPad is faster and easier to use for most tasks.
The thing is, you might as well say, "I don't know why you'd use a screwdriver when you could use a hammer." If you put the MacBook Air and the iPad on a table together, that is 1 computer. The Web browser and email and video playback and some other things are on the iPad, and the Web development and similar production tools are on the MacBook Air. I carry both all the time. I use the iPad 100% of the time, and about 50% of the time, I use the MacBook Air as well. The MacBook Air is an iPad accessory. I never use the MacBook Air alone. The Web browser on iPad is better than on MacBook Air. When I'm making Web content, I'm editing on the Mac and viewing it on iPad.
And it isn't really about luggage space. Both iPad and MacBook Air fit into a tiny little briefcase that most people don't even think has a computer in it, let alone 2. It's about times when all you want to do is surf the Web or watch a video or play a game and you just have something the size of a piece of paper in your lap and it's instant-on and the battery lasts forever. It comes out of the bag and you're using it literally a few seconds later, and it goes back just as easily, and it's always connected to 3G.
Nokia's high-end phones are also more expensive than an iPad, clunkier, slower, have worse battery life, and although they're smaller, the screen is smaller too. I wouldn't consider an N900 in place of my iPad, even if you bought the iPad from me and gave me the N900 for free.
> Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device.
Citrix Receiver was one of the first iPad apps. You can remote into any PC with it. iPad is a great dumb client for any PC.
If you want to run "applications meant for PCs" you are better to run them on a full-size PC rather than a netbook and use them remotely from a tiny iPad. Running them on a struggling netbook with half or less the CPU the apps want and the battery lasting 3 hours is not a better solution. Plus, you have to do all the complicated Windows/Linux admin and app installation again on the netbook. Better to just run them on your existing full-size system.
We're talking about iPad versus netbook here, not iPad versus laptop or desktop. We're assuming you already have a full-size PC with all your apps on it, and you're choosing an iPad or a netbook as a middle system between laptop and smartphone.
So when we're talking iPad apps, we're really talking about:
- native iPad apps ... all running in a device that's half the size and weight of a netbook, has 10 hour battery life, and unlimited 3G for a dollar a day.
- native iPhone apps
- W3C HTML5 apps running locally or over the network
- any app from any PC running any OS which you have access to over the network
No shortage of apps.
> Can you watch a video that's encoded using Theora codec? [on iPad]
No, thank goodness.
No Windows Media or Adobe FLV or any other nonstandard formats either.
The iPad's community is the whole world, not PC hobbyists. It uses ISO standard video, not Linux video, or Windows video, or Adobe video.
The freedom to see the content of the video is prioritized over seeing the code that makes the video.
Every app morphs the entire iPad into something else. It has a full OS X under there. There's not really any limit to what it can do. By comparison, PC apps are like one app that has interchangeable tools. You can edit a spreadsheet in Excel or a photo in Photoshop and it's essentially still the same device just with a different set of tools. The mouse and cursor and menus and keyboard and windows are always there. On iPad, it changes into an entirely different device easily, including content creation devices, like musical instruments or art tools or writing tools.
You have to be careful about saying it's only for consuming stuff. I write songs on an iPhone constantly, and many songwriters do. Being able to take your phone out of your pocket, push one button, and it turns into a 4-track recorder/mixer is very, very appropriate for songwriting. Later, you take those songs over to a Mac and open them in Logic Pro and start a production phase. So I don't really make music on the Mac anymore, I make it on iPhone, then I produce it on the Mac. There is even a remote on iPad that controls Logic Pro on a Mac, that replaces a $800 device.
Also, consider how much sketching is used in even very computer heavy tasks like software development. User interface designers often draw on a pad of paper for a few hours before starting to work on an interface in Photoshop. Sketching on a virtual pad of paper on iPad can be just as good or better. It's easy to take the sketches into Photoshop and continue.
Apple is only just now putting in the file sharing features for iPhone OS, but even so, every time you sync an iPhone OS device, it's entire contents are backed up to your Mac, and there is a tool called iPhone Backup Extractor on the Mac that pulls any app's data out of your backup. So data is very easy to get off an iPhone. Of course, most apps have Wi-Fi sharing as well or some other method. But starting work on iPhone and continuing on a Mac is easy.
The 199,800 apps you don't use also don't affect your use of iPad. The fact that it has content creation apps doesn't affect your use for consumption.
>> With an iPad, you can not only do what netbooks can do...
> Stop right there. The iPad is a cool device, but as a long-time Apple zealot, even I can't argue that it can do everything
> a netbook can do. I currently use a real laptop, but if I did have a netbook, I could still run Finale or Sibelius (clumsily);
> I could still run Apache, PHP, and a web browser to prototype a web site; I could still compile and debug software;
> I could still run Photoshop (slowly); and so on.
The first problem is you're essentially expanding the conversation to iPad versus laptop. People who buy a $300 netbook to run $600 Photoshop are pretty much out of their minds. Netbooks are generally about Web, email, and watching video. A single Atom chip is not a modern PC. Adobe's Photoshop system requirements for some time now say "Pentium 4" or better. Does that include an Atom 1.6GHz? I don't know.
But even if I take you at face value, and you want to run full-size professional PC apps while on-the-go, you would still be better off on an iPad running Citrix Receiver and remoting in to your laptop or desktop PC. You would get 10 hours of use over 3G, you would get the advantage of the Core 2 Duo in your full-size systems, you wouldn't have to install all that software on a netbook, and you would also have access to multiple disks and various accessories you may have on the full-size system. The experience would likely feel faster also.
> Clearly when people say "real" keyboards, they are talking about something with more than
> haptic touch response. Everybody knows this.
Keyboards a non-issue in iPad versus netbook. iPad supports standard Bluetooth and USB keyboards. My iPad plus 100% scale full Bluetooth keyboard is still much smaller and more portable than your netbook with its 89% scale keyboard with missing keys. Netbooks are universally reviled for their keyboards.
Whether a keyboard is important to you or not, that just doesn't enter into iPad versus notebook buying decisions. If you want a mechanical keyboard, you can get either device. Both support accessory keyboards. However, with iPad you have a choice of using only the onscreen keyboard when that's convenient that you don't have with a netbook.
> I own a netbook. My in-laws own a netbook. I've worked on probably 15 others, and they've all run Flash video
> just fine with the exception of two that are old.
You have to run Windows to get even barely acceptable performance, because that's the only system where Flash can access the GPU. Even so, what you're calling "fine" is not fine compared to iPad. You're ignoring battery life. These are systems that are supposed to be run 100% of the time away from wall power. iPad is half the size and weight of your netbook, yet can run YouTube over 3G for 10 hours. So your netbook's Flash is not "fine". And you even admit that 2 of them can't run it. Video runs great on a 5 year old iPod. What is your netbook's excuse?
> Your issue with pricing goes the other way. If I want more features, I can buy a better netbook or laptop.
There is no netbook with the small size and weight of iPad, or the touch, or the ease of use, or the 10 hours of battery. If you're buying a laptop, now you're talking 3-4 times the size of iPad.
> My point was that even a bottom of the barrel netbook does way more than the nicest iPad
No, your netbook does much less than iPad. Your netbook does not have a multitouch screen. It cannot morph into thousands of other devices like iPad can. For example, when running StudioTrack, iPad is a multichannel audio mixer and recorder with real-time effects, which would be a $400 device on its own. Your netbook cannot turn sideways to have a portrait orientation for reading or for photos. Your netbook cannot become a board game that 4 people can play, sitting around a table. You can't draw and paint on your netbook with your fingers or a stylus. You can't watch unlimited Netflix movies on your netbook over 3G for $29.99 a month.
> So what's not cool about being able to browse Facebook normally
NORMALLY!?
What is normal about pushing a cursor around a screen like carrying an egg on a spoon?
Browsing is unparalleled on iPad. The Web has *buttons* and *scrolling* and *zooming*. Those are the 3 primary interactions you do with it. On iPad you press the buttons with your fingers, flick to scroll, pinch to zoom. It is *normal* to browse the Web on iPad. It's PC browsing that is strange.
> (for the nerdier among us) play videos from a home server or the internet that's not YouTube?
Go right ahead. That works great on iPad. All you need is an Apache server, you don't even need a streaming server because the iPad browser plays videos natively using HTTP streaming, so you can scrub an hour into a video you haven't downloaded yet. It is painless to watch a server full of videos on iPad. And there is also an app for that.
You're not going to win the argument based on video. iPad is a consumer electronics device made by a vendor with the largest online video store and the most popular video editing suite who make the dominant computer in creative fields and whose CEO is the largest shareholder in Disney and used to be the CEO and owner of an Oscar-winning movie studio. It's a video iPod with full-size screen. If your priority is video, you get an iPad.
> Netflix, Unbox, and Hulu are really big forces in the netbook market.
> Netbooks may not have a large keyboard, but it is physical, and it has keys.
I have an Apple Bluetooth keyboard I use with my iPad. It is physical, it has keys. The keys are 100% scale, not 89% as on a netbook. It is so small and light, that even when combined with iPad, the whole thing is half he weight and size of a netbook.
> Flash runs fine on every netbook I've tested it on. FUD.
No, Flash runs like shit. Unless you are using Windows, it can't access the GPU, which means it can't play full screen video on an Atom chip. Even on a Core 2 Duo, it will run the fan just to run an SD movie full screen.
Even under the best circumstances, Flash pegs the CPU, it reduces your battery life considerably. You can watch YouTube for 10 hours on a single charge on iPad. Next time you are using a netbook, go to youtube.com and see how many hours you get. That is Flash running like shit.
And Flash is the worst security risk of any software, and crashes more than any software. That is Flash running like shit.
Maybe you have the one fucking machine on the planet on which Flash actually runs well. I don't think so though. I think Flash has just trained you to have low expectations.
> Obviously every machine has limitations, but the iPad's are stupid limitations that don't serve much of a purpose other than vendor lockin or stupid pricing strategies.
I think that's ridiculous. There is no vendor lock-in on iPad, while there is on netbooks. The Web apps on iPad are W3C standard, not IE as on netbooks. The audio video is ISO standard on iPad, not Windows Media and Flash as on netbooks. Yes, the native apps only exist on iPhone OS, but Windows apps only exist on Windows, Linux apps only on Linux, we are pretty used to native apps being *native*. That's hardly vendor lock-in. Especially when you also have native-style HTML5 apps that run on all platforms.
> You can buy a $400 netbook and a $50 Sprint 4G card if you want to replace that $600 3G iPad
$400 netbook, plus $50 4G card, plus $60 per month for 5GB of data on contract for 2 years is $1890. $629 iPad 3G, plus $29.99 per month unlimited data with no contract is $1348.76.
So you save almost $550 with iPad compared to your netbook idea and you get unlimited data and no contract, not a contract for 5GB per month. That means you could buy the high-end $829 iPad and still save $350, enough to get a netbook as an iPad accessory for when you're in Wi-Fi.
> and you can do all sorts of cool things
Until you hit 5GB of bandwidth that month and the meter starts. With iPad, you can watch unlimited Netflix videos, unlimited YouTube, unlimited ABC or CBS TV shows, unlimited Skype, unlimited Pandora, all over 3G with no meter running. With your netbook you can only do a small amount of Web and email or you'll go over your 5GB and start being bled.
> such as type like a normal person
Any Bluetooth keyboard or USB keyboard works on iPad. Again, still smaller than a netbook even with an accessory keyboard.
> video chat
There will be a dock accessory for this for iPad soon, no doubt. Or USB webcams may be supported soon.
> do things in Flash
Like crash, or have your machine pwned, or burn out your battery in 2 hours. Flash only runs on Intel, which means 2x the size and weight and half the battery life for your Flash device. Flash is not worth that.
> listen to music in stereo
I have no idea why you think iPad can't play stereo music? It's an iPod. The headphone output has been described as having great sound, and same with the Bluetooth audio output, and both are stereo of course. It works with iPod accessories.
Are you talking about the built-in speaker? That has also been described as being great. Yes, it's mono, but it's 2 speakers, one for low, one for high. iPad is too small to have stereo separation from the speakers, same as a netbook. The idea that you would buy an iPad or netbook based on their built-in speakers, though
> ...except the iPad doesn't have a real keyboard
It has a real onscreen keyboard, and supports real Bluetooth keyboards, and supports real USB keyboards.
An iPad plus Apple Bluetooth keyboard is still half the size and weight of a netbook.
And netbook keyboards are garbage, 89% scale, missing keys. I wouldn't qualify a netbook keyboard as "real". A friend of mine who is a writer always carried a Bluetooth keyboard with his netbook, and now uses the same one with iPad.
> has crap multimedia format support
No, it's you who has crap multimedia format support. iPad supports vendor-neutral ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC, the "online DVD" that is standard in consumer electronics and built-into the hardware of everything, even NVIDIA GPU's. If you are using nonstandard audio video, that is your fault, not Apple's. The audio video on iPad is what music and movie publishers make, what consumer electronics companies support, and not some PC hobbyist junk.
To support Flash, Apple would have had to use an Intel chip (that's all Flash runs on) which would have meant doubling the size and weight of iPad. Not worth it. Most Flash sites already provide ISO media alternatives to mobiles such as iPad, and more and more provide them every day.
> and a crap web browser
The open source WebKit browser on iPad is gorgeous. It gets 100/100 on Acid, it's has hardware-accelerated graphics, and it's much faster than Firefox and exponentially faster than IE. It's a beautiful Web browser. The touch UI is meant for the Web. Every Web page is like a custom onscreen keyboard, an arbitrary set of buttons, and scrolling and zooming are integral to the Web also. With iPad, you press buttons, you easily flick to scroll, you easily pinch to zoom. The Web has never, ever been better.
> with no plugin or extension support.
Another reason is is a beautiful Web browser.
> I have a laptop, a netbook and an iPad. I use the netbook almost not at all.
That is the meat of this article, whether the numbers mean anything at all. There's no use for a netbook in an iPad world.
Saying an iPad is "intentionally crippled" is hilarious when you consider a typical PC has a 20 year old BIOS and a virus-prone DOS successor that can't even wake and sleep right. And to make it "mobile" they shrunk it in the wash.
Fact is, you can install any open HTML5 application to local storage on any Apple device, and there are 200,000 native apps for iPad that are available with a 1-click install as a kind of bonus. Many are free. You can recommend them to your non-nerd friends (if you have any) and they can install them themselves as well, without I-T help, and without knowing what "malware" is.
Yes, there are a very small percentage of native apps that don't get approved, but there are also hundreds of thousands of blacklisted Windows apps, and about 10% of the Web is not visible in Google. You don't get 100% of any app platform. The only difference with Apple is they bolted the gate before the horses got out. Managed app platforms are the norm in consumer electronics, and Apple's is by far the most open. There are little kids who are iPhone developers.
So your complaint amounts to "get off my lawn you kids with your crazy rock 'n' roll ... mutter mutter mutter!"
So what you're saying is: iPads are no good for having access to the net and email while on the go? Uh, right.
I guess what you're also saying is that people who value mobility won't pay 30% more to get something that is half the size, half the weight, and has double the battery life? And doubles as a reader?
You can't knock the iPad keyboard in a context of a netbook because netbook keyboards SUCK. They are 89% scale. I have a friend who carried a Bluetooth keyboard with his netbook for the past year and replaced the netbook with an iPad and continued to use the same Bluetooth keyboard. You can also hook a USB keyboard to iPad, and there are many people saying they're getting 50 wpm on the onscreen keys.
The other use you missed is video. On an iPad, you have 10 hours of stutter-free video with no heat and no fan. And it's overflowing with video, with Netflix, YouTube, ABC, iTunes.
A netbook has a plastic screen (easy to scratch) and plastic body (easy to scratch). iPad is glass (you need a diamond to scratch it) and aluminum. There is a rubber case for $39 as well as hundreds of other options.
iPad is also about 1000 times more reliable than a netbook, which requires PC admin. And iPad is instant-on and can sleep a month without the battery draining.
And the 3G plan on iPad is so cheap that over 2 years, a high-end $829 iPad with totally unlimited built-in 3G is cheaper than a $300 netbook plus USB 3G modem and standard $55/month 5GB plan.
I don't find your defense of the netbook convincing at all.
Macs since about 2007 can netboot wirelessly. Before that, you had to connect via Ethernet. But MacBook Air has no Ethernet, or optical drive. The way you install an OS is to boot from the DVD in another machine on the Wi-Fi network. Optionally, you can use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to speed things up, or a USB DVD drive. But a Wi-Fi netboot is the default way.
The Mac firmware is savvy about all of the system's hardware. It can also connect to Bluetooth devices, so your keyboard and mouse continue to function whether the computer is booted into an OS or not.
My understanding is this all works with Windows and Linux as well, although I only use Mac OS so I don't know from experience. The firmware is EFI so in theory it should work. I did see a Linux disk with a cute penguin icon on the boot screen of a Mac once, but it may have been attached via USB or FireWire, and that may have been the old Mac firmware on a PowerPC Mac.
Apple makes just 1 of each product for the whole world in almost every case. The only difference between an iPhone bought in San Francisco and one bought anywhere else is the government in question. There are not "US editions" and "international editions." Apple does not even make proprietary Verizon or Sprint iPhones to serve the US cell market of 3 overlapping monopolies, they run on AT&T only in the US because it's the only US carrier that is compatible with the world. So not only are these criticisms of Apple misguided, they're entirely opposite. International customers should be praising Apple for providing them with the exact same product.
Apple even sells power adapters that are worldwide-compatible. They have a "World Travel Adapter Kit" which is simply a set of various international plugs. You simply pull the US plug off your MacBook, iPad, iPhone, or iPod adapter and plug on the correct plug for where you are and it just works.
Is there any other US corporation that is so internationally-minded?
The numbers look pretty grim for netbooks since the pre-iPad hype that dominated CES, and they get worse after the iPad introduction and worse again after the iPad shipped. But even so, I wasn't really sure that iPad was killing the netbook until Thurrott said it's not.
Thurrott was pro-tablet right up until Apple reinvented the tablet. Now he will be anti-tablet right up until Microsoft has an iPad copy for him to promote.
The guy is paid by Microsoft and Dell and has no credibility.
He whined and whined and whined about iPhone v1 and v2 not having "such a basic feature" as Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications. Then when Microsoft announced they were killing Windows Mobile in 2009 and would be back in 2011 with "Windows Phone 7" which would lack both Copy/Paste and multitasking of 3rd party applications, Thurrott cheered them. So, keeping score: not having Copy/Paste in 2007-2008 during your first 2 years in the phone market is just totally inexcusable, while removing Copy/Paste in 2011 in your 10th year in the phone market is just fine, no biggie.
He also said of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" that "he can't disagree more" with it. That shows Thurrott knows nothing about mobiles, where there is no FlashPlayer at all, and nothing about the consumer market, where vendor neutral standardized audio video is not just the norm, it's a religion.
To the actual issue of tablet versus netbook: it's clear that perceptions of the tablet and netbook have been changed, same as iPhone versus the smartphones of 2007. A month ago, HP released an HP Slate teaser video, then just recently they bought Palm and we hear the Slate has been canceled because Windows 7 is apparently not a mobile OS. (You don't say!?) Compared to a netbook, iPad is half the size, half the weight, double the battery life, and 1000 times sexier. It makes a netbook look like a pocket protector. Half the size and weight and double the battery life ... that just can't be argued with. Even with a small Bluetooth keyboard added, iPad is still much more mobile than a netbook. And you can use a 100% scale Bluetooth keyboard and get real typing done.
The netbook had fatal flaws anyway. If you're going to have a keyboard, make it 100% scale. Every PC maker CEO spoke out against netbooks, even when they were most popular. So it would actually be surprising if we could have this Year Of The Tablet in 2010 and not see the netbook be very much affected. Walt Mossberg said iPad replaced 80% of his notebook use in the first week, so where does that leave a netbook? He's a techie. For consumers it is even worse, they are finding iPad replaces 95% of their Mac/PC use.
It's desktop software, right? Isn't it written in C? Doesn't work on Android, right?
> Why doesn't the iPad support future AND current technologies (HTML5 and Flash).
The funny thing here is I bet you meant Flash is "current" and HTML5 is "future".
On mobiles -- like iPad -- HTML5 is 3 years old and universal, while Flash has not yet shipped and is of course therefore completely non-existent. In other words, on mobiles, HTML5 is "current" and Flash is "future".
Adobe has not yet shipped a FlashPlayer for ARM architecture at all. Here are the system requirements for FlashPlayer according to Adobe, as of today, May, 2010: Intel P4 2GHz or better with 2GB RAM. That's multiple times more power than any mobile will have for years.
If you read Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" at apple.com you will notice he says that Apple has been asking Adobe to demo FlashPlayer for Mobiles for 3 years now, on any mobile they choose, and Adobe has failed to do that.
In February 2009, Adobe announced that FlashPlayer for Mobiles would be on half of all smartphones by 2010. It's mid-2010 now and it has yet to ship. It is on 0 smartphones.
Recently, Adobe announced that FlashPlayer for Mobiles will ship with Android v2.2 "later this year [2010]". Android v2.2 only supports about 25% of existing Android phones. It takes 6 months to upgrade those phones, going by past experience. So we are looking at FlashPlayer for Mobiles being on 25% of Android phones by mid-2011. That's less than 1% of smartphones.
THERE IS NO FLASH ON MOBILES. STOP BLAMING APPLE. END OF STORY.
The HTML5 Web has been on mobiles for 3 years. There is still no FlashPlayer for Mobiles (aka FlashPlayer Forever.)
According to Adobe's current best-case estimate, by this time next year (mid-2011) FlashPlayer will be on 25% of Android phones (new and existing phones that can run Android v2.2). That's best-case. So features that you develop in Flash are exclusively PC-only right now and will be almost exclusively PC-only for the foreseeable future. There's no growth in PC's. Users are not putting down mobiles to go to a PC and use the Web. It's the other way around. If you're building Web content that doesn't run on a mobile in 2007 forward, what are you thinking?
HTML5 is on 100% of smartphones that are under active development. It's on about 50% of PC's (every Mac plus PC's with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera). It's in IE9, so it's coming soon to all PC's, either because users upgrade their IE to 9 or continue to switch away from IE to Chrome and Firefox and Safari and Opera. This is happening much faster than Flash is coming to mobiles. It's not hard to develop in a backwards-compatible way so that your HTML5 works universally, just losing some fidelity on IE6-IE8, which we can consider to be an end-of-life browser with the IE9 HTML5+H.264 rewrite.
At the same time, Flash blockers are hip. On the Mac, the Click-to-Flash Flash blocker won a design award in 2009. Tim Bray is Google's Android developer evangelist, and even with Android's recent embracing of Flash, Tim Bray runs a Flash blocker. Even though I have the Flash developer tool on my Mac, I run Safari with plug-ins and Java turned off for security and speed and stability. So Flash is losing presence on PC's, not gaining, even as HTML5 gains.
So it comes down to this:
* 2010
- PC: HTML5 50%, Flash v10 75%
- mobiles: HTML5 100%, Flash v10 0%
* 2011
- PC: HTML5 70%, Flash v10 70%
- mobiles: HTML5 100%, Flash v10 1% (at best, using Adobe's own predictions)
So even if HTML5 cannot provide as much flash (small F) as Flash in the near term, the deployment matters much more. The long-term prospects matter much more. The mobile penetration matters most of all.
And using HTML5 does not prevent you from adding a little Flash for PC users. But making these bullshit Flash-only presentations, which should never have been done, it was always supposed to be optional, that is a thing of the past. Even people who aren't Web developers are blaming publishers for blue legos now, which is where the blame always belonged.
I do both HTML5 and Flash development. I haven't made any new Flash stuff since iPhone shipped, because nobody wants it. "Make it work in IE" changed to "make it work on iPhone" overnight, without publishers knowing HTML5 or Flash or what. Now they want it to work on iPad. The bulk of my Flash work now is converting older Flash stuff to HTML5+H.264, though. The existing Flash apps are prototypes, mockups, for new HTML5 apps now. I haven't heard of anybody converting the other way, for example converting something made for mobiles over the past 3 years to Flash so it can run in FlashPlayer for Mobiles, if and when it ships.
So whether HTML5 is ready or not, it's all that we have going forward. Adobe failed to bring Flash to Mobiles in any kind of reasonable time frame. They blamed Apple in 2007 but then did not deliver for Android in 2008, and now it is just way, way too late. The transition is over, we are in the hairy early stages of the new era now. You just have to build using progressive enhancement and let the browsers catch up.
It's not an Apple Tax, it's a UK Tax. It pays for all kinds of things you take for granted in the UK that simply don't exist here in the US.
Here is an example of how it works for the terminally stupid:
* in the US, Joe walks down to his local Apple Store and buys an iPad for US$499, then on his way back home, while stepping over a family of homeless people who are dying on the sidewalk, Joe falls and breaks his leg. A passerby calls 911 and Joe is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, who refuses to treat him because he doesn't have insurance, even though he works 40 hours per week at a profitable multinational company for 3 years, he is still considered a temp and he cannot afford the cost of buying his own healthcare, which is 50% of his annual salary. So back in the ambulance and over to the worst hospital in town, still without so much as a pain killer to ease his suffering, where his leg is set by a disinterested doctor and he is billed $15,000. Total cost of iPad: US$15,499.
* In the UK, Simon walks down to his local Apple Store and buys an iPad for £429, then on his way back home, while stepping over a government surveillance camera that has fallen onto the sidewalk, Simon falls and breaks his leg. A passerby calls 999 and Simon is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, who treat him and bill him nothing. Total cost of iPad: £429.
So STFU. Apple tax! What a fucking asshole.
This has already happened. iPod touch is a solid-state game cartridge with game console built-in. The answer to "game cartridge or cloud" is "both". The iPod touch is rewritable and you load more games onto it over the Internet.
iPod nano is a solid-state CD/DVD with a CD/DVD player built-in.
Similarly, whereas you buy Windows 7 Ultimate on a DVD, you buy "Mac OS X Ultimate" on a Mac mini for $200 more. The packages are even about the same size. A Mac mini is not quite solid state yet, but will be soon. The principle is right though: instead of a "dead" DVD, you're getting a "live" disk with the rest of the components it needs built-in. Instead of "requirements: Intel Core 2 Duo" you get an actual Intel Core 2 Duo.
It's not just that solid-state storage got cheaper and higher-capacity, the rest of the device got much smaller and much more portable as well.
We kill them all and take what's theirs and hear the lamentations of the women, etc. That is clear.
Truly, if there is life on Mars I think that will cause us to go there and rape it even sooner than otherwise.
Microsoft Research is a nerd-fest only. It's a hobbyist fair. Entertainment for geeks. It has nothing to do with actual product development.
Microsoft's product development is all done outside the company:
- Windows is a clone of Mac
- MS Office is a Mac app
- DOS was a clone of CP/M
- XBox is a clone of PlayStation
- Zune is a clone of iPod
- Bing is a clone of Google
None of this stuff came out of Microsoft Research.
So yes, zero chance that this latest nerd-fest produces any products.
There is nothing stopping Adobe from creating an HTML5 export for Flash so that Flash developers can create apps that run on iPhone. Why did they put a proprietary Cocoa export on their Web app tool instead of open HTML5 export? Because Adobe is currently run by people with their heads up their asses.
Flash apps are made with ECMAScript, HTML, CSS, and MPEG-4. All of that runs in the iPhone browser without a proprietary Adobe runtime.
Either make Flash export HTML5, or make an HTML5 runtime for Flash, like Gordon, which one guy made and it runs Flash on iPhone.
H.264 is the online successor to the DVD. It's quality and universality is worth paying for. This is great news for Ubuntu.
It's not healthy to have one $16 billion company monopolizing online video. In a few years, websites will look more like TV stations. You lose the open Web entirely if you can't publish video without a $599 tool that only runs on Mac and Windows. All devices have hardware H.264 decoders now, even PC's. HTML5 has an API for controlling audio video, there is no need for Flash anymore. If no need, then it is just a toll booth.
If you want to port an iPhone app to another phone, Palm is the only one who have made that possible so far. They only just got started, but nobody else has a C API ... other platforms expect you to rewrite your app in Java. So Palm OS has the best chance of being Pepsi to iPhone's Coke. Android has no chance. Not to mention less than 30% of Android runs v2. There's just no user see for developers.
Arguing over closed and open is a good way to kill time while Apple takes over the whole world. After a decade of XP malware, iPhone OS is bug-free for 3 years and that has spoiled corporate for the unprofessional bullshit the PC industry passes off as product. If you aren't malware-free (and Android has malware not to mention no encryption, remote wipe, and other problems) then you have no fucking hope. The world has changed.
Laughing at HP for buying Palm is asinine. The whole PC market has been pushed down to low-end crap. A smartphone or iPad sells for more than a PC. Putting Palm OS on a tablet enables HP to sell it for more than a Windows tablet, and to sell much more of them.