If you create a complete solution, you can tune it for best performance, you can make it easier and cheaper to deploy, you can guarantee a certain level of quality, you can include a warranty, you can harden it in ways that software alone can't.
You use a meta tag to turn on GPU acceleration in Safari. It even works on iPhone. So this is disingenuous. If you deploy something like this, you add the meta tag to turn on layers in Safari.
Plenty of Jobs in Apple II, Woz loves iPhone
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The Apple Two
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There is plenty of Jobs in Apple II. The fact that it is a finished personal computer, not a kit, is Jobs. The fact that the enclosure was made by designers, which is still controversial today in PC's, is pure Jobs. Jobs also pushed Woz to do his best work. Woz has also said, if not for Jobs, he would have worked on some anonymous project at HP or something. The idea that you can say the Apple II is Woz only is bullshit. The fact that it is such a balanced and holistically sound product in so many ways is the best thing about it.
As for the iPhone and iPad, Woz fucking loves them. He carries 2 iPhones everywhere, and I would be surprised if there is ever a time for the rest of his life when he ventures more than 2 meters from an iPad. He was at the Apple Store on iPad launch day like he's been there for every other product launch, soaking in the community he helped start. Woz came to grips long ago with the idea that computers are also for music hackers, movie hackers, novel hackers, and so on, not just for computer hackers. An iPhone or iPad does not prevent you from getting your computer hacking done. Nothing typically prevents a computer hacker from getting their hacking done. And you can program iPad in open HTML5, installed off your own Web site, or in managed Cocoa, hosted for free and optionally sold with very hacker-friendly terms by Apple. Or, you can contribute to fucking BSD if you want to hack the lower levels. It's a fucking great device for hackers. It's the best device for digital comic books ever.
Further, every Apple product has followed in the engineering tradition started by Woz. The A4 in iPad is very much in the spirit of the Apple II. The A4 is not special because of what they added to it, or loaded it down with, it's special in that they took a bunch of stuff out to make it smaller and lower power. For example, the standard ARM design has 3 USB and a Java interpreter. The A4 has 1 USB and no Java. It's very much in the spirit of Apple II where you had to do much more with much less.
Also, have you seen the videos of little babies using iPads? That is the kind of thing that makes Woz lose his fucking mind with happiness. I would bet Woz is as proud of iPad as any Apple product ever, including Apple II. Little kids who don't have the motor coordination to use a mouse are working with iPads without even being shown how to use the fucking things.
So I disagree with the whole premise of the article. I think it's bullshit to invent some schism between Jobs and Woz.
Also, it incredibly stupid to say that Woz would think Apple had finally lost its way with iPad. They lost their fucking way from 1985-1995 without Jobs. The NeXT project started at Apple as "Big Mac" and should have been completed at Apple. When Apple lost their way is not controversial. It's well known.
You're supposed to be typing on your laptop
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> I am typing this review on my laptop.
The iPad is a printer. It replaces your printer. Nobody ever said it replaces your laptop. You're supposed to be typing the review on your laptop, in the same way that you would type your review on a typewriter if it was 1960. But thanks to the iPad, I don't have to *read* your review on a typewriter.
I'm tired of Google's 10 obfuscated links per query. You have to do a lot of mental calculation to determine if that's the link you want in many cases. It's actually really opaque. Apple would create a search engine for consumers and make it a much better experience. Guaranteed they would come in with some kind of twist that make Google Search look like a hand-cranked antique. They would likely also leverage their very extensive video knowledge (not just selling in iTunes, but also QuickTime, which is like the Unix of video creation) so that you could find video effectively. They might even promote it as being for users who want to find video.
Apple's Spotlight client search is much better than what you find on other platforms, so it isn't like they're starting from scratch. And iTunes has its own built-in search engine. A Web index is really just expanding their search.
Google's weakness is that they're all Ph.D computer nerds and most consumers are not. That's why you see that Android is used overwhelmingly by computer nerds. Google has almost no designers and artists. Ask yourself why the 10 results don't show me a little thumbnail of the page, even if that comes in after the results, that would be much more helpful in a lot of cases. Why isn't there an option at least to turn that on? Apple's search would likely be very, very graphical.
If you remember the flap recently where people were trying to login to Facebook from a page that was not Facebook but was the #1 Google result for "Facebook login" then realize that is a Google Fail right there. That is people just typing words in and taking the first result. They're not even pressing "I'm feeling lucky" which would take them right there, they're going to the 10 results and just picking the top one without reading. I've seen this behavior again and again when training users. That's how most people "use" Google. They barely scratch the surface. Apple doesn't have to compete with the whole thing, just that surface 0.01% that most users are using.
Google is vulnerable on privacy with Eric Schmidt recently saying you don't have any, and with them turning on Buzz the way they did. In the same way that Apple doesn't have to make very much money on iTunes Store (because it sells devices that they make money on) they don't have to make very much money in search and ads. They can out-privacy Google easily.
Google is vulnerable on copyright, where they recently pissed off every book author in the world, just as Apple is opening a bookstore.
AdWords is great but it's a lot of work for the advertiser. Apple's customers are a very desirable demographic. If they can make an ad platform that lets you reach Apple users for less work and less money than AdWords, many people would be very interested in that. Only 1 in 10 PC's is a Mac, but 9 out of 10 high-end PC's is a Mac. What if there was some link to Apple's credit card database, so that if a user comes in to your site via an ad on Apple's search engine, they can pay with their iTunes account?
Google is obviously just searching the Web. Apple can offer the iTunes Store, their native app platforms, for example, enabling you to find something in the print/iPad edition of TIME. They could even do some kind of peer-to-peer from their client platforms, where you find what you're looking for in the public folder of somebody else's Mac. Which every Mac already has. The Web is the common space of the digital world, not the whole digital world.
And Apple has a higher market cap and more money in the bank than Google. You can't dismiss it when any company that is bigger than you comes into your space. When that company is on such a roll that people who want to knock them point to the Power Mac G4 Cube as their awesome failure, that is really something to be concerned with. The Cube predates the iPod that is so long ago, and it was a profitable product (although not very) and it enjoyed a very loyal and even cult following even years after they stopped making it. Many companies would love to
Corporations will tell you that the US has the highest tax rate, but there are all these loop holes so the US actually has the lowest tax rate. There should be a minimum tax rate for corporations so that after they do all their loop holes, it can only get them down to 20% or something like that, not to zero.
They will say they can't afford it, but that is BS. If you apply it equally, then it has zero impact on competitive advantage. But every corporation would receive massive benefits from it as their pool of workers got healthier and better educated and the roads got better and telecommunications got better and so on. The government is way underfunded in the US, and it spends a ton of money on weapons, so it's even worse.
The article says *their* first personal computer. In 1980, the Apple II was 3 years old and VisiCalc had been out for a year. Nobody was creating *the* first PC at that time.
You run the Flash games natively, you don't pretend they're part of the Web.
Since the beginning of Flash, you could export your app as Mac or Windows native, and lately you can export for iPhone also. With Android and Blackberry targets you're looking at a great future for Flash as a mobile app tool. With HTML5 export it could be a great Web tool also.
But cutting a hole in the browser to show a Mac/PC app through is over now that the Web is on diverse platforms and interfaces. The HTML5 Web has been on mobiles for 3 years and there is no FlashPlayer there yet. Mobiles have hardware video players and FlashPlayer is a battery hog, so that is done.
I have some Flash games on my iPhone right now, but they run natively. iPhone is the only mobile that runs Flash, even though Adobe will tell you it's the only mobile that doesn't.
The little bugs add up, and users consider your software and even computers in general to be very unreliable these days. The PC has such a bad reputation that users just openly mock it all the time. It's expected to suck. Microsoft software especially is expected to have bugs. The whole platform is just a big bugfest, a race to the bottom in quality.
Part of why Apple has been making hay over the past decade is that their software is just more reliable than what people have come to expect. They spent years putting a Unix core under the Mac and they were mocked for it, "why do consumers need that level of reliability?" Now, it's typical for a Mac never to crash, typical for an iPhone never to crash. Users may not even consciously be able to explain that, but it's part of what they love and why they come back.
Thr truth is, you can't parse out the right level of quality you're "supposed" to ship. You have to take pride in your work at every level. Software is layered, all dependencies... if you don't shoot for perfect you will never even get good. And you'll get into the race to the bottom, making Wal-Mart software. "Hey. we have 1 less bug thatn our competition, break out the champagne!"
Generally speaking, users hate computers. No wonder the PC is being replaced by mobiles with simplified software and a much, much higher expectation of quality.
So there is always damage from bugs. It may not be measured in this quarter's report, but you can see your whole product or company or platform hurt by it long-term.
For the same reason we standardize markup around W3C HTML5, we standardize video around MPEG-4 H.264. We need to be able to make just one Web app and have it work on any browser from any manufacturer. We need to be able to make just one video and have it work in any video player from any manufacturer. If we don't have that, then consumers cannot choose their own preferred browser, or preferred media player. They get stuck using IE6 or Windows Media Player solely to decode nonstandard Web apps and video. It's not acceptable.
Modern consumer electronics devices have one video codec burned into hardware, and that is MPEG-4 H.264. This is almost 10 years old now. Same as DVD players all had MPEG-2. That's the reason the H.264 codec exists. If you want to publish a video that will play on iPod and other media players, iPhone and other smartphones, various set-top boxes, both FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player, both YouTube and iTunes, that is H.264. If you want to play video that was made with Flip camcorders, or Kodak camcorders, or Canon cameras, or Nikon cameras, or Panasonic cameras, or iPod/iPhone, that is H.264.
A key thing to understand is that MPEG-4 is not owned by any one company. The patents are not held by any one company. They are put into a pool and licensed equally to all comers. This puts all the consumer electronics manufacturers on equal footing. Flip is not going to cease to exist one day because a submarine patent takes all their devices off the market. The entire MPEG-4 group would address the submarine patent, all the manufacturers are protected from litigation in this way. That's just not true with Ogg.
On a Mac/PC, if you are somewhat technical, you can load all kinds of software codecs, most of which are made for authoring or some other special purpose, not made for consumer playback. Same as you can happily make Web apps for IE6 if your company uses IE6. But if you want to share Web apps with the world, you use HTML5. If you want to publish video for the world, you use H.264.
Also, you have to understand that video authoring tools all work with H.264 for many years now, and not with nonstandard formats. Where you see Ogg video, or Windows Media, or Real Media, or any other nonstandard media, they were very likely created from H.264.
This all has nothing to do with HTML5. As I said, H.264 is almost 10 years old and both YouTube and iTunes and both FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player play it. That *is* Web video. H.264 plays in Firefox today, and will play there tomorrow. HTML5 standardizes *markup* not video. So browsers now have to become video players. If Firefox doesn't want to do that, then they will see their users make an exodus for Chrome or Safari. There isn't any way to turn back time to when Ogg was current technology and rewrite history and re-encode the incredible amount of video that is stored in H.264.
If you imagine that Mozilla was saying "we can't support UTF-8" that is the same as them not supporting H.264. The UTF-8 text is already out there, and there's no other technology to replace it, and that is the same with H.264 video. A Web browser that can't play YouTube is not a Web browser.
You can't charge for the Web. The experience that most users get sucks. They are in IE on a PC and it sucks. There are too many other sources that also suck to bother paying, with very rare exception.
They should be making non-Web content to charge for. For example, iPad apps, or eBooks, and so on. And advertise that on your Web site.
Think of a Sunday newspaper with a magazine in it. Make the newspaper free (Web), charge a low price for the magazine (eBook). Make the part you pay for downloadable and rich in photos and videos and audio. Make the Web compete with that.
The reason HBO worked was it was something née and different from free ad-supported TV. They didn't try to take NBC to a paid model.
> base 2 number system, which is ultimately the most > important base system for people working with computers
That is a truly ridiculous statement. "People working with computers" is EVERYONE. And they all have 10 fingers and count in base 10 and have standard measurements based on 10's in which a kilometer is 1000 meters.
You're doing the elitest programmer priesthood thing, but even there you are wrong. Programmers also use maps and drive cars and none have 10.24 fingers. What's more, computer programs have to work internationally, and be maintained by arbitrary programmers, so they need to follow standards. If one programmer is working with nonstandard 1024 kB and the rest aren't you have a problem.
The argument against this is the same as other arguments against SI in general. Carpenters don't want to give up inches, etc. Give us a break. The world is international and connected and very tiny. If you're not using SI you're asking people to fix your shoddy work or for a Mars probe to smash uselessly into Mars.
Yeah... but color blindness? I think this is the wrong place to draw the line. We slap a pair of glasses on people to correct vision all the time. Is there any advantage to color blindness at all? It's more like a cleft palate than Asbergers.
And I'm much more concerned with the fact that there are so many untreated medical issues around me every day in the US due to no health system than I am that people are getting too many cures. More concerned that the recent health care "reform" did not fix this. If we get to where people are getting too many cures... I might prefer that over what we have now.
Also, I'm more horrified by doctors mutilating a newborn's genitals than I am by a doctor curing their color blindness.
This is not "Opera" the Web browser. This is "Opera Mini," which is a feature phone pseudo-browser that makes up for the lack of resources on a feature phone by essentially running the Web browser on a server at Opera, rendering the pages there and sending photos of them back to the user. The problem is, that means you have absolutely no privacy, and absolutely no security. Opera not only knows your history, they know your passwords, they sit in-between you and authenticated servers. Maybe on a feature phone where you have no other choice, it's worth it to give that up. But on a smartphone where you already have an HTML5 browser, it's not a good idea.
Well, let the user choose, you say. If you are technically advanced enough to install Opera Mini on your feature phone, then maybe you also understand what privacy and security you're giving up. Somewhere in the arduous process of installing the app you read a terms of service and were warned about the implications of using the browser. But on iPhone, you only have to know how to click "INSTALL" and users who are accustomed to a private, secure browsing experience will assume that is what they're getting in Opera, not realizing it is "Opera Mini." When users install native apps, they're putting your trust in Apple. iPhone users expect the apps they get at the App Store to be 100% malware free and to be 100% respectful of their privacy and security. The example that is used is the app should not upload your address book. How much worse is it that the app uploads every password you give it, that the app sits between you and your bank, that the app uploads every single URL you give it, sees every single email? Knows your Facebook login, your Gmail login, and so on?
The reason Opera is doing this big "they won't approve it" PR campaign is that Opera knows full well Apple won't approve it because of the privacy and security issues, and they want to make PR hay with the implication that Apple can't compete with Opera. But if they really wanted to put a browser on iPhone, where is "Opera," the desktop-class Web browser? That is what they should be offering users who have OS X in their phone if they offer anything at all. There are dozens of alternative browsers on iPhone. Why isn't one of them "Opera" by now? Why didn't they ship that years ago already? Why would you possibly offer users of a smartphone that has had a desktop-class browser for 3+ years the pseudo-browser from a feature phone? Unless you were being disingenuous from the start.
What's more, Opera says that Opera Mini is the most used mobile Web browser, when that is clearly not true. Apple Safari for iPhone is responsible for the vast majority of mobile Web browsing in every study. Opera says that Opera Mini is the most popular mobile Web browser, on 50 million handsets. But there are more than 50 million iPhones, and Safari for iPhone is also on another 50 million iPods, and now a million iPads have been sold already as well. So their disingenuous behavior extends to every aspect of this PR stunt.
The most foolish part about this is people here saying "evil Apple" when Opera Mini violates the core principles of the Web, and Apple WebKit has brought desktop-class HTML5 browsing to phones, including Nokia, Android, Palm, and soon Blackberry. Get a grip. You ought to be ashamed of your hypocrisy.
An E-Mu or Tascam USB interface is about $150 and is 24-bit and works with Mac or PC. A MacBook Pro or iMac not only has a line-in, it's 24-bit and is both analog and digital optical. iPods and iPhones have line-ins on the dock connector, you just need the right cable. Probably iPad is the same.
Generally speaking, pro audio is FireWire-based.
If recording LP, make sure you have the right preamplifier. LP doesn't give out a line level signal.
So tired of the whining from Windows users. Botnets are almost 10 years old now. It's 8 years since Bill Gates promised to eradicate them. Why the fuck are you still running Windows? There is absolutely nothing it does which is unique. A mix of Mac and other Unix gives you malware-free computing. Not by accident, but by design.
I love how Microsoft can come along in 2010 and with a straight face say it's about time they took multiprocessing seriously. Or say it's about time we started putting HTML5 features into our browser. And we're finally going to support the ISO audio video standard from 2002. And by the way, it's about time we let you know that our answer to the 2007 iPhone will be shipping in 2011. And look how great it is that we just got 10% of our platform modernized off the 2001 XP version! And our office suite is just about ready to discover that the World Wide Web exists. It's like they are in a time warp.
I know they have product managers instead of product designers, and so have to crib design from the rest of the industry, necessitating them to be years behind, but on engineering stuff like multiprocessing, you expect them to at least have read the memo from Intel in 2005 about single cores not scaling and how the future was going to be 128 core chips before you know it.
I guess when you recognize that Windows Vista was really Windows 2003 and Windows 7 is really Windows 2005 then it makes some sense. It really is time for them to start taking multiprocessing seriously.
I am so glad I stopped using their products in 1999.
> Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs?
Apple has been doing this for years. This is one of the advantages for the user of buying a complete product. Apple can't pretend that someone else will solve the problem for them through bigger hardware or the magic of open source.
Enabling large scale multiprocessing is one of the fundamental features of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. The feature is called "Grand Central" and enables an app developer to make fairly small modifications to their app which cause it to go from pegging 1 CPU to pegging an unlimited number of CPU's. But multiprocessing has been part of OS X since the beginning. They shipped machines with multiple CPU's a long, long time ago compared to PC. Even Mac OS 9 had multiprocessing features.
Apple has also had XGrid going for some time now, which is quick and easy cluster computing.
Then if you look at iPhone OS, that has been highly, highly optimized. An iPhone 3GS with a 600MHz CPU outperforms a Nexus One with a 1000MHz CPU. The iPhone 3G with a 400MHz CPU outperforms a Palm Pre with 600MHz CPU. Those optimizations are part of the reason why Apple is currently undercutting both Android and Palm on price, which is the opposite of what was expected by Palm and Android developers and the entire industry. iPad on a 1000MHz CPU has been described by the people who have used it so far as being incredibly fast.
So you are right if you're talking about Microsoft (and maybe Linux, I don't know) but you're definitely wrong if talking about all OS designers.
There were only 1 million TabletPC sold, and only 3 million Kindles. Apple has apparently ordered 5 million iPads for the first quarter of sales, and has sold half a million already, even though they have a 2-per-customer limit, no bulk sales yet, and no devices in stores yet. So they are fairly easily going to outsell all previous tablets within a very short time.
The key thing is that iPad can morph into any tablet-sized device. It's thousands of tablets, not just one tablet. Whatever you used a tablet for previously, or wished you could use one for, iPad can do that. It can even remote control any PC if you want a full PC on there. It even has a Kindle app to run those proprietary books, as well as many open book readers. It can be a photo album or a TV. And the Apple touch interface is like butter, it's smooth and responsive and doesn't misfire. It's accurate enough for professional artwork, same as iPhone. The software stack is incredibly deep: OS X, HTML5, Cocoa, iPod. Any 10 iPad buyers may buy for 10 different reasons. I can already see this in my friends who are planning to buy an iPad, they are from all walks of life, and only a few could be described as gadgety. Everyone has a really good uses for iPad. One friend wants it solely for presentations, another for photos. I probably want it most for the Web browser.
Another important thing is Apple did not try to make a PC-replacement. You're not supposed to ditch your PC for this, which was always a feature of TabletPC. Bill Gates used to say everyone will be using a stylus soon. Apple has clearly made iPad a secondary computer to your PC. If you have a PC and a tech book on your desk right now, iPad replaces the tech book, not the PC. I think they found exactly the right balance between ambition and humility in attempting to replace all the tablets but not attempting to replace a single PC.
> Apple products are not popular due to any amount of technical merit, despite what fanboys claim. Apple products > are popular due to the visibility they have, first on tv, then in what you might call "executive" circles, then everyone.
No, that is bullshit. What you're saying is that Apple products are the same as their competitors, but they're popular just because they're fashionable. It's bullshit. Their products are not fashionable, they are DESIRABLE. And their products are not the same as their competitors at all. Not in the slightest. In the first place, they actually work. Not kind of work, not might work soon, not work if you have a CS degree, not work if you plug them into 3 other products, but actually practically work, right out of the box. There aren't any other choices in tech that have these features. You don't need to go looking for some airy reason like they're fashionable. In fact, people who don't have any Apple products often don't want one because they think they are a fad, they think their stuff is the same but just fashionable. Then they try an iPhone or Mac and they want one anyway. They buy one in spite of it being popular. Because it works. Because there is free support at the stores. Because you can try before you buy. Because they have so much software on them right out of the box. Because they back themselves up automatically so you don't lose stuff. For thousands and thousands of unique reasons.
So to dismiss Apple products as merely fashionable ignores the hundreds and hundreds of things Apple has done to make their products desirable. Things that nobody else is doing. Unique things that their customers fucking love.
Just go to an Apple Store and eavesdrop at the Genius Bar and you'll get the picture. When I was there last time, the person to the right of me was having trouble with her Mac because she had dismissed every single software update it offered her for 2 years and now some 3rd party software she downloaded wouldn't run. She was afraid to approve the updates because "that was what killed the Windows machine I had before this." They basically held her hand as she updated her software and then everything was fine. The guy on the left of me had a piece of plastic fall out of his MacBook, and they helped him figure out it had fallen off his knapsack, and then into and back out of the MacBook optical drive, the machine itself was fine. Nobody else is offering that. It's a much, much more plausible reason for the popularity of Apple products than "they're fashionable."
> There is a bit of a qualification to this : of course it helps that a product is useable
That is EVERYTHING. Usability is EVERYTHING. The products work. The tech specs don't matter. The shiny doesn't matter. Usability is EVERYTHING. And Apple's products are exponentially more usable than other products. Apple is pretty much the only tech company with product designers instead of product managers. They start with the usability and that is why it is there in the end.
I mean, "of course it helps that their cars start."
If you are a "gadget hound" it may be enough that a device has blinkenlights. Most people are not gadget hounds, especially not the people who are buying Apple products. The products have to work. The Mac absolutely has to make you more productive than Windows. The iPhone absolutely has to expose all of its features to every user, not just the ones with CS degrees. There can be NO MALWARE. Users do not know what that is.
It is actually sad to hear you trot out this old fashionable canard. You have to look deeper than that. Apple's products may be the shiniest and the most visually appealing, but that is not all there is too them. You're essentially saying because they're good looking they must be stupid. But that is not the case here.
The iPad already does 10 hours of video at close enough to hi-def that few people could tell the difference. We're talking about a matter of a few pixels in most cases. You're going to have a tough time making the case to iPad users that they're missing out on something. Especially not when the alternative is a portable DVD player with a 7-inch screen that doesn't get 10 hours of battery life.
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If you create a complete solution, you can tune it for best performance, you can make it easier and cheaper to deploy, you can guarantee a certain level of quality, you can include a warranty, you can harden it in ways that software alone can't.
You use a meta tag to turn on GPU acceleration in Safari. It even works on iPhone. So this is disingenuous. If you deploy something like this, you add the meta tag to turn on layers in Safari.
There is plenty of Jobs in Apple II. The fact that it is a finished personal computer, not a kit, is Jobs. The fact that the enclosure was made by designers, which is still controversial today in PC's, is pure Jobs. Jobs also pushed Woz to do his best work. Woz has also said, if not for Jobs, he would have worked on some anonymous project at HP or something. The idea that you can say the Apple II is Woz only is bullshit. The fact that it is such a balanced and holistically sound product in so many ways is the best thing about it.
As for the iPhone and iPad, Woz fucking loves them. He carries 2 iPhones everywhere, and I would be surprised if there is ever a time for the rest of his life when he ventures more than 2 meters from an iPad. He was at the Apple Store on iPad launch day like he's been there for every other product launch, soaking in the community he helped start. Woz came to grips long ago with the idea that computers are also for music hackers, movie hackers, novel hackers, and so on, not just for computer hackers. An iPhone or iPad does not prevent you from getting your computer hacking done. Nothing typically prevents a computer hacker from getting their hacking done. And you can program iPad in open HTML5, installed off your own Web site, or in managed Cocoa, hosted for free and optionally sold with very hacker-friendly terms by Apple. Or, you can contribute to fucking BSD if you want to hack the lower levels. It's a fucking great device for hackers. It's the best device for digital comic books ever.
Further, every Apple product has followed in the engineering tradition started by Woz. The A4 in iPad is very much in the spirit of the Apple II. The A4 is not special because of what they added to it, or loaded it down with, it's special in that they took a bunch of stuff out to make it smaller and lower power. For example, the standard ARM design has 3 USB and a Java interpreter. The A4 has 1 USB and no Java. It's very much in the spirit of Apple II where you had to do much more with much less.
Also, have you seen the videos of little babies using iPads? That is the kind of thing that makes Woz lose his fucking mind with happiness. I would bet Woz is as proud of iPad as any Apple product ever, including Apple II. Little kids who don't have the motor coordination to use a mouse are working with iPads without even being shown how to use the fucking things.
So I disagree with the whole premise of the article. I think it's bullshit to invent some schism between Jobs and Woz.
Also, it incredibly stupid to say that Woz would think Apple had finally lost its way with iPad. They lost their fucking way from 1985-1995 without Jobs. The NeXT project started at Apple as "Big Mac" and should have been completed at Apple. When Apple lost their way is not controversial. It's well known.
> I am typing this review on my laptop.
The iPad is a printer. It replaces your printer. Nobody ever said it replaces your laptop. You're supposed to be typing the review on your laptop, in the same way that you would type your review on a typewriter if it was 1960. But thanks to the iPad, I don't have to *read* your review on a typewriter.
Yeah, not using "sonographed" is the bigger mistake.
> The only realistic way to archive digital media is to have a planned rotation policy.
It's like gardening. You don't get to put your data on a disc and put it on a shelf for 100 years. It will be dead, even if the disk survives intact.
Ballmer is a sales guy with no understanding of technology and no vision. I'm happy to watch him destroy Microsoft but it's amazing he gets to do it.
I'm tired of Google's 10 obfuscated links per query. You have to do a lot of mental calculation to determine if that's the link you want in many cases. It's actually really opaque. Apple would create a search engine for consumers and make it a much better experience. Guaranteed they would come in with some kind of twist that make Google Search look like a hand-cranked antique. They would likely also leverage their very extensive video knowledge (not just selling in iTunes, but also QuickTime, which is like the Unix of video creation) so that you could find video effectively. They might even promote it as being for users who want to find video.
Apple's Spotlight client search is much better than what you find on other platforms, so it isn't like they're starting from scratch. And iTunes has its own built-in search engine. A Web index is really just expanding their search.
Google's weakness is that they're all Ph.D computer nerds and most consumers are not. That's why you see that Android is used overwhelmingly by computer nerds. Google has almost no designers and artists. Ask yourself why the 10 results don't show me a little thumbnail of the page, even if that comes in after the results, that would be much more helpful in a lot of cases. Why isn't there an option at least to turn that on? Apple's search would likely be very, very graphical.
If you remember the flap recently where people were trying to login to Facebook from a page that was not Facebook but was the #1 Google result for "Facebook login" then realize that is a Google Fail right there. That is people just typing words in and taking the first result. They're not even pressing "I'm feeling lucky" which would take them right there, they're going to the 10 results and just picking the top one without reading. I've seen this behavior again and again when training users. That's how most people "use" Google. They barely scratch the surface. Apple doesn't have to compete with the whole thing, just that surface 0.01% that most users are using.
Google is vulnerable on privacy with Eric Schmidt recently saying you don't have any, and with them turning on Buzz the way they did. In the same way that Apple doesn't have to make very much money on iTunes Store (because it sells devices that they make money on) they don't have to make very much money in search and ads. They can out-privacy Google easily.
Google is vulnerable on copyright, where they recently pissed off every book author in the world, just as Apple is opening a bookstore.
AdWords is great but it's a lot of work for the advertiser. Apple's customers are a very desirable demographic. If they can make an ad platform that lets you reach Apple users for less work and less money than AdWords, many people would be very interested in that. Only 1 in 10 PC's is a Mac, but 9 out of 10 high-end PC's is a Mac. What if there was some link to Apple's credit card database, so that if a user comes in to your site via an ad on Apple's search engine, they can pay with their iTunes account?
Google is obviously just searching the Web. Apple can offer the iTunes Store, their native app platforms, for example, enabling you to find something in the print/iPad edition of TIME. They could even do some kind of peer-to-peer from their client platforms, where you find what you're looking for in the public folder of somebody else's Mac. Which every Mac already has. The Web is the common space of the digital world, not the whole digital world.
And Apple has a higher market cap and more money in the bank than Google. You can't dismiss it when any company that is bigger than you comes into your space. When that company is on such a roll that people who want to knock them point to the Power Mac G4 Cube as their awesome failure, that is really something to be concerned with. The Cube predates the iPod that is so long ago, and it was a profitable product (although not very) and it enjoyed a very loyal and even cult following even years after they stopped making it. Many companies would love to
Corporations will tell you that the US has the highest tax rate, but there are all these loop holes so the US actually has the lowest tax rate. There should be a minimum tax rate for corporations so that after they do all their loop holes, it can only get them down to 20% or something like that, not to zero.
They will say they can't afford it, but that is BS. If you apply it equally, then it has zero impact on competitive advantage. But every corporation would receive massive benefits from it as their pool of workers got healthier and better educated and the roads got better and telecommunications got better and so on. The government is way underfunded in the US, and it spends a ton of money on weapons, so it's even worse.
The article says *their* first personal computer. In 1980, the Apple II was 3 years old and VisiCalc had been out for a year. Nobody was creating *the* first PC at that time.
You run the Flash games natively, you don't pretend they're part of the Web.
Since the beginning of Flash, you could export your app as Mac or Windows native, and lately you can export for iPhone also. With Android and Blackberry targets you're looking at a great future for Flash as a mobile app tool. With HTML5 export it could be a great Web tool also.
But cutting a hole in the browser to show a Mac/PC app through is over now that the Web is on diverse platforms and interfaces. The HTML5 Web has been on mobiles for 3 years and there is no FlashPlayer there yet. Mobiles have hardware video players and FlashPlayer is a battery hog, so that is done.
I have some Flash games on my iPhone right now, but they run natively. iPhone is the only mobile that runs Flash, even though Adobe will tell you it's the only mobile that doesn't.
The little bugs add up, and users consider your software and even computers in general to be very unreliable these days. The PC has such a bad reputation that users just openly mock it all the time. It's expected to suck. Microsoft software especially is expected to have bugs. The whole platform is just a big bugfest, a race to the bottom in quality.
Part of why Apple has been making hay over the past decade is that their software is just more reliable than what people have come to expect. They spent years putting a Unix core under the Mac and they were mocked for it, "why do consumers need that level of reliability?" Now, it's typical for a Mac never to crash, typical for an iPhone never to crash. Users may not even consciously be able to explain that, but it's part of what they love and why they come back.
Thr truth is, you can't parse out the right level of quality you're "supposed" to ship. You have to take pride in your work at every level. Software is layered, all dependencies ... if you don't shoot for perfect you will never even get good. And you'll get into the race to the bottom, making Wal-Mart software. "Hey. we have 1 less bug thatn our competition, break out the champagne!"
Generally speaking, users hate computers. No wonder the PC is being replaced by mobiles with simplified software and a much, much higher expectation of quality.
So there is always damage from bugs. It may not be measured in this quarter's report, but you can see your whole product or company or platform hurt by it long-term.
> I don't see why this is an either / or issue.
In one word: standardization.
For the same reason we standardize markup around W3C HTML5, we standardize video around MPEG-4 H.264. We need to be able to make just one Web app and have it work on any browser from any manufacturer. We need to be able to make just one video and have it work in any video player from any manufacturer. If we don't have that, then consumers cannot choose their own preferred browser, or preferred media player. They get stuck using IE6 or Windows Media Player solely to decode nonstandard Web apps and video. It's not acceptable.
Modern consumer electronics devices have one video codec burned into hardware, and that is MPEG-4 H.264. This is almost 10 years old now. Same as DVD players all had MPEG-2. That's the reason the H.264 codec exists. If you want to publish a video that will play on iPod and other media players, iPhone and other smartphones, various set-top boxes, both FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player, both YouTube and iTunes, that is H.264. If you want to play video that was made with Flip camcorders, or Kodak camcorders, or Canon cameras, or Nikon cameras, or Panasonic cameras, or iPod/iPhone, that is H.264.
A key thing to understand is that MPEG-4 is not owned by any one company. The patents are not held by any one company. They are put into a pool and licensed equally to all comers. This puts all the consumer electronics manufacturers on equal footing. Flip is not going to cease to exist one day because a submarine patent takes all their devices off the market. The entire MPEG-4 group would address the submarine patent, all the manufacturers are protected from litigation in this way. That's just not true with Ogg.
On a Mac/PC, if you are somewhat technical, you can load all kinds of software codecs, most of which are made for authoring or some other special purpose, not made for consumer playback. Same as you can happily make Web apps for IE6 if your company uses IE6. But if you want to share Web apps with the world, you use HTML5. If you want to publish video for the world, you use H.264.
Also, you have to understand that video authoring tools all work with H.264 for many years now, and not with nonstandard formats. Where you see Ogg video, or Windows Media, or Real Media, or any other nonstandard media, they were very likely created from H.264.
This all has nothing to do with HTML5. As I said, H.264 is almost 10 years old and both YouTube and iTunes and both FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player play it. That *is* Web video. H.264 plays in Firefox today, and will play there tomorrow. HTML5 standardizes *markup* not video. So browsers now have to become video players. If Firefox doesn't want to do that, then they will see their users make an exodus for Chrome or Safari. There isn't any way to turn back time to when Ogg was current technology and rewrite history and re-encode the incredible amount of video that is stored in H.264.
If you imagine that Mozilla was saying "we can't support UTF-8" that is the same as them not supporting H.264. The UTF-8 text is already out there, and there's no other technology to replace it, and that is the same with H.264 video. A Web browser that can't play YouTube is not a Web browser.
You can't charge for the Web. The experience that most users get sucks. They are in IE on a PC and it sucks. There are too many other sources that also suck to bother paying, with very rare exception.
They should be making non-Web content to charge for. For example, iPad apps, or eBooks, and so on. And advertise that on your Web site.
Think of a Sunday newspaper with a magazine in it. Make the newspaper free (Web), charge a low price for the magazine (eBook). Make the part you pay for downloadable and rich in photos and videos and audio. Make the Web compete with that.
The reason HBO worked was it was something née and different from free ad-supported TV. They didn't try to take NBC to a paid model.
> base 2 number system, which is ultimately the most
> important base system for people working with computers
That is a truly ridiculous statement. "People working with computers" is EVERYONE. And they all have 10 fingers and count in base 10 and have standard measurements based on 10's in which a kilometer is 1000 meters.
You're doing the elitest programmer priesthood thing, but even there you are wrong. Programmers also use maps and drive cars and none have 10.24 fingers. What's more, computer programs have to work internationally, and be maintained by arbitrary programmers, so they need to follow standards. If one programmer is working with nonstandard 1024 kB and the rest aren't you have a problem.
The argument against this is the same as other arguments against SI in general. Carpenters don't want to give up inches, etc. Give us a break. The world is international and connected and very tiny. If you're not using SI you're asking people to fix your shoddy work or for a Mars probe to smash uselessly into Mars.
Yeah ... but color blindness? I think this is the wrong place to draw the line. We slap a pair of glasses on people to correct vision all the time. Is there any advantage to color blindness at all? It's more like a cleft palate than Asbergers.
And I'm much more concerned with the fact that there are so many untreated medical issues around me every day in the US due to no health system than I am that people are getting too many cures. More concerned that the recent health care "reform" did not fix this. If we get to where people are getting too many cures ... I might prefer that over what we have now.
Also, I'm more horrified by doctors mutilating a newborn's genitals than I am by a doctor curing their color blindness.
Microsoft's bugs have cost society plenty. Even at a penny per big they can raise 300 million easy.
This is not "Opera" the Web browser. This is "Opera Mini," which is a feature phone pseudo-browser that makes up for the lack of resources on a feature phone by essentially running the Web browser on a server at Opera, rendering the pages there and sending photos of them back to the user. The problem is, that means you have absolutely no privacy, and absolutely no security. Opera not only knows your history, they know your passwords, they sit in-between you and authenticated servers. Maybe on a feature phone where you have no other choice, it's worth it to give that up. But on a smartphone where you already have an HTML5 browser, it's not a good idea.
Well, let the user choose, you say. If you are technically advanced enough to install Opera Mini on your feature phone, then maybe you also understand what privacy and security you're giving up. Somewhere in the arduous process of installing the app you read a terms of service and were warned about the implications of using the browser. But on iPhone, you only have to know how to click "INSTALL" and users who are accustomed to a private, secure browsing experience will assume that is what they're getting in Opera, not realizing it is "Opera Mini." When users install native apps, they're putting your trust in Apple. iPhone users expect the apps they get at the App Store to be 100% malware free and to be 100% respectful of their privacy and security. The example that is used is the app should not upload your address book. How much worse is it that the app uploads every password you give it, that the app sits between you and your bank, that the app uploads every single URL you give it, sees every single email? Knows your Facebook login, your Gmail login, and so on?
The reason Opera is doing this big "they won't approve it" PR campaign is that Opera knows full well Apple won't approve it because of the privacy and security issues, and they want to make PR hay with the implication that Apple can't compete with Opera. But if they really wanted to put a browser on iPhone, where is "Opera," the desktop-class Web browser? That is what they should be offering users who have OS X in their phone if they offer anything at all. There are dozens of alternative browsers on iPhone. Why isn't one of them "Opera" by now? Why didn't they ship that years ago already? Why would you possibly offer users of a smartphone that has had a desktop-class browser for 3+ years the pseudo-browser from a feature phone? Unless you were being disingenuous from the start.
What's more, Opera says that Opera Mini is the most used mobile Web browser, when that is clearly not true. Apple Safari for iPhone is responsible for the vast majority of mobile Web browsing in every study. Opera says that Opera Mini is the most popular mobile Web browser, on 50 million handsets. But there are more than 50 million iPhones, and Safari for iPhone is also on another 50 million iPods, and now a million iPads have been sold already as well. So their disingenuous behavior extends to every aspect of this PR stunt.
The most foolish part about this is people here saying "evil Apple" when Opera Mini violates the core principles of the Web, and Apple WebKit has brought desktop-class HTML5 browsing to phones, including Nokia, Android, Palm, and soon Blackberry. Get a grip. You ought to be ashamed of your hypocrisy.
An E-Mu or Tascam USB interface is about $150 and is 24-bit and works with Mac or PC. A MacBook Pro or iMac not only has a line-in, it's 24-bit and is both analog and digital optical. iPods and iPhones have line-ins on the dock connector, you just need the right cable. Probably iPad is the same.
Generally speaking, pro audio is FireWire-based.
If recording LP, make sure you have the right preamplifier. LP doesn't give out a line level signal.
So tired of the whining from Windows users. Botnets are almost 10 years old now. It's 8 years since Bill Gates promised to eradicate them. Why the fuck are you still running Windows? There is absolutely nothing it does which is unique. A mix of Mac and other Unix gives you malware-free computing. Not by accident, but by design.
I have no sympathy for you.
I love how Microsoft can come along in 2010 and with a straight face say it's about time they took multiprocessing seriously. Or say it's about time we started putting HTML5 features into our browser. And we're finally going to support the ISO audio video standard from 2002. And by the way, it's about time we let you know that our answer to the 2007 iPhone will be shipping in 2011. And look how great it is that we just got 10% of our platform modernized off the 2001 XP version! And our office suite is just about ready to discover that the World Wide Web exists. It's like they are in a time warp.
I know they have product managers instead of product designers, and so have to crib design from the rest of the industry, necessitating them to be years behind, but on engineering stuff like multiprocessing, you expect them to at least have read the memo from Intel in 2005 about single cores not scaling and how the future was going to be 128 core chips before you know it.
I guess when you recognize that Windows Vista was really Windows 2003 and Windows 7 is really Windows 2005 then it makes some sense. It really is time for them to start taking multiprocessing seriously.
I am so glad I stopped using their products in 1999.
> Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs?
Apple has been doing this for years. This is one of the advantages for the user of buying a complete product. Apple can't pretend that someone else will solve the problem for them through bigger hardware or the magic of open source.
Enabling large scale multiprocessing is one of the fundamental features of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. The feature is called "Grand Central" and enables an app developer to make fairly small modifications to their app which cause it to go from pegging 1 CPU to pegging an unlimited number of CPU's. But multiprocessing has been part of OS X since the beginning. They shipped machines with multiple CPU's a long, long time ago compared to PC. Even Mac OS 9 had multiprocessing features.
Apple has also had XGrid going for some time now, which is quick and easy cluster computing.
Then if you look at iPhone OS, that has been highly, highly optimized. An iPhone 3GS with a 600MHz CPU outperforms a Nexus One with a 1000MHz CPU. The iPhone 3G with a 400MHz CPU outperforms a Palm Pre with 600MHz CPU. Those optimizations are part of the reason why Apple is currently undercutting both Android and Palm on price, which is the opposite of what was expected by Palm and Android developers and the entire industry. iPad on a 1000MHz CPU has been described by the people who have used it so far as being incredibly fast.
So you are right if you're talking about Microsoft (and maybe Linux, I don't know) but you're definitely wrong if talking about all OS designers.
There were only 1 million TabletPC sold, and only 3 million Kindles. Apple has apparently ordered 5 million iPads for the first quarter of sales, and has sold half a million already, even though they have a 2-per-customer limit, no bulk sales yet, and no devices in stores yet. So they are fairly easily going to outsell all previous tablets within a very short time.
The key thing is that iPad can morph into any tablet-sized device. It's thousands of tablets, not just one tablet. Whatever you used a tablet for previously, or wished you could use one for, iPad can do that. It can even remote control any PC if you want a full PC on there. It even has a Kindle app to run those proprietary books, as well as many open book readers. It can be a photo album or a TV. And the Apple touch interface is like butter, it's smooth and responsive and doesn't misfire. It's accurate enough for professional artwork, same as iPhone. The software stack is incredibly deep: OS X, HTML5, Cocoa, iPod. Any 10 iPad buyers may buy for 10 different reasons. I can already see this in my friends who are planning to buy an iPad, they are from all walks of life, and only a few could be described as gadgety. Everyone has a really good uses for iPad. One friend wants it solely for presentations, another for photos. I probably want it most for the Web browser.
Another important thing is Apple did not try to make a PC-replacement. You're not supposed to ditch your PC for this, which was always a feature of TabletPC. Bill Gates used to say everyone will be using a stylus soon. Apple has clearly made iPad a secondary computer to your PC. If you have a PC and a tech book on your desk right now, iPad replaces the tech book, not the PC. I think they found exactly the right balance between ambition and humility in attempting to replace all the tablets but not attempting to replace a single PC.
> Apple products are not popular due to any amount of technical merit, despite what fanboys claim. Apple products
> are popular due to the visibility they have, first on tv, then in what you might call "executive" circles, then everyone.
No, that is bullshit. What you're saying is that Apple products are the same as their competitors, but they're popular just because they're fashionable. It's bullshit. Their products are not fashionable, they are DESIRABLE. And their products are not the same as their competitors at all. Not in the slightest. In the first place, they actually work. Not kind of work, not might work soon, not work if you have a CS degree, not work if you plug them into 3 other products, but actually practically work, right out of the box. There aren't any other choices in tech that have these features. You don't need to go looking for some airy reason like they're fashionable. In fact, people who don't have any Apple products often don't want one because they think they are a fad, they think their stuff is the same but just fashionable. Then they try an iPhone or Mac and they want one anyway. They buy one in spite of it being popular. Because it works. Because there is free support at the stores. Because you can try before you buy. Because they have so much software on them right out of the box. Because they back themselves up automatically so you don't lose stuff. For thousands and thousands of unique reasons.
So to dismiss Apple products as merely fashionable ignores the hundreds and hundreds of things Apple has done to make their products desirable. Things that nobody else is doing. Unique things that their customers fucking love.
Just go to an Apple Store and eavesdrop at the Genius Bar and you'll get the picture. When I was there last time, the person to the right of me was having trouble with her Mac because she had dismissed every single software update it offered her for 2 years and now some 3rd party software she downloaded wouldn't run. She was afraid to approve the updates because "that was what killed the Windows machine I had before this." They basically held her hand as she updated her software and then everything was fine. The guy on the left of me had a piece of plastic fall out of his MacBook, and they helped him figure out it had fallen off his knapsack, and then into and back out of the MacBook optical drive, the machine itself was fine. Nobody else is offering that. It's a much, much more plausible reason for the popularity of Apple products than "they're fashionable."
> There is a bit of a qualification to this : of course it helps that a product is useable
That is EVERYTHING. Usability is EVERYTHING. The products work. The tech specs don't matter. The shiny doesn't matter. Usability is EVERYTHING. And Apple's products are exponentially more usable than other products. Apple is pretty much the only tech company with product designers instead of product managers. They start with the usability and that is why it is there in the end.
I mean, "of course it helps that their cars start."
If you are a "gadget hound" it may be enough that a device has blinkenlights. Most people are not gadget hounds, especially not the people who are buying Apple products. The products have to work. The Mac absolutely has to make you more productive than Windows. The iPhone absolutely has to expose all of its features to every user, not just the ones with CS degrees. There can be NO MALWARE. Users do not know what that is.
It is actually sad to hear you trot out this old fashionable canard. You have to look deeper than that. Apple's products may be the shiniest and the most visually appealing, but that is not all there is too them. You're essentially saying because they're good looking they must be stupid. But that is not the case here.
The iPad already does 10 hours of video at close enough to hi-def that few people could tell the difference. We're talking about a matter of a few pixels in most cases. You're going to have a tough time making the case to iPad users that they're missing out on something. Especially not when the alternative is a portable DVD player with a 7-inch screen that doesn't get 10 hours of battery life.