> So yeah, it's very, very believable that the MSI unit, or any Tegra2 based tablet, > will dramatically outlast the iPad doing the same kind of things.
The thing you left out is background tasks, which the user manages on Android but the system manages on iPhone OS. The iPhone gets much better battery life than other handsets with comparable chips and batteries because it freezes apps that aren't being used and that probably carries over to the bigger devices. In practice an iPhone user may run 30 apps within an hour but only have 3-4 apps running at any one time. I don't know if Android is capable of running 30 apps within an hour but the user likely has more than 3-4 apps running for the entire hour.
> The majority of people don't want multi-tasking?
No, the majority of people don't want traditional multitasking because what happens is the machine stalls after they launch their 10th app and gets worse from there. Multitasking causes them to run out of memory and get errors. It causes unexpected interactions like 2 audio sources playing simultaneously that they don't know how to solve.
If you know about computer science then you naturally clean up after yourself, you quit apps you're not using, you don't try to run 50 apps at once. You manage the applications on a computer without realizing it. Most people simply do not do that. On the Mac it is really easy to see what is running or not, the running apps have a light next to them in the Dock, yet time and time again I have been training users and tell them that is what the light means and they have no idea, and not only that, they do not understand what it means if an app is "running" versus "not running."
What has made the iPhone App Store so successful is that the limitation that only lets you run one 3rd party app at a time also enables you to run 100 apps in a single hour without the phone stalling or slowing down or running out of memory. That is how regular people use their apps. iPhone apps also freeze their state when you change to another app, so the apps all seem to be running all the time, and they are always available at a moment's notice. The Springboard is not so much an application launcher as an application switcher. You can leave Maps and when you come back 3 days later, the map you were looking at last time is still there.
What the iPhone does is not a lack of multitasking; it's very aggressive multitasking. The user is going to run so many 3rd party apps today that the computer refuses to let any 3rd party app use system resources in the background. iPhone users will literally run 10 times the number of apps that a PC user will run in any particular day.
Background processes also decrease security and lead to the user having to learn to use a task killer, which again, requires them to understand what a running app is versus a not running app, which they do not know and do not want to learn anymore than you want to learn how to be an ER nurse or a bus driver or any kind of job that you don't do already.
This is not an academic debate. We've had decades of "real multitasking" and only 3 years of iPhone-style multitasking and iPhone users use more apps. They do more tasks. They don't see out of memory errors like on Android, they don't have to have a task killer like on Android. The most popular app on non-iPhone phones is the task killer... on iPhone it's always a game or a productivity tool or once in a while something that makes artificial farts.
1) There are gloves that are made to work on touchscreens for people in cold climates.
2) The headphones that come with the iPod touch have a clicker to cycle to the next song.
3) There are 10,000 plug-in remotes for iPod touch with a complete set of transport controls on them.
> Touchscreens are good for a specific purpose
The whole point of the touchscreen is it morphs into anything, they're good for general purpose, not specific purpose. If you have a specific purpose (like transport controls in a cold climate) then you get a plug-in remote with real buttons.
Similarly, the onscreen keyboard is good for general purpose. If you're writing a book, get a mechanical keyboard.
> The Microsoft Courier [arstechnica.com] will use a stylus
By saying "will" you're implying that is a real device. Microsoft have already said publicly that the Courier is a character in a fictional concept video. There is not now, never was, and never will be, a Microsoft Courier.
> Given that the most desirable feature of tablets for many is the ability to write on > them and annotate documents,
No, that is not the most desirable feature. If it were, then Apple would not be outselling all Microsoft Tablet PC's ever sold with every quarter of iPhone sales. The most desirable feature of touch tablets is that the interface can morph into anything. If you want a music player, the interface morphs into an album art viewer, transport controls, volume control, and so on. If you want a music recorder, the interface morphs into channel faders, transport controls, EQ, dynamics processor, and so on. These interface are as useful as the real devices. In some cases they are more useful because the real devices may not have the ideal interface in order to save money on real parts.
> the main reason for a laptop for me is making notes and reading / browsing > whilst travelling. The iPad falls down very badly on the first of those.
In the first place, the iPad was never even advertised as a laptop replacement. It replaces the books and magazines you have with you along with your laptop, not the laptop. Secondly, iPad is great at taking notes. If you don't like the virtual keyboard, you can use a mechanical keyboard via Bluetooth of the iPod dock connector. Apple's Bluetooth keyboard weighs only a few grams and is very tiny, very thin, yet has full-size keys. But in addition to that, you can draw freely on the iPad screen to take a visual note, with very fine resolution, you can draw very thin lines in many colors. You can annotate photos or documents with hand-drawn arrows, or circle something in a photo. You can write on it with your finger, again in very fine lines, one pixel thin lines are very easy, very accurate, same as on iPhone.
> I'm not sure Apple would be happy to know that I've finally found their target > audience though - technologically inexperienced parents with slight arthritis.
Actually, they would be very happy to hear that. They would be very happy to hear that they brought computing to someone who otherwise could not experience it, or who otherwise would be tortured with a Windows system by their ignorant grandson.
The Archos is a nice Apple Newton derivative, very 1992, but the iPad is a generation ahead of that.
The iPod touch and iPhone sold more units in the past 3 years than all of the stylus devices since 1992, including the Palm Pilot and the Tablet PC. Apple sold more iPhones in Q4 2009 than all of the Tablet PC's ever shipped. We are talking about something entirely different since the iPhone. A stylus is a way to emulate handwriting on paper; an iPhone morphs into various devices, it becomes a multitrack recorder with transport controls and faders, it becomes a checkerboard with moveable pieces.
I appreciate your admiration for Archos, but it can't come at the expense of what Apple has done with touch tablets during the last few years.
If you want a screen you can draw on, those have been available for years. Hopefully you have not been waiting for one. But a 12-inch Cintiq costs 2x what the iPad costs, and considering that many people who are currently using Wacom tablets don't use the pressure (they're just making Photoshop selections) it would be a waste to prioritize pressure on an iPad at this time.
There are ideas out there about how to make pressure work on devices like iPad but it is not happening yet.
Also, keep in mind that the Mac will get touch in the near future. That is when we may see Wacom being made obsolete by stock Macs.
> I have a Google Nexus One, and I use the voice regcognition feature all the time. > Why would I want to type a sentance on a tiny virtual keyboard, when I can just speak it?
Why would I speak text messages when I can just call the person? I easily type 40 wpm on my iPhone. It works great for messaging. If I am on the train or the street I don't want to talk, I want to type. If I wanted to talk I would make a call.
Touch on Nexus One may be "just nice"... on iPhone you have multitouch, you have more accuracy, you have a much more mature implementation... it is much better than nice, it is amazing. It adapts to what I want to do, not the other way around.
If you are speaking messages into to your phone, why not just record the audio and give that to the recipient via voicemail?
It's a book. You hold it like a book, you use it like a book. Books are held with 2 hands or they are put on a stand or they are laid flat on a desk. Notice the iPad has an IPS screen that specifically enables you to lay it flat on a desk and still read it from a lousy angle.
Stop being so literal and trying to substitute iPad for a notebook computer because they both have screens and CPU's and do computation. The notebook computer is a typewriter; the iPad is a book; the iPod is a music box; the TiVo is a VCR, the bank machine is a bank teller. It doesn't matter that these things all have computers in them. They are the computerized versions of many different devices. Different form factors follow the different functions.
The iPad is much more likely to replace a computer book than a computer in your life. That is the idea. Instead of 10 computer books next to your desk, you'll have one iPad with 10 eBooks on it. You'll still have the personal computer you've got now on the desk for Photoshop, but you'll have Photoshop Bible on the iPad.
> By buying the iPad, you're locked into Apple's products: apps you buy on the iPad > will only work on Apple products
That is true with native apps on all platforms, however, the native apps on iPad are optional: it runs HTML5 Web apps also, it runs all the same apps as Chrome OS runs. Chrome is even based on the Apple browser... whatever runs on Chrome runs on iPad.
> books you buy for the iPad will only work on Apple products
The books on iPad are ePub, it's made out of XML and runs on all the other book readers. Similarly, the music from the iTunes Store is ISO MPEG-4, it runs on all other devices. If not for the movie studio -mandated DRM, the video from iTunes Store would run on all devices, including FlashPlayer, including Android, including Blackberry, and is even the same as the movie format on Blu-Ray. Photos are JPEG, they work everywhere.
There is no vendor lock-in from Apple except for the native apps, but again, they are optional, and again, that is the case with all platforms.
> Android, Flash, and J2ME don't run run on the iPad or iPod.
Those are native app platforms from other manufacturers, they run only on those platforms. Android has Android apps, Flash has Flash apps, J2ME has J2ME apps, iPhone OS has iPhone OS apps, Mac OS has Mac OS apps, Windows has Windows apps, Windows Mobile has Windows Mobile apps, Blackberry has Blackberry apps, X-Windows has X-Windows apps, bash has bash apps, KDE has KDE apps, Gnome has Gnome apps.
The common app platform is the World Wide Web. All of Apple's devices, in addition to running their own native apps, also run HTML5 Web apps, out-of-the-box. If you want to move around from platform to platform and take everything with you, all you do is forgo the completely optional native apps and run HTML5 Web apps. The HTML5 Web apps from all of Apple's devices are the same exact ones from Chrome OS... Chrome is based on the Apple browser.
You are ranting and raving but you're standing on sand. There is just no content in what you're saying. Apple could have done iTunes Store in QuickTime but they used MPEG-4, they could have done an IE-style proprietary browser but they did HTML5, they could have done a proprietary 3D language but they did OpenGL, and so on, and so on.
Even the iTunes LP and iTunes Extras which are DVD-style animated menus for iTunes are done in HTML5. You can run them in Firefox.
The Web is the killer app for touch tablets. We have been making links look like buttons for about 75% of the Web's history and clicking them with the mouse instead of pushing them with fingers. Also the scrolling is much better with touch.
There are a lot of other applications for it, but when you move the Web from mouse to touch it gets better without any recoding.
> The whole point of lugging around something the size of a laptop is that > you get the *functionality* of a laptop. > Why the fsck anyone would buy one of these is beyond me,
The iPad is not meant to replace your laptop. Neither was your iPhone or iPod.
Imagine someone sitting at a desk coding Java on a laptop, and next to them on the desk is a big computer book "Learn Java in 21 Days." The iPad is meant to replace the big computer book, not the laptop.
One of the key reasons I'm getting an iPad is to replace the 10 or so Web development reference books I always own. I'm not getting the iPad to replace my MacBook Air where I make the websites, but since the MacBook Air is 1.3 kilos and my 10 Web development books are like 10 kilos, I want to put the 10 kilos of books into the 0.7 kilo iPad and my whole work setup is 2 kilos. I want to refer to the books without putting my text editor or Photoshop or other app into the background on the computer. In the same way my desktop computer turning into a laptop enhanced my mobility, my books turning into an iPad enhances my mobility.
Computer books have had CD-ROM in the back for many years now, and the chief complaint (outside of their weight) is errata can't be corrected... the whole computer book section is begging to be touch eBooks. Not to mention the black-and-white screen captures can become animations of the whole procedure, the code clippings can be actual clippings.
Lots of people have laptops and iPods even though the laptop can play music. The laptop can make phone calls but you have an iPhone. Same is coming for books, tutorial videos, tutorial websites. If you want to learn Photoshop in the near future, you'll download Photoshop to your MacBook and Photoshop Bible to your iPad and get down to it.
> The only thing it is missing is the touch component but I have yet > to find an app that makes me care.
The Web, and every Web app, is much better with touch than mouse. Primarily because the fake buttons all become real buttons... I mean, look at the buttons on the Web... aren't they made for fingers? Secondarily the scrolling... there is a lot of scrolling on the Web and flick-to-scroll is by far the easiest scrolling interface. If you haven't surfed the Web with touch yet then you are in for a surprise when you try an iPad or similar device. Pinching to zoom something is also very good. The Web browser in iPad is WebKit-based, HTML5, it runs the same apps as Chrome OS and Firefox.
The other kind of app that is really good are music and audio apps are where the touch really shines. The transport controls and faders on a mixer become essentially real. Drum machines give you a square of 16 pads, and you can hit 2 or more together. For many years, music and audio software has been emulating the look and functionality of real devices, but we've been trapped on the other side of the glass from them, poking at them with a mouse. In a typical music studio there are MIDI surfaces that provide transport controls and faders and knobs are are basically a poor man's touch screen. Check out "FourTrack" for iPhone, "BeatMaker" for iPhone. They replace dedicated devices, not just emulate them.
Also art tools: painting is outrageously good on the Apple touch interface, you can draw very, very fine lines with tremendous accuracy. "Brushes" is simply fantastic. Organizing photos into a slideshow, or slides into a presentation is very natural with touch, you just drag them around.
Of course many, many games benefit from touch. Even simple stuff like Chess.
So it is likely you'll find an app that makes you care about touch if you browse a catalog of touch apps.
Not to mention that there are photos on Facebook you can flip through like a stack of prints using the touch interface. And there are cameras and even SD cards with Wi-Fi in them now. That is why the camera/SD connections are optional.
By flexibility, you mean computer science flexibility, but for most people, a Mac/PC/Linux is very, very inflexible because they don't know how to work it.
Also, iPad is not meant to replace other computers. Many people will use an iPad to learn computers, to run a digital copy of "Learn Linux in 21 Days" or whatever. If they have to tinker with their book reader they can't rely on that source of learning which enables them to run their "flexible" computer.
This article is so backwards. It is also sad to see yet another everybody-should-be-a-computer-nerd story.
iPad runs the same apps as Chrome OS. If you're going to say that Apple is anti-tinkerer, then what is Google? Chrome OS is a subset of iPhone OS: Unix core, HTML5 browser. But on iPad OS you get native app development also. So you can run a multitrack recorder and tinker with music. Chrome OS is much more limited than iPhone OS.
There's tons of open source code running in an iPad. Is that anti-tinkerer? Are the people who are making all the iPhone OS apps and games anti-tinkerer? Are the people who make music and movies and books for iPad anti-tinkerer? Just because they tinker with music, not software code?
The development platform for iPhone OS is the Mac, which comes with dev tools, is Unix-certified, and includes Apache2, PHP5, Python, Perl, Ruby, and more. It also has tons of open source software, including Apple WebKit, which enables standards-based Web development for consumers who have iPad or iPhone or iPod or Chrome or Android or Nokia or Palm instead of the bullshit IE-specific Web development Microsoft propagates. Is WebKit anti-tinkerer? The Mac also comes with a multitrack music studio, a video editor, a photo light box. There is a ton of stuff to discover on Apple platforms, not just coding. But if you're into coding, the entire Mac UI can be scripted and so can the Unix shell of course. There are about 10 computer languages built into every Mac.
Some of us get a sense of wonder from writing books or music, not fucking around endlessly with computers. I got my nerd on as a kid in-between a set of headphones, listening to an LP, looking at album art, reading the lyrics. The iPad is the perfect device to provide the 21st century version of that. Many, many kids will discover music, movies, literature, websites on iPad and want to make those things. Hopefully they will also discover the idea of making stuff with some QUALITY which they certainly will not get from running most computing platforms. Making stuff for iPad is as easy as getting a Mac, which is $400 per year including the service plan, and if anything stops you from being able to make music today, you take the Mac to Apple and they fix it. So if you are a music tinkerer, you don't have to take a course in computer science, you take a course in music.
I'm truly tired of this everybody-should-be-a-computer-nerd philosophy of computing. Have you watched most people use a computer? It's like they are sentenced to hard labor.
At the iPad introduction, Steve Jobs said "Apple sees itself at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." The idea is to enhance the entire broad field of human endeavor with computers, not enslave them with computer science tasks. To enable them to enhance their own work (i.e. doctor, musician, architect) with computing, not sit and do various mindless steps to get anything done. What is joyful coding to a computer scientist is grim slavery to 90% of humanity. Many people do not have the kind of memory it takes to find the 15th nested dialog box in Outlook that lets them change their email signature. Me, I can hear any melody once and remember it forever, but I don't say that everyone should have to be able to do that in order to listen to music.
The funniest thing about this everybody-should-be-a-tinkerer idea is that computer scientists are among the most focused people on the planet. The joke is that they don't shower or shave because they're too into the computer. So to have computer scientists say that everyone else should have to learn more about the computer before they listen to music or read a book or whatever they do is outrageous. What if you were forced to learn a musical instrument in order to use a computer? You'd lose your fucking mind.
The switch to digital is not an excuse to force computer science on the rest of humanity.
Inherent in these kinds of stupid arguments against the Mac is the false idea that the PC, whether it's running Windows or Linux, is technically equivalent to the Mac for creative people. It is not. Even if Linux is "more free", we cannot use it. Richard Stallman is on The Setup right now rocking a 9-inch Yeelong that is not at all suitable for music or video production. I respect what he has done for computer science, but he doesn't make audio tools.
All you have to do to setup a music studio on a Mac is run a few installers and plug some gear together. It takes less than a half hour to be up and running making music. Virtual instruments and effects plug into the system, digital audio workstations plug into the system, audio and MIDI hardware plugs into the system, and the system manages it all. The Mac knows all the music gear and just recognizes it when you plug it in. I often run 2 full digital audio workstations and 2 separate audio interfaces and they all just work together seamlessly, including working with all of my virtual instruments and effects, including working at very high sample rates and with perfect timing. There is no other platform that offers anything like this.
For years I worked at a studio complex with dozens of studios. Most of the studios had Macs in them, but some had PC's in them. There was an I-T consultant who worked with the PC guys, and they paid him well, and they were still always having problems. The Mac users just made music.
So you can whine on about software freedom or whatever philosophy you hew to, but it doesn't impress me compared to the freedom to make music, the freedom from technical problems and technical hurdles, the freedom to participate in digital art without having to take a computer science degree. If you can make a better system for music and video producers, then make it, or STFU already. Pretending like you are offering an equivalent technical system that is somehow more free is disingenuous. You are not. Windows and Linux can barely do consumer audio.
Me, I actually can code, but I spend my time coding HTML5 to share my work, I spend my time coding AppleScript to create reusable creative workflows with various Mac apps passing grunt work around between them so I don't have to do anything but actually create new stuff. But the idea that a musician should have to learn to code to make music is outrageously offensive. What if you couldn't do computer science if you didn't play a musical instrument? It's offensive.
There's just nothing worse than a nerd pushing their tech on you like a cat offering a mouse. If you think a Mac and a PC are the same at all, then you don't understand the Mac. It's not at all the same. The PC and Mac are not technically equivalent. The only thing they have in common is they are both computers. So is a car and a PC these days, they are both computers. Would you like it if I told you to do your coding on a fucking Ford dashboard, because then you'll have the "freedom to travel" while you code? It makes no sense.
What's worse is to hear this from open source advocates who know full well that the core operating system of the Mac is open source. The "open source Mac" is the Mac. The parts that need to be open source are open source. The Mac talks to the Internet like BSD, it is a great network citizen. It does not create botnets, it does not infringe on the freedom of Linux users to have a virus-free Internet. You coming down my pipe and telling me what I should run is bullshit. I have absolutely no interest in telling you not to use Linux. But I also have absolutely no interest in pretending Linux is suitable for music production.
Finally, what's ignored in this article is that the Mac is ridiculously standardized. Apple WebKit is HTML5 and 100/100 on Acid3, ISO MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, even though Apple could have pushed proprietary QuickTime down our throats with iTunes Store. The Mac is a full Unix, including Apache2, PHP, Python, Perl, and much more. USB, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, Displ
Apple sells more iPhone 3GS in a week than all the Android phones combined sell in a month. The same exact thing can also be said for iPhone 3G and iPod touch... each of those models sells more in a week than all of the Android phones combined sell in a month. Is the Zune a threat to the iPod? No. Same goes for Android and iPhone.
I guarantee you, the smartphone that pisses Apple off is the new Palm, because Palm hired away so many Apple employees and then produced a clone of iPhone. And Palm are selling more phones than Android.
One can even argue that Android helps iPhone and Apple. Android replaced Windows Mobile on the exact same phones, that means that Droid and Nexus One are running an Apple WebKit browser and ISO MPEG-4 media player instead of a Microsoft IE browser and Windows Media player. Therefore Android users are better Apple clients than they would have been with Windows Mobile, whether for Apple Store or for iTunes Store or as Mac users. Also, the work that Google does on mobile Search and Maps for Android benefits the iPhone. The work that Google does on its Android apps shows up in Google's iPhone apps. The battery door falling off the Droid and Verizon applying a sticker to it to hold it on makes Apple hardware look better by comparison. The 1GHz Nexus One having a less fluid interface than the 600MHz iPhone 3GS makes Apple software look better by comparison. Google's Nexus One launch with the round robin Google/T-Mobile/HTC "support" made Apple's support look totally fucking awesome by comparison. Google shipping malware out of Android Market was one of the first news stories that explained iPhone app approvals, and some people are now calling for Google to do approvals of Android apps, like they ban malware website from their search index. Google has proven that making and selling and supporting a smartphone and application platform is really, really hard. Google has proven that Apple made a lot of things look really easy over the past few years.
This is not a knock against Android. If you are happy with your Android phone, then more power to you. But what has that got to do with iPhone? Almost nothing.
It's viruses that are only possible on Windows. All operating systems have security holes, but only Microsoft systems get viruses. The Apple commercials very clearly refer only to viruses. The PC sneezes and acts like he has a cold, he's caught something, and the Mac can't catch it from him, he's immune to the viruses. Security holes are not covered at all.
Jobs' was selling personal computers for 6-7 years before WIMP, for 5-6 years before the IBM PC. And since WIMP the object-oriented NeXT tools were used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, and there was this thing called the iPod which had a whole generation named after it. And after that came a multitouch phone you might have heard of, with both an iPod and a Mac in it. Jobs doesn't need to look for a follow-up to bringing WIMP to consumers.
And the Apple tablet doesn't need eye-tracking to be interesting. It has the potential to make the IBM/Microsoft PC look like as antique as the typewriter it replaced.
Google already said that they can't do YouTube in Ogg because the Internet does not have enough bandwidth. The back end of YouTube is MPEG-4 H.264. No matter what format you upload your video in, it's converted to H.264 and that is the primary copy. The upcoming YouTube redesign has also been revealed to be essentially porting the mobile version of YouTube to the desktop. That means HTML5 and MPEG-4, which is what mobiles all use.
An ISO MPEG-4 audio video player is already built into EVERYTHING, there is no opportunity to change it now. Blu-Ray, set-top boxes, smartphones, iPod and other media players, GPU's, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, iTunes, game consoles, Safari, and Chrome all have H.264. If you don't publish MPEG-4, you might as well send your video encrypted with AES-256 and don't send the key. Nobody can play it if it's not MPEG-4. Ogg is a hobbyist format, suitable for ripping your CD/DVD onto a Linux box and watching them yourself, not suitable for sharing. Sharing requires that you use the community codec, which is what MPEG is all about for 20 years now.
Also, aside from the players, there is the whole professional toolchain of cameras, recorders, editing suites, encoders, servers. All of it is MPEG-4 because it's the standardization of QuickTime and that was already built into all the tools. Tools that supported proprietary QuickTime were upgraded fairly easily and quickly to support open ISO MPEG-4. Audio video is bigger than the Web. Audio video standardization is more successful than Web standardization. The idea that the W3C is going to tell Pixar and Dolby and such how to make audio video is insane. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the entire world.
And if we want to close one eye to professional content producers, we can open the other to amateurs who have, for example, a Flip camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264, or an iPhone camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264 and emails clips right from the iPhone. Users are not going to do a round trip through a PC so they can convert that MPEG-4 to Ogg before they share it. Especially not when all their video players have H.264 in their hardware already. That is why an iPod can play more hours of MPEG-4 H.264 than many laptops: the iPod has an "MPEG-4 CPU" so to speak, a dedicated chip that decodes the video with maximum efficiency. It doesn't have a big general purpose CPU like a PC. Multiple codecs is an AUTHORING side thing, not a consumer side thing. You use various codecs on a workstation to get your editing done, you don't demand that the consumer have a dozen codecs in their video player, it's not practical. The community agrees on one consumer codec and we all use it, just like CD/DVD, and everybody wins. Not the Linux community, the free software community, or the Web community... the audio video community: MPEG.
This whole debate happened 10 years ago already. You're way too late to change the consumer audio video standard to something other than MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. And you certainly can't change it to something that isn't at least technically superior. Consider that Adobe Flash was the de facto HTML4 video player that is being replaced by the audio and video tags and associated JavaScript API's in HTML5. The video codec in Flash is ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC for some years now. The Web is already an ISO MPEG-4 player in HTML4. It will continue to be in HTML5 because that's the format all the video is stored in. Including YouTube, iTunes, Blu-Ray, and all the movies people are shooting with their camcorders.
In short, Ogg is out for technical reasons: it requires too much bandwidth, it doesn't exist in the players, it doesn't exist in the cameras, it doesn't exist in the editing tools, it is not in the game at all.
No. OS X led to iTunes (1999) which led to the iPod (2001) which lead to the mainstream iPod (2004) which lead to OS X being ported to iPod (2004-2007), which was called the iPhone. By the time the iPod became a phenomenon, OS X had already proven itself, and even had WebKit and the Safari browser for a year. iTunes for Windows was not released until late 2003. The whole Mac app platform was already on OS X at that point.
What the iPod did for OS X was cause Apple to port OS X to the iPod and that's the iPhone of course. But the iPod is definitely post- Mac OS X. The first Mac OS X was released in 1999. iTunes was Mac OS X's music player, a next generation version of the CD Player app from Mac OS. Without it, no iPod as we know it.
If you are deploying Windows then you made so many problems for your users that you deserve whatever they do to make your life miserable.
If not deploying Windows, then being available by phone, email, and physical help desk should be plenty. I manage to find the Genius Bar once every 3 years when I need I-T help. I know the Apple employees are wearing colorful T-shirts but the way I tell who I'm meeting with is who is behind the big bar at the time of my appointment.
Apple just open sourced "Concierge", their app for users to make appointments for I-T help. Maybe that kind of thing on your Intranet would be helpful. If a user can make an appointment in a Web browser (on their phone if their PC is down and vice versa) then they feel like they're in control, they know someone is coming at 11:00 or they have to go to the help desk at 11:00 and someone will be there to meet them. If you tell them "soon" then they feel like they're not in control and you'll never get there and they have to go looking for you.
Wow. The original poster apparently thinks that having technology is a license to invade and kill and steal from people who have less technology. The entire last 500 years of history was lost on him, just like George Bush and about 40% of the US population. The 2 million Iraqis America killed over the past 20 years were just sacrifices on the altar of technology, the price of having semiconductors. BULLSHIT. Europeans developed sophisticated technology first because they lived in the cushiest geography, with beasts of burden and temperate climates and an east-west axis which enabled easy sharing of agricultural innovations. They were not superior people and had no right to steal from other cultures.
Avatar is clearly anti-American, not anti-tech. Not only do you have parallels with the US war machine killing people in their own homes and stealing their resources, you have the lack of a public health care system forcing one of the characters into war in order to get his spine fixed. In an ethical society, spine-fixing is funded BEFORE warships, and the warships are used for DEFENSE. What level of technology you're at is immaterial, totally irrelevant. Ethics apply whether you're on sailing ships or space ships.
The iPhone has an open source kernel and open source Web browser engine, and has the best support for the outrageously open HTML5 API of any phone. It also has security features such as not running arbitrary native code, so that even people who are not computer scientists can run it safely. If you can't understand that both the openness and the locking down are features, that is your problem, not the problem of phone companies and the 90% of humanity that DOES NOT WANT to have to learn about bits and bytes in order to use a fucking phone, they have THEIR OWN JOBS to geek out on.
It's just as bad to say that everything has to be open as it is to say everything has to be closed, because your extremism blinds you, gives you myopia, and you go on to produce a piece of shite like Windows Mobile or OpenMoko and tell people that's better than an iPhone, which is an actual solution to phone problems, not an academic exercise for computer nerds. Have you learned nothing from the PC, where you have one totally closed OS and one totally open, and you have to dual boot between them to get anything done? Me, I'm running Photoshop and Apache side-by-side for a decade. I have work to do.
I truly feel sorry for anyone who has evangelized open source over the past 20 years and doesn't see the iPhone as a success. You will never find peace. You will just grind yourself down on your bullshit philosophy until you die unhappy. The rest of humanity is not going to join you in your extremism.
Is it safe to eat? How does it taste? Will this end hunger? These are much bigger questions.
> is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh > rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very > difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.
No, this is backwards. The reality is the same as fur versus artificial fur. When you buy a fur coat, the danger is not that you will pay for fake fur and get real fur, it's that you will pay for real fur and get fake fur. The fake is cheaper, more plentiful, or else it would not exist. You will have to go out of your way to get the real stuff. Especially if they can turn out a million times more fake meat than real meat.
And we already have vegetarian restaurants that serve artificial meat made with soy but shaped and spiced to taste as much like the real thing as possible, and there is no widespread problem where people go into a place and order a meal with soy chicken and they serve them chicken instead.
So it isn't vegetarians who have to worry about this. This will just be one more option on the cruelty-free menu, which you can choose to eat or not. It's your diehard meat-eater who doesn't want to ingest any artificial meat who will have a problem. They will have to be like vegetarians today, always making sure they are not getting any meat products thrown into what they're eating. The tables are turned.
When you look at factory farms, with all the cruelty and disease, the only solution is artificial meat.
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> So yeah, it's very, very believable that the MSI unit, or any Tegra2 based tablet,
> will dramatically outlast the iPad doing the same kind of things.
The thing you left out is background tasks, which the user manages on Android but the system manages on iPhone OS. The iPhone gets much better battery life than other handsets with comparable chips and batteries because it freezes apps that aren't being used and that probably carries over to the bigger devices. In practice an iPhone user may run 30 apps within an hour but only have 3-4 apps running at any one time. I don't know if Android is capable of running 30 apps within an hour but the user likely has more than 3-4 apps running for the entire hour.
> The majority of people don't want multi-tasking?
No, the majority of people don't want traditional multitasking because what happens is the machine stalls after they launch their 10th app and gets worse from there. Multitasking causes them to run out of memory and get errors. It causes unexpected interactions like 2 audio sources playing simultaneously that they don't know how to solve.
If you know about computer science then you naturally clean up after yourself, you quit apps you're not using, you don't try to run 50 apps at once. You manage the applications on a computer without realizing it. Most people simply do not do that. On the Mac it is really easy to see what is running or not, the running apps have a light next to them in the Dock, yet time and time again I have been training users and tell them that is what the light means and they have no idea, and not only that, they do not understand what it means if an app is "running" versus "not running."
What has made the iPhone App Store so successful is that the limitation that only lets you run one 3rd party app at a time also enables you to run 100 apps in a single hour without the phone stalling or slowing down or running out of memory. That is how regular people use their apps. iPhone apps also freeze their state when you change to another app, so the apps all seem to be running all the time, and they are always available at a moment's notice. The Springboard is not so much an application launcher as an application switcher. You can leave Maps and when you come back 3 days later, the map you were looking at last time is still there.
What the iPhone does is not a lack of multitasking; it's very aggressive multitasking. The user is going to run so many 3rd party apps today that the computer refuses to let any 3rd party app use system resources in the background. iPhone users will literally run 10 times the number of apps that a PC user will run in any particular day.
Background processes also decrease security and lead to the user having to learn to use a task killer, which again, requires them to understand what a running app is versus a not running app, which they do not know and do not want to learn anymore than you want to learn how to be an ER nurse or a bus driver or any kind of job that you don't do already.
This is not an academic debate. We've had decades of "real multitasking" and only 3 years of iPhone-style multitasking and iPhone users use more apps. They do more tasks. They don't see out of memory errors like on Android, they don't have to have a task killer like on Android. The most popular app on non-iPhone phones is the task killer ... on iPhone it's always a game or a productivity tool or once in a while something that makes artificial farts.
1) There are gloves that are made to work on touchscreens for people in cold climates.
2) The headphones that come with the iPod touch have a clicker to cycle to the next song.
3) There are 10,000 plug-in remotes for iPod touch with a complete set of transport controls on them.
> Touchscreens are good for a specific purpose
The whole point of the touchscreen is it morphs into anything, they're good for general purpose, not specific purpose. If you have a specific purpose (like transport controls in a cold climate) then you get a plug-in remote with real buttons.
Similarly, the onscreen keyboard is good for general purpose. If you're writing a book, get a mechanical keyboard.
> The Microsoft Courier [arstechnica.com] will use a stylus
By saying "will" you're implying that is a real device. Microsoft have already said publicly that the Courier is a character in a fictional concept video. There is not now, never was, and never will be, a Microsoft Courier.
> Given that the most desirable feature of tablets for many is the ability to write on
> them and annotate documents,
No, that is not the most desirable feature. If it were, then Apple would not be outselling all Microsoft Tablet PC's ever sold with every quarter of iPhone sales. The most desirable feature of touch tablets is that the interface can morph into anything. If you want a music player, the interface morphs into an album art viewer, transport controls, volume control, and so on. If you want a music recorder, the interface morphs into channel faders, transport controls, EQ, dynamics processor, and so on. These interface are as useful as the real devices. In some cases they are more useful because the real devices may not have the ideal interface in order to save money on real parts.
> the main reason for a laptop for me is making notes and reading / browsing
> whilst travelling. The iPad falls down very badly on the first of those.
In the first place, the iPad was never even advertised as a laptop replacement. It replaces the books and magazines you have with you along with your laptop, not the laptop. Secondly, iPad is great at taking notes. If you don't like the virtual keyboard, you can use a mechanical keyboard via Bluetooth of the iPod dock connector. Apple's Bluetooth keyboard weighs only a few grams and is very tiny, very thin, yet has full-size keys. But in addition to that, you can draw freely on the iPad screen to take a visual note, with very fine resolution, you can draw very thin lines in many colors. You can annotate photos or documents with hand-drawn arrows, or circle something in a photo. You can write on it with your finger, again in very fine lines, one pixel thin lines are very easy, very accurate, same as on iPhone.
> I'm not sure Apple would be happy to know that I've finally found their target
> audience though - technologically inexperienced parents with slight arthritis.
Actually, they would be very happy to hear that. They would be very happy to hear that they brought computing to someone who otherwise could not experience it, or who otherwise would be tortured with a Windows system by their ignorant grandson.
The Archos is a nice Apple Newton derivative, very 1992, but the iPad is a generation ahead of that.
The iPod touch and iPhone sold more units in the past 3 years than all of the stylus devices since 1992, including the Palm Pilot and the Tablet PC. Apple sold more iPhones in Q4 2009 than all of the Tablet PC's ever shipped. We are talking about something entirely different since the iPhone. A stylus is a way to emulate handwriting on paper; an iPhone morphs into various devices, it becomes a multitrack recorder with transport controls and faders, it becomes a checkerboard with moveable pieces.
I appreciate your admiration for Archos, but it can't come at the expense of what Apple has done with touch tablets during the last few years.
If you want a screen you can draw on, those have been available for years. Hopefully you have not been waiting for one. But a 12-inch Cintiq costs 2x what the iPad costs, and considering that many people who are currently using Wacom tablets don't use the pressure (they're just making Photoshop selections) it would be a waste to prioritize pressure on an iPad at this time.
There are ideas out there about how to make pressure work on devices like iPad but it is not happening yet.
Also, keep in mind that the Mac will get touch in the near future. That is when we may see Wacom being made obsolete by stock Macs.
> I have a Google Nexus One, and I use the voice regcognition feature all the time.
> Why would I want to type a sentance on a tiny virtual keyboard, when I can just speak it?
Why would I speak text messages when I can just call the person? I easily type 40 wpm on my iPhone. It works great for messaging. If I am on the train or the street I don't want to talk, I want to type. If I wanted to talk I would make a call.
Touch on Nexus One may be "just nice" ... on iPhone you have multitouch, you have more accuracy, you have a much more mature implementation ... it is much better than nice, it is amazing. It adapts to what I want to do, not the other way around.
If you are speaking messages into to your phone, why not just record the audio and give that to the recipient via voicemail?
It's a book. You hold it like a book, you use it like a book. Books are held with 2 hands or they are put on a stand or they are laid flat on a desk. Notice the iPad has an IPS screen that specifically enables you to lay it flat on a desk and still read it from a lousy angle.
Stop being so literal and trying to substitute iPad for a notebook computer because they both have screens and CPU's and do computation. The notebook computer is a typewriter; the iPad is a book; the iPod is a music box; the TiVo is a VCR, the bank machine is a bank teller. It doesn't matter that these things all have computers in them. They are the computerized versions of many different devices. Different form factors follow the different functions.
The iPad is much more likely to replace a computer book than a computer in your life. That is the idea. Instead of 10 computer books next to your desk, you'll have one iPad with 10 eBooks on it. You'll still have the personal computer you've got now on the desk for Photoshop, but you'll have Photoshop Bible on the iPad.
> By buying the iPad, you're locked into Apple's products: apps you buy on the iPad
> will only work on Apple products
That is true with native apps on all platforms, however, the native apps on iPad are optional: it runs HTML5 Web apps also, it runs all the same apps as Chrome OS runs. Chrome is even based on the Apple browser ... whatever runs on Chrome runs on iPad.
> books you buy for the iPad will only work on Apple products
The books on iPad are ePub, it's made out of XML and runs on all the other book readers. Similarly, the music from the iTunes Store is ISO MPEG-4, it runs on all other devices. If not for the movie studio -mandated DRM, the video from iTunes Store would run on all devices, including FlashPlayer, including Android, including Blackberry, and is even the same as the movie format on Blu-Ray. Photos are JPEG, they work everywhere.
There is no vendor lock-in from Apple except for the native apps, but again, they are optional, and again, that is the case with all platforms.
> Android, Flash, and J2ME don't run run on the iPad or iPod.
Those are native app platforms from other manufacturers, they run only on those platforms. Android has Android apps, Flash has Flash apps, J2ME has J2ME apps, iPhone OS has iPhone OS apps, Mac OS has Mac OS apps, Windows has Windows apps, Windows Mobile has Windows Mobile apps, Blackberry has Blackberry apps, X-Windows has X-Windows apps, bash has bash apps, KDE has KDE apps, Gnome has Gnome apps.
The common app platform is the World Wide Web. All of Apple's devices, in addition to running their own native apps, also run HTML5 Web apps, out-of-the-box. If you want to move around from platform to platform and take everything with you, all you do is forgo the completely optional native apps and run HTML5 Web apps. The HTML5 Web apps from all of Apple's devices are the same exact ones from Chrome OS ... Chrome is based on the Apple browser.
You are ranting and raving but you're standing on sand. There is just no content in what you're saying. Apple could have done iTunes Store in QuickTime but they used MPEG-4, they could have done an IE-style proprietary browser but they did HTML5, they could have done a proprietary 3D language but they did OpenGL, and so on, and so on.
Even the iTunes LP and iTunes Extras which are DVD-style animated menus for iTunes are done in HTML5. You can run them in Firefox.
> Microsoft One-Note. It's the killer tablet app.
The Web is the killer app for touch tablets. We have been making links look like buttons for about 75% of the Web's history and clicking them with the mouse instead of pushing them with fingers. Also the scrolling is much better with touch.
There are a lot of other applications for it, but when you move the Web from mouse to touch it gets better without any recoding.
> The whole point of lugging around something the size of a laptop is that
> you get the *functionality* of a laptop.
> Why the fsck anyone would buy one of these is beyond me,
The iPad is not meant to replace your laptop. Neither was your iPhone or iPod.
Imagine someone sitting at a desk coding Java on a laptop, and next to them on the desk is a big computer book "Learn Java in 21 Days." The iPad is meant to replace the big computer book, not the laptop.
One of the key reasons I'm getting an iPad is to replace the 10 or so Web development reference books I always own. I'm not getting the iPad to replace my MacBook Air where I make the websites, but since the MacBook Air is 1.3 kilos and my 10 Web development books are like 10 kilos, I want to put the 10 kilos of books into the 0.7 kilo iPad and my whole work setup is 2 kilos. I want to refer to the books without putting my text editor or Photoshop or other app into the background on the computer. In the same way my desktop computer turning into a laptop enhanced my mobility, my books turning into an iPad enhances my mobility.
Computer books have had CD-ROM in the back for many years now, and the chief complaint (outside of their weight) is errata can't be corrected ... the whole computer book section is begging to be touch eBooks. Not to mention the black-and-white screen captures can become animations of the whole procedure, the code clippings can be actual clippings.
Lots of people have laptops and iPods even though the laptop can play music. The laptop can make phone calls but you have an iPhone. Same is coming for books, tutorial videos, tutorial websites. If you want to learn Photoshop in the near future, you'll download Photoshop to your MacBook and Photoshop Bible to your iPad and get down to it.
> The only thing it is missing is the touch component but I have yet
> to find an app that makes me care.
The Web, and every Web app, is much better with touch than mouse. Primarily because the fake buttons all become real buttons ... I mean, look at the buttons on the Web ... aren't they made for fingers? Secondarily the scrolling ... there is a lot of scrolling on the Web and flick-to-scroll is by far the easiest scrolling interface. If you haven't surfed the Web with touch yet then you are in for a surprise when you try an iPad or similar device. Pinching to zoom something is also very good. The Web browser in iPad is WebKit-based, HTML5, it runs the same apps as Chrome OS and Firefox.
The other kind of app that is really good are music and audio apps are where the touch really shines. The transport controls and faders on a mixer become essentially real. Drum machines give you a square of 16 pads, and you can hit 2 or more together. For many years, music and audio software has been emulating the look and functionality of real devices, but we've been trapped on the other side of the glass from them, poking at them with a mouse. In a typical music studio there are MIDI surfaces that provide transport controls and faders and knobs are are basically a poor man's touch screen. Check out "FourTrack" for iPhone, "BeatMaker" for iPhone. They replace dedicated devices, not just emulate them.
Also art tools: painting is outrageously good on the Apple touch interface, you can draw very, very fine lines with tremendous accuracy. "Brushes" is simply fantastic. Organizing photos into a slideshow, or slides into a presentation is very natural with touch, you just drag them around.
Of course many, many games benefit from touch. Even simple stuff like Chess.
So it is likely you'll find an app that makes you care about touch if you browse a catalog of touch apps.
Not to mention that there are photos on Facebook you can flip through like a stack of prints using the touch interface. And there are cameras and even SD cards with Wi-Fi in them now. That is why the camera/SD connections are optional.
By flexibility, you mean computer science flexibility, but for most people, a Mac/PC/Linux is very, very inflexible because they don't know how to work it.
Also, iPad is not meant to replace other computers. Many people will use an iPad to learn computers, to run a digital copy of "Learn Linux in 21 Days" or whatever. If they have to tinker with their book reader they can't rely on that source of learning which enables them to run their "flexible" computer.
This article is so backwards. It is also sad to see yet another everybody-should-be-a-computer-nerd story.
iPad runs the same apps as Chrome OS. If you're going to say that Apple is anti-tinkerer, then what is Google? Chrome OS is a subset of iPhone OS: Unix core, HTML5 browser. But on iPad OS you get native app development also. So you can run a multitrack recorder and tinker with music. Chrome OS is much more limited than iPhone OS.
There's tons of open source code running in an iPad. Is that anti-tinkerer? Are the people who are making all the iPhone OS apps and games anti-tinkerer? Are the people who make music and movies and books for iPad anti-tinkerer? Just because they tinker with music, not software code?
The development platform for iPhone OS is the Mac, which comes with dev tools, is Unix-certified, and includes Apache2, PHP5, Python, Perl, Ruby, and more. It also has tons of open source software, including Apple WebKit, which enables standards-based Web development for consumers who have iPad or iPhone or iPod or Chrome or Android or Nokia or Palm instead of the bullshit IE-specific Web development Microsoft propagates. Is WebKit anti-tinkerer? The Mac also comes with a multitrack music studio, a video editor, a photo light box. There is a ton of stuff to discover on Apple platforms, not just coding. But if you're into coding, the entire Mac UI can be scripted and so can the Unix shell of course. There are about 10 computer languages built into every Mac.
Some of us get a sense of wonder from writing books or music, not fucking around endlessly with computers. I got my nerd on as a kid in-between a set of headphones, listening to an LP, looking at album art, reading the lyrics. The iPad is the perfect device to provide the 21st century version of that. Many, many kids will discover music, movies, literature, websites on iPad and want to make those things. Hopefully they will also discover the idea of making stuff with some QUALITY which they certainly will not get from running most computing platforms. Making stuff for iPad is as easy as getting a Mac, which is $400 per year including the service plan, and if anything stops you from being able to make music today, you take the Mac to Apple and they fix it. So if you are a music tinkerer, you don't have to take a course in computer science, you take a course in music.
I'm truly tired of this everybody-should-be-a-computer-nerd philosophy of computing. Have you watched most people use a computer? It's like they are sentenced to hard labor.
At the iPad introduction, Steve Jobs said "Apple sees itself at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." The idea is to enhance the entire broad field of human endeavor with computers, not enslave them with computer science tasks. To enable them to enhance their own work (i.e. doctor, musician, architect) with computing, not sit and do various mindless steps to get anything done. What is joyful coding to a computer scientist is grim slavery to 90% of humanity. Many people do not have the kind of memory it takes to find the 15th nested dialog box in Outlook that lets them change their email signature. Me, I can hear any melody once and remember it forever, but I don't say that everyone should have to be able to do that in order to listen to music.
The funniest thing about this everybody-should-be-a-tinkerer idea is that computer scientists are among the most focused people on the planet. The joke is that they don't shower or shave because they're too into the computer. So to have computer scientists say that everyone else should have to learn more about the computer before they listen to music or read a book or whatever they do is outrageous. What if you were forced to learn a musical instrument in order to use a computer? You'd lose your fucking mind.
The switch to digital is not an excuse to force computer science on the rest of humanity.
Inherent in these kinds of stupid arguments against the Mac is the false idea that the PC, whether it's running Windows or Linux, is technically equivalent to the Mac for creative people. It is not. Even if Linux is "more free", we cannot use it. Richard Stallman is on The Setup right now rocking a 9-inch Yeelong that is not at all suitable for music or video production. I respect what he has done for computer science, but he doesn't make audio tools.
All you have to do to setup a music studio on a Mac is run a few installers and plug some gear together. It takes less than a half hour to be up and running making music. Virtual instruments and effects plug into the system, digital audio workstations plug into the system, audio and MIDI hardware plugs into the system, and the system manages it all. The Mac knows all the music gear and just recognizes it when you plug it in. I often run 2 full digital audio workstations and 2 separate audio interfaces and they all just work together seamlessly, including working with all of my virtual instruments and effects, including working at very high sample rates and with perfect timing. There is no other platform that offers anything like this.
For years I worked at a studio complex with dozens of studios. Most of the studios had Macs in them, but some had PC's in them. There was an I-T consultant who worked with the PC guys, and they paid him well, and they were still always having problems. The Mac users just made music.
So you can whine on about software freedom or whatever philosophy you hew to, but it doesn't impress me compared to the freedom to make music, the freedom from technical problems and technical hurdles, the freedom to participate in digital art without having to take a computer science degree. If you can make a better system for music and video producers, then make it, or STFU already. Pretending like you are offering an equivalent technical system that is somehow more free is disingenuous. You are not. Windows and Linux can barely do consumer audio.
Me, I actually can code, but I spend my time coding HTML5 to share my work, I spend my time coding AppleScript to create reusable creative workflows with various Mac apps passing grunt work around between them so I don't have to do anything but actually create new stuff. But the idea that a musician should have to learn to code to make music is outrageously offensive. What if you couldn't do computer science if you didn't play a musical instrument? It's offensive.
There's just nothing worse than a nerd pushing their tech on you like a cat offering a mouse. If you think a Mac and a PC are the same at all, then you don't understand the Mac. It's not at all the same. The PC and Mac are not technically equivalent. The only thing they have in common is they are both computers. So is a car and a PC these days, they are both computers. Would you like it if I told you to do your coding on a fucking Ford dashboard, because then you'll have the "freedom to travel" while you code? It makes no sense.
What's worse is to hear this from open source advocates who know full well that the core operating system of the Mac is open source. The "open source Mac" is the Mac. The parts that need to be open source are open source. The Mac talks to the Internet like BSD, it is a great network citizen. It does not create botnets, it does not infringe on the freedom of Linux users to have a virus-free Internet. You coming down my pipe and telling me what I should run is bullshit. I have absolutely no interest in telling you not to use Linux. But I also have absolutely no interest in pretending Linux is suitable for music production.
Finally, what's ignored in this article is that the Mac is ridiculously standardized. Apple WebKit is HTML5 and 100/100 on Acid3, ISO MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, even though Apple could have pushed proprietary QuickTime down our throats with iTunes Store. The Mac is a full Unix, including Apache2, PHP, Python, Perl, and much more. USB, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, Displ
Apple sells more iPhone 3GS in a week than all the Android phones combined sell in a month. The same exact thing can also be said for iPhone 3G and iPod touch ... each of those models sells more in a week than all of the Android phones combined sell in a month. Is the Zune a threat to the iPod? No. Same goes for Android and iPhone.
I guarantee you, the smartphone that pisses Apple off is the new Palm, because Palm hired away so many Apple employees and then produced a clone of iPhone. And Palm are selling more phones than Android.
One can even argue that Android helps iPhone and Apple. Android replaced Windows Mobile on the exact same phones, that means that Droid and Nexus One are running an Apple WebKit browser and ISO MPEG-4 media player instead of a Microsoft IE browser and Windows Media player. Therefore Android users are better Apple clients than they would have been with Windows Mobile, whether for Apple Store or for iTunes Store or as Mac users. Also, the work that Google does on mobile Search and Maps for Android benefits the iPhone. The work that Google does on its Android apps shows up in Google's iPhone apps. The battery door falling off the Droid and Verizon applying a sticker to it to hold it on makes Apple hardware look better by comparison. The 1GHz Nexus One having a less fluid interface than the 600MHz iPhone 3GS makes Apple software look better by comparison. Google's Nexus One launch with the round robin Google/T-Mobile/HTC "support" made Apple's support look totally fucking awesome by comparison. Google shipping malware out of Android Market was one of the first news stories that explained iPhone app approvals, and some people are now calling for Google to do approvals of Android apps, like they ban malware website from their search index. Google has proven that making and selling and supporting a smartphone and application platform is really, really hard. Google has proven that Apple made a lot of things look really easy over the past few years.
This is not a knock against Android. If you are happy with your Android phone, then more power to you. But what has that got to do with iPhone? Almost nothing.
It's viruses that are only possible on Windows. All operating systems have security holes, but only Microsoft systems get viruses. The Apple commercials very clearly refer only to viruses. The PC sneezes and acts like he has a cold, he's caught something, and the Mac can't catch it from him, he's immune to the viruses. Security holes are not covered at all.
Jobs' was selling personal computers for 6-7 years before WIMP, for 5-6 years before the IBM PC. And since WIMP the object-oriented NeXT tools were used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, and there was this thing called the iPod which had a whole generation named after it. And after that came a multitouch phone you might have heard of, with both an iPod and a Mac in it. Jobs doesn't need to look for a follow-up to bringing WIMP to consumers.
And the Apple tablet doesn't need eye-tracking to be interesting. It has the potential to make the IBM/Microsoft PC look like as antique as the typewriter it replaced.
Google already said that they can't do YouTube in Ogg because the Internet does not have enough bandwidth. The back end of YouTube is MPEG-4 H.264. No matter what format you upload your video in, it's converted to H.264 and that is the primary copy. The upcoming YouTube redesign has also been revealed to be essentially porting the mobile version of YouTube to the desktop. That means HTML5 and MPEG-4, which is what mobiles all use.
An ISO MPEG-4 audio video player is already built into EVERYTHING, there is no opportunity to change it now. Blu-Ray, set-top boxes, smartphones, iPod and other media players, GPU's, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, iTunes, game consoles, Safari, and Chrome all have H.264. If you don't publish MPEG-4, you might as well send your video encrypted with AES-256 and don't send the key. Nobody can play it if it's not MPEG-4. Ogg is a hobbyist format, suitable for ripping your CD/DVD onto a Linux box and watching them yourself, not suitable for sharing. Sharing requires that you use the community codec, which is what MPEG is all about for 20 years now.
Also, aside from the players, there is the whole professional toolchain of cameras, recorders, editing suites, encoders, servers. All of it is MPEG-4 because it's the standardization of QuickTime and that was already built into all the tools. Tools that supported proprietary QuickTime were upgraded fairly easily and quickly to support open ISO MPEG-4. Audio video is bigger than the Web. Audio video standardization is more successful than Web standardization. The idea that the W3C is going to tell Pixar and Dolby and such how to make audio video is insane. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the entire world.
And if we want to close one eye to professional content producers, we can open the other to amateurs who have, for example, a Flip camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264, or an iPhone camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264 and emails clips right from the iPhone. Users are not going to do a round trip through a PC so they can convert that MPEG-4 to Ogg before they share it. Especially not when all their video players have H.264 in their hardware already. That is why an iPod can play more hours of MPEG-4 H.264 than many laptops: the iPod has an "MPEG-4 CPU" so to speak, a dedicated chip that decodes the video with maximum efficiency. It doesn't have a big general purpose CPU like a PC. Multiple codecs is an AUTHORING side thing, not a consumer side thing. You use various codecs on a workstation to get your editing done, you don't demand that the consumer have a dozen codecs in their video player, it's not practical. The community agrees on one consumer codec and we all use it, just like CD/DVD, and everybody wins. Not the Linux community, the free software community, or the Web community ... the audio video community: MPEG.
This whole debate happened 10 years ago already. You're way too late to change the consumer audio video standard to something other than MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. And you certainly can't change it to something that isn't at least technically superior. Consider that Adobe Flash was the de facto HTML4 video player that is being replaced by the audio and video tags and associated JavaScript API's in HTML5. The video codec in Flash is ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC for some years now. The Web is already an ISO MPEG-4 player in HTML4. It will continue to be in HTML5 because that's the format all the video is stored in. Including YouTube, iTunes, Blu-Ray, and all the movies people are shooting with their camcorders.
In short, Ogg is out for technical reasons: it requires too much bandwidth, it doesn't exist in the players, it doesn't exist in the cameras, it doesn't exist in the editing tools, it is not in the game at all.
No. OS X led to iTunes (1999) which led to the iPod (2001) which lead to the mainstream iPod (2004) which lead to OS X being ported to iPod (2004-2007), which was called the iPhone. By the time the iPod became a phenomenon, OS X had already proven itself, and even had WebKit and the Safari browser for a year. iTunes for Windows was not released until late 2003. The whole Mac app platform was already on OS X at that point.
What the iPod did for OS X was cause Apple to port OS X to the iPod and that's the iPhone of course. But the iPod is definitely post- Mac OS X. The first Mac OS X was released in 1999. iTunes was Mac OS X's music player, a next generation version of the CD Player app from Mac OS. Without it, no iPod as we know it.
If you are deploying Windows then you made so many problems for your users that you deserve whatever they do to make your life miserable.
If not deploying Windows, then being available by phone, email, and physical help desk should be plenty. I manage to find the Genius Bar once every 3 years when I need I-T help. I know the Apple employees are wearing colorful T-shirts but the way I tell who I'm meeting with is who is behind the big bar at the time of my appointment.
Apple just open sourced "Concierge", their app for users to make appointments for I-T help. Maybe that kind of thing on your Intranet would be helpful. If a user can make an appointment in a Web browser (on their phone if their PC is down and vice versa) then they feel like they're in control, they know someone is coming at 11:00 or they have to go to the help desk at 11:00 and someone will be there to meet them. If you tell them "soon" then they feel like they're not in control and you'll never get there and they have to go looking for you.
Wow. The original poster apparently thinks that having technology is a license to invade and kill and steal from people who have less technology. The entire last 500 years of history was lost on him, just like George Bush and about 40% of the US population. The 2 million Iraqis America killed over the past 20 years were just sacrifices on the altar of technology, the price of having semiconductors. BULLSHIT. Europeans developed sophisticated technology first because they lived in the cushiest geography, with beasts of burden and temperate climates and an east-west axis which enabled easy sharing of agricultural innovations. They were not superior people and had no right to steal from other cultures.
Avatar is clearly anti-American, not anti-tech. Not only do you have parallels with the US war machine killing people in their own homes and stealing their resources, you have the lack of a public health care system forcing one of the characters into war in order to get his spine fixed. In an ethical society, spine-fixing is funded BEFORE warships, and the warships are used for DEFENSE. What level of technology you're at is immaterial, totally irrelevant. Ethics apply whether you're on sailing ships or space ships.
The iPhone has an open source kernel and open source Web browser engine, and has the best support for the outrageously open HTML5 API of any phone. It also has security features such as not running arbitrary native code, so that even people who are not computer scientists can run it safely. If you can't understand that both the openness and the locking down are features, that is your problem, not the problem of phone companies and the 90% of humanity that DOES NOT WANT to have to learn about bits and bytes in order to use a fucking phone, they have THEIR OWN JOBS to geek out on.
It's just as bad to say that everything has to be open as it is to say everything has to be closed, because your extremism blinds you, gives you myopia, and you go on to produce a piece of shite like Windows Mobile or OpenMoko and tell people that's better than an iPhone, which is an actual solution to phone problems, not an academic exercise for computer nerds. Have you learned nothing from the PC, where you have one totally closed OS and one totally open, and you have to dual boot between them to get anything done? Me, I'm running Photoshop and Apache side-by-side for a decade. I have work to do.
I truly feel sorry for anyone who has evangelized open source over the past 20 years and doesn't see the iPhone as a success. You will never find peace. You will just grind yourself down on your bullshit philosophy until you die unhappy. The rest of humanity is not going to join you in your extremism.
> The big question
Is it safe to eat? How does it taste? Will this end hunger? These are much bigger questions.
> is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh
> rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very
> difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.
No, this is backwards. The reality is the same as fur versus artificial fur. When you buy a fur coat, the danger is not that you will pay for fake fur and get real fur, it's that you will pay for real fur and get fake fur. The fake is cheaper, more plentiful, or else it would not exist. You will have to go out of your way to get the real stuff. Especially if they can turn out a million times more fake meat than real meat.
And we already have vegetarian restaurants that serve artificial meat made with soy but shaped and spiced to taste as much like the real thing as possible, and there is no widespread problem where people go into a place and order a meal with soy chicken and they serve them chicken instead.
So it isn't vegetarians who have to worry about this. This will just be one more option on the cruelty-free menu, which you can choose to eat or not. It's your diehard meat-eater who doesn't want to ingest any artificial meat who will have a problem. They will have to be like vegetarians today, always making sure they are not getting any meat products thrown into what they're eating. The tables are turned.
When you look at factory farms, with all the cruelty and disease, the only solution is artificial meat.