Apple Mac's worst kept secret finally revealed

[Canadave]

Exactly. Why not just carry around a laptop?

Because a laptop forces me to flip open the bulky keyboard for all the things I do that don't require keyboard input.

The screen on my iPod Touch is too tiny for my 50-year-old eyes to look at for long stretches. The iPad sounds like exactly the compromise I'm looking for, between an iPod and a laptop. I can't wait to have one.

This. A laptop is heavy and cumbersome. It also requires a power cable and a dedicated bag. Add a mouse and/or a base fan to avoid the heat the thing gives off and I detest carrying one anywhere. The iPad looks rather ergonomic and simple. Like the Kindle, I would be able to carry it just about anywhere or toss it in a bag with other items.

But when you're talking netbooks (which are the iPad's most logical competition given their similar price), you have something that's about the same size or potentially even smaller than the iPad. And again, a netbook just has more features, and on top of that, many of them even have a comperable battery life to the iPad (~10-12 hours, from what I've heard). In all, it just sounds like a good way to part people from their money.

 

[RoJoHen]

But when you're talking netbooks (which are the iPad's most logical competition given their similar price), you have something that's about the same size or potentially even smaller than the iPad. And again, a netbook just has more features, and on top of that, many of them even have a comperable battery life to the iPad (~10-12 hours, from what I've heard). In all, it just sounds like a good way to part people from their money.

Yeah. I mean, I can see the device itself being attractive to buyers, but I would want it to do a lot more stuff before I'd buy one. (I'd want it to be a more like a new design of laptop, rather than a glorified iPod).

 

[Tim]

I'm not clear on what this product is trying to be. Is it an iPod Touch with a larger screen or a fancy e-reader?

Products without a well-defined purpose and market tend not to fare well, but I've learned not to underestimate the fervor with which people will buy Apple products--evidently the result of excellent marketing by Jobs and company.

 

[Stone_Cold_Sisko]

It's WAY too gimped for something that's 10 inches and takes up that much physical space.

Talk about a waste of:

1) a really nice screen and
2) a really fast processor.

You can't run more than one app at a time. No Flash at all. That's just ridiculous.

Seriously...

YOU CAN'T LISTEN TO PANDORA WHILE BROWSING THE WEB. You can't watch porn on the various "Porn Youtube" sites. You can't check out cool (or awful depending on your POV) Flash websites. YOU CAN'T WATCH HULU or NETFLIX INSTANT VIEWING on this thing. No watching Inside the NBA on nba.com. Can't jump between a browser window and a Word doc. I actually made a mental list of things I like to do on a computer/laptop and 90% of them, I can't do on this $600 10 inch machine. Wow.

Gimped user experiences are a trade-off for extreme portability. The iPhone, limitations and all, BLEW AWAY what other phones could do. That shit don't fly when you're in the 10-inch range. Well ok it will fly with the faithful, they'll start rationalizing why you don't really need the stuff it can't do, but it doesn't fly with me. The iPad does not blow away other devices at similar price points, at similar size ranges... unless you pull a "branding exercise" and try to convince people... "hey, it might be the same size as these other devices... might cost as much as them... but really you shouldnt be comparing it to them" as someone who works in marketing and branding, i know this all too well. This is a netbook in smartphone-clothing.

Actually I suspect the real reason is that if you could watch video on Hulu or the other Flash video streaming sites, that's less people using iTunes to buy video on their iPad, and more people playing Farmville on facebook instead of downloading/buying games from the App Store.

HP Slate looks much better. It runs full Windows 7 with multi-touch and a similar form factor.

 

[Venardhi]

Are any of these 'slate' computers friendly for drawing? High 'DPI' on the touchscreen, directional/angle sensitivity for a stylus, etc? That will be the selling point for me.

 

[Guartho]

But it'll surf the web and display the Flash that 90% of the websites on the planet use!

90%? I don't think so. Unless you're talking about ads in which case I'd call that a plus. I've done lots of browsing on my touch and I can't remember the last time I even noticed lack of flash, let alone was inhibited by it. I don't think flash is nearly as ubiquitous as you keep repeating in iPad discussions.

Seriously...

YOU CAN'T LISTEN TO PANDORA WHILE BROWSING THE WEB.

Who says you can't? I can do this on my touch. Does the iPad have limitations that the iPod Touch doesn't? (Other than pocketability of course)

I'm with you on Hulu and Netflix though. The iPad isn't all that appealing to me, but I'd be drooling if it put those libraries at my fingertips.

 

[Rii]

I'm an Apple fan here, and I am not impressed. I don't quite understand who this product is supposed to be marketed at. I already have an iPhone (love it) and a MacBook Pro (also love it). Why would I need an iPad?

Is there some rule that because you own an Apple product that all subsequent products from Apple are meant to cater to your interests or something?

Consumer: "Hey, I already have a car that meets my needs, what does this larger car offer me? I am not impressed by your new car."

 

[ManOnTheWave]

Are any of these 'slate' computers friendly for drawing? High 'DPI' on the touchscreen, directional/angle sensitivity for a stylus, etc? That will be the selling point for me.

I don't think it will have an optional stylus, but it does have some sort of drawing software. Go here and scroll down to about the middle.

edit: Watch this video and go to about 42 minutes.

 

[Canadave]

But it'll surf the web and display the Flash that 90% of the websites on the planet use!

90%? I don't think so. Unless you're talking about ads in which case I'd call that a plus. I've done lots of browsing on my touch and I can't remember the last time I even noticed lack of flash, let alone was inhibited by it. I don't think flash is nearly as ubiquitous as you keep repeating in iPad discussions.

YouTube. One of the most popular websites on the internet is entirely unusable on the iPad. Sorry, but if I pay $600 for what amounts to a fancied-up netbook, I want to be able to use friggin' YouTube.

 

[Rii]

YouTube. One of the most popular websites on the internet is entirely unusable on the iPad. Sorry, but if I pay $600 for what amounts to a fancied-up netbook, I want to be able to use friggin' YouTube.

Fortunately, you can.

Incidentally, that Apple is willing to use Star Trek to advertise the iPad's video functionality comes as a welcome surprise. As always I spit in the face of any so-called video functionality that doesn't extend to include XviD/DivX, but that's neither here nor there.

 

[Guartho]

YouTube. One of the most popular websites on the internet is entirely unusable on the iPad. Sorry, but if I pay $600 for what amounts to a fancied-up netbook, I want to be able to use friggin' YouTube.

YouTube works on the flashless iPhone and iPod Touch and has since version 1 of each device. What makes you think the iPad will not?

 

[SinglePurpose]

But it'll surf the web and display the Flash that 90% of the websites on the planet use!

90%? I don't think so. Unless you're talking about ads in which case I'd call that a plus. I've done lots of browsing on my touch and I can't remember the last time I even noticed lack of flash, let alone was inhibited by it. I don't think flash is nearly as ubiquitous as you keep repeating in iPad discussions.

...

I'm with you on Hulu and Netflix though. The iPad isn't all that appealing to me, but I'd be drooling if it put those libraries at my fingertips.

Just to be pedantic I'd like to point out that all of Hulu's videos are flash so at least sometimes the lack of flash is inhibiting.

 

[Guartho]

Yep. Hence the "I'm with you on hulu and Netflix though."

 

[Data Holmes]

A question to the more tech savvy out there, but I keep seeing mention of an html5 killing flash soon... What is this about, and if true, could apple simply be waiting for this new development to come along rather than adopt flash now?

 

[Shaw]

This is a bizarre thread.

There are thousands (millions?) of products in this world that I neither need or care for (or about). And yet I have never considered starting a thread about one of them.

I don't need or want every product by any company to be a perfect match for me. I don't see a need (for me) for the iPad. But then again, I also don't need (or have) an iPod, iPhone or iPod touch, yet haven't needed to declare them failures or waste energy trashing them because I have no compelling reason to use them.

Generally, I would hope that most people would realize that the appropriate response to a product they aren't going to use is to ignore it. It is disturbing to see so many waste so much of their time declaring how they aren't going to waste their time with this product.

 

[T'Baio]

I know! People talking about things on a message board!

Idiots.

 

[David cgc]

A question to the more tech savvy out there, but I keep seeing mention of an html5 killing flash soon... What is this about, and if true, could apple simply be waiting for this new development to come along rather than adopt flash now?

I think it has more to do with the fact that Flash sucks like ass.

For one thing, Flash is a closed standard. Considering the structure of the internet, it's probably not the best idea to have a big bundle of content dependent upon the whims of one company. Hell, the iPhone/iPad issue is a perfect example of why the prevalence of Flash is a Bad Thing. If Flash were an open standard, Apple could develop their own Flash player that addresses the problems I'm about to go into.

Now, let's consider more specifically why Flash sucks like ass where Apple products are concerned. The current version of the Flash plug-in for Mac is a) 32-bit, and b) the number-one cause of application crashes in Mac OS X.

Now, Apple recently made their Safari webbrowser a 64-bit program. All things being equal, a 64-bit program can't run 32-bit plug-ins. Adobe apparently had their thumb wedged somewhere in the vicinity of their rectum, and did not or could not compile a 64-bit version of Flash for them, so Apple, to solve that and the crashing problem, rewrote Safari 64-bit so that plug-ins would run in their own little bubble, so it didn't matter if they were 32-bit or 64-bit, and if they crashed, it wouldn't bring down the whole browser (a welcome change to someone who's lost more than one tab explosion to a Flash crash).

Also, Apple likes having their computer-like appliances running as a closed ecosystem. It keeps things clean and reliable. They can't do that with Flash. What if they had Flash on the iPhone and wanted to transition it to 64-bit, or if they decided Flash was crashing too damn much? Too bad, Adobe's the only one can fix it. And you know damn well that when Flash is slow or crashy on an iPhone, Apple's the one that's going to be blamed. I've seen it happen plenty of times in Mac labs at Uni when Flash fines some new and exciting way to shit itself and die. Same with that shitty excuse for a port of Maya that Autodesk inflicts on us. But I digress.

So how to we solve this? Flash is the de facto standard, so everyone need to support it. And since everyone supports it, people keep developing for it instead of, as a for instance from the future, using the new HTML 5 equivalents for streaming video. Apple, by virtue of their unconquerable market superiority is taking the opportunity to break this vicious cycle. There are millions of iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads out there, and not a damn one can view Flash. Now, content creators have an incentive to go back to proper, open standards like HTML 5 since it's no longer a guarantee that every browser someone uses will have some kind of Flash support.

And the best part is, as I alluded to above, Apple can get away with this because they're doing this in product lines where they own, and the lack of Flash isn't a dealbreaker. Flash isn't ever going away as a statement on the Mac, but the iPhone? The iPad? Why the fuck not? Who's not going to buy one of these things solely because of the lack of Flash? No one, that's who. What, you want to watch YouTube? There's an app for that (Netflix and Hulu forthcoming, if those companies are to be believed). Want to waste your time with mindless flash games? Hey, hot damn, there are games on the App Store. Want to watch porn? Why not go to a bar and win a few bets by looking things up on your iPhone, so you can get laid for real?

 

[Amaris]

A question to the more tech savvy out there, but I keep seeing mention of an html5 killing flash soon... What is this about, and if true, could apple simply be waiting for this new development to come along rather than adopt flash now?

I think it has more to do with the fact that Flash sucks like ass.

For one thing, Flash is a closed standard. Considering the structure of the internet, it's probably not the best idea to have a big bundle of content dependent upon the whims of one company. Hell, the iPhone/iPad issue is a perfect example of why the prevalence of Flash is a Bad Thing. If Flash were an open standard, Apple could develop their own Flash player that addresses the problems I'm about to go into.

Now, let's consider more specifically why Flash sucks like ass where Apple products are concerned. The current version of the Flash plug-in for Mac is a) 32-bit, and b) the number-one cause of application crashes in Mac OS X.

Now, Apple recently made their Safari webbrowser a 64-bit program. All things being equal, a 64-bit program can't run 32-bit plug-ins. Adobe apparently had their thumb wedged somewhere in the vicinity of their rectum, and did not or could not compile a 64-bit version of Flash for them, so Apple, to solve that and the crashing problem, rewrote Safari 64-bit so that plug-ins would run in their own little bubble, so it didn't matter if they were 32-bit or 64-bit, and if they crashed, it wouldn't bring down the whole browser (a welcome change to someone who's lost more than one tab explosion to a Flash crash).

Also, Apple likes having their computer-like appliances running as a closed ecosystem. It keeps things clean and reliable. They can't do that with Flash. What if they had Flash on the iPhone and wanted to transition it to 64-bit, or if they decided Flash was crashing too damn much? Too bad, Adobe's the only one can fix it. And you know damn well that when Flash is slow or crashy on an iPhone, Apple's the one that's going to be blamed. I've seen it happen plenty of times in Mac labs at Uni when Flash fines some new and exciting way to shit itself and die. Same with that shitty excuse for a port of Maya that Autodesk inflicts on us. But I digress.

So how to we solve this? Flash is the de facto standard, so everyone need to support it. And since everyone supports it, people keep developing for it instead of, as a for instance from the future, using the new HTML 5 equivalents for streaming video. Apple, by virtue of their unconquerable market superiority is taking the opportunity to break this vicious cycle. There are millions of iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads out there, and not a damn one can view Flash. Now, content creators have an incentive to go back to proper, open standards like HTML 5 since it's no longer a guarantee that every browser someone uses will have some kind of Flash support.

And the best part is, as I alluded to above, Apple can get away with this because they're doing this in product lines where they own, and the lack of Flash isn't a dealbreaker. Flash isn't ever going away as a statement on the Mac, but the iPhone? The iPad? Why the fuck not? Who's not going to buy one of these things solely because of the lack of Flash? No one, that's who. What, you want to watch YouTube? There's an app for that (Netflix and Hulu forthcoming, if those companies are to be believed). Want to waste your time with mindless flash games? Hey, hot damn, there are games on the App Store. Want to watch porn? Why not go to a bar and win a few bets by looking things up on your iPhone, so you can get laid for real?

It would be nice to see something better than flash. I know Microsoft is really pushing Silverlight, and I hope they succeed. Netflix uses Silverlight instead of flash, and the quality difference is noticeably positive.

 

[Kestra]

Generally, I would hope that most people would realize that the appropriate response to a product they aren't going to use is to ignore it. It is disturbing to see so many waste so much of their time declaring how they aren't going to waste their time with this product.

It's in the news, it's something people have been discussing since before it was revealed, and many people are interested in other products by this company. I have an iPod Touch and while the iPad doesn't seem like something I'm likely to use, I've been following this discussion. Sure, people overcompensate on both sides, but that's due to a divisive atmosphere that these companies themselves have encouraged.

Not all products are the same. It's not like a new toaster that came out. This is a product that is supposed to be unique so it is only natural to take interest in it, whether you want to own one or not.

 

[Commander Rabbit]

I mean, you have the iPhone, and you have the Macbook series. The iPad fits in between but doesn't really seem to fit in.

Who are they targeting this product at? Everyone here at work have says they have no interest in such a product, and almost half of them are solid Mac users/supporters.

Apparently they are targeting me.

I've just started a new job that involves a lot of travel. I have an iMac at home and was considering getting a Macbook, but I don't really need all the power/size/cost of one. I don't want to upgrade my cellphone to a smartphone, iPhone or otherwise, because I don't want to surf or even read e-mail on such a small screen. So...

The iPad is going to be absolutely perfect for me. I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas! I just kind of wish they'd spelled it iPADD.