15 comments so far

1. Actually, according to people who have started poking around the dev kit, the iPad OS has a “shared” folder that mounts as a drive when you plug into your computer, and all apps have access to this folder. That’s a big step in the right direction – I think even Apple acknowledges that with something that’s much closer to a computer, they need to open some things up a bit.

   With the iPhone not being able to drag-and-drop files, I don’t really know how much of it is piracy fears, I think it’s more about an attempt at a streamlined user experience. For example, the process of adding MP3s or wallpaper images to the Droid or Blackberry is something that immediately puts it out of technical reach to someone like my Mom. You have to mount it on your computer and then navigate to what folder? And then how do I find it on the phone now? In fact, the whole way the Droid works, as simple as it is, still has a sort of Windows-like un-intuitiveness to it. It’s common knowledge to us, but the iPhone is ALL about simplicity. It’s about the most elegant un-computer-like experience possible, and among other things that means never worrying about RAM or seeing the ugly file structure inside the phone. I think geeks kind of misinterpret the iPhone mentality as an act of war against them, because it’s asking them to buy a computer that they can’t tinker with. But I think the iPhone, and by extension the iPad, were very intentionally NOT designed with the geeks in mind. I don’t think Steve Jobs thinks of these as computers, he thinks of them as gadgets. You don’t complain that Nintendo has a closed ecosystem for the DSi and the Wii, do you? Why not? Because it’s a gadget, it’s not a computer. It’s designed to do a certain thing in a very specific way, and if you don’t want to play by those rules, you have to go back to PC gaming, or you have to go the super-geek route and hack your Wii. If you think of the iPhone and the iPad as gadgets and not computers, then the desire to control the user experience much more tightly makes a lot of sense. I understand that hurdle is simply too big for some people when it comes to a smartphone – they want something they can do anything they want to it. I totally understand that. When I use the Droid there’s so much more I can do TO the phone, and that’s very refreshing, but unfortunately there’s a lot less I can do WITH it, because the apps just aren’t there yet. I went the ultra-geek route and jailbroke my iPhone, and now, for me, I have the best of both worlds.

   I have a jailbroken iPhone, and a 17″ MacBook Pro I can do anything with, so I think I’m going to be okay playing by Steve’s rules with the iPad, and it’s mostly because I’m thinking of it as a fancy gadget, and I’m thinking about my Mom using it and never having to navigate through a file structure or see a configuration file or worry about a virus or whatever else comes along with any other OS, and it all makes sense in a strange sort of way. It’d be one thing if Apple didn’t make the hands-down best professional laptops money can buy, but they do, so I understand targeting the tablet at an entirely different audience than someone who wants a tricked-out 17″ MacBook Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE an OS X based tablet that I could run Photoshop on and download torrents to, but I’m strangely not too stung by having a sexy gadget that lets me do a whole lot of fun stuff in a brand new way.

   Rob - 01.28.10, 1:40 pm

2. I mostly agree with Rob: I don’t imagine why anyone would buy their parents a “real” computer now that there is the iPad. The iPad is relatively cheap, there’s nothing that can go wrong, and it makes it easy to the sorts of things that moms want to do–web, email, pictures, Facebook, etc. I think DaringFireball.net gets it right, when they say it’s like the change from stick shift to automatic. There are always going to be people who care about the details under the hood, but most people are just going to want to press gas to go and brake to stop.

   I’m also pretty nervous about the fact that you can’t load unsigned apps onto the iPad/iPhone, especially since I know how to program and I like writing my own little automating scripts for daily tasks. I think if Apple would just let us run our own apps at our risk (maybe with no access to G3, so you don’t accidentally flood the cell network), that would basically take away my one hesitation about the iPad.

   It’s funny though if you compare it to the Kindle, whose DX version is almost $500, how very different it is. No one is saying, “Oh boo, the Kindle didn’t change computing; the Kindle is too restrictive; the Kindle is a disappointment” or whatever. The Kindle is a gadget, just like the DSi, so people are willing to overlook its limitations, since no one expects a gadget to do 100% of everything, the way people expect a computer to do everything.

   Long story short, the laptop is now obsolete. The desktop lives on though. For 60% of stuff, the iPhone/Droid will do it on the go; for 90% of stuff, the iPad will do it around the house and comfortably; and for the final 10% of stuff, you’ll have a real desktop computer.

   Carl - 01.28.10, 6:55 pm

3. I just looked at the 8 things that suck about iPad article. It says,

   No Multitasking
   This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.

   This strikes me as completely wrong. There’s only one legitimate gripe on the list, Pandora. And that seems like an easy fix: have some way to stream other sources of music through the iPod.app, which can run in the background. As for his other two complaints, Mobile Safari already runs in the background on the iPhone, and most Twitter clients have built in browsers, so you don’t have to leave the app. AIM is delivered by push messaging, so it doesn’t need to be open to get a message.

   I can see why people think they want multitasking, but if you think about it, it’s not as though you can physically do more than two things at once: you can listen to one thing and look at something else… and that’s about it. Maybe if they invent -iSmell-o-Pod, that would be a third thing that can be done simultaneously. Other than that the question is making sure that when you relaunch an app it remembers its state so that you go right back to where you were.

   Other issues:

   Big, Ugly Bezel – you need to be able to hold it without touching something

   No Cameras – agreed, but wait for iPad 2.0.

   Touch Keyboard – Uh, did this guy read about Bluetooth support? What else did he expect? Apple can’t really do magic, despite the ads for iPad saying otherwise. The one improvement I can see is that they might integrate speech-to-text like Android does. Wait for iPhone OS 4.0.

   No HDMI Out – There’s a component out adapter.

   The Name iPad – True. Besides a maxi pad, it also sounds like a Bostonite saying iPod.

   No Flash – Not a big deal. All the video sites will offer HTML5 soon, so the only problem left will be Flash games. But why have a Flash game when you can make a native game?

   Adapters, Adapters, Adapters – It’s not too bad, but yeah, having a USB port or card reader in version 2.0 would be nice.

   It’s Not Widescreen – Whatever. Black bars aren’t a big deal.

   Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G – I’m on AT&T already, so I don’t care. I’m sure T-Mobile will roll out a micro-SIM or whatever to adapt.

   A Closed App Ecosystem – This is the one really serious complaint in the whole piece. I hope Apple opens up a little.

   Carl - 01.28.10, 7:10 pm

4. I just don’t get it. It’s truly not as useful as a netbook, not much better than a iPhone, and not even close to a real laptop. It probably will have some cool programs made for it, but my main hope is that it will push companies to make some real nice convertible netbooks, and get ms to release Courier.

   peshue - 01.28.10, 8:11 pm

5. I just remembered that I put the word ‘tablet’ in my moderation queue a long time ago because I get spammed by so many pills-for-cheap sites. Maybe it’s time to take that one out.

   That’s encouraging news about the shared folder…definitely does sound like a first step in the right direction. I want to love this thing.

   I see your point about the elegance of the Apple user interface, Rob, and how it’s been created to put the devices within the reach of people who have no prior experience with computers, etc. And I think that’s awesome.

   Part of my aversion to Apple’s system likely has to do with the way I got my start on portable media players: I was in Korea, it was many years before the iPod was available locally, and I had very little money, but I wanted a nice, small device on which to listen to my music. (I’d owned a Sony MD player since they were first released, but I could put up with it no longer. A mistake of epic proportions.) By that time, I had been using iTunes for a while on my computer and buying songs ‘legally’, but it had left me frustrated and DRM’d to the point that I decided I didn’t want in on Apple’s music business, which meant I wasn’t going to spend the money to import an iPod, no matter how good they were. (I hadn’t yet tried one.) So I bought a tiny 256 MB Samsung mp3 player for around $130 that I ran with a rechargeable NiMH AAA battery, and it gave me years upon years of good, no-frills service, which was just what I wanted. The storage space may have been small, and the user interface may have been bare-bones, but it was enough for me, and most importantly, it let me do what I wanted with my files. I still have it today, and I don’t think I’ll ever throw it away. I developed so much affection for the thing that I actually took it apart and managed to fix it when it broke a couple years ago. Long story.

   I get set in my ways easily, and I’m sure this fact played in to how I developed such a strong preference for simple USB mass storage devices in this case. Coming from that background, I can’t help but feel like I’m being told how to comb my hair and brush my teeth whenever I’m met with the one-two punch of Apple’s iPod family of devices + iTunes. As much as I love the experience of using the devices themselves — and I really love it — that’s enough to turn me off. And the ‘Don’t Steal Music’ sticker has always made the turn-off that much worse.

   For me, it’s almost maddening to plug a device into a computer and not be greeted with a simple folder that shows me what I have inside, what can be taken out, etc. I go crazy without that simple, ‘real’ interface. Simple to people like us, anyway. But you’re right: For the vast majority of people out there, and for the mass market that Apple has so brilliantly won over (or created), this would never work. They needed a go-between, something to do the work for them and make it seamless, and iTunes made everything possible.

   The Droid/’Windows-like un-intuitiveness’ comparison is a good one, because yeah, my parents would never know what to do with it either. I’ve even had to take my wife by the hand to show her the ropes, and she’s usually okay with this stuff. (Though in terms of drag-and-drop, I will say that the Droid does seem to recognize/organize anything and everything I drop into the main directory, regardless of folders.) The iPhone would be a different story. For me, though, the nerdy freedom that Android provides is a lot of fun.

   The Windows analogy hits home, because just the other day I was thinking of Android as the first take on Windows that I actually like using. And as brought up in the Mashable comments, yeah, it’s nice to at least be able to listen to music while doing stuff. That one’s a no-brainer. I was sitting in a big comfy chair in a bookstore yesterday, reading a book, listening to some nice background music, checking emails as they came in, and looking stuff up. It was seamless and pleasant. If Google and Motorola can make that happen, then Apple can certainly do it better.

   I’d never thought of the possibility that Steve Jobs might think of his non-computer devices in the same way that Nintendo thinks of its game systems — each one an ‘island’ project. Perhaps the reason I hadn’t was because, again, the first devices of similar functionality that I’d used and become comfortable with were so very different, basically just ‘arms’ of the computer itself. So I see what you’re getting at, and it’s admirable if Apple’s vision was simply to break down the barriers for people. But I can’t help thinking that a large part of it was also about controlling what people could do with digital content.

   I have a very special place in my heart for gadgets that are based on closed systems, because they tend to be the ones that actually feel like real toys. It’s hard to describe, but there’s something that can be very special about them. And yeah, that’s one of the reasons I love the DS and the Wii. They’re like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in the age of food corporations — standalone bastions of fun that feel like a throwback to simpler times when everything wasn’t integrated and connected. They make me feel like I’m supporting the independent little guy, even though that’s not really the case. And I distinctly remember feeling that way using Apple computers at home throughout the 90s, when they were the odd man out. Fond memories.

   Of course Nintendo, Apple, and all the rest are built to make money and not to appease people like me, but when a company’s mindset is closed to the point that consumers are being screwed and/or their freedoms taken away, I think that’s a sign that things have gone too far, and I can’t help but wonder if it will come back to bite those responsible.

   Google may be just another company whose goal is to make money and take over the world, but the post on the ‘meaning of open’ really resonated with me: http://googlepublicpolicy.blog.....-open.html

   I’m crazy about Nintendo, but I hope that they can find a way to loosen things up just a bit in the next round, both for my sake and theirs, because no matter how much success they have right now, the times are changing. And as far as Apple goes, a standard drag-and-drop storage option for its portable devices (plus an accompanying opt-out of iTunes) is all it would take to get me on board.

   Nick - 01.29.10, 1:01 am

6. I didn’t own any Apple product yet, but these capabilities with this price makes me think warm of it as a replacement for my old EeePC. Despite the drawbacks.

   Tom N. - 01.29.10, 2:50 am

7. No multi-tasking. No flash. No USB inputs. Those three reasons alone make this device seemingly useless. Why would anyone who already has a laptop have any use for this thing?

   starbangledscanner - 01.29.10, 1:18 pm

8. And laptops obsolete? Are you joking? For anyone who needs a portable computer for more than Facebook or checking email, say for instance running Photoshop, while running Flash, Skype, and Chrome, etc…not to mention having a real keyboard, any inputs I might need at any time…

   starbangledscanner - 01.29.10, 1:27 pm

9. No multitasking? I used to live without it on a netbook. Sure it can multitask but the performance drops so much that it’s not worth it.

   No flash? This is very debatable. Flash as a closed-code extension has grown too important over the time. It sure is installed in almost any web browser, but it makes the whole broowsing too dependable on one company. Flash in the way it exists today needs to be replaced.

   No USB? You need to transfer XiViD_DVDRip_XXX_Avatar-hot.avi?

   Tom N. - 01.29.10, 1:48 pm

10. Sorry so many comments got caught in the filter here. Settings updated!

    Nick - 01.30.10, 1:52 am

11. Hmm, Skype is a legitimate use for multitasking, since it falls under the “hearing” rubric. Photoshop though is not. Can you edit a photo and browse the web simultaneously? How? Do you have two heads? I can see wanting to switch back and forth between PS and a web based guide, but that’s not real multitasking. All that’s needed for that is state restoration and quick start up times for PS.

    Anyway, people who moan about the multitasking of iPad are like people who complained iPhone 1.0 didn’t have 3G or copy-and-paste. Yeah, it didn’t because the technology wasn’t ready yet. 3G ate too much battery, and Apple didn’t like the UI for copy-and-paste. The next year Apple fixed the 3G problem and the year after that updated it with copy-and-paste. Does anyone really think there will never be an iPad with multitasking? Unless they decide to pull the plug on it for financial reason or whatever, I’m sure some multitasking-like solution will be added in the next 5 years, maybe even as soon as next year.

    In the meanwhile, it’s worth thinking about why for Apple multitasking is a low priority. Here are some reasons:

    1. It eats battery. (I read one Nexus One owner complaining that apps will eat up his battery then the device reboots, then since the memory is wiped you can’t tell who was the guilty party.)

    2. You can only do two things at once anyway: hear and see. Hearing is mostly covered by the iPod app, with the exceptions noted above.

    3. The difference between apps that are “running” and apps that are not is difference only of interest to nerds. In the future there should be no difference. Part of making this future possible is to encourage apps to cold boot quickly. To encourage quick cold boot times (devs only do things if they are forced to by necessity), take away multitasking.

    Carl - 01.30.10, 2:01 am

12. I agree with Carl. Instead of implementing a feature that almost every other machine vaguely labeled a “personal computer” has had for the last twenty-odd years, Apple should force developers to retool their apps–all 134,000 of them–so that they boot up fast enough to be a valid replacement for multitasking. I also agree that we should totally ignore the minor “hearing and seeing” problem, because honestly, who listens to music while they browse the web? Nerds, that’s who.

    (In case you can’t tell, Carl, I am INTERNET ANGRY at you.)

    Iron Clad Lou - 01.31.10, 1:36 am

13. What turns me off about the iPad is that they try to sell it to you as something way better than an ebook, netbook an mp3 player or anything else you already own.
    So basically you’re paying a premium thinking that you’re going to get something awesome that’s going to replace all of those things but then you run into all the limitations that the system has, like no usb, no flash, no camera, no multitasking, poor battery life and the biggest one for me is that it doesn’t have e-ink, so I can’t even use it to read a few pages of a book without my eyes falling off.

    My prediction is that the 1st gen iPad is going to sell moderately well but not as many units as the Kindle, then in 2/3 years with the release of the 2nd and 3rd gen devices they will start getting things right and selling them like Wiis filled with hotcakes.

    Sad thing is that HP revealed the Slate a few weeks ago which seems generations ahead of the iPad in terms of functionality (still no e-ink which is sad) and no one cared, now Apple shows an iPod touch with gigantism, calls it “magic” and panties drop everywhere.

    DAGO - 01.31.10, 1:45 am

14. Someone just sent me this video http://www.funnyordie.com/vide.....ts-an-ipad and man, that’s almost too perfect!

    DAGO - 01.31.10, 2:34 am

15. I.C. Lou,

    1. I got the sarcasm, thanks.

    2. “Apple should force developers to retool their apps–all 134,000 of them–so that they boot up fast enough to be a valid replacement for multitasking.”

    Uh, the apps in the iPhone store are already designed to work without multitasking. I don’t really see your point here. Do you think that iPhone apps boot too slowly? That hasn’t been my experience at all.

    3. “I also agree that we should totally ignore the minor ‘hearing and seeing’ problem”

    I don’t think you got what I was trying to say. I’m saying that yes, the number one legitimate use for multitasking is so you can hear something from one app while you look at another. So, that’s a real problem for Apple. To be sure, however, it is possible to listen to music in your iPod app on your iPhone/iPad while you do something else, because the i-systems actually do have multitasking, just not pervasive multitasking like you get on a traditional computer. The question is how will Apple extend their current system so while you’re using different apps you can also listen to other things, like Pandora, or talk to other people using Skype, the way you can with the Phone app.

    So, yes, that’s a legit criticism. But it doesn’t seem to me to be a deal breaker, and I strongly suspect the problem will be solved in iPhone OS 4.0.

    Carl - 01.31.10, 6:35 pm

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