i have never seen a bigger failure than 'IPAD'

[COVID-19]

How the iPad Will Change Mobile Computing

02.01.10

Tim Bajarin

Those who were disappointed by Apple's recent announcement aren't seeing the big picture.


by Tim Bajarin
Apple review, Apple commentary, Apple news... Everything Apple

When Apple unveiled the iPad last week, most everyone saw the device as an update to the tablet—a mobile computing form factor than has been around for nearly 20 years. The device is, in a sense, a more consumer-friendly version of the tablets we've been seeing for the past two decades, but the iPad will have a much more far-reaching impact on the market than its competitors.

With the iPad, Apple has introduced a completely new portable computing model. The device clearly works well in tablet mode. However, in that mode, the iPad is best for accessing and viewing content. And contrary to what Steve Jobs says about the virtual keyboard being great for text input, it doesn't seem likely that people will use it for too extended a period. But three pieces of technology tied to the device help the iPad deliver on its computing potential.

The first is Bluetooth—Phil Schiller, Apple's executive VP of marketing, told me that the iPad works with a Bluetooth keyboard. Second is the slick keyboard dock that lets users do real work on this device. Third is the introduction of iWork for the iPad. Apple clearly wanted to show people from the start that the iPad is a great productivity device. This is more than just a newfangled tablet—it's a new approach to mobile computing.

The iPad poses threats to competitors on a couple of other fronts. The biggest is the fact that Apple uses its own processor for the device. That means no Intel tax in the bill of materials. Apple also owns the OS, UI, and app SDK. I suspect that even with the cost of screens and memory, Apple is still able to get margins of over 20 percent for the $499 version of the iPad because of this vertical integration of Apple IP. On the other hand, any competitor building a similar device would have much smaller margins to work with if it wanted to stay competitive with that sub-$500 price point. Apple is also able to tap into its rich ecosystem of 140,000 or so apps, giving it additional functionality from the start. At the very least, it puts the company two years ahead of thos attempting to create competitive products with similar ecosystems.

In the iPad's version of mobile computing, the screen is the star. It delivers the full Internet and all manner of applications that can be viewed and accessed in tablet mode. The device can also be transformed into a serious productivity tool with the addition of a mobile keyboard. The iPad has the potential to upend the entire mobile computing paradigm as we know it.

I predict that the iPad will really shake up the competition and hurt the netbook business in the long run. The competition will really struggle to create devices that are equally unique and competitive. Sure, they'll create similar designs, but Apple's ability to deliver the full package of hardware, software, apps, and services all tied together, is the company's real advantage. And with iPads starting at $499, it will be much easier for Apple to push a new mobile computing agenda that goes well beyond the interest of enthusiasts. The iPad will tap into the mobile computing needs of the public at large.

[street bully]

Thought it was cool in the begining, however, it seems to be an overgrown ipod touch.

[COVID-19]

Thought it was cool in the begining, however, it seems to be an overgrown ipod touch.

Friday
29Jan2010
Future Shock

Friday, January 29, 2010 at 05:39AM
I'll have more to say on the iPad later but one can't help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.

Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Les space than a Nomad. Lame.". I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.
Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They're demanding access to software. they're demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

People talk about Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, and I don't disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

[street bully]

Friday
29Jan2010
Future Shock

Friday, January 29, 2010 at 05:39AM
I'll have more to say on the iPad later but one can't help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.

Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Les space than a Nomad. Lame.". I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.
Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They're demanding access to software. they're demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

People talk about Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, and I don't disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

Abbreviated version?

[- v e t -]

i have no idea what people are smoking nowadays...

i think the Sega Saturn was a bigger failure

still no flash

i know, and they're blaming it on Adobe

i think its funny that the Nexus One has a processor as powerful as this overgrown iPod Touch

[Grand Champ]

Nice review IMO.

[- v e t -]

BB i knew it wouldnt take you long

[COVID-19]

If history is any guide, people will line up to buy Apple’s iPad
Thursday, January 28, 2010 - 01:11 PM EST

Yesterday "Apple finally unveiled its tablet computer, the iPad," David Pogue reports for The New York Times. "Thus concludes Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists."

Pogue writes, "Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who've never even tried it: 'No physical keyboard!' 'No removable battery!' 'Way too expensive!' 'Doesn't multitask!' 'No memory-card slot!'"

"That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April," Pogue explains. "Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers."

MacDailyNews Take: Oh, they don't disappear. We file them away in our iCal and pop them out at opportune times. Just like this:

• "[iPhone] just doesn't matter anymore. There are now alternatives to the iPhone, which has been introduced everywhere else in the world. It's no longer a novelty." - Eamon Hoey, Hoey and Associates, April 30, 2008

• "We are not at all worried. We think we've got the one mobile platform you'll use for the rest of your life. [Apple] are not going to catch up." - Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft Mobile Communications Group Product Manager, April 01, 2008

• "Microsoft, with Windows Mobile/ActiveSync, Nokia with Intellisync, and Motorola with Good Technology have all fared poorly in the enterprise. We have no reason to expect otherwise from Apple." - Peter Misek, Canaccord Adams analyst, March 07, 2008

• "[Apple should sell 7.9 million iPhones in 2008]... Apple's goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year is optimistic." - Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research analyst, February 22, 2008

• "What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much... Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious." - Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, May 21, 2007

• Motorola's then-Chairman and then-CEO Ed Zander said his company was ready for competition from Apple's iPhone, due out the following month. "How do you deal with that?" Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference. Zander quickly retorted, "How do they deal with us?" - Ed Zander, May 10, 2007

• "The iPhone is going to be nothing more than a temporary novelty that will eventually wear off." - Gundeep Hora, CoolTechZone Editor-in-Chief, April 02, 2007

• "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone... What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it's smart it will call the iPhone a 'reference design' and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures... Otherwise I'd advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you'll see." - John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, March 28, 2007

• "Even if [the iPhone] is opened up to third parties, it is difficult to see how the installed base of iPhones can reach the level where it becomes a truly attractive service platform for operator and developer investment." - Tony Cripps, Ovum Service Manager for Mobile User Experience, March 14, 2007

• "I'm more convinced than ever that, after an initial frenzy of publicity and sales to early adopters, iPhone sales will be unspectacular... iPhone may well become Apple's next Newton." - David Haskin, Computerworld, February 26, 2007

• "There's an old saying -- stick to your knitting -- and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that's not their knitting... I think people overreacted to it -- there was not a lot of tremendously new stuff if you think about it." - Greg Winn, Telstra's operations chief, February 15, 2007

• "Consumers are not used to paying another couple hundred bucks more just because Apple makes a cool product. Some fans will buy [iPhone], but for the rest of us it's a hard pill to swallow just to have the coolest thing." - Neil Strother, NPD Group analyst, January 22, 2007

• "I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone... I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful)... So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008." - Richard Sprague, Microsoft Senior Marketing Director, January 18, 2007

• "The iPhone's willful disregard of the global handset market will come back to haunt Apple." - Tero Kuittinen, RealMoney.com, January 18, 2007

• "[Apple's iPhone] is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine... So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot." - Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, January 17, 2007

• "The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant... Apple is unlikely to make much of an impact on this market... Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won't make a long-term mark on the industry." - Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg, January 15, 2007

• "iPhone which doesn't look, I mean to me, I'm looking at this thing and I think it's kind of trending against, you know, what's really going, what people are really liking on, in these phones nowadays, which are those little keypads. I mean, the Blackjack from Samsung, the Blackberry, obviously, you know kind of pushes this thing, the Palm, all these... And I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong, but I think Apple can do wrong and I think this is it." - John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, January 13, 2007

• "I am pretty skeptical. I don’t think [iPhone] will meet the fantastic predictions I have been reading. For starters, while Apple basically established the market for portable music players, the phone market is already established, with a number of major brands. Can Apple remake the phone market in its image? Success is far from guaranteed." - Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, January 11, 2007

• "Apple will launch a mobile phone in January, and it will become available during 2007. It will be a lovely bit of kit, a pleasure to behold, and its limited functionality will be easy to access and use. The Apple phone will be exclusive to one of the major networks in each territory and some customers will switch networks just to get it, but not as many as had been hoped. As customers start to realise that the competition offers better functionality at a lower price, by negotiating a better subsidy, sales will stagnate. After a year a new version will be launched, but it will lack the innovation of the first and quickly vanish. The only question remaining is if, when the iPod phone fails, it will take the iPod with it." - Bill Ray, The Register, December 26, 2006

• "The economics of something like [an Apple iPhone] aren't that compelling." - Rod Bare, Morningstar analyst, December 08, 2006

• "Apple is slated to come out with a new phone... And it will largely fail.... Sales for the phone will skyrocket initially. However, things will calm down, and the Apple phone will take its place on the shelves with the random video cameras, cell phones, wireless routers and other would-be hits... When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don't exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren't clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good." - Michael Kanellos, CNET, December 07, 2006

• "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." - Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, November 16, 2006

Pogue continues, "The iPad is, as predicted, essentially a giant iPod touch: aluminum-backed, half-inch thin, with a 10-inch screen surrounded by a shiny black border. At the bottom, there's the standard iPod/iPhone connector and a single Home button. It will be available in models ranging from $499 (16 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi) to $830 (64 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi and 3G cellular)."

"The cellular signal will be provided by AT&T for $15 a month (250 megabytes of data transferred -- think e-mail only) or $30 a month, unlimited. Amazingly, those AT&T deals involve no contract. You can cancel whenever you like. And since this thing isn't a phone, you don't have to worry about dropped calls; you're paying exclusively for Internet service," Pogue reports.

"There's no reason you couldn't use it to make calls using Skype, of course -- Apple says that virtually all of the existing 140,000 iPhone apps run fine on the iPad," Pogue reports. "(You can run them either at regular tiny size, or blown up double with some loss of clarity.) Then again, you might look a little bizarre walking through the airport holding this giant clipboard up to your ear."


Pogue continues, "It's too early to draw any conclusions. Apple hasn't given the thing to any reviewers yet, there are no iPad-only apps yet (there will be), the e-bookstore hasn't gone online yet, and so on. So hyperventilating is not yet the appropriate reaction. At the same time, the bashers should be careful, too. As we enter Phase 2, remember how silly you all looked when you all predicted the iPhone's demise in that period before it went on sale."

Full article here.

[street bully]

Yo BB I thought this was cool the first day, but I have read about the specs, and they are horrible. I mean are you kidding me? The least the could have done is add usb ports.

[Sick/]

BB i knew it wouldnt take you long

I loved the sega Saturn. Some of my fav games were virtua fighter, house of the dead, sega rally. Playstation killed it just like it did the dreamcast