I didn’t say much about the iPad 2 launch last week, because there isn’t much to say. It’s an excellent follow-up to a groundbreaking product. What’s more interesting is the almost comical inability of Apple’s competitors to touch the iPad in cost, functionality and performance. Here are a few snippets from a review of the iPad’s closest competitor, the Motorola Xoom:
LTE isn’t the only hardware feature that’s not working right out of the box. The Xoom’s microSD card slot is also non-functional, due to software issues that are attributed to Honeycomb. Motorola says that the feature will be fixed soon in an over-the-air update. The Xoom’s much-touted support for Adobe Flash is also absent at launch and will similarly be delivered in an upcoming software update. […]
The relative awkwardness of using portrait mode on the Xoom isn’t a huge issue, because most of the Honeycomb software seems to favor landscape orientation. One issue that’s worth noting, however, is that a lot of the existing Android phone applications are designed to be used in portrait orientation. Until more third-party developers start making native Android tablet software, Xoom users will end up having to use portrait orientation more often than they might like.
A year ago, competitive tablets didn’t exist. Today, slower, uglier and clunkier tablets exist. And Apple is readying more killer features, like the Retina display, that will keep the competition playing catchup. I’m anything but an Apple fanboi, but they deserve a hell of a lot of respect, because it’s becoming clear that nobody else can do what they’ve done with the iPad.
Zifnab
iPhone competitors have mostly caught up to the smart phone market. Apple is making a killing as a trail blazer, but their not staffed by magicians. I have complete faith that the rest of the industry will release comparable iPad 2 products in another two or three years.
stuckinred
@Zifnab: neva hoppin GI, Apple rox!
stuckinred
I bought a new 13″ MacBook Pro last week and I’m lovin it. Should get the iPad2 next week!
Wag
By which point Apple will have left them on the dust on the next big platform
stuckinred
@Wag: It’ll hit like a Thunderbolt!
Dennis SGMM
Ah, the iPad2: the finest pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers on the market.
christian mistermix
@Zifnab: Motorola, Samsung, Asus and HP have been making a big tablet computing push – they just haven’t been able to catch up.
stuckinred
@Dennis SGMM: P-38!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Notice what you get with Apple: proprietary everything. We went through decades of trying to not have that. The market has been trying tablets for a long time, but making it work has been hard because those who would have used it 10 years ago:
1. Did not want to be locked into a particular brand of hardware.
2. Wanted to be able to program on it.
You get neither of these from Apple. Plus, I do think that hardware has finally gotten powerful enough, and the internet ubiquitous enough that they do make more sense.
Plus, if you aren’t thanking the BSD developers for Apple, then you’re not paying attention. Though Jobs would just as soon shut that group down now that he has an OS based on their code.
baldheadeddork
The iPad 2 is “an excellent followup to a groundbreaking product”? Are you sure you’re not a fanboi? Because I see a mediocre update that didn’t deliver on some much wanted features like a USB port and the storage capacity didn’t increase despite a huge drop in flash memory prices.
I’m still skeptical about the long-term potential of the entire tablet market. It can’t replace a full-feature laptop or desktop and it still doesn’t have the killer app that makes it attractive as a $500 (and up) supplement. It’s the sports car of the computer market – the people who want one will buy it in the first year or two (and pay a premium for it), but for the 99% of the computer market it’s just not going to connect.
terraformer
I know in my little corner of R&D, all our customers want is for their interfaces to be “like an iPad”. They really have done an outstanding job with technology and marketing, and the rest of us can only look on with envy. A huge part of why they are so successful is something that too many companies who make electronic devices overlook in favor of numbers and values (e.g., power, speed) that they think is the whole she-bang: the user experience. And Apple does that in spades.
Culture of Truth
That’s impressive, but I hear scientists in Denmark are working on a functional portable reading/writing system system, apparently made of wood pulp or possibly plant fibers. Fascinating what these lab geeks come up with.
Zifnab
@Wag: iPhone 4 sucks balls. Droid forever!
someguy
Indeed. They have market power and they’ve managed to cartelize software development and wireless services through exclusivity agreements and closed source code. It’s an admirable bit of vertical integration they’ve achieved with their pals at a couple telecoms, and with their Apps Store.
BTW, Microsoft got their ass kicked in an antitrust suit for integrating operating systems and a single app, the web browser. Apple manages to get away with integrating hardware, apps, and until recently wireless service through a tidy little exclusive dealing arrangement with AT&T, and everybody wants to blow Steve Jobs over how wonderful it is.
I guess it’s true. Apple must just be cooler.
Culture of Truth
I have some limited insight since I’ve been intensively computer shopping since December. Macs are cool but a bit pricey, so I haven’t made up my mind yet, but some of my encounters with retailers and computers makers have seemed comical. One big company send a laptop to a major review site to test but it was defective.
stuckinred
@Culture of Truth: I have Applecare for all my stuff and when there is a problem they fix it. . .period. Try that with the competition.
PurpleGirl
@Culture of Truth: Very good. LOL!
cathyx
I switched to a mac last summer and it was the best decision in the world. I can’t even stand to use the pc anymore. Macs are so much easier to use, at least for me it makes more sense in how to do different tasks. Well worth the extra money alone in just the amount of aggravation it saves me.
RalfW
The best thing about the iPad is that John McCain thinks they’re made in the good ol U.S. of A. He said so right on Amanpour’s This Week yesterday. Saw it with my own two lyin eyes.
Dennis SGMM
@stuckinred:
I build my own PCs. The components and the Win7 OS are so good these days that there’s no need for heavy-duty tech support.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I am very happy wandering around in the wilderness outside the pretty Walled Garden the Apple users live in.
Buy an iProduct to only have it become yesterdays got-to-have thing when they repackage it, slap a new version number on it and let you buy it again?
Fuck that.
MikeJ
Honeycomb works great on my nook color.
stuckinred
@Dennis SGMM: jam on! I’m trying to figure out if I should do my on rear wheel bearing replacement on my 66 fleetside!
TaMara (BHF)
Meh. I spent a week with an ipad a while back and it did nothing I needed it to do. It was slow, clunky, heavy as hell, bad sound quality, iffy video. I could go on. What exactly do you guys use it for?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Dennis SGMM:
Yup, I’m my own tech support and have been for over twenty years now.
I like it because I work cheap and I can yell at myself. That and I’m not throwing all of my money at one company for shit that’s out of date next year.
Comrade Mary
@Dennis SGMM: Piker. This guy built his own toaster — from scratch — starting with mining and smelting the iron.
rageahol
who gives a shit?
it’s still a walled garden, and thus made entirely out of fail.
rageahol
also, fuck windows.
linux ftw.
CaptainFwiffo
I’m still not sure what a tablet computer is for. It doesn’t replace my laptop – I can’t do real work on it on the go. It’s not as portable as my smartphone, I can’t put it in my pocket, and I can’t make calls with it. I guess I could use it as an e-reader, but a kindle is a cheaper solution for that. And anyhow, I don’t want an e-reader because I can’t use it in as many places as a paperback and a lot of the books I read are not published for e-readers.
It’s great for browsing the web on the couch, but it’s an awful lot of money to replace a function I can already use my laptop for, and since it can’t replace my laptop…
Until it can replace one of my already too many devices, or has some killer app that only a tablet is good for, I don’t see myself getting one.
dr. bloor
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The one thing that endlessly amazes me is that people who shoot down Apple for these reasons–who are smart enough to correctly identify the advantages of an open platform like Android–fail to realize that these features are increasingly unimportant to many, many consumers. Preference is given to a “seamless” user experience on a device that works out of the box. 99.9999% of the flame wars on the web are between folks who simply have different priorities when shopping.
Having said that, I am interested in seeing what HP can do with WebOS. Late roll out, etc, etc, but their new line looks pretty slick on paper.
dr. bloor
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I missed the part of the user agreement on my Mac that says I have to buy a new everything the second it comes out. Are there people that do that? Sure, but that’s their shortcoming, not the company’s or the product’s.
jwb
@baldheadeddork: Where I work, the talk is coupling desktop machines with iPads, and that combination will replace (Apple) laptops since the total cost outlay would be less. Whether the iPad will remain serviceable for the same number of years that the laptops they are currently issuing is one big question. The other problem, and I don’t know that this was addressed in the iPad2, is support for the external display. With the iPad1, you can only use the external display as a mirror, which means that you can’t access your notes when running presentation software. For me, that makes it less than ideal as a laptop replacement.
Dennis SGMM
@stuckinred:
Changing that bearing will hurt, it will expand our ability to string together curses, and it will put you more in touch with your truck than you were before.
RalfW
@someguy:
As terraformer says in 11, it’s the user experience. I grew to hate, hate, hate the Vista “experience” so much on my work computer that I bought myself a Mac to do most of my job, just to stay sane (I work from home for a small non profit).
My partner got some Android crap-phone and after weeks of using it still can’t figure out how to make one of the apps that always pops back to the home screed go away. We both use iPod touch wifi devices, and they’re fully intuitive and function way better as far as user interface than Android.
All that blowing of Steve Jobs allowed, I will say that I do not like Apple’s monopolistic tendencies. I think they get away with it because MS/PC market share is so big. Apple is at a measly 7.4% of US computer sales share. If they were at 25% share, I’d be much more concerned about their extreme vertical integration.
Likewise the iPhone is a boutique product that has spawned some (improving) copycats.
Marmot
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Terraformer says this below, but the real Apple advantage has been user experience.
The two user requirements you mention —
— are specific to techies. While they’re knowledgeable and concerned about interoperability and being able to get to the nitty-gritty code, they always forget that these things aren’t that important to everyone else.
At the risk of re-starting a classic Holy Flame War, it’s a miracle that the Mac operating system didn’t completely crush DOS and Windows from 1990 on. I think the techies’ preferences were more important back then. Too bad their taste in user-interface design ruled for so long, but it’s good that everyone now pays attention to that factor.
Culture of Truth
I’ve used Macs for more than 20 years, in school, business and for personal use. I have one now – it’s lasted for seven years, but is sadly outdated. Having said that, they are clearly more expensive for what you get. Having said that, setting aside the virtues and prices of the actual products, the shopping and buying experience, of their rivals vs. Apple, is sorely lacking. Just parking last year’s product at Best Buy in the hope some consumer walking by will like it is not going to get the job done, for me anyway.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@TaMara (BHF): My laptop was in the ship for a week and all I had at home to use was an iPad. Didn’t do everything I needed to do, but it did enough to keep me sane and reasonably caught up until I got the laptop back. I couldn’t grade papers on it, which was the only real pain in the ass.
I’d never use one for my primary computer, but I’d never use a netbook for that either. It’s a fun little adjunct to my main computer and it does more than any e-reader out there–I wouldn’t want to try blogging from a Kindle, for example, but I did on the iPad–but that’s all I ever expected it to be. I find the complaints about the iPad tend toward what it isn’t, and that’s legit, I suppose, but I prefer to look at what it is and how it does that.
dmsilev
@TaMara (BHF): Reading, the web, e-books, and professional articles (in PDF form). I’d say that makes up about 2/3s of the use that my iPad gets. For the remaining third, email plus a slew of time-wasters. Crossword puzzles for one; I can get the daily NYT puzzle for a price well below either subscribing to the paper or buying their “premium puzzle” subscription on the web, and it’s a far better solving experience than on a small phone screen.
dms
arguingwithsignposts
@CaptainFwiffo:
The answer is: It’s not for you. It’s a light-weight semi-computer that’s useful in certain contexts for people who don’t want or need a full laptop. It’s good for reading books on (as is the nook), taking notes in meetings, managing e-mail, watching movies in bed if you don’t have a laptop, and playing touch-screen games, among other things.
Sure, you can do those things with laptops, but there’s apparently a market for people who don’t need laptops. And frankly, old tired eyes like mine get tired of the small smartphone screen.
I don’t see why people can’t understand that.
stuckinred
@Dennis SGMM: I’ve done the tranny twice and I know I did a real axle bearing on my 62 jimmy about 35 years ago. I don’t recall having to yank the carrier plate and c pins on that one but everywhere I look tell me I will on this. My biggest issue is whether the bearing presses onto the axle or into the differential casing.
Sentient Puddle
Ah good, I was missing a good Apple bitch-fest around here.
DecidedFenceSitter
@dr. bloor: Yeah, I want to like the Xoom, I want to not be tied into Apple, and I want to not support Apple’s business practices of changing the rules on the content suppliers.
But I also want to be able to use the tablet to do exactly what I want – and it appears most of those apps are going to be Apple’s.
stuckinred
@Sentient Puddle: I like to stoke it up!
Marmot
Dang it. Dr. Bloor beat me to it.
TaMara (BHF)
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): @dmsilev:
And if it did all that for say $300, I’d be on board. But burning $700 + for that limited ability just seems like the Emperor’s New Clothes to me. I’m not an apple hater by any means. Love my ipod, not a big iphone user, but understand its appeal and I’m as comfortable using a Mac as a PC. So I guess I just get frustrated by the hype. Now get off my grass! Also. Too.
dmsilev
Also, as far as the upgrade treadmill goes, I have absolutely zero desire to sell my v1 Old Shiny Object and purchase a v2 New Shiny Object. Once a high-density (aka “Retina”) display makes its appearance, presumably in v3, I may revisit the question.
dms
Kirk Spencer
@someguy: One key difference: Market Share. Apple, for all its fans, is not so dominant as to be almost monopolistic.
Culture of Truth
It’s not even the existence of those well-known Apple stores, which HP, Dell don’t have (Sony does) it’s that even inside a Best Buy, the Apple section is totally different and much more user-friendly (machines are always on and working and hooked to the Internet.) This is true at 3 stores I’ve been to, plus one non-Best Buy.
Dustin
The moment Jobs decided to have locked in minuscule storage capacity with exhorbent storage costs was the moment I decided against an iPad purchase. For naked storage drives the difference between a 16gb model and a 64gb is about $85; on the iPad it’s $200.
Why the hell would I pay that sort of markup?
jwb
@dr. bloor: It’s not that the features are unimportant, it’s that the complexity of accessing them is daunting. Apple has built its recent success on providing simplicity. However you give away a lot and pay a lot for that simplicity.
ant
Ive been really happy with the newer batteries that apple changed to a while back. After about a year with this macbook pro, the durability of the battery shows a marked improvement over my older model.
With regard to the tablet, I have to admit, I just don’t “get it”. Eliminating buttons seem like a tech fix to a nonexistent problem.
What in the world can the tablet do better than the pro?
Syphon
At least the Xoom has those features. Which ones does the iPad have? Oh, right.
Additionally, the iPad2 does not feature the Retina display, and has a lower resolution than the Xoom.
And having just played around with a Xoom the other day, I can safely say that in no way is Honeycomb uglier, slower or clunkier than the iPad. At least it sports an OS that isn’t just a big-isized phone OS.
All that said, holy shit yes the Xoom is way overpriced. Why is there no 16GB Wifi-only version to match the iPad’s lower $500 price?
Walker
@Zifnab:
By competitors, you mean Android. Anything else is not even close.
Android, however, has some interesting issues. The fragmented hardware platform is a major millstone for Android developers. iPhone is seen as the number one mobile game platform right now; in the US it dwarfs both the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. The Android could be there too, but the hardware fragmentation has made the game developers very wary about the platform. It is akin to the PC vs. Console situation (and PC is not winning).
Kristine
I use my iPad as an eReader and browser. I have yet to take it on the road to see whether it is functional enough to take the place of my laptop, but I hope to do that soon. Bought the wireless keyboard and everything.
I started buying Macs in 2004 in order to get away from all the virus/trojan/infestation issues that plagued Windows. I’m also one of those folks who has No Interest Whatsoever in building my own system or reprogramming. Out of the box and go. I just need it to work.
MikeJ
@Marmot: Being free to program your own computer shouldn’t be specific to techies. Even you will never write a single line of code why on earth would you want something you were forbidden from operating?
As Doctorow says, when somebody puts a lock on your property and doesn’t give you a key, they aren’t doing it for your benefit.
Dustin
@Kirk Spencer: In the tablet market, the second hottest computing market besides smartphones, it is.
stuckinred
@ant: We are exploring how to use the iPad in higher ed.
Dennis SGMM
@stuckinred:
Ouch! I’ve faked presswork with a judicious use of a brass hammer (I was a machinist for a couple of decades). In this case, I’d take it to someone who has the gear.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@dr. bloor:
I have a few Mac geek friends who are so Apple-everything and gotta have the latest ‘Stevie Wonder’ toy to prove their loyalty. Ok, they like the stuff, I get it and that’s fine. But the way they come across is like they are fans of some sports team called Apple. It’s like every ‘new’ bling-thing from the Big A is a touchdown that scores Apple elebenty billion points.
As much as the Mac and Windows users rage online, I have to say that at least the Windows users couldn’t care less about Gates and his next version of bloatware while the Apple users fight over who gets to hump Job’s leg with every product release. Makes for great entertainment though.
Viewed, of course, from outside the walled garden. ;)
dmsilev
@TaMara (BHF): Get a v1 iPad then. Apple is still selling them, for $100 off the original price, or $150 off for a refurb (Apple refurbs are pretty good in general). $350 for the base model.
dms
stuckinred
@Dennis SGMM: It is important for me to pay attention to people who know of what they speak. I love working on it but I don’t have a garage so it sort of limits things. I did sand it down on the curb when I had it re-painted flat black. thanks
stuckinred
@Odie Hugh Manatee: sheeeet, it’s a fucking computer. I have a Apple Theater monitor run by a Dell laptop. Don’t mean nothin.
Marmot
@MikeJ: Oh, I’m not opposed to being able to get at the code for some reprogramming!
But I personally can’t do it, so this is a completely unimportant factor when I’m shopping for a computer. And that’s also the case for 99% of computer users, including my 65-year-old mom. They all want something that’s easy to use and reliable, not “customizable.”
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@TaMara (BHF): I did all that on the base model one at $500. I’ll admit that there was a bit of the new gadget desire at play when we bought it, and we won’t be getting the iPad 2 when it drops, though we’ll probably get one eventually.
unabogie
I am writing this on an Arcos 70. 20 gig of hd space using a flash drive, working Flash plugin, Android OS, capacitive screen, got it for half the price of an iPad.
Love it.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Odie Hugh Manatee: The view from inside the walled garden is that Apple anti-fans screech at how mind-blind Apple folks are without ever really asking what it is Apple fans like about the stuff, and then dismissing them because we’re not techies and don’t really want to muck about in the innards of either the code or the machine. But that’s just the view from inside the walled garden.
Marmot
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I like the company’s stuff, but that approach is just foolish.
Did you somehow miss 1995-2000? Don’t remember all the hype about Windows95 doing stuff that Macs had done for years? About Bill Gates being such a brainy wunderkind constructed of high-grade win?
You’re right that the hero worship is dumb, but let’s represent it clearly!
Odie Hugh Manatee
@stuckinred:
Yup. I build with the hardware I need to do what I want and only throw the money at it that it needs to get the job done.
That’s all I care about. :)
donnah
I’ve had an iPad since July 2010. I love it and use it every day because it’s easy, portable (I carry mine in my purse) and it does everything I need it to do. My photo library is on it; I download any photos from my camera and put them in files to view or email.
The apps are both practical and fun. I have a GPS app and 3G, so when we travel, I don’t need a Garmin or TomTom. I have calorie counter apps, games, news, writing programs and Netflix. I can write, read, listen to music and watch a movie if I want to, no matter where I am. I have purchased books and downloaded free books. So I don’t need a Kindle.
Gee whiz, if you don’t want one and can’t imagine why anyone would want it, don’t get it. I don’t think much about Steve Jobs or Apple in general. I just like the convenience and amazing capabiities I have found in the iPad.
I may get the upgrade when it comes out, let my son buy this one.
dr. bloor
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Oh, no argument that those guys exist, and they’re equally as amusing inside the garden.
Although I would suggest that the parallel breed popping up in the wild are technogeeks that think it’s really cool that they can root their brand new phones to get rid of bloatware and overclock their freaking telephones. I’m sure the new opportunity to rid their toys of malware will make them splooge.
burnspbesq
@baldheadeddork:
And shy should apple care? It has sold 15 million iPads so far, at a margin of around 25 percent. What’s not to love about two billion of gross profit?
FlipYrWhig
@MikeJ:
Does anyone apply this test to any other product? “I can’t buy that TV, it prevents me from customizing its internal workings!” “I was going to buy that toaster, but then I realized that I have to be able to toast at a very specific temperature, and its thermostat didn’t work that way!” I use a lot of products without being able to customize them, and I don’t experience that as a loss.
Lurker
@TaMara (BHF):
I do not yet own an iPad, but my dream is to someday purchase one to read webcomics, digital comic books and graphics-heavy Kindle books.
I live in a small apartment. I love comics, but I do not have much storage space.
Joey Maloney
I bought an iPad to be my road machine after the kitten knocked a full cup of coffee into my Macbook and I couldn’t afford to replace it.
I was actually surprised at how much of my work I was able to do with it. Some things were more awkward, some things prohibitively so. The things that I couldn’t do were due to the app sandboxing. If I jailbroke the device so that apps could share files and data, I’d be able to do everything.
What I’ve ended up using it for most when at home, is for ebooks. I’m living in a place where English-language books are scarce and expensive. I hatehateHATE the DRM that Amazon and B&N force on me, but damn it sure is convenient to have pretty much every new release and a huge back catalog available without leaving my couch.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Marmot:
I think that Gates hype is much like the Vietnam vet that got spit on…lol
Win95 was a big change in the WinWorld but only because Apple was priced out of the budgets of most people while pc parts were getting cheaper. Once they got Win95 they went right back to bitching about Billy Boy. His killing Netscape and other browsers by bundling Internet Exploder with Windows was enough to get the hate rolling again.
The one thing that Apple and Win users agree on is to hate on Billy Gates.
stuckinred
@FlipYrWhig: I’ll say this, I can work on my 66 Chevy but the rice burner is pretty much out except for oil changes and body stuff. I like the old school in that case.
Chad N Freude
@MikeJ: Did you liberate your Nook from its reader-only prison?
different church-lady
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
It’s true: Win Fanbois don’t care about Microsoft. They care about trying to prove dominance over the Mac Fanbois. It’s analogous to the wingnut mindset: it doesn’t matter if Michelle Bachmann is batshit crazy as long as she drives liberals up a tree.
@Marmot:
The platform wars are over. The Mac won.
Mind, I didn’t say Apple won. I said the Mac won. Want proof? It’s right there in the conventional wisdom from that time: “Hey, you know all that stuff the Mac does that we sneered at and told you was stupid and unnecessary? Well now our team does that too!”
I became a Mac adherent for three reasons:
1) It felt like a clearly, overwhelmingly superior product.
2) It was superior because Apple cared about the user experience while Microsoft could not even give a fraction of the first shit.
3) A whole lot of people were trying to drive that experience out of existence.
FlipYrWhig
@stuckinred: I do not have the tinker gene, I guess. If I have to know about how something works internally, from a car to a computer to a cat, I feel dread and distress.
Chad N Freude
@TaMara (BHF): I have dealt with providers of interior design stuff who use iPads as catalog displays. Easy to carry around and page through (swiping) a large number of images that look absolutely brilliant.
different church-lady
@different church-lady: (self reply since editing still seems to be buggy): All that being said, I’ve never bought or wanted an iPod, have no lust for an iPhone, and might think about the iPad only when the current 2 year old laptop needs replacing (in about 3 years, considering my track record of longevity on the Macs I’ve owned). Three years from now tablets might have taken leaps and bounds, and I’ll not just automatically go for Apple, but their history with me will give them a running start.
stuckinred
oops
Cheryl from Maryland
I love my Macbook pro; it is less than one year old, and I do a great deal of photo editing work, so I couldn’t jettison it for an iPad. Nor could I justify $700 for a e-reader. So no iPad — and I’d wait a few years anyway. Got a Nook color with Wifi this weekend — love it so far, easy to read and transport in my purse, and I can share books with my spouse. Working up to liberate it as tech kahunas in this blog have suggested.
The Moar You Know
@MikeJ: The Nook Color is the shit. It’s actually very useful right out of the box (I’ve posted here using it before). Jailbreak it and it’s a freaking Xoom for $250.00.
Only shitty thing on it is the sound chip; the sound is truly awful. Which will be an issue as I want to get a field recorder and not dump a lot of money on it. Might end up using my wife’s iPad.
Chad N Freude
@different church-lady: I think it’s less about caring about the user experience and more about Jobs’s obsessive, narcissistic perfectionism coupled with his indisputable aesthetic sensibility.
Have you ever had to resuscitate something you had Moved To Trash? Have you ever had to go into Terminal to copy a directory structure because Snow Leopard decided you didn’t have access permission? Apple is well aware of these and other issues and has done nothing so far to fix them. (Trash retrieval can be done without a commercial tool, but the user experience is is considerably worse than Windows).
I replaced a clunky Windows laptop with a MacBook Pro two years ago, and when my desktop Windows box died a horrible, gurgling death I replaced it with an iMac. Both are excellent machines and the user experience is infinitely superior, but Apple is well aware of the problems I mentioned (and several more), and has so far shown no inclination to fix them.
scarshapedstar
I thought the iPad was pretty cool until I got an Android phone that does more stuff and fits in my pocket. Also, too, it has an audible speaker!
I do not know what Jobs is thinking, not allowing Swype. You cannot turn a flat screen into a keyboard.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@different church-lady:
A whole lot of people were trying to drive that experience out of existence.
I remember this most about techie “common wisdom” in the mid-1990s. And I’m saying this as a bona fide techie.
I’d been using Macs since 1987: PC users I knew would literally sneer at the mouse and GUI. Eight years later, those very same PC users were upgrading to Win95, announcing to all who would listen that “Apple was dead”
Linux was already around –I used to run mklinux (one of the distant ancestors of the current OS X) on a PowerMac 7100– but still a very fringe OS at that time.
For a decade that was so focused on building an “open” internet, folks (in aggregate) sure were determined to exterminate anything that wasn’t Windows.
somegayname
@jwb: You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer.
Debian supremacy!
liberal
I forget where I saw it, but someone pointed out awhile back that the name “retina display” is truly idiotic. Any visual display is a “retina display.”
different church-lady
@Chad N Freude:
No and no, but I’ll be on the lookout. Thanks for the tips.
I’m a Mac adherent, but I’ll never try to claim that Apple can’t be colossal assholes at time. Trust me, I know some things about the inner workings of FinalCut that would make your head spin. What usually happens is that they ignore the hell of out everybody, and then fix it in the next version without saying a word about it.
liberal
@jwb:
Yeah…AFAICT the markup on Apple hardware is very large. (50 to 100%?)
chopper
lol, i love self-righteous nerdism. yeah, we get it, you’re pissed cause you can’t put linux on your toaster.
Sentient Puddle
For all this talk about Windows 95 copying the look and feel of Macs, I’m looking back at the time and the only thing I’m left thinking is that I must have been fucking insane to be able to put up with the 3.1 interface. Jesus, how the hell did I manage that?
Lee
@Syphon: There is now. I just Sam’s Club has a Xoom Wi-Fi only for $539.
What you have to look at on the Xoom is the hardware problems versus the software problems. Most (if not all) of the problems with Xoom are software. These are very easily remedied. The hardware on Xoom blows away the hardware on iPad and iPad2.
scarshapedstar
@Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta):
Kinda reminds me of how Jobs is now waging a lawsuit jihad against open source OS’s and codecs.
I have issues with Baltimore
@The Moar You Know: Yes, the nook is furious once it’s rooted, even with the poor sound quality. I bought a nook for christmas with the sole intent of rooting it. And for $250, there’s absolutely no guilt when I go several weeks without even picking it up to surf the web from bed.
cleek
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
oh, i wish that was true.
i hang out on CodeProject a lot, and there are plenty of people who wet themselves with glee every time MS announces a new programming framework/language/technology. old timers like me laugh and point to the long line of techs MS has announced with great fanfare then quietly abandoned, the MS fanbois don’t care – they think everything new is going to change the world.
dr. bloor
@liberal:
That certainly isn’t true for the iPad. One of Motorola’s (and others’) problems is that they can’t price the Xoom for less because of the build costs.
gwangung
@Joey Maloney: Well, the first thing is to find a de-DRM program….makes me VERY happy….
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
I have an iPad, a 2008-vintage iMac and also one of the newer Android phones.
The iMac actually spends most of its time running Ubuntu (main home development machine). The iPad sits on a stand with a BT keyboard on my coffee table (it’s turned into my ‘second screen for surfing while watching the TV’). And the Android phone seems to have become my main interface to my email/twitter and newsfeeds (to the point where I’ll whip out the phone when I’m sitting in front of the computer or the iPad to check email). All of these patterns arose naturally.
I will say that, having used the iPad, I don’t think that most ‘normal’ people will really need full computers for much longer. I look at how (for example) my mother or my partner actually use their $800-1200 computers, and there’s not one purpose that couldn’t be served just as well by a decent tablet with a keyboard accessory. And the tablet wouldn’t need free tech support every month (they insist on buying Windows machines).
Even in my case, the only thing I seem to use my Mac for these days is to develop software to run on other machines– or to serve as the ‘home base’ for devices like iPods and the iPad.
chopper
@dr. bloor:
i know. i listen to people bitch about the iphone’s ‘walled garden’ and i’m all ITS A FUCKING PHONE. most people don’t give a shit about how open their OS is on their computer, you think they’re going to care about the one on their telephone??
people have this amazing ability to assume that everyone in the world is as obsessed as they are about the negative qualities they see in some unnecessary gewgaw.
gwangung
@liberal:
Margins on their hardware is 25-35%. Now, this is very large for the computing hardware industry. It’s about average for most manufacturing industries (and software is much higher than that, according to the last time I looked at bizstats.com).
liberal
@dr. bloor:
What about desktops and laptops?
chopper
@RalfW:
i’m in a similar boat. vista screwed me over, i got a mac instead and it’s been a fine computer and OS. i hear win 7 fixed a lot of issues and is actually a very good OS, but it’s too late for me.
as for android, my wife got an android phone, and (i think it was her particular model) that thing was a pile of shit. after a year or so of dealing with it she got the iphone and it’s far better, despite not being as open. she doesn’t give a shit about how open her phone’s OS is, she just wants it to work. plus, it’s a fucking phone.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@scarshapedstar:
Kinda reminds me of how Jobs is now waging a lawsuit jihad against open source OS’s and codecs.
Um, yeah. Totally like that.
If only Apple would support open source where it’s appropriate for their OS. Then the Apple-haters would be appeased, and never, ever complain again!
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
You do realize that, to 90% of computer users, this question is about as comprehensible as ancient Greek, right?
Beverley
Mac people have always irritated me with their devotion to Apple products. I laughed my ass off when the prototype for the IPhone4 was “acquired” and all it’s secrets were on the Internet the next week. I actually heckled the “apple heads ” who circled the block of my local Apple store when the IPhone4 went for sell and then laughed again when all the glitches were announced.
Last October, I brought my first ever “First Generation” product when I brought the iPad and I am having a hard time even imagining buying another PC or Blackberry. Will I get the iPad2? No, but my once Apple-Hater husband has dusted off his lawn chair for his sit in at our local Apple Store.
peej
I plan on getting the iPad 2 when it comes out on Friday (but I refuse to stand in line for it). I’m going to use it to replace my netbook. It’s not going to be a replacement for my Dell laptop by any means (although the netbook will be replacing my old desktop computer since the only thing I’m using that for is to anchor my home network).
Chad N Freude
@Joey Maloney: Calibre might help. I use it to convert pdf to Kindle azw (Mobipocket) format. Kindle pdf display is badbadbadterrible.
BTW, talk about user experience, Calibre is so user-friendly that I think it wants to sleep with me. Unfortunately, you have to read the instructions.
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: Yesbut. We’re all highly talented, highly experienced, high IQ nerds here. The 90% you refer to are mere rabble.
daveNYC
This. Exactly this. I built my home PC, and I’m willing to mess around on it. If I had a tablet, I probably wouldn’t be too worried about trying to root it and tweak it around. But my phone? Not going to happen. I just want my phone (iPhone, to be specific) to work. I don’t have a land line, and if the phone dies, then I will basically not be able to communicate with people. That’s why the whole locked down nature of the iPhone doesn’t bother me. And to be honest, prior to the iPhone did anyone give a rat’s ass about whether or not they could change the bootloader on their StarTac?
The tablets bother me. They’re new and shiny, and I’ve played around with a Xoom and found it quite spiffy, however I can’t see any need what-so-ever for one. It’s sad, I want to want one, but it just isn’t happening.
cs
@Marmot:
I remember those years very well. I was a die hard mac user until 1997. In that year, I was working for a very small design and web development company. Was using a decently powered Mac clone and I was happy. But I needed an upgrade to the system and priced out a few new Mac and Mac clone systems for the company’s owner to evaluate. Armed with this, he went out shopping and came back, to my great horror, with a Compaq running Windows 95.
He asked me to try to live with it since it cost substantially less and the budget was tight. And, you know, the Windows 95 system turned out to be far better than the MacOS 7.5 and 8 systems we had in the office. It was faster overall, had preemptive multitasking, tons more software available, had many more options for tinkering, and best of all: it would regularly crash every 3 to 4 days. This doesn’t sound like anything good until you remember the old Macs would crash at least once a day and usually two or three times a day, no matter how many times you did the dance with extension manager.
When we found out our production software would run under NT, we upgraded, and when 2000 came out, upgraded again with an OS that was clearly far better than anything Apple had available. It wasn’t just hype in those days.
Joey Maloney
@Sentient Puddle: Windows 3.1 was actually a nice leap if you were coming from the DOS command-line. Which makes sense when you consider that it wasn’t a full OS, just a GUI that rode on top of DOS.
The other nice thing I remember was all of its config files were human-readable. You could understand and fix them with nothing more than a text editor.
The Raven
The competition is dependent on the cellular carriers, which are trying to charge for everything. This leads to crippled, limited systems. In the long run, Google may finally push the carriers into behaving sensibly. Still, Apple takes usability most seriously of all the firms in the market, and that tells.
TomG
I’ve been 99% satisfied with using Linux (Mint 10) on my laptop. That last 1% is just Netflix. (My laptop is used as a main computer, and is 17″)
I expect to buy a 10″ netbook near the end of summer, for portability – and since I won’t expect to use it for Netflix, Linux will suit it just fine.
As far as games go, there’s a LOT of native games available, many for casual gamers. And Wine software lets you nearly always play the best Windows games.
The Raven
Oh, yes, and one is utterly dependent on Apple for the security of one’s iPhone and iPad. Censorship is a serious problem on all iOS devices? For the moment, it is not too big an issue, but in the future it is likely to become one.
Have you considered the possibility of a KochPhone?
Sentient Puddle
@The Raven: Slippery slope is slippery.
snarkypsice
@Zifnab:
And by then Apple will have moved on to something completely new.
snarkypsice
@ant:
e-reader
Tom Levenson
I’ve got an iPad and I’m very likely to pick up the iPad 2 this week. Why? Because within minutes (hyperbole alert), my iPad became my son’s iPad. He’s mildly dyslexic and had always found reading pure struggle, even as (with very hard work on his part) he worked his way up to grade level as measured by reading a paragraph or two, any substantial block of text was simply daunting.
The iPad allowed him to flip the text to white-on-black (which the Kindle does note) and to blow up the copy. No more flipping letters, no more struggle to find the start of the next line, and perhaps most important, no more sense of just too many words to face, in the way that a thick YA book can just overwhelm a slow or struggling reader. Now there are only words on the screen, a finger swipe, and a manageable next screen. He reads whole books with pleasure now, and has from within a week or two of starting to play with the device. Hence, it is no longer mine.
And I find it useful, though I keep wavering between buying one of the new iPads or a small MacAir as a traveling and note taking machine. Each has its virtues — but I’ll probably pick the iPad as more suited to my immediate needs.
All of which is to say that its horses for courses, and some of us have different tracks to run.
Corner Stone
@stuckinred:
Now that should definitely go into the memoir!
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: there you go again!
Joel
Outside of travel, I haven’t seen many iPads; is it really that successful? Or is it more of a status thing? I just can’t see myself using one when the iPhone does so damn much already..
stuckinred
@Joel: Call me when your eyesight get as bad as mine!
scarshapedstar
@daveNYC:
Whatever, I rooted my Android phone and never looked back. Better battery life is hard to argue with.
The people who brick their phones are in over their heads.
someguy
@different church-lady: \
Yeah, that’s what it is.
Keep on believing that the scorn is because Techies are jealous… A friend of mine just converted his workforce of ~ 100 developers to ‘Droid programming. They mostly support business and government agencies, and the Apple products aren’t a viable option, unless the only things you need to do involve communications. Because the source code is readily available and there aren’t too many restrictions on how you use the platforms, it’s the only option if you want to put your operations on pads or smart phones. If your company can get away with off-the-rack software that Apple sells, great, good for you. The “Windows fanbois,” meanwhile, are replacing laptops, desktops, and mobile logistical platforms (e.g. UPS appliances) with ‘Droid pads and smartphones.
MoZeu
Notion Ink Adam.
That is all.
MoZeu
Notion Ink Adam.
That is all.
different church-lady
@cs:
OS 7.5 was a catastrophe, and one of the five things that almost killed Apple dead in 1996. (I can’t remember all the others now, but the cancellation of Copeland was probably #1, and that lead to buying Next, and the rest is history…)
I won’t agree that Win ’95 was better, only that it was one of the few times when MS was doing a better job than Apple.
Chad N Freude
@Joel: Well, there’s this: @Chad N Freude
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The apple fan boys will buy whatever child labor produced piece of shit Jobs puts on the market. Everyone else, not so much.
different church-lady
@someguy: When we say “Win Fanbois” I think you and I are talking about two different groups of people.
If your friend employs 100 “win fanbois” to do his ‘droid programming, then I feel very sorry for him. Thank goodness that’s not very likely to be true.
dr. bloor
@Sentient Puddle:
This, a thousand times this. I wasn’t as attracted to Apple as I was driven away from Windows. I’m far from computer illiterate, but ever since then I’ve had the feeling that the folks at MS are designing for each other and not for me.
N W Barcus
I was going to get a Xoom, but it turns out the SD card slot won’t work yet, Adobe hasn’t finished Flash for it yet (which means it can’t even see its own product page on the Web), it doesn’t handle portrait orientation well, and to get 4G I’d have to send it back to Motorola for a couple of weeks at some time in the future.
Yep, it’s going to kill the iPad — sell all your Apple stock ASAP!
Robert Sneddon
I don’t know where the “iPad is going to get a Retina Display” story started but it’s one of those things that has me scratching my head over how people assume something that’s very difficult to do is a simple matter.
The iPhone screen is about 300pix/inch resolution but it’s only about 4 inches diagonal. Building a 10″ diagonal display with the same ppi is a lot harder, like building a 400mph car is more than twice as hard as building a 200mph car (and costs a lot more than twice as much). I could envisage a 7″ display at that sort of resolution, maybe 1600 x 900 pixels but I’ve not heard any of the screen makers talking about having one and they would be shouting it from the rooftops if they could make them cheaply enough to sell at an affordable price point. There are other problems such as power consumption — more pixels means more switching and more precious battery capacity used up as well as the increased luminosity of the backlight due to the extra traces on the screen, and battery life is one of the factors that sells the iPad to a lot of folks.
Many Apple watchers were expecting a 7″ iPad in this cycle, something that doesn’t require a backpack or a shoulderbag to carry it around. I think that might be a next step for Apple once they see how the assorted 7″ ‘Droids on the market sell or don’t sell.
Amanda in the South Bay
I generally prefer iOS devices to Android, but on the flip side of the coin, I do think Macs are too expensive. Honestly, my combo of Windows 7 and Ubuntu serve me just fine(Windows 7 is vastly underrated,IMHO).
I guess…I have no problem with Apple marketing their computers to more affluent customers but (*cough* class privilege *cough*) I really don’t care for more affluent types themselves-the kind of people that can buy an 1100 dollar netbook, for example-telling me that buying a Mac is soooo much better than anything else. I’m working on attaining that level of affluence myself, but in the meantime, class privilege can strike anyone.
Amanda in the South Bay
I generally prefer iOS devices to Android, but on the flip side of the coin, I do think Macs are too expensive. Honestly, my combo of Windows 7 and Ubuntu serves me just fine (Windows 7 is vastly underrated,IMHO).
I guess…I have no problem with Apple marketing their computers to more affluent customers but (*cough* class privilege *cough*) I really don’t care for more affluent types themselves-the kind of people that can buy an 1100 dollar netbook, for example-telling me that buying a Mac is soooo much better than anything else. I’m working on attaining that level of affluence myself, but in the meantime, class privilege can strike anyone.
Brachiator
@christian mistermix:
You nailed it. I am continually amazed that competitors at the CES and other venues clearly don’t seem to understand how Apple continues to kick their butts. Apple’s iPad announcement clearly communicates some essentials: here’s the product, here’s what it costs, here’s when it’s available, and (most critically) here’s what you can do with it as soon as you get it.
Apple could have decisively crushed the opposition had they either lowered the price of the iPad by $100 or more, or made the entry level iPad a 32GB model.
By the way some tech reviewers are as lost as developers. I don’t know why anyone is supposed to be interested in a tablet that a reviewer could only look at, but not handle. I don’t know why anyone is supposed to be interested in a tablet that is not currently running honeycomb, or whatever operating system is supposed to be optimized for running on a tablet. And any review of a tablet that does not verify useful battery life is a waste of time.
This is not to say that Apple is magic. Their subscription model for books and magazines is a serious stumble. And over time, others will catch up, and ultimately surpass Apple.
But not today.
Also, the Fraser Speirs blog continues to be one of the most hard headed and useful considerations of the use of the iPad for education. A couple of excerpts:
scarshapedstar
Well, or you could have an actual laptop with a keyboard and stuff, but that’s so last millennium. Let’s write a three-page book report on a keyboard with no tactile feedback and an awful spell-check, children, you’ll love it! Wait till you see what it’s like trying to edit one letter in the middle of the word, because Jobs has decreed that even the most rudimentary trackball a la Android is EVIL…
Full disclosure, I actually type reasonably well on an iPad keyboard, but it’s like holding my breath – I just can’t wait till it’s over. For all his Vision, Jobs needs to admit that tapping is out and gestures/swipes are in.
Amanda in the South Bay
I’m not sure I get that Frasier Spiers blog-other than being annoyingly wanktastic, what do apps like GarageBand and iMovie have to do with education?
Blah, less wanking, more…clear headedness.
Gromit
@scarshapedstar:
What are you talking about? You can use a physical keyboard with an iPad if you wish. Apple will gladly sell you one. Oh, and a trackball on a touchscreen tablet isn’t evil, it’s stupid. That sort of feature is only necessary to overcome the failings of the hardware and/or software.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Gromit:
How much does a keyboard for an iPad cost? I’ll be honest, I’d have considered getting one instead of a netbook if I wasn’t saving my money for surgery, and if I could actually code on an iPad. I bring my netbook out and about quite a bit to do programming homework on, and the iPad just seems like a ridiculously expensive work around. Even if you buy the entry level model, the keyboard and kickstand are gonna add a little extra on it, which makes it…well, just sorta ridiculous, IMHO. Plus, there’s the whole issue of coding on an iPad, which seems…IDK, not really what its designed for.
Peter J
Apple products are generally nice, even if I prefer to use another OS.
Their walled garden for iOS isn’t.
I would have had some sympathy for it if they only blocked things that would be technically harmful. But they are not. They are using it to block apps they feel are morally harmful.
I’m an adult, I don’t need supervision. Ergo, I don’t see a need for any iOS products.
Sentient Puddle
@Amanda in the South Bay: You can sync any Bluetooth keyboard to it, to the cost of that is whatever your favorite option in that space is.
That said, if you’re going for coding, you definitely want to stay away from the iPad. Anything that compiles code doesn’t pass muster for the app store, so the only real way you could use it for coding is by typing it out in a text editor and exporting it to another computer later. Which…yeah, pretty freakin’ obtuse.
scarshapedstar
Also:
Pages = Google Docs
Numbers = Google Docs
Keynote = Google Docs
Instapaper = Dolphin Read Later… how does this even make the list?
Elements = Actually a decent example, except a chemistry picture book is still a picture book.
iMovie, Garageband, Toontastic… Only things on this list I can’t quibble with.
I don’t know how many times I read stuff like “IOS HAS INSTAGRAM, DOES COOL EFFECTS AND POSTS TO FACEBOOK, U JELLY ANDROID?!” except Camera360 has better effects and photo sharing has always been built in to Android.
It’s like these guys have never actually used any other devices, except to say “I tried for 5 minutes and it totally sucked.”
I think my real beef with iOS is… it’s not an OS. It’s a platform for apps. Your homescreen is a list of apps that you can page through.
Half of my Android homescreen displays my last three messages (SMS, Gmail, and IMAP) in a scrollable list. Below it to the left is my mp3 player widget. Below it to the right is a daily calendar. I can scroll through 6 other homescreens that serve various functions, a little hotbar at the bottom that also scrolls, and occasionally I actually go into the app list.
Also, when I get a new message and I’m in an app, I just get a little notification at the top of the screen, which I can pull down to read and reply to without even interrupting the app I’m in. Try that on iOS.
scarshapedstar
@Gromit:
I’ve witnessed the brilliance of the iPad autocorrecting a word that didn’t need correcting in the first place (the worst part is it never learns; I type Digby, it changes it to Dig By, EVERY SINGLE TIME) and so I have to hold down my finger, drag the little bubble to whatever letter or space needs fixing, and then when I let go, it jumps to the wrong letter and I get to repeat the magic all over again.
On my dinky little phone, I can just hold on the word to bring up 8 or so different options, or I can scroll with the optical trackpad, or I can do it Apple style with the touchscreen cursor, but obviously it’s not my preferred method. But Swype doesn’t make too many mistakes anyway; any algorithm that lets you trace an entire word before it starts trying to figure out what you wanted is obviously going to be more accurate than predictive typing.
Sentient Puddle
@scarshapedstar:
Uh…no. Not even remotely close.
N W Barcus
@Amanda:
You seem to have overestimated to price of a MacBook by 10% (it’s actually $1K, not $1100). But given their longevity (I’ve earned $50K with one from 2007 and it’s still on its first battery) it’s a good investment even at $1400, which is what mine cost back then.
And it runs Windows 7 and Ubuntu just fine when I need them. I don’t even have to maintain a façade of class-consciousness to mark myself as of-the-people yet upwardly-mobile, which leaves me with ample time to, you know, make things with these tools instead of gabbing about how superior they are to everyone else’s.
FlipYrWhig
I can’t even comprehend 92% of the complaints about Apple/Mac on this thread. And in the 1990s I was both a web developer and a front-line tech support person, so I’m not starting from a baseline of absolute ignorance.
Amanda in the South Bay
@N W Barcus:
I really don’t have a problem with OS X or Macs hardware wise, its just…like it or not, they do signify something: that you have plenty of money to spend. Add to that the implication that if you don’t buy a Mac instead of a much, much cheaper PC, its your fucking fault for not making that cushy high 5/low 6 figure job.
Brachiator
@scarshapedstar:
Or you could read the other entries in the blog, to see what this experiment found valuable in using iPads, and what was not as useful.
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Second verse, the same as the first. Speirs blog is a series of articles about the use of the iPad in a school, with very clear views about what has worked and what has been problematical. If you don’t read more of the series, you might miss what is really going on. Not all of it is an unalloyed hymn of praise to Apple. Buying apps in quantity for a school, and backing up ain’t a bed of roses. But this would be an issue with any device. But I recall this early entry:
And not surprisingly, the longer battery life of the iPad is pushing companies to come up with ways to extend battery life in all devices, from smartphones to laptops to other tablets.
Barry
@Zifnab: “I have complete faith that the rest of the industry will release comparable iPad 2 products in another two or three years.”
By which point iPad3 will be out, or nearly out?
Barry
@someguy: “BTW, Microsoft got their ass kicked in an antitrust suit for integrating operating systems and a single app, the web browser. Apple manages to get away with integrating hardware, apps, and until recently wireless service through a tidy little exclusive dealing arrangement with AT&T, and everybody wants to blow Steve Jobs over how wonderful it is.”
It’s called ‘market share’. If you have a few percent of the market, you are allowed to be more restrictive. Please read up on the whole affair.
MattR
IMO, the iPad is like the Segway. It provides some useful features to some people, but you would think it was a revolutionary product that nobody can live without based on the hype and/or news reports.
dr. bloor
@Amanda in the South Bay:
File this one under “Mac as Rorschach Blot.”
RSA
@FlipYrWhig:
There are wide variations in personal preferences in computers, given people’s background knowledge about computing, the tasks they want to perform, the situations they want to use a computer in, their physical capabilities (eyesight, manual dexterity, etc.), their views about the computer business, and so forth. In my experience, most complaints about MS and Apple products seem to boil down to “Here are the things that matter to me, and such-and-such a product makes those things harder to do than it should be.” Flamewars (not that this is one) start when people generalize their own preferences to everyone else, I think.
(Over the years I’ve switched back and forth between a Mac and a Windows box, and now I have a Mac laptop. I keep a Windows laptop at work for other things beyond my personal work, though. I don’t need an iPad, given what I do.)
Nutella
I know this started as an iPad post but now we’re getting into all of the Apple product line, so can anyone explain the ‘Mac is so much easier to use’ thing? I got a Mac Book Pro 1.5 years ago because it’s most popular in my professional field and it’s fine but I still don’t see why it should be preferred to Windows.
It’s different in some ways but it’s not better. GUI is GUI — I’ve got windows and tabs and menus just the same as as on Windows except for minor and stupid differences like the window close button being on the left rather than the right corner.
And considering the lousy battery life and the chintzy number of USB ports, it’s way over-priced.
So, fanbois of OSX, what specifically is so great about it? (Not a snarky question. I really want to know.)
mantis
LTE isn’t the only hardware feature that’s not working right out of the box.
Well, since no LTE networks are really live yet, having that functional now won’t do much for you (though needing to send it back to enable is really annoying). How about LTE on the iPad? Nope, doesn’t have that.
The Xoom’s microSD card slot is also non-functional, due to software issues that are attributed to Honeycomb.
And the iPad’s external memory slot? Oh yeah, it doesn’t have one.
The Xoom’s much-touted support for Adobe Flash is also absent at launch and will similarly be delivered in an upcoming software update.
And the iPad’s Flash support? Oh yeah, it doesn’t have that either.
A few other things the Xoom has that the iPad does not:
– Ability to manage files as if were a computer and not a toy
– USB port
– Bootloader for developers
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an Apple hater. In fact, I am a dedicated Mac user, owning two Macs (one laptop and one tower) that I use almost exclusively (except for games and Linux stuff). But the fact is the iPad is not a powerful computing device for people who know computers and want to use them in ways they choose. It’s little more than a toy that does what Apple wants you to do with it, and nothing more. I would pay $100 more for a Xoom that I can use the way I want any day.
someguy
@Barry:
Market share and market power are all in how you define it. Nobody has apparently cared to take on Apple over their vertical integration. If the market is defined not as “all sold” but “all sold within market sector” then they’d have trouble. This probably explains Apple’s lack of interest at selling to anybody outside of schools, the creative class, and smug consumers who mainly like the GUI and various communications / media features.
The so-called Windows fanbois – many of whom don’t use Windows for any particular purpose – get tired of hearing it and goad right back because the main argument is “Apple is superior because even stupid people find it easy to use.” This is like seeing a guy with a really good hammer tout the superiority of his tool over the tools of a guy who owns a shop full of woodworking equipment, and whose hammers are pedestrian. Sure, it’s a hell of a nice hammer, but not every IT problem is a nail.
stuckinred
Disney as a model for Apple after Jobs
N W Barcus
@Amanda:
If we accept your premise (that what your tools do are significantly less important than how affluent they make you look), I think that if anything a MacBook indicates that one is unable to afford a MacBook Pro. What kind of conspicuous consumption does buying the budget-conscious version evince?
That said, for 95% of the computer-buying population (ie, non-geek-programmers, a group of which I am not a member) building your own laptop or desktop for cheap is not an option, and every time I see the Mac-price issue come up on Slashdot it seems that for the general build quality level the prices have been comparable for some years now. And that doesn’t include the value of the included software suite.
Getting back to the iPad:
For non-geeks seeking a tablet the iPad is the obvious choice for at least the next year or so, until Android and WebOS catch up. For us geeks, the choice (ignoring ideological/religious factors) is less clear-cut, and depends on use cases. If you want to code or compile on-device the iPad/iPhone is not for you, full stop. So buying one would indeed be a questionable investment if that’s all you want it it for.
Btw, another term for “walled garden” is “disneyland”, but that hasn’t caught on because some people (including A-list anti-Appler Cory Doctorow) love Disneyland. Meanwhile, turns out Google had to pull the kill switch this week on 21 malware-poisoned apps that could take over Android phones, and which had been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times from their open apps bazaar. It’s up to the consumer to decide which model they prefer.
Angry Black Lady
I love my iPad. I don’t know how I practiced law before the iPad. Lots of legal pads and boxes of documents and binders and dragging my litigation bag to and from work. oy, what a pain. now i have hundreds of documents on my ipad, all the briefs and motions and memos and cases all annotated.
i can’t live without it now. i rarely use it for anything but work (and playing fruit ninja).
stuckinred
@Angry Black Lady: Take a letter to my lawyer!
Gentlemen Question Mark
stuckinred
You left out a Huhgadunga
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
BTW it’s notable to me how Apple’s iPad and MS’s Kinect came out in the same year.
Both are nothing new in terms of pure tech (tablets have been around for a decade, motion-control/visual recognition even longer), but each will be remembered as the first consumer-oriented, reasonably affordable and usable instance of its technology to gain wide acceptance.
IMO a good example of this is the old Atari 2600: How many people remember the Fairchild Channel F or Magnavox Odyssey2?
Amanda in the South Bay
I guess all I can add is that Macs are like Burning Man-nice if you have some money to spend, but if you are working poor, a very poor investment.
Peter J
@Nutella:
One of my bigger dislikes of OS X has to do with its GUI and how little you’re allowed to do through it when it comes to the System/Finder/etc. For people who accept this, that might not be a problem, but I hate having to google for obscure commands that needs to be typed in the Terminal.
The Ratfucker Assigned To Balloon Juice
@Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta):
Hey! The Oddyssey rocked, damnit!
Peter J
@N W Barcus:
You can block what can cause technical problems without having to resort to blocking what you find to be morally wrong, it’s not all or nothing.
BTW.
There’s a Troublemaker Inside Apple’s Walled Garden.
Flashlight App Sneaks Tethering Into App Store.
Apple slapped with iOS privacy lawsuit.
etc.
The Apple process isn’t foolproof. Now I’m not completely aware of how the process to allow Apps into the AppStore works. So, I’m unsure if you would be able to build some sort of ticking timebomb into an App and have it go off in a year or so. The story about the Flashlight App with Tethering does seem to indicate that devolopers being honest is important to the process (maybe Apple thinks that the treat of being removed from the AppStore is enough to stop developers from adding undocumented “features”), but then malware makers rarely are…
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@The Ratfucker Assigned To Balloon Juice:
Yep, it did (my richer cousins had one). It had better graphics, and those cool “real” joysticks, with actual metal. And the Dreamcast was arguably better than the PS2 (except for that damned controller, which had apparently been beta-tested by Andre the Giant).
But, alas, the marketplace (may peace be upon it) is ever cold, blind, and fickle.
burnspbesq
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937:
“The apple fan boys will buy whatever child labor produced piece of shit Jobs puts on the market. Everyone else, not so much.”
Show me a consumer electronics company whose products aren’t manufactured by contact manufacturers in Asia, and I’ll show you a company that’s dead because it’s products aren’t competitive on price. Apple does as good a job as any US company (and better than most) of policing its’ manufacturing partners’ employment practices.
If you think Apple’s products are shit, don’t buy them. You have the right to be stupid.
burnspbesq
@Amanda in the South Bay:
“I really don’t have a problem with OS X or Macs hardware wise, its just…like it or not, they do signify something: that you have plenty of money to spend”
Like it or not, I do have plenty of money to spend. And I feel no need to apologize for that fact. I’ve been busting my ass since the mid-1970s to get to where I am today.
burnspbesq
@Angry Black Lady:
Don’t get me wrong, I too love my iPad, for many of the same reasons you stated. But until Pages can deal with track changes, it’s not a laptop replacement for lawyers.
Thlayli
@N W Barcus:
Gruber says Flash was deliberately kept off so that reviewers wouldn’t see — and write about — what a battery hog it is.
someguy
@burnspbesq:
See Burns, you’re not a real Apple guy and you risk apostacy charges here. If you were a true Apple guy, you’d realize that your need to edit is a failing related to you. It’s your *need* for Track Changes that is the flaw, not a flaw in Apple’s OS or Apps. Thinking you need more than Apple offers – your buying of non-Apple stuff – means you’re stupid. Or so I’m told.
Ps. Apple fanatics don’t seem to get this but the surest way to turn people into Apple haters is to tell them they’re morons and there’s simply no reason to have anything else. The irony is double lemony when you know the Apple stuff isn’t capable of doing what you need it to do.
Brachiator
@Thlayli:
Gruber is an idiot. And I note that he is usually an Apple apologist. The dumbest stuff he ever wrote was how the iPhone “death grip” wasn’t real because he could not reproduce it.
Flash is a battery hog and people who use iPads love it because of its battery life. This suggests to anyone using 2 braincells that every freaking tablet device (and most laptops and netbooks) made by anyone should avoid Flash, and that there is gold in a sold Flash alternative.
@someguy:
But that’s just it. None of this started out as “Apple is great, bow down before Jobs.” It was simply an observation that Apple has done a better job in developing, deploying and marketing the iPad.
wes
you guys rarely bring up tech!
anyways, although the ipad2 is basically super kick ass awesome, i’m really excited for Android tablets. In my opinion, Motorola has always sucked at hardware. I’m more excited about the HTC Flyer; http://www.htc.com/www/product/flyer/overview.html
don’t discount Android Tablets just yet! The Android + HTC Combo is strong enough to take on Apple.
JC
Too bad I got here too late. I guess everything is said now.
I think the ArsTechnica gets it right, in that there are a lot of ‘niggling annoyances’, that you simply don’t get on the Apple products.
I have a mac laptop at home, and Win7 at work, and truth is, I do prefer Win7. An easier interface for ‘semi power users’.
I just always prefer how long the apple computers I’ve had, have lasted.
But both are good.
Similarly for phones, the Iphone4 is just such a wonderful piece of industrial art, number 1. Just feels great holding it in your hand. Not to mention the predictability, and lack of any issues that I’ve had with it. (As long as I don’t use it as a PHONE, of course. Damn ATT.)
I almost switched to a (not nearly as pretty, smooth) android phone, before the Iphone4. I love google apps, and the native google apps on phones are just awesome. But then apple allowed google voice on the iphone, and friends started bitching about stupid placement of buttons, that kept doing things they didn’t want their android phone to do.
As much as I like tech, I actually, at this point, just want my stuff to work easily, with ease and predictability, and have access to a lot of apps.
So it’s apple stuff, until I see the ‘whole product – the actual hardware, the 99.9% proof software, and the apps measure up.
Again, I realize that the Xoom is better hardware. When honeycomb is bulletproof, there’s easy updating to new versions, the music solution is as good, and the app store is filled with titles that work smoothly, AND I’m not at risk for downloading bad stuff, then it will be fun to switch
Brachiator
@wes:
And yet, there is this … So Far Rivals Can’t Beat iPad’s Price
So, the answer to the “overpriced” iPad is to deliver devices that cost more than the iPad? What’s wrong with this picture?
Also, I find it amusing that companies are spending money on 3D devices that no one seems to want instead of on cheaper and faster devices. Where, for example, is USB 3.0 and its promise of faster transfer speed? Or a tablet that exploits cloud resources better than existing devices? Or one that is a superior cross-platform device?
joeshabadoo
Ipad and Iphone will continue to do well but they will slowly be eclipsed by android devices. It is pretty much inevitable. It is already the fastest growing smart phone OS and I see no reason it won’t carry over to pads. Apple is just too restrictive to continue to dominate these markets when they have decent competition.
The real loser is Microsoft because soon (if not now) my phone will be powerful enough to be my main computer and all I will need at home is a monitor and a keyboard to plug it into. Phones will become the new PC.
FuzzyWuzzy
I use my Ipad 24 to analyze substances, communicate with alien species, make medical diagnoses using the “wheedelee wheee” attachment, and to make strange oscillating noises in front of my fellow blue shirts while making serious face. If you hold it just right you can communicate with Starfleet, too! But you can’t touch the sides or you will die in a transporter accident.
joeshabadoo
I’m not convinced that the lack of flash is just to conserve battery life.
I see a ridiculous amount of apps being sold or given away with apple ads that are knockoffs of flash games that would already be available if there was access.
Taking away flash gives apple all the revenue from apps instead of the flash websites.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
The iApps of the iWork products have some very serious limitations. Pretty much the only way to use Keynote for iPad is to build the presentation on the iPad, because it can’t handle importing presentations from Keynote on your desktop. For one thing, the iPad can’t see dropped images in an imported presentation, so you have to make sure you have the original image inserted in the presentation before you transfer it. That’s leaving aside the much more limited choices in fonts and themes.
My boss is dying to trade in her laptop for an iPad, but until we can load the complicated presentations she needs to make onto the iPad without half of the images dropping out, she’s dreaming the impossible dream.
AxelFoley
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
How’s that different from any other company and their products?
different church-lady
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Well, believe it or not, I don’t have plenty of money to spend.
Which is another reason I go for the Mac: the damn things just last longer.*
I assume you buy the cheapest car and eat the cheapest food you can too, otherwise you’d just be waving your affluence around, right?
(*Although I do remember one of the other things that nearly killed Apple in 1996: the infamous case design of the 5300. The screen hinges broke on every damn one of them. The first time I took apart a broken one myself I was slack jawed: “How in the hell could they possibly think these hinges WEREN’T going to break?” The point of maximum torque was up against an absurdly small piece of plastic.
By the time they put out the next series of laptops (The original G3s the hinges were anchored against the metal that gave overall rigidity to the base. You could stun an ox with a Wallstreet without having to reboot.)
Gromit
@joeshabadoo:
Except apps can be given away for free and ad-supported, too. This is a variant on the speculation that Apple disallowed Flash to keep people from watching Hulu and Netflix. Now both have free apps that allow iOS users to access TV and movies with no revenue to Apple (this might change slightly with the new subscription rules, but only if the apps take in-app subscription purchases, as I understand it). Also, when the iPhone was first released, Apple plugged web apps hard, and it was developers who demanded native apps.
It just doesn’t add up that the Flash move is about trying to restrict content. And once you consider Flash’s power consumption habits on devices that do run it, well, Occam’s Razor.
Gromit
I should have added that the free apps don’t have to use Apple’s ad service.