My Apple Tablet (iSlate) Use Case: Baby Following | Hacker News Reader

My Apple Tablet (iSlate) Use Case: Baby Following

gabrielweinberg.com

8 pointsepi0Bauqu10 comments

Somewhat like the author does, I use my iPhone for this. It's actually surprised me how often this comes in handy. Unlike the author, while I wouldn't mind more screen space and easier typing, for the "with kids" situations I'm in I generally need a hand free. So a larger device is right out.

I suppose if I spent more time just hanging out at home that'd be more useful, but I'm usually doing something either at home or out (with the kids).

The moment I pull an iPhone out in front of my kids, it's ripped from my hands by an 18-month-old and that becomes the primary toy for the next 30 minutes. She can unlock it, scramble my home pages, and leave it full of drool and sugar-based crust in a matter of seconds.

If this guy thinks a fancy $1000 tablet is going to be that much more usable around kids, he's in for a rude awakening. If Eli already wants to climb all over his laptop, why wouldn't a tablet suffer the same fate?

When my son was 2, he could unlock and enter the passcode to his mom's iPhone. About that time, we had a TV crew at our house filming for a China talk show. He was captured on camera (and broadcast around China) playing Blackjack on the iPhone. Its a remarkably accessible device ;).

I agree, the iPhone really has been a remarkable thing in terms of how kids latch onto it. One can probably do a whole human factors study on the affordances of the slide-to-unlock thingy.

If only Apple would give us a way to disable the Home button. I could write all kinds of killer little games for the rugrat to play with.

This sounds like a good idea, but keep in mind that various stages in a baby's development is shorter than you might otherwise think. I worked at home when my kids were born, and for a while it was cool to have a mat in my office where I could lay them down for a nap. Shortly, they were walking. Strategies for one stage went out the window when the next stage came along. But, hey, if that is what helps you decide to purchase an iSlate, more power to you.

It'd be nice if they made it 100% waterproof.

I used to perch a laptop on my lap whilst feeding my son with a bottle. That stopped reasonably sharpish after he puked all over the laptop keyboard.

How hard can it be to make laptops waterproof? Or at least resistant to water spills etc :/

Until you can find a way to cool a laptop CPU passively, you're going to need airflow, so sealing the case is out.

Although building the platform on ARM (as we presume the Tablet to be) probably fixes that by simply not using a laptop CPU. Not to say that you can't have a passively-cooled x86 system, but are any of the new integrated platforms cool enough for that? Given the power you can get with ARM SOCs these days, it may not matter.

true, true. I'd at least like to see laptops that have a sealed keyboard/top system, so that they can withstand a spill from above. They'd sell like hotcakes.

They do make those but they are "rugged" pc's you can spill your whole water on it while running and it won't stutter.

The downside is that they are expensive as all get out for a lobotomized laptop. http://www.ruggednotebooks.com/

tl;dr I'm going to buy a tablet so I can distract myself while watching the baby.

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