Insanely great? Ars reacts to the Apple iPad | Hacker News Reader

Insanely great? Ars reacts to the Apple iPad

arstechnica.com

16 pointsj0530038 comments

Yet another spec-list comparison that completely misses why Apple has succeeded in the past: usability.

The iPhone didn't have as many features as its competition when it came out, the iPod was missing some highly touted ones too... yet they wiped the floor with the competition. You would think that at this point geek pundits would be looking at these spec tables they keep putting up, and realizing the world doesn't think in spec matrices.

I would call it "desirability" more than "usability."

Yah, I desired a usable phone.

I'd suggest it's both, and that they work together.

I LIKE using my Mac and my iPhone. I DON'T like using my BlackBerry and Windows machine.

All of those machines offer pretty good usability (I can use them all to get things done). But I'm not attracted to the BlackBerry and the Windows box. It's not that they're ugly, just . . . unattractive.

I suggest Apple has tapped in to something innately human: we like pretty stuff. Or at least enough people do to make the iPhone the best selling smartphone in the world. . . .

The usability Apple mixed in with the lipstick makes these things irresistible for large chunks of the market. These things sell like crazy.

The iPhone didn't stack up well in feature grids either, if you'll recall, there were phones with better cameras, more storage, SD cards, physical keyboards etc.. Apple devices are intended to be more than the sum of their checkboxes (and I would think people would figure this out after the iPhone). It's about "the experience", that's the whole point. It's about the transition from portrait to landscape being smooth and without flicker, it's about the UI moving when you swipe your finger, not a millisecond after.

Maybe they fail at "the experience", in this case that remains to be seen, but please, please stop with these feature grids. They're useless outside of Tom's Hardware, et al..

A table with a column for "A bazillion other tablets in 2010?"

They could also have a table column for "A bazillion other tablets in 2005!"

(Don't get me wrong, I like the iPad very much. But it's Apple once again using 20/20 hindsight by looking at what the Wintel world did wrong in the past.)

Another nitpick: you technically can use media from a non-Apple Amazon store. You download and run the Kindle iPhone app, get on Safari, buy a Kindle book from Amazon, and it will "Whispernet" to your device automagically.

The first generation is meaningless. Of course the first-gen iPad is lacking "obvious" features competitors have. Same thing with the iPhone on Day 1. But in 9-12 months, when iPad 2.0 comes out, and a year after than when iPad 3 hits the shelves, those feature gaps will be closed, like they were with the iPhone.

Apple doesn't win by cramming in all the features on the first go. They win by polishing the heck out of things and executing features well. Then they expand those features in follow-up revisions.

remember this? http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

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