The iPad Is For Everyone But Us | Hacker News Reader

The iPad Is For Everyone But Us

flyosity.com

77 pointsjazzychad44 comments

This is apple, once and for all, signaling to the world, that the people who make computers do cool things, the developers and the savvy, are not the market. It's too small. No one knows how to make computers do cool things, but lots of people want cool computers.

I, for one, take this as a blessing. If you are technically savvy, it's in your best interest for companies like Apple to lull consumers into a sense of satisfaction. Your job, as a programmer, is to avoid all things consumer. Your job is to do the hard stuff. If you're using facebook, you're wasting time. If you're building facebook, you're making tons of money.

This has been coming. The writing has been on the wall. The app store tragedy. Hard for developers, easy for consumers. The developers, as always, are the ones jumping through hoops. Change the color, add this, add that, i want it this way.

So the devs say ok and do it. That's the way it has always been and increasingly into the future, it will be more typical. Developers work harder so everyone else can work less. That's the way it should be.

Change the color, add this, add that, i want it this way.

This reminds me of what's been going on in real-world architecture for years.

If you want to build in Apple County, it's got to have green awnings and Spanish tile and stucco walls with eaves of at least 18" ...

And yet the most desirable neighborhoods in the country are planned in just that fashion.

That's kinda the same point: the people who just want to browse the web and look at photos are the people who want to live in cookie-cutter gated communities, burdened by CCRs.

The iPhone and the iPad are gated communities with a HOA. Your neighbor can't park a clunker across the street from your house for six months... but neither can a friend of yours stay in an RV in your driveway for a week.

"Most desirable" is a relative term.

I want to have freedom, even at the cost of a more difficult life. I'm house hunting right now, and I'm actively avoiding the kinds of places you describe.

"Most desirable" may be relative for each individual, but median sale price (or in Apple's case, profit margin) is a pretty good proxy for desirability at large.

DHH said something about this in his presentation at Railsconf.[1]

He compared developers to puppies, saying that we really all just want to be loved, and fetch that ball over and over and over, even if it gets thrown in the mud. We need to stop thinking like that, and start demanding to be treated as equals in the requirements making process.

--- 1: http://brightkite.com/objects/a8ab4412399611de9db7003048c108...

Why the entitlement? We exist at the whim of the consumer - that is who we serve, after all.

You'd have to watch the full video to get his whole argument.

http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2081411/

It starts roughly around minute 46.

His point was in relationship with stakeholders. Most people, when making up requirements, think about the Absolute Best Thing They Could Imagine. However, in reality, they'd be equally as satisfied by something that's much less fully featured, but also much faster to complete. In addition, simplicity also tends to have performance implications.

He uses a permission system as an example. He worked for two weeks on a Best Permissions Ever, and then said "let's go back to the drawing board." They managed to find a 90% solution that he could code in a day and a half, was much more performant, and they found out that that last 10% didn't even really matter.

I can grok that argument - but in my experience when it comes to consumer-facing software we (as developers) often stop well before the 90% solution. We hit the 50% solution, call it good enough, and wait for some guy willing to put the effort into the 90% solution to come and kick our ass (sadly, this has often been Apple).

Quite true, and usually in the UX department. (for both most developers and Apple)

I'm kind of tired of this type of thinking.

No, we wouldn't have a job without the customers, but then again, the customers wouldn't have anything without us.

This isn't supposed to be a parasitic relationship, it's supposed to be a symbiotic one. We have something the customers want, they have something we want. We need to reach a mutually beneficial agreement to trade for these things. Each side wields equal power, it's time both sides understood that.

Master/servant? I prefer the pusher/user metaphor myself.

You work for Zynga? :P

Once again, think of another tragically hip Steve: Steve Rubell, owner of Studio 54. He was completely capricious when choosing who got into his club and who had to remain a hopeful standing in the cool New York night, and his word was law. But that was okay because his club was the coolest around, and it was cool because, not in spite of, his caprice.

Jobs, like Rubell did, knows cool when he sees it, and is in the business of delivering the coolest, most desirable, most enviable experience to his loyal customer base. That mandates a snobbish and dictatorial selection policy, because if you let pedestrians make the UX decisions what you end up with is... pedestrian.

Apple's goal is to sell the iPad to people who already have a desktop, but don't feel like they need a full-blown laptop.

For people who want a full-blown laptop, Apple still sells those. If they made a $800 iPad fully capable of replacing a $1200 MacBook, they'd be in trouble.

No, they wouldn't be in trouble. The laptop form factor will always have the advantage of a physical keyboard and higher performance or battery life as compared with the iPad form factor. $400 sounds a bit smaller than the expected Apple markup to get those two advantages, which probably indicates how much more miniaturized the iPad components are compared with the MacBook. If you compare the iPad to the MacBook Air, which is similarly miniaturized, you get a $700 disparity, of which about $500 can be attributed to the difference in form-factor and the resulting expectations, and about $200 of which go to performance and storage improvements that aren't consequences of the relaxed size and weight limits.

If you ask me this new model of computing is mainly interesting for Apple because they like their 30% earning. In fact there is nothing preventing you from doing simple to use smart computer than when you press Ctrl+L+A+M+E open an terminal where it's also possible to do more interesting stuff.

Or a smart computer where I can save an image from a web page and later email it. Or a smart enjoyable computer that allows me to change ebook reader and still open /My/Ebooks to read all my old stuff with it.

The iPad has usability limits that are a direct consequence of the fact that Apple want to control what you can do whit it, because more control, more $$$.

I don't want a world where most of the computers can't be used to write code. My dad taught me BASIC when I was 7 because we had computer at home, and this computers where build to write programs, attach it to the power line and what you see is a BASIC prompt.

Don't have to be so exasperated today of course, but the iPad has all the potential to make computer users more stupid.

What we really need is a decent competitor, able to do cool computers without the aim to control the world.

Sorry, Apple's not making much money off the App Store nor the iTunes music/video store.

They're a hardware company--that's where they make their money.

How many songs have they sold at a 30% cut from the music store again? I can't find anything right now to back this up, but my gut feeling is that they make a _lot_ of money from the software side, and they're going to keep pushing that because there's a lot more profit and (again, I suspect) lower costs.

If I find some numbers to back this up then I'll post them...

Edit: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-t... (Q3 2009) shows $958m from Music and $528m from software, services. This isn't as much as from hardware totalled, but those numbers and the iPhone numbers are the only ones with growth. They're going to keep growing as they put more hardware out which can buy music, videos, apps etc from their stores.

I'm not sure about this. Computers are versatile things and there is a LOT of specialized software out there. My mom has quilting software that she loves. She'd have to give that up unless the iPad quilting market gets big enough. My Dad has GPS software he uses for fishing. How's that going to work? Both of them print like crazy. My dad doesn't like games except the rare first person shooter.

This MIGHT be Joel Spolsky's 80-20 problem ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html ). If you make the 20% of features that everyone wants, you have something that's sufficient for NO ONE.

I use an MBP, but my 3 year old does not...I can see the iPad keeping her occupied and me happy on long trips.

yes, and no dvds to scratch when you buy movies. I wish the iphone had better parental controls, so you could flip on a child mode and hand it over when in line. since ou can't override the button, there is no real way to provide this functionality, either.

I agree here. I wrote a similar post this morning with the same point.

http://rajuv.com/2010/01/28/ipad-is-the-computer-for-rest-of...

"This is a device I can hand it my grand father and he won’t have much trouble using it. Compare this to handing him a laptop and training him about how an OS works, what a drive is, what a file system is, why he needs an anti-virus software etc. Ease of use is the key here. Infact, we have seen this with iPhone already. Every day I see many 2-3 year old having absolutely no problem using the device. That makes a HUGE difference.

In a country like India, there are over 500 million mobile phones. But there are less than 15 Million computers (connected to the internet). Why is this the case? One of the reason is, PCs are complicated to use/learn for non-techies. I think this device can address a broader market as it hides the details from the user."

I disagree with the main premise: That as long as you provide the "90% functionality" (i.e mail,chat e.t.c), no casual user will miss the last 10%. Sure, most of the time this will work fine, but occasionally people want more. Maybe upload a video to youtube, or chat on that new up-and-coming social networking site? "The user" is not quite so simpleminded as some here seem to think. More importantly, since the web market can change so fast any static set of features could get sidelined by a new application/web page et al, and it's very hard to predict in advance what the user will want. Therefore, one makes devices that can do everything. This is not an anachronism, it's the only logical solution to a market that changes too fast to lock people in to a very small subset of a computer.

I'd rather just use a chrome OS tablet, at least I don't have to connect it to a computer in order to update/sync/install stuff. And all the apps are web based so even if I need to use a regular computer I still have access to all my apps and data.

So long as I can replace the dumbed-down supplied OS, I'm happy.

- With a Chrome OS Tablet, ALL your data lives in someone ELSE's cloud (unless you synchronize it with your computer).

- If that floats your boat, it was pointed out in one of the earlier front page links that you can do that too with this new iTouch device. It uses an advanced HTML5 compliant browser called Safari. It will even save your web app frontend with its own icon on the main screen, giving it the same user attention privileges as any normal app.

> - With a Chrome OS Tablet, ALL your data lives in someone ELSE's cloud (unless you synchronize it with your computer).

Wrong, with HTML5 offline storage you can keep all your data offline on your own machine too.

> - It uses an advanced HTML5 compliant browser called Safari.

I think most people on hacker news know that safari and chrome share the same webkit engine, thanks for the news though :p

> It will even save your web app frontend with its own icon on the main screen, giving it the same user attention privileges as any normal app.

But this kind of device is not for me (see the link), it's for people who don't know much about computers or don't want to deal with one.

The problem with the iPad is that you still need to own a computer and know how to use iTunes to sync/update your device. So my friends will still need me to help them with itunes (I know my mom would). With the chrome os tablet, I can just get one for my mom because it syncs and updates itself automatically so she'll never need to call me to ask "how that thing plugs into the computer again" and why itunes is asking her to "sync or delete my whole photos collection" or "why itunes doesn't work anymore? it says I need to download 200MB of update, is that a virus or can I go ahead?" etc.

I see the point that he is trying to make in this article about the iPad's intended audience, but I think that the iPad is still a disappointing device.

If someone needs a computer for typical tasks such as Chatting with friends, Sending and receiving email, Listening to music, Watching videos, Playing games, and Browsing the web, then they should just get a netbook for ~$300. A netbook is still highly portable and can do all of these tasks at a cheaper price.

Except that the experience won't be nearly as slick, which has been the main selling point of apple devices: provide a highly polished user experience, and nothing that is not as good. Thus limited feature set in v 1.0.

While a netbook may do all of those tasks, it doesn't do them particularly well. The iPad will turn on instantaneously, will be easy to use, and apps will be optimised for the screen size. The biggest problem with netbooks is that they run OSs and apps that have been optimised for much larger displays.

Yes, normal people who... Chat with friends WHILE writing an email? Browse the web WHILE chatting with friends? Plug their USB digital camera in to upload photos?

How can you write an e-mail and a chat message at the same exact time?

Voice/video chat.

The gmail web interface? It might require a complete mental context switch, but it does not require closing of one program and opening another, then back again.

That would work on the ipad too, wouldn't it?

But I too, think that the missing multitasking is a problem for this device. I think this is something Apple will change soon. They will not change their app store policy. This is the main reason for me not buying an ipad.

But what bothers me the most is that they could close also the Mac-Platform. Then I would have to leave it. And that makes me sad.

The end of the desktop OS.

The Last March of the Ents

Cobol's last gasp...

Netcraft confirms it...

This thread is worthless without pics.

BUT... I do those things too and don't mind buying a general purpose device to achieve them... Doesn't mean I need to give up my laptop, desktop, server, phone, abacus. You're allowed to have more than one gadget, in fact, do you know what? It's positively encouraged. I honestly don't get all the hate.

I disagree. I think the iPad is perfect for reading Hacker News and PragProg e-books and I can't wait to get one.

That the rebuttal for pointing out flaws in the iPad is simply to say that one is not the target market for the device is ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com