Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

Yep. This is exactly what I've been thinking for the last several days while reading through all the piss and vinegar the technorati on the web have been throwing at the the iPad.

The iPad cost $500-$900 and does a few things exceptionally well. (Like hook into iBooks, iTunes and Apple's App Store.)

The Modbook on the other hand, starts at ~$1700 and does all that other crap the technorati wanted the iPad to do. I think everyone just wanted Jobs to come out with a tablet computer that was cheap and badass like MacBooks are and, unsurprisingly, that didn't happen.

I mean, I'd love it if Chevy held a press conference and said they were going to sell Camaros for $10k. But it won't happen and I'm not going to get all indignant about it.

After all, Steve Jobs said himself they couldn't build a computer for $500 that wasn't, "a piece of crap." So I don't see what the big deal is about the iPad, in that sense. (I think it is a big deal in several other senses, like the piggy-backed announcement of iBooks and the A4 chip, etc...)

My wife has a modbook, and it is made of unmitigated awesome. It's a little heavy, and the display is a bit dim because of the glass screen cover... But it's awesome. And the price is very reasonable. The stylus works really well (and comes with several different types of tips, including a felt tip that feels just right...)

She bought it to do UX design work with it, and started on a webcomic with it because she just liked playing with it so much. ArtRage is awesome on it.

It's always surprised me that, given the number of artists Apple targets with their offerings, they have absolutely no offering like this that artists can use.

Here's a review of a similar workflow from 2002 by the Penny Arcade guys using a Windows tablet.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2002/11/27/

and here is their take on the desire of web artists to have a tablet from Apple right before the iPad came out.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/22/

Yeah, she she's spent a lot of time on setting it up to work (mostly) without a keyboard -- She says Quickscript is really good (but has some bugs). I want to play with it more myself, but it's one of those "you can have it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" kinda deals.

> I mean, I'd love it if Chevy held a press conference and said they were going to sell Camaros for $10k. But it won't happen and I'm not going to get all indignant about it.

I think the analogy is wrong. Myself, and many of the people I know were expecting a scaled down Mac experience in a tablet form factor, price and feature competitive with netbooks (<=$500).

OSX already runs well on hacked netbooks, so the hardware is more or less ready, put on a better display that works at a higher rez, make it touch sensitive, squeeze it into a tablet form factor, mix in driver software to handle the various and obvious netbook/tablet widgets like a webcam and tilt sensors, charge $499 for it and voila! Instant win.

Instead we got the equivalent of people showing up to the Chevy Volt unveiling, and seeing a Segway that had been scaled up to seat 2 at the same price as a Malibu.

Once you add in the multitouch, accelerometer, and processors powerful enough to smoothly present the UI at the higher resolution, you don't have enough left in your budget (or the physical enclosure!) for a battery big enough make the device not suck. Instead of compromising on battery life, Apple chose to simplify the device down to something that $500 of hardware can actually do for 10 hours.

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