My verdict after one day of using the iPad
scripting.com
scripting.com
And people definitely don't go and watch plays and operas live anymore now that they can do so in their living room with a TV.
You need a better dictionary..
Anyway, I was merely illustrating that "the future of" does not mean "the sole replacement of".
Motor/Steam boats are now used where Sailboats were used, 100% of the time.
TV/Movies have replaced Opera/Theater for mainstream entertainment.
For me, as a developer, the ipad certainly won't be much more than a diversion or a target for development. For people like my wife, though, I think it will definitely have an impact. Many people simply want a content consumption device (web, media, etc), and I think the ipad is a very good device for consuming most content.
I think I will try implementing something similar with my iPad, and see how it works.
"I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. "
That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions to really make this kind of product shine.
I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how could they install them?
I'm sorry, bad camera angle is the biggest piece of piss poor excuse I've ever heard. I'd honestly be more appeased if Apple simply said "sorry, things got missed out that we wanted to implement, shit happens - that's life".
He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural."
My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.
The browser on the iPhone always felt like a last-browser-of-desperation except for sites specifically tuned to it. On iPad, it's actually usable. The sites that I work on all look great (with the exception of embedded flash video, naturally)
It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.
Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.
It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/markThisDay.html
"the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”"
http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
I'm not making any predictions about how the iPad will do (sitting and waiting will get me better information than pulling a guess out of the air), to make sure that's clear. Just reminding myself that it possible that perhaps Apple will produce a product that won't change the world.
Like MobileMe? :)
In the same vein though Apple TV isn't a game changer, but it could become more relevant as time goes by.
I was an early adopter and got burned. It never worked for me. After fighting for hours with configuration and bad Apple support (which is uncharacteristic), I realized that the time it would potentially save me was being burned up in setting it up, so I abandoned it. In the end I ended up losing $99 and gaining nothing. I'm guessing from what you said that they've worked the kinks out now, though.
How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. So what?
Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.
Consider it to be an example of paraphrasing.
I also work with people who are not very deeply skilled in computer technology, exactly the kind of people this product is supposedly for. It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. We learned a long time ago that inexpert users don't use less resources, they just use them differently. The argument that the Mac wasn't a serious computer was nonsense. I was there when all these arguments were fresh. This is not a replay. Keep dreaming if you want, but if you give the iPad to your mother expect the light to go on for you. At that exact moment you will realize how poorly prepared it is for that.
If you read his comment carefully you will see that he simply stated a fact. Stating a fact is not being a jerk. However, by saying "don't be a jerk" you've added a personal insult to the conversation.
Tone is really hard to convey on the Internet and I also hope you don't misread the tone of this comment. I'm writing this in the spirit of a friendly reminder that I myself need sometimes, too.
I think one issue may have been that what I wrote in my post was just the first two sentences; the whole second paragraph is cut-and-pasted from Winer. In that paragraph Winer himself comes off as pretty aggressive, and by quoting all of that it may have made my comment read as more caustic than it was designed to be. (though I guess we should heed techiferous' point about tone on the internet and give Winer a little benefit of the doubt here too!)
This community (and discussion forums in general) is only useful if we sometimes can correct each other's mistakes and use evidence to argue against each others' positions. However, we should always do so in ways that never make it feel like anyone is being attacked, and it's my bad if I fell short of that.
I sent Aaron a direct message on Facebook already saying all this, but I wanted to clarify for everyone else here, especially anyone who flagged my comment: I was somehow locked out of HN starting sometime shortly after I made my original reply to Aaron and ending just a minute ago. My best guess is that this must have been caused by some mechanism triggered when several people flag your post but a mod hasn't decided whether to ban you yet. Just speculation, though: it's also possible my co-founder logged into my account and turned on noprocrast as a subtle message to get off HN and get back to work! :) That's actually pretty good advice that I'll be following now. Have a good few weeks, HN.
It's perfectly fine for email, posting on message boards, etc. I also will probably use it to write documents when I'm out and about, and using it today I felt like I would like to be able to code on it (though ssh or jailbreaking are probably the only ways that will happen).
24 hours ago, I would have agreed 100% with you that "iPad is for consumption not for production". After a day of using one I have changed my mind entirely. The iPad can be an adequate device for production, and it has the potential to be a great one.
Specifically, having a software keyboard has large and untapped potential advantages over a physical keyboard, once basic typing is acceptable. The buttons on a software keyboard can change to adapt to the situation. We already see see small examples of this with the built-in keyboard: when the address bar in safari is open, the space bar disappears and the forward slash and .com buttons take its place. Imagine alternate keyboards for things like LaTeX markup. Furthermore, your pointing device (finger) is much closer to the keyboard, so no moving your hand from your keyboard to your mouse. I think apps that really take advantage of the possibilities of the interface are yet to come. Once they arrive the "tablets will disrupt the laptop" argument sounds sounding really plausible.
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It's not obvious how to add an advanced button that the right people will press, and others won't. You can hide it, but it will get reported on websites that newbies see, with simple instructions. But that said, I'm sure there's a solution, and I hope Apple finds it.
I think the development effort from Apple to enable stuff which would only be used by a fraction of the audience -- even done to Apple's high standards of polish -- is a secondary and more minor issue. Apple can afford it, and Apple knows that developers are worth the expense. However, in terms of development time rather than money (which aren't equivalent because finding, hiring, and training good programmers is hard), this has to be lower priority than enabling multiple programs to run at once and some other stuff, so maybe it'll be a while.
However, I believe your latter point is right. I won't dump any amount of money on an iPhone/iPad until it's able to run multiple programs, and until it is route access is likely pointless.
My girlfriend (a university professor) is in the process of finishing her first book, and would love to do the rest of her writing and revising on the iPad in Pages, but she doesn't see it as being realistic. She's still really excited about being able to watch Battlestar Galactica on the iPad. (regarding BSG: yes, I am lucky.)
I spend all of my time writing code in Ruby and Objective C. I'd love to be able to get access to MRI, the Rails gems, MySQL and TextMate on the iPad in order to do my work there, but it's just not realistic. And that's ok: because I am unbelievably excited about the web browsing experience and the games on the iPad.
Edit: I amend my comments above with a Tweet from the author of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air: http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495
I think if they had multi-tasking it'd go a long way to shutting up this criticism.
1. You've probably forgotten more about this sort of data than I'll ever know, but I look around at folks on laptops in cafes and see nothing but Facebook or Gmail on Netbooks. I think we, as a class of users, are the exception: most people on computers spend the bulk of their time consuming information instead of producing it.
2. Rumor has it that iPhone OS 4 will be announced at WWDC 2010 (big shock) and will feature multi-tasking.
The bigger critique, though, is multi-tasking. I like to be able to consume music and webpages at the same time. A consumption device that won't let me multi-task is inherently unsuited for my normal day-to-day use.
The problem has never been that the iPhone and iPad can't support multi-tasking, it's that Apple has only permitted some of its own apps to multi-task.
I think the relevant verdict would be delivered not by the Pogues or Mossbergs but by mom, dads, and the 4-5 year-olds who see this device for what it is. Because, for the first time we (as in majority of the general public) can look at a computer as a consumer device as oppose to a general purpose device that needs training or learning. I think most reviews I read missed this aspect.
Hmm, I think he is possibly incorrect here. A lot of people do multi task; but my parents close every application when they start a new one. If they are sending emails they close Word - and vice versa.
My gran did this, my brother used to do this till a few years ago, most of the people on my uni course (electrical engineering) who were not computery people tended to do this, all my friends generally do this as well.
Indeed the only thing I have seen people traditionally leave on is music (which can be done on the iPad) and chat (which currently cannot).