The iPad’s Dirty Secret | Hacker News Reader

The iPad’s Dirty Secret

codesketch.com

47 pointsg0atbutt58 comments

I remember that the iPod's dirty secret was that you had to pay big money for a battery replacement since it wasn't user serviceable. Other dirty secrets for popular consumer products include things like child labour being used to build sneakers or unsafe factory/dormitory combinations that kill hundreds of people when the factories catch fire.

I get the sense that the phrase "dirty secret" is being watered down in the same sense that the word "evil" is being watered down to simply mean "something I disagree with."

You once said "Web applications are dangerous." You were taking similar creative license with the word "dangerous." There is nothing wrong with this practice in non-formal writing.

It is my honour to bestow the order of the sacred upmod garter upon you for service to HN's tone and quality. Arise, Sir Cooper!

Again? But I'm already in the Order of the Sacred Pedant and I just can't turn my back on it..

Very good point about the watering down. I'd add "anti-competitive" and "monopoly" to your list as well.

Oh yeah. And "journalism."

It was meant as a rebuttal to Steve Jobs proclaiming the iPad offers "the best browsing experience you've ever had" which is simply not true.

While it's true that other "dirty secrets" (some of which you listed) are more important, it doesn't change the fact that is one of Apple's dirty secrets.

To me, "Dirty little secret" implies a factual piece of information that Apple is knowingly hiding from the public.

"I don't like the iPad browser because it doesn't have tabs." is NOT a "dirty little secret".

Yeah, but 'only 256 mb RAM' might be for a lot of people that have got used to more.

What? It was news to me from reading the article. I had assumed it would have about the 1gb which is a common spec on $300 netbooks now. I think people are overreacting a bit to the the title...it's just one of those headline cliches, like 'anatomy of a flame war'.

It's only a "dirty secret" if you're prone to believing in conspiracy theories.

I don't think the iPad browser experience is going for the "leaning forward" kind of browsing. It's going for the "leaning back" approach to browsing you do while lounging in the couch. The tabs aren't as important there, although I would of course not mind if the leaning forward part of the equation worked better, too.

Then again, it's version 1.0 of the iPhone OS for iPad, and considering the strides of iPhone OS for the iPhone, I am sure we have plenty of UX refinements to look forward to.

On a side note: The author makes the assertion that anyone can be tossed an iPad and figure out the interface on their own... I challenge that assertion. I've taken a few relatives through the process of getting iPhones up and running, and I would claim that the interface is more difficult than the standard desktop metaphor.

At some point an article floated through here suggesting that the iPhone interface isn't simple. Rather, the author argued, it's the fact that it's very fun to use that contributes to its success.

I can't find the article right now, but I do agree with the author. The iPhone/iPad lacks affordances and all sorts of cues about what the hell you're supposed to DO with the thing. Again, my experience is that folks find it incredibly unintuitive (although they enjoyed it immensely when they 'got it').

I recognize my sample size is extremely small. However these constant assertions that Apple has managed to create an instantly usable and discoverable user experience are based on even more tenuous science. Does anyone have any hard data or usability testing they'd like to share? :)

Donald Norman (founder of Human Interface Group at Apple) once said [paraphrasing] 'give people something beautiful, and they'll assume it is simple'.

I can't find the original quote, but he said it again on Canada's BNN a few weeks ago.

It's not quite what he's saying. At least not if you read his book, _Emotional Design_. There have been research studies that show that beautiful things are perceived to work better -- after real usage, too, not just "Look at this picture. How do you think it will work?"

Aesthetics are so very important!

I am sure you're right, but I believe you're not taking the "learning how a mouse and keyboard works, what the difference between clicking and double-clicking is" into consideration, as most people have used computers enough to already know that. Give people the phone and help them with the basic gestures, and I'm sure they'll give someone who's never used a mouse/keyboard combo a run for their money.

I don't think the basic gain is that you don't have to learn anything to use the device, just that once you get the hang of the gestures, stuff works fairly intuitively.

I do believe, however, that once I show someone how to do a three-part call one time, they'll remember it the next time around... Which is the most important part. It's frustrating having to read the manual several times, just because the task you're trying to achieve just doesn't make sense.

Instapaper solves your reading later problem nicely. I'd give it a try - a simple bookmarklet and you can read whenever, wherever you want.

Instapaper is nice and usable, but for this it is also a kludge.

It forces the user to pick ahead of time which things they will and won't want to read later, instead of the simpler possibility. That being, letting the user just stop at any point in the interaction, confident in the assumption that the machine will take care of whatever annoying details are necessary for the page to still be there when they come back to where they left it.

Having to pick ahead of time isn't all that onerous, so the work-around is a pretty good one. It also has the benefit that you can pull it up on another machine, so that is nice. However, that too could be done more simply by having all of the user's browsers sync the their histories.

Well, in fairness, picking out which pages he wanted to read was one of the scenarios in the article, so even though your point is valid, Instapaper would solve that particular part of the problem.

I love the Pro version, well worth the price. But if you need convincing there is a free version too. I can't imagine not having it after using it for the last few months. I actually read lots of long articles I would typically skim to save time.

Is this because the iPhone OS doesn't use paging? It seems like this could be handled from the software side of things: the HD is solid state, and though sacrificing a second of time to switch to a web page that's been cached in the HD isn't Apple-gorgeous it's certainly faster and nicer to see than a blank white page and a twirling loading symbol.

Safari, like any modern web browser, simply uses a lot of memory. Remember that mobile Safari is (almost) always running in the background and on 128 MB devices it is always consuming most of the available RAM despite how aggressively it tries to flush things from RAM.

Caching to disk alone isn't enough. All web browsers cache to disk, but most non-trivial web sites will still hit the network as they are rendered by the browser, even if the content is cached. And if the network is slow you'll be waiting a while for that "cached" page to appear. Safari would need some kind of off-line browsing mode, like what I think Firefox has.

It's just the problem with the interface design paradigm that says a user should be able to do anything immediately without instruction. If you want to cache, you need to have an understanding of how the Internet works, so it's "too hard" for "most people" to understand or care about.

You're missing my point: the OS should be able to cache the (up to n) pages that haven't been explicitly closed by the user in the HD, and when there's a page fault in main memory when a user tries to access the ones the 256MB can hold, the OS should go to the disk and grab that page, and swap out another page that's currently in RAM with the requested page.

Bam, no re-downloading the page. Should be over in under a second (depending on the memory used in the iPad.)

If they made an assumption on the usage pattern of the drive they could buy cheaper parts that were not expected to be used as often. If there is no wear leveling built into the drive then it could reduce the lifespan of the drive. I am all for swap but I think they chose to omit the swap space for some other reason that I cannot think of right now.

The entire device doesn't have to use swap for Safari to save the state of a particular "tab" to disk.

I think most people would like to see page/tab management and caching improved in mobile Safari. It's hardly a "dirty secret". Depite that, I still love browsing the web on the iPad. It's like you're flying over your web pages.

This isn't the most well thought out post. I can admit that having only 9 open tabs is annoying and it uses an arbitrary method of closing previously opened tabs (or lets call them new windows, because they're not exactly tabs). But I guess this is something we'll just have to live with.

Instapaper is an app that's about $5. It solves all my offline reading needs for me. I've never looked back since.

The lack of tabs didn't surprise me, but the way the iPad OS poorly handled memory management did.

That's not poorly handled memory management, it's good handling. Poorly handled would be to give you an out of memory error, or make the other pages disappear completely as if you'd never opened them at all.

I would have to disagree. My Droid also has 256 mb of memory, and I can have more pages open at once without it having to flush pages. This is still true with Pandora running in the background.

Overall I'm a fan of the iPad, it just falls short in this area.

What is the screen resolution of the droid? What is the screen resolution of the ipad? If there is a big difference then it may be because the software keeps bitmaps of rendered screens laying around for a quick switch.

The same thing is pretty much true on the iPhone as well. In theory, it keeps pages in memory, but in my experience it reloads the page way more often than I would prefer. It is definitely on my wish list for future Safari updates, once they have consolidated the iPhone OS to have the same version on both devices.

To make it a fair test - were they the same pages? iPhone at least does this same thing - but it does not reload every switch, only sometimes.

For all I know the iPad may do that so it can shut down memory chips and save the power of refreshing them. Just because it doesn't do exactly what you wand doesn't mean it's handled badly - it still does what it does gracefully and without errors or slowdowns.

It does after all not claim to be able to hold pages open indefinitely; and you could have saved them to some ereader app for future Reading.

Misuse ipad -> doesn't do what you want, is hardly a 'dirty secret'

Wow, that is some truly masterful backing away from the "the best web browsing experience you’ve ever had" claim without appearing to notice doing it. Humpty Dumpty skill level, at least, the word "best" means just what you want it to.

I've never said it's the best experience, or offered my support to that claim.

What position, that I used to hold, am I backing away from?

Perhaps I misread the dialectic somehow. I was taking the point back to the thesis of the article (that Jobs was quite wrong in his characterization of best browsing ever), a thesis which g0atbutt was supplying support for. Support which you seemed to be trying to counter or undermine in you comment with things like "Just because it doesn't do exactly what you want doesn't mean it's handled badly - it still does what it does gracefully and without errors or slowdowns" and "It does after all not claim to be able to hold pages open indefinitely...".

As you were countering the support being given for the thesis, I took it that you were attacking the article's thesis (thus defending Jobs' characterization). But then your comment moved the goal for what constituted "best" so far that it functionally proved the thesis of the article. I apologize that I was overly eager to point this oddness out and did so badly.

I actually love this limitation. My ADD has plummeted and I don't feel like I'm so much less effective.

Yeah, there may be ways to overcome RAM constraints but iPhone OS represents opinionated computing that apparently values single-tasking on the part of humans.

Of course, it will value human single-tasking until it no longer does, at which point Apple will go to great lengths to show how many more tabs iPhone OS can keep open than other mobile OSes.

You have a point. I've noticed I think more before blindly following links on the iPad. It adds just enough time to randomly surfing around that it provides a sort of focus.

P.S. Accidental down vote, sorry! (As a result of being on a iPad, alas..)

Perhaps the thinking behind non-caching is that people will forget to clear their cache, so why not do it automatically? It might be best to leave that as a default for people who don't care but offer a cache preference in Settings for people who know what that is, no?

Breaking old habits is hard but sometimes worth it. Is opening a bunch of background tabs a really efficient way of doing things? On a PC it works if you have a high enough resolution to display all the open tabs and enough RAM/CPU to quickly switch between them. On mobile devices it pays to focus on more efficient ways of doing things because you're dealing with limited resolution, potentially slower 3G networks, limited CPU/RAM/battery, etc. That being said there are browsers on the App Store that support tabs.

I would argue that tabbed or multi-windowed browsing is most important on limited resource and low bandwidth devices. The main advantage of opening a tab/window in the background is not having to wait for it to load; the longer the wait, the more that functionality matters. I used the ability to open links in a new window extensively as soon as browsers offere that functionality, which was probably on a 133MHz machine with less than 256MB of RAM on a 14.4kbps (or 9600 baud...not sure) connection if I remember my computing timelines correctly.

I remember how annoying opening multiple web pages were before tabs. I don't want to be constrained.

Being able to open tabs is better than not. If the hardware/network does not support that very well, that is an issue with the hardware/network.

I'm really hoping there is a fix for this in 4.0. After all, 4.0 does allow apps to 'state save' - I can't imagine a cached webpage would use much more ram than a cached app.

The Safari refresh thing has always bugged me on my iPhone, but I think it's slightly more acceptable since I have an always-on connection and just have to wait 10 seconds for a page to reload.

Perhaps Apple's way of getting me to cough up the extra $130 for the 3G...

I don't see how this UI decision — a screen of pages vs. a row of tabs – could be related to a hardware limitation. All other things remaining the same, why couldn't the switcher look like tabs instead of pages?

Page caching is the real issue, but I think this could also be addressed by software if Apple decided to.

Of all the things that could be considered deal breakers for the iPad, this is among the least of them.

Rentzsch (developer of Click To Flash) posted his thoughts on this a bit ago. http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/382362022/persistent-mobiles...

I agree it is very frustrating though. Hopefully it will be addressed in the next update.

FWIW, there is a tabbed browser for the iPad. It's called Atomic. Seems to have good reviews but not tried it yet.

That the iPad got the same amount of RAM as the existing iPhone defintely seems weak.

That's exactly why I waited to get the 3G version. A mobile device that rely exclusively on WIFI doesn't make sense to me.

Also, as somebody else already pointed out, Instapaper solve this problem in a very elegant way.

I don't own an iPad so I can't test but Opera Mini for iPhone does keep the other tabs as I left them, no need for refreshing or to show some blank pages. It really improved my browsing experience on the iPhone.

A lot of things about the iPad could use some tweaking and fixing up. That said, it's still better than everything else out there for "simple and ease of use" devices for the technically inept.

I disagree on the need for tabs, but that is a nice looking webpage.

There's an app for that.

The worst part is the constant refresh on Back and Forward buttons.

Apple should come up with a gesture to switch between tabs.

IMO, one of the big achievements of Fingerworks keyboard was it's vast array of gestures. Apple drastically watered down the gesture support in it's various products. Perhaps to make it simple for grandma?

the problem here is once you put two fingers on the surface it starts expanding/contracting the page

This is FUD. The multitasking to be introduced in the next iteration of the ipad OS will almost certainly allow for the presence of tabs. I agree that right now it's somewhat annoying to have tabs lose state once and a while when I'm browsing, but since I only use my ipad at home where I have a persistent and fast wifi connection it's not an issue to wait a second for the page to reload.

The author gushes about how awesome it is to browse the web on the ipad and then pigeonholes it because he couldn't recall a tab while he was away from an Internet connection, a closet case if there ever was one. It seems self defeating to focus on such a minor annoyance. This thing is an amazing piece of hardware, and no it's not perfect.

The iPad OS is perfectly capable of multitasking since version 1.0, this is just not exposed to the user, so there are no current technical limitations related to multitasking in order to implement tabs in Safari.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com