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Comment by sdh | Hacker News Reader

Apple Rule #1: Never buy the 1st rev of any Apple product.

It is unfortunate, because I really want an iPad, but it's a hard reality we have to tolerate until Apple figures out how to get their 1st revs right.

The most disturbing aspect of this rule is the almost guaranteed denial of 1st rev problems by Apple.

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Your mentioning of the iPad strikes me as peculiar, as it hasn't had any significant widespread problems and has been out for months now; in fact I was struck last night when I realized that there hasn't even been an update of any kind to the OS yet, though there's not clamor for it either. "Never buy rev 1" might be a decent rule of thumb, but it shouldn't be made more than that, and at this point it seems like we can draw some very good conclusions about the reliability of iPad 1.0s, whereas iPad 1.1 or 2.0 could be riddled with problems.

I thought there was some issue early on with using the iPad on some wifi routers... ah, yeah, there is some reason to think that memory was accurate http://www.google.com/#q=ipad+wifi+problems . Or was that issue pretty rare and overblown?

Pretty rare and overblown. The issues only affected some campus wifi networks with short DHCP leases. iPad has some unique features that allow it to receive push emails and notifications even while it is in sleep mode, by keeping the wifi connection active. Apparently it isn't yet smart enough to renew it's DHCP lease while in this sleep mode, so it was staying on a leased IP after the expiration time.

You were probably only affected if you were using an iPad on specific University campuses, and I see no reason why the network admins couldn't work around it by giving out longer DHCP leases to iPad specific hardware, at least, until an official fix was issued.

The iPad has overall been surprisingly bug free for a 1.0 product.

uhh this is version 4 of the iPhone.

While I agree with you, on first gen, but this is a 4th gen iPhone conversation.

Eh, I would consider the phones to theoretically be version 1.0 (first gen), 1.5 (3g), 1.6 (3gs) and the iPhone 4 is 2.0. Avoiding "dot oh" releases is a common thing regardless of manufacturer.

You're confusing branding with identity. The previous three iPhones were all roughly the same hardware — incremental improvements with each model. The iPhone 4 is significantly different hardware. It keeps the iPhone brand, but it is a new piece of hardware. Similarly, the PowerBook G4 was not the fourth revision of the original PowerBook hardware.

I bought the first iPhone and it was far and away the best phone I've ever had. I replaced it with a Sony Ericsson phone because I've grown to be quite uncomfortable with Apple. The Sony phone is awful. It sort of makes me wonder what I'm really accomplishing by doing this :)

I don't have an iPhone but as far as I understand, the first iPhone was absolutely awful as a phone even though it had a great UI and was amazingly functional in general (I've used the iPhone's camera function and it rocked).

An ex-boss stopped making cellular calls and used skype instead just so he could keep doing other stuff with his iPhone.

Or in this case the 5th rev?

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