So Steve Jobs walked into a Mac team meeting with an iPad | Hacker News Reader

So Steve Jobs walked into a Mac team meeting with an iPad

posterous.mclov.in

13 pointsiamclovin16 comments

I don't get it. The iPad does not turn on instantaneously from being turned off. It does turn on instantaneously from sleep, as does my MacBook Pro (aside from some significant caveats, such as the time it takes to re-join a wireless network). The trick with the iPad is that sleep is the state you get when pressing the button that looks suspiciously like a power button. The iPad also does not have a Safe Sleep or Hibernate state like the MacBook does, so it will drain battery until turning itself completely off.

Is the solution to design a laptop that you never turn completely off except in rare circumstances?

The solution is to enforce the same "save everything, all the time, because someone might hit Home on that shit at any moment" philosophy that gets rid of the difference between close, quit, sleep, hibernate, and power-off for iPhone and iPad apps.

An alternate solution could be a timer that switches the MacBook from "ram-sleep" to "disk-sleep" automatically after 10 minutes or so.

Currently, when you close the lid, it will just ram-sleep until the battery is almost dry and only then suspend to disk.

It's quite frustrating to pull the MacBook out of its sleeve in a meeting only to realize it has "slept itself to death" once again...

You might want to check up on that: does your MacBook keep playing music if it's "ram-sleeping"? If so, it might not really sleeping as hard as it should. I've kept my MBP's in "I shut it and put it away" mode for days without noticeably losing juice.

> Is the solution to design a laptop that you never turn completely off except in rare circumstances?

Yes, but laptop batteries do not last anywhere near long enough to make this feasible, and the faster the wake time the more power required to stand by.

To get instant response with the memory footprint of a laptop, you absolutely MUST keep the RAM powered or else radically modify the existing technology in ways that haven't been thought of yet, and Apple is not in the inventing-new-hardware business (rather, the apply-existing-hardware-to-new-ideas business)

In other words, it's what we'd like to have, but with current technology it is an unworkable solution (as it would require either massive batteries, slow CPU's or constantly being plugged in)

“Yes, but laptop batteries do not last anywhere near long enough to make this feasible …”

Uhm, I never turn my MBP off, I always just close the lid. I’m not seeing any diminished battery life. My 2007 MBP already behaves pretty much like an iPod touch or an iPad. It’s mostly an UI problem, not a Hardware problem.

In their defense, I really don't see how my MBP is any slower at waking up than my iPad. And you really only have to cold boot them when there are updates to the OS...

Just a completely bogus story by someone who must not be a Mac user.

I put my MacBook to sleep and it wakes up instantly. I shut down my MacBook and it takes a min to boot.

I put my iPad to sleep and it wakes up instantly. I shut down my iPad and it takes a min to boot.

It's the exact same interaction. My MacBook will sleep for a day or more with no problem, come back and it's instant on. If it sleeps to the point of killing the battery it hibernates instead where the RAM is written to disk.

I think this guy doesn't understand how well Macs perform with sleep/hibernate/shutdown and he's imagining it works like his generic PC.

I think this is one of those things people really underestimated as just 'being nice to have' (aka instant on). It's a feature of the iPhone that I think is easy to overlook and is really one of many consumer focused touches that set device apart.

If they can pull this off (really pull it off, not some sleep mode bs), I think this would be a huge selling point for Apple.

I open up my Macbook and it's instantly on. You don't need to turn it off when you're finished using it - it really doesn't take that much power in standby.

-- Ayjay on Fedang

Fear: the solution will be proprietary memory DIMMS where each one comes with a flash backing store.

I don't care about this because I don't build my own computers anymore. Almost no one builds their own cars (hot rodders aside). Even fewer build their own laptops, and I've never heard of anyone building their own cell phone. So if a company can make the whole device that I buy smaller, faster, more reliable, easier to use, etc., that's going to be something I'll pay for. I honestly don't care at all how they do it, as long as it makes the device better by the standard I just enumerated.

You can talk about how open something is until you're blue in the face, and that has nothing to do with whether most users will want it or not. Walk into an Apple store and count how many customers ask about what kind of RAM is in the white plastic MacBook they're about about to buy, or about Mac OS X's POSIX compliance, or even how to bring up a shell. The number you come up with will average close to zero. What's more, this isn't a bad thing!

Not many people build their own these days. But it's not uncommon to add RAM after purchase.

At the moment, you can buy RAM anywhere, so you're not limited to the vendor's overpriced offerings, if they even sell RAM upgrades.

But if Apple came up with RAM units that included on-board Flash backup, they'd be the only source for it, so adding RAM later would depend on Apple's inclination to sell upgrade packages, and would be priced higher than current RAM prices.

OK, but why is that important? If they did that well enough, their computers would be improved and have increased value for me. I'm more than happy to pay more for something that is better.

At any rate, I don't think that we'll have to worry about upgrading the memory in our computers. The RAM in my phone is soldered in place, and I've never thought once (until now) about adding more. This might seem shocking, but ask yourself: with the rise of the laptop, where have all the expansion slots gone? Why doesn't anyone miss them? They seemed like such a big deal twenty (and even ten) years ago, but now we all get along fine without any of them.

It's worth noting that Man Utd also ended the 2008 season £699m in debt with operating losses for the year at £43m on £257m turnover.

And who the fuck cares iSheep?

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