How the iPad Wants to be Used | Hacker News Reader

How the iPad Wants to be Used

speirs.org

25 pointstelcodud21 comments

My initial reaction to the iPad when it was first announced was that it needed user accounts. I mean, your smartphone is yours. No-one else is going to pick it up and use it for a few hours. But the iPad just intuitively seems like a device that's destined to live on the coffee table and be a family's shared machine. The software may "want" to be personal, but the hardware definitely doesn't.

There's really nothing stopping this happening from a technical standpoint. Have multiple "swipe to unlock" arrows on the lock screen, one for each user, labelled of course. Passwords on accounts if users so choose. Everyone gets their own apps, browser history/cookies/cache, music, movies, etc.

Where this gets tricky is when users of the same device want to share things. You shouldn't need to have two copies of the same movie on a device. I also have no idea how iTunes syncing would work.

Absolutely yes.

The iPad doesn't need user accounts... everyone in your family needs an iPad! :)

This sounds exactly like the kind of feature that Apple would carefully consider and ultimately reject because it doesn't match their vision. The ability to have user accounts is just one more feature that makes everything more complicated for the user.

The iPad shipped a year before the competition. Sure it doesn't have a multiuser operating system... it was based on smartphones. Apple faces engineering tradeoffs too. They shipped, they delivered, and they will add this if it makes sense when they can.

I have to agree with you. Apple won't saddle iOS with a stop-gap feature that won't be necessary in 5-10 years when iPads will be cheap enough that everyone will have their own.

I would bet that Apple has a lot data from Macs being brought in for repair and from new setups that would indicate that only a small percentage of users actually use more than one user account on their Macs.

There is a mod on Cydia enabling user accounts for the iPhone, not sure how it's implemented though.

I'd think that in the future your data foot-print won't be tied to any piece of hardware. With cloud storage solutions, you should be able to pick up any device and have it be immediately "yours" with your data and your settings. Hand the device over to your friend, and now it's got his data and settings.

The iPad might be a single-user device but I think the author here is wrong in thinking that's this a fundamental property of the hardware. It might be that the software isn't up to modern standards of multi-user access or it might be that the software to do this well hasn't even been invented yet. But it's a software issue and it's one that will eventually be solved (but maybe not by Apple).

Apple is trying to sell more iPads. Why would they make them easier to share when people want them so badly?

"The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated."

This sentence sums up my experience with my iPad, and its one of the main reasons I don't like it or use it much.

What you're seeing is the slow merge of PC's with consumer electronics and the surprising thing is that people actually like it ...

What I think is going to happen eventually is that only 'geeks' will have real laptops/desktops. Everyone else will have one of these personal devices (in varying forms of complexity).

We live in interesting times.

I think if that happens (which seems more likely every day) it'll create a bigger disconnect between creators and consumers than we have now and it sort of worries me. I got involved in making things from my desktop PC just stumbling on "how to make x" guides, if I'd only owned an iPad I don't think that would have ever happened because I'd have to have had made a concious choice to purchase a desktop computer for the "advanced" tasks like creating.

I guess it's good for Apple short term, but long term... although I guess the exposure to the app store and similar systems may cause that concious decision to purchase a desktop to create.

You're absolutely right, but is that such a bad thing?

I mean right now you could look at it like we're forcing Users to deal on a level of knowledge/abstraction that they don't want to be on ... that is too complex for them, as evidenced by things like users not knowing what a browser is or the inane questions users ask tech support when their computers run into trouble.

To take an extreme example ... Automobiles ... I drive one everyday, but I barely know anything about how its built, how it works or how to fix it when its has problems ... now imagine if to start my car in the morning I had to have some knowledge of exactly how a car worked? (You can even substitute a manual transmission for this) ? Wouldn't that be a bad thing?

What is going to happen is the segmentation of enthusiasts and experts from everyone else, and I actually think that is a good thing.

The way that he suggests Windows PCs "want" to be used (with antivirus) is clearly a design flaw, for any usage scenario. Why isn't this a design flaw, even if only for use in schools where a cheap tablet that automatically resets itself to a known good state and leaves user date in "the cloud" seems a better idea. The ChromeOS idea of being able to lose or break your laptop and carry on regardless (possibly even from a random Windows desktop as long as it has Chrome) seems a perfect fit for students, even if it doesn't play to Apple's strengths.

Schools would do much better to give every student a Kindle.

Please explain...

The iPad is too much fun. It's slightly better geared for single-tasking than a PC, but at any moment you're still three taps from every piece of attention-sucking media in the world.

Although reading books works fine on an iPad, reading books is the only thing that works on a Kindle. And reading books is the behavior most critical to learning and becoming educated.

But is Kindle really good for textbooks where there are a lot of diagrams, pictures etc? It might be good for novels, but I don't agree it would be more suited to textbooks than iPad.

Maybe if the DX price was lowered to normal Kindle price, it would be more appropriate; but at the moment if you are going to shell out 350$ for a Kindle DX, it is wiser to spend 150$ more to get an iPad.

How many textbooks have you seen that actually need more than two or three colors to effectively communicate the point? Unless you're studying art or showing a really complicated map or 3d surface plot, the Kindle's 16-level grayscale should be enough. It would also have the effect of discouraging the gaudy, overly flashy designs textbook publishers use to distract from the lack of content.

In my experience, for subjects like math or most basic science courses, the quality is inversely proportional to the number of colors of ink used.

Self control and focus is just as important as bool learning. Learning how to think is also vital and the iPad can help develop this with tested puzzles simulations and learning labs.

The iPad can be completely locked down so noting but your app or task works. You can also wipe it after each user with minimal fuss. It is the perfect tool for sharing though I agree it should be personal to get everything from it.

After a while, you learn that the best method of self control is to remove the easy distractions. And the design of the ipad is an easy distraction. Lock down would imply you don't own it. PG even does that by having two computers, and his work computer is not connected to the internet. If he needs something from the internet, he needs to get up and go across the room to the internet computer to get it.

No, no they wouldn't.

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