Steve Jobs Takes The Stage At iPad 2 Event | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Takes The Stage At iPad 2 Event

techcrunch.com

93 pointsibejoeb31 comments

Craig Hockenberry: "Two reasons Steve did the keynote today: 1) To tell his competitors to fuck off. 2) To tell those speculating about his health to fuck off."

http://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/43030854980730881

Robert Scoble: "I've been watching Jobs for the entire keynote. Even when he's back stage. He's been standing the entire time, looks healthier than me."

http://twitter.com/#!/Scobleizer/status/43021083867222017

Robert Scoble - blogger, technical evangelist, author and MRI machine ...

There's a camera app for that.

(It probably comes with one of those annoying vintage filters, however.)

Standing is the bar we set for healthy now.

Some days after having my butt in a chair for a marathon coding session, I'm happy to find that I can still stand :)

Convore needs a room for that. Stereotypical programmer has been sitting on his butt for five hours straight. To go with:

https://convore.com/early-bird-codes-before-8am/

Is that a feature or a bug that texts from downvoted posts are greyed down to unreadable but not the hyperlinks?

To be fair, if someone was in truly poor health or undergoing radical chemotherapy, standing at length would likely be either incredibly difficult or impossible.

So sure, it's not fool proof, but its also not a bad indication that reports of his impending demise are exaggerated.

When my dad eventually succumbed to cancer (technically kidney failure), it wasn't until the last couple of weeks or so that he had energy and weakness issues. Even a month before, he was still out and about. With chemo, he was only weak for the day of, and fine the next day. I wouldn't say Job's apparent health can give any clues as to his health, aside from the fact he has at least another month left.

Not only that, but Scoble is the bar Scoble sets for healthy. Slightly less germane, but about 6% funnier.

That's nice to see, even if you have no interest in the iPad.

Congrats to Steve and the Apple team. The iPad 2 is a phenomenal product. 33% thinner design in less than a year since it was first released. And crazy cool covers as a bonus.

Or was the first version 33% thicker than it needed to be to give them an easy win in version 2?

This isn't entirely a crazy idea.

Seeing as they were already setting the bar for tablets they could afford to make it thicker that they needed to. In all likelihood it was more of an economic consideration, larger components being cheaper, but knowing they had the ability to make it thinner and lighter later would have been part of the medium term plans.

Actually, at very high volumes (where the non-recurring engineering cost is sufficiently amortized), the larger equivalent component is more expensive, since you are using more material to manufacture the component.

Obviously, other factors, like process yield can be a factor here as well, since a lower process yield for the smaller component would increase its price.

Other factors include things like larger components might use cheaper materials and factories need to be tooled up to produce newer components.

Competitors’ tablets aren’t any thinner. That’s what you would expect if Apple had made the first iPad purposefully thicker than they could have done.

They probably didn’t spend much time optimizing the thickness the first time around. I would guess that they made a ton of dummy mockups, figured out some sort of maximum thickness to still get a compelling product and designed the first iPad with that goal in mind.

Could they have released a thinner iPad last year? Probably, but it might well have taken them a few months longer. It’s simply a matter of priorities. You can’t do everything.

I don’t for one second believe that they already had the design for a thinner iPad drawn up and added some thickness in the last minute just to make their job easier.

I knew a guy that used to apply this principle to coding. He'd put a bunch of while loops counting from one to a gazillion that could be removed at a later time during "optimization".

How did he make sure that the compiler wouldn't optimize them away?

You mean, 50% thicker than it needed to be....

Well, the camera was left out of the first version for that reason (presumably). Remember the slot left in the back of the bezel that took a standard iPod sized camera module?

When does a thinner iPad matter?

When holding an iPad up as a book a lighter iPad matters, and it is 15% lighter.

When you pack it away the iPad gets thicker anyway because you stick a case around it.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say Apple's Smart Cover is 33% as thick as the previous iPad.

33% thinner is an engineering achievement.

Being thinner should allow for a better grip -- especially for little hands. My totally unscientific reasoning is the more efficiently you can transfer the weight into your fingers (being spread wider) the more comfortable it will be to hold the weight. This can also help with wrist fatigue if it allows you to find a more comfortable resting position. Lastly the sharper angle on the back should make it easier to lift when sitting flat on a surface. Perhaps all small things but for hours of usage it can add up.

I think this is potentially a mistake, it furthers (in my opinion) the image that Jobs is irreplaceable (being on a medical leave of absence he must still come back to launch products, etc.).

Several people have posited that Jobs should stay well back from the limelight, for just such a reason:

Why Steve Jobs Shouldn’t Return to Apple http://db.tidbits.com/article/11981

"For someone who's supposed to be on a leave of absence, he's sure doing a lousy job of it" is how it was put to me a few days ago.

unfortunately the "one more thing" was missing at the end...hoped it would be the retina display :(

Oh man I could make a really nasty joke about Steve Jobs and the iPad being 33% thinner. But I won't.

It does look like he's lost weight but Jobs has always been skinny, so I don't think it's fair to speculate on how healthy he really is. I really hope he's doing well.

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