I am in general agreement with everyone here. Is it cool? Sure. Can I think of a practical use for it? Not really. I’ll save my money for the iPhone 4GS methinks.
I too shall resist - I just don’t need it. plus - no multipass…er, I mean mutlitask - just can get there from here
I also am a little annoyed at the use of “magical” as a descriptor. Seriously. Are unicorns flying out of this? Or will that be in 2.0?
I do a lot of surfing on my iPhone, so I can see getting it for that alone. Add in the Kindle-killing iBooks, and I’m sold without even hitting the app store.
Plus, this is Apple. It’s currently an oversized iPod Touch because that’s a stable UI that they know works well. As they update the OS, they’ll certainly start to differentiate it. Think of the difference b/t the iPhone as it was introduced (no 3rd party apps, no cut and paste, etc.) vs. how it is now.
The annoying thing is that they’ll charge a nominal fee for some updates due to their interpretation of Sarbanes/Oxley.
I guess I’m a true-believer or something, but I think this will be a breakthrough device and a big seller (though not quite as big as the phone or pod).
I think this for one specific reason: This looks to me to be the first true lifestyle computer. It’s not a gadget (e.g. nerd device) in any sense of the word. It just lets you do the most common computer type things easily.
In the months of rumors and all that, I didn’t really care about it; I wasn’t sure what I would use it for. Then, about a week ago, I was sitting on my couch in front of my TV, and I was looking at my iPhone & reading RSS & checking e-mail. At that point I knew what this thing was for: I drain my battery doing these things, not making calls.
And, it’s small enough & pretty enough that you wouldn’t mind leaving it out on the table, where it would be easily reachable. It becomes a part of your lifestyle.
Good point. If it could have a video camera and a dock with power supply and key board it could replace the 2nd lap top of many typical two user households. Often, that extra lap top is just used for emailing and skyping anyway.
Once, someone designs an app that enables shorthand writing on the screen I’d get one to take notes in meetings.
Bingo. As someone put it, for 90% of users, this will cover 99% of what they do. Plus it runs all day and you don’t have to boot it.
Yeah, the lack of a front-facing camera puzzled me too. I’m guessing they wanted to hit their price point, and that shaved a few bucks off. Or it may be that they thought people would be holding it and it would be shaky video.
The keyboard dock is optional, but I’m not sure I’d need that. I’d probably pull out the MacBook if I wanted to go there.
io9 has a great piece that i think really applies.
I see the manual vs. automatic transmission analogy Gruber’s making and it’s quite possible we’re going in the direction of very usable but also very locked-down computers in the future. But where the analogy breaks down is that a transmission is a several thousand dollar piece of hardware and unless you count the sport shifters you have on newer automatic cars, you can’t just switch between them at will. Whereas with a computer it’s quite easy to multi-boot operating systems or even run one virtually on another. Theoretically there’s no reason why Apple could let an iPod or iPad run a different operating system like they do with their Macs, I think they’re just doing it to keep their iTunes and App Store monopoly. I don’t think people would have been as eager to make a shift to automatic transmissions if that meant any time they wanted to modify their car they could only go to one store ran by one company with veto power over any accessories that competed with their own.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. I am EVER SO HOPEFUL that Apple will improve battery life this year, given the tremendous improvements they’ve made with the MB and MBP. And let’s face it: they’ll have to address multi-tasking at some point, just like they eventually caved in and gave us cut-copy-paste on the iPhone.
I had the Palm E2 and I adored it. When it started getting screen drift that couldn’t be fixed I went back to Palm.com to order a new one. Much to my dismay, only Smart Phones. So I ended up with a Touch.
I really don’t see this iPad becoming very popular. It weighs 1.5 lbs which would end up becoming painful to hold after a while. You can’t put it in your pocket and whip it out to kill time in the checkout lane at the grocery store. And it doesn’t seem to be able to do anything more than the Touch can do. Well, if it has a decent copy/paste function, maybe…
saying the iPad is a big iPod touch, is like saying a 30" monitor is just a big 13" monitor. plus, whats wrong with it being like a big iPod touch? it’s got a 10" screen, runs iPhone os, and has iWork. It was mostly designed to do what most people do on full size computers; surf the web, use Office/iWork, and watch videos/movies/TV shows. And, Apple does this in a lerger device with a touch screen? oh! and it’s got 3g.
…and it can multitas—oh wait
well, it has Fla…oh that’s right.
Look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it being a big iPod Touch. Or that there is aobsilutely no use for it (in fact if Virgin Airways doesn’t start putting these in international flights - they are missing out. It would be perfect for long flights).
But if you don’t travel a lot and you have a laptop and a iPod…you’re pretty much golden - again, just my opinion. I don;t see shucking out any money for soemthing that I pretty much already have, just smaller. Again, totally just me.
I know it can’t multitask (shhhh it will soon) or have flash. But apple Has a reason for no flash; most crashes from firefox/chrome/safari are caused from flash. Apple wants html5 to replace flash. So if you think about it, apple doesn’t want safari to suddenly crash on you when using the ipad/iPhone (although it would be nice). Just give it time, if flash loses than apple is already ready. And if flash wins, apple WILL add flash. And not saying you can’t have your opinion, it’s just I’m a diehard mac (although I do like microsofts hardware and 360)
Actually, it can and does have multi-tasking. The iPhone has had it from day one. It’s restricted to the core Apple apps (the OS, broadly speaking) but it’s in there.
They are extremely reluctent to open that up to third party apps, though. They didn’t want third party apps to begin with (for the first year, it was webapps or nothing.) That makes perfect sense on a smart phone (obviously an ancilliary device that must be a phone first and foremost.) This thing is a different beast, and I’m not sure even Jobs has a handle on what it is, exactly. They’ll probably enable it eventually, but they’ll take their time.
ETA: And if Adobe wants Flash to run on it, they’ll demonstrate that by giving a crap about fixing it on OSX, finally.
everything i’ve heard about html5 sounds like awesome. i can’t wait until this replaces flash.
Look for the HTML version of YouTube