Opinions - page 21

A lot of people following the Steve Jobs iPad keynote this morning weren’t convinced about the device until he mentioned the price: $499.

All of sudden, people wanted to buy three of them.

The price is the big news here. Everyone was expecting it to cost $700 to $1,000 — Apple makes pricey products, right?

But there’s no “Apple tax” on the iPad. This thing is priced to move, and they’re going to sell boatloads of them. And not just to Apple fans — the iPad will attract scores of Windows switchers.

Go to any Apple store and you’ll see heaving throngs of shoppers checking out Apple’s goods. A lot of them are Windows users shopping for a new home machine to replace an aging Windows box. They’re sick of the headaches and want an alternative.

The iPad is that alternative. It’s not an extra gadget, a luxury for someone who already has an iPhone and a laptop. It’s a replacement for that laptop — a true alternative.

And at $499, it’s also an alternative to the Kindle, cheapo netbooks and even Apple’s own MacBooks.

The iPad+ keyboard dock = cheap MacBook. It’s half the price of Apple’s cheapest MacBook, and a third of the MacBook Air.

Steve Jobs is a ballsy guy. He’s probably the ballsiest CEO in the U.S. right now. Who else would undercut their own laptop line — which are Apple’s most popular and most profitable computers — with a brand new device that costs half the price?

But this is how Jobs rolls. He killed the popular iPod Mini and replaced it with the iPod Nano. He’s undercutting the entire iPod line with the iPod Touch. He’s a forward-looking guy, and the iPad is a forward-looking computer.

Although John Gruber over at Daring Fireball predicted it a couple weeks ago, I think most of us were shocked when it turned out that Apple’s newly announced iPad tablet didn’t have a forward mounted camera.

After all, why not? With an entry-level price and a $29.95 unlimited 3G coverage plan, the iPad seems like it would afford a perfect solution for mobile video calling. Hell, even if it didn’t have those things, surely it would be just as good as, say, a MacBook in letting people play around in Photo Booth. Right?

No. I think Apple knew what they were doing here. Unless it’s mounted in the iPad keyboard dock accessory, the iPad is going to be predominantly used in a below eye-level position. What that means is that a forward fronted web cam would need to point upwards at a slant to capture a human face.

So what, our lithe and muscular long-necked readers ask? Two words: double chin. Or three words, if you prefer: double triple chins.

One of the most crucial announcements of today’s iPad introduction was the launch of iBooks, Apple’s e-reading application, which has a bundled iBookstore that allows users to purchase e-books on the go. By all accounts, the experience is compelling and fun.

But there’s a big question here around content access. Though Steve Jobs listed off about 8 book publishing partners for the platform, he didn’t mention access to a specific book store partner like Borders, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. And that’s pretty troubling. Even though Apple’s going with the open-source ePub format, which means books from Barnes & Noble should work, there’s no direct mechanism yet for connecting the two, and the import experience remains to be seen.

And I’m not confident in Apple’s ability to populate an amazing bookstore on their own. The movie selection of iTunes leaves a lot to be desired, and I fear the same for books without a partner on-board who really knows the field. Janky as the Amazon Kindle is, its library selection is unmatched.

iBookstore: Slamdunk or Slamflop? You decide!

When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.

With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.

This article originally appeared on Revert to Saved.

I’m on the hardware beat of CoM’s iPad coverage, so while the App Store devs take the stage, I wanted to just a quick aside on why I think the iPad is a terrible name for the Tablet, as spontaneously ill-considered as my opinion might be.

In an earlier post, I swore that if Apple was creatively bereft enough to call their tablet the iPad, I’d eat an extremity… but not that one. Either way, I’m reneging on my promise, since I like my digits.

But I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.

Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?'”

Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.

iSlate had its problems — I equate a slate with something monochrome, fragile, easy shatterable — but it was a lot better than iPad.

What do you guys think?

Of all the people in the world, you’d think Cultofmac.com readers would go bonkers for the iPad. But judging from Twitter reactions, they’re not sold — and Steve hasn’t even mentioned the price yet!

Here’s some of the feedback tweets we’re getting:

@cultofmac Just a big iPhone, nothing special just yet.

@cultofmac i’m not sold. I mean why get this if you have an iphone or mac or both????

@cultofmac: It has huge borders!!! and i hoped to see usb conectors for the #ipad

There’s so much expectation and hype about the things the Apple tablet will include, but there’s one thing I want it to exclude: wires.

1. Nick Merritt at TechRadar says the arrival of the tablet highlights the sad state of modern computing: “…This view sees the iSlate as the Omega to the Mac’s Alpha, the final delivery of the Holy Grail of computing, the fabled ‘information appliance’, completing the job the Macintosh started. How? By finally delivering on Jeff Raskin’s/Larry Ellison’s visions: something so flexible yet simple to operate a baby could use it.”

2. David Nuttycombe makes his views perfectly clear:

3. Photographer and self-confessed Apple fan Paul Inskip spells out his thoughts: “By my own admission I’m an Apple fan but this is another case where if Apple re-writes the rule book on tablets and creates something it helps to push everything forward. CES saw the same tired laptop-into-a-tablets computers thrown about hoping to ride the wave of the Apple device but they will end up looking like the chunky ‘smartphones’ of old before the iPhone came out.”

4. Finally, Jeff Harper at the Canadian Chronicle Herald has this to say about the tablet’s possible effect on the publishing industry: “Newspapers that were struggling to make money with their online product will now be able to harness the power of Apple’s iTunes store and sell monthly subscriptions there. It also allows papers to reach readers outside each business’s traditional boundaries of provinces and state lines. If your content is good, people will buy it.”

Our old friend Farhad Manjoo has an insightful piece on Slate explaining why he hopes Apple’s tablet will be like a toaster.

Farhad hopes the tablet will have an iPhone-like operating system (as we’ve mentioned here before) that offers a somewhat restricted, locked down computing experience like the iPhone. That is, he hopes Apple has removed all the complexity of using and maintaining a traditional personal computer.

“The most revolutionary thing about Apple’s phone wasn’t its sleek case or the multitouch gestures, but the artful way in which it hid nearly every bit of complexity behind a display of easy-to-understand icons. The iPhone contains no visible “directory structure.” Your music is not in a particular place on your phone; it’s just on your phone, and you get to it by launching the music player. Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.”

I think Farhad has put his finger on the most important feature of the tablet. It’s not designed for nerds, like traditional PCs (even the Mac) but for ordinary consumers who have no interest whatsoever in learning how to use a computer.

If you can get your noodle around it, it’s an astonishing thought. Steve Jobs is attempting to reinvent computing again, but to do it right this time.

The tablet will usher in a new era of consumer-level computing that will be utterly different to computing in the past. Instead of mice and keyboards, there’ll be a new generation of software designed for fingers and voice. It’ll be a lot easier to use (see all those videos of toddlers using iPhones), and a lot easier to maintain. Thanks to Apple’s controls over app installation, it’ll be largely free of the viruses, driver issues and tech-support headaches of traditional PCs. Of course, we’ll sacrifice some freedom to tinker for all this — but who cares? (Our own Leigh McMullen for one. See his “My Tablet Won’t be Running any Silly Phone OS.”)

No wonder Steve Jobs is so excited about the tablet. All the way back to the Apple II in the late 1970s, his earliest ambition was always to make computers accessible to mere mortals — to make the computers “for the rest of us.” It’s the realization of his earliest dreams.

Well, it’s finally here: Tablet Week. Or, as I like to think of it, it’s time for there to be Just One More Thing. We all know how significant we expect this announcement to be. A major new advancement in computing, a killer device for a market that has failed time after time, and, just maybe, the last great breakthrough product of Steve Jobs’s amazing career.

All will be revealed on Wednesday, but since we’ve got to something in the interceding 60 hours, I’ve decided to go all in and actually make some bets on killer features for the Apple Tablet With No Name. They’re my best guess based on what we know about the existing tablet and eReader markets, soon-to-launch technologies, and past actions of Apple itself. I haven’t touched one, I haven’t talked to anyone who has, and the Apple employees I’ve seen in the last few weeks are people who know even less about the big secret project than I do.

We’ve been talking about an Apple tablet for years now, and of course, that chatter has boiled over into a frenzy that almost guarantees that Steve will walk on stage with something tablet-ish on the 27^th, if for no other reason than the fear of a near-nuclear backlash.

While we’re confident that this will be the greatest innovation in tablets since Moses brought a couple down from Mt. Sinai, that’s all we know. The Apple-Reality-Distortion-Echo-Chamber has progressed from being all a twitter with conflicting expectations to achieving some kind of pig-headed consensus that frankly has got to be totally wrong. Principal among these group-think features is the absurd notion that the Moses Tablet v2.0 will run an OS from a freekin’ Phone.

Follow us after the jump where we taunt the conventional wisdom, until they go home crying to momma.

Gary Snyder, a 79-year-old poet with roots in the Beat scene, lives in the tranquility of the Sierra Nevada foothills. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and he hasn’t heard about the existence of the Apple tablet.

But he loves his Mac.

John Markoff of the New York Times got in touch with Snyder to chat about the latest from Apple, but what he got out of it was a new lens on the world. Or at least computing. Snyder allowed the Times to reprint, with permission, his poem “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.” You’ve got to head over to read the full thing, but just consider this line:

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

Could not say it better myself. Is it Wednesday yet?

Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac has written a great curtain raiser on the upcoming tablet. His lengthy posts covers everything you ever wanted to know about the tablet, including the likely surprises.

We especially like the way he starts by recalling the way Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone:

At the introduction of the iPhone, Steve Jobs touted that new device as a “Widescreen iPod”, “Revolutionary Mobile Phone” and “Breakthrough Internet Communications Device”.

I believe the same type of convergence thinking is going into the tablet. It can’t just be a “Kindle-killer” eBook reader. It can’t just be a “Media Pad”. It can’t be only a Nintendo DS or PSP competitor. It can’t just be a small NetBook-sized MacBook either. It has to be all of these things. At the same time. Say it together:

“The best eBook reader. The best Netbook. And the best portable media player and gaming device.”

Repeat.

Well worth reading the entire thing.

Savant Systems is a home automation company that sells a range of wireless control tablets that may illustrate how Apple’s tablet will work in the real world.

Unlike the endless mockups and magazine-publisher demos, Savant’s line of Rosie Touch systems are real products.

Based on OS X, the Rosie Touch panels control the home’s heating, lighting, security and entertainment systems. They run an iPhone-like touch interface based on a photo-realistic model of the house’s interior. Built on pictures of the actual home, the UI allows users to control the lights and AV components by interacting with pictures of the actual components onscreen.

In other words, tap the hallway light onscreen, and the actual hallway light turns on or off. Slide your finger down the picture of the kitchen window, and the blinds in the kitchen are drawn down.

Leander posted yesterday about rumoured features for iPhone OS 4.0, including multi-touch gestures OS-wide, background apps, UI changes, and more.

Today, on TechRadar, Gary Marshall outlined his thoughts on 10 ways to make iPhone OS 4.0 damn near perfect, offering ideas such as disabling orientation, deleting default apps, home-screen widgets, document sync from a Mac (or PC), Mail filters, and one I’d love to see—touchable wireless icons (so you can disable Wi-Fi without accessing Settings).

I commented on that article with ideas of my own about what I want to see in iPhone OS 4.0:

Mail needs an optional unified inbox that can be set as the default view. Forcing me to go in and out of each inbox is dumb.

All default apps should be removable, with a suitably chunky warning if you decide to do so. If Apple only hides them, I don’t care. Perhaps there should be a show/hide list in Settings.

The Springboard needs serious work, because while it was great pre-App Store, it’s now a nightmare to arrange/organise apps. One might argue you should do this in iTunes, but plenty of people only use their device, ignoring iTunes in the main.

I’d like to see an app list, available by swiping left of Spotlight to access an app launcher that lists every app on the device, but that can be filtered as per Spotlight. I did a mock-up of this for Cult of Mac back in October.

On deleting an app, you should be able to optionally store its settings, which should (again, optionally) be available when reinstalling the App via iTunes at a later date. In other words, if I’ve spent 20 hours getting 90% of the way through Myst or Peggle, but delete the app, I shouldn’t have to start from scratch on reinstalling it. As it stands, Apple’s decided iPhone and iPod touch gaming should be akin to cheapo Nintendo DS carts, as opposed to something with a battery back-up. Such a system would benefit apps, too.

Also, Apple should fire/beat to within an inch of their life whoever came up with the sync UI in iTunes and get someone with some actual talent to redesign it. I don’t appreciate ‘film’ titles being truncated after about 25 characters, forcing me to check a tiny thumbnail to see if I’m syncing the right one. And the Applications tab is a disgrace, coming across like an interactive Flash website from 1999, not a robust system for organising your apps.

So, what are your wishes for iPhone 4.0? Tell us in the comments!

Having wrapped up the fairly well-thought-out and fairly grounded predictions for 2010, we thought it would be a good idea to try to take a look further in to the future of Apple. Now, before you proceed, you should be aware that looking beyond a one-year outlook is notoriously difficult. After all, at this point 10 years ago, Apple was more than a year away from shipping iTunes software, let alone making iPods and disrupting the mobile phone industry. So you should be aware that I refuse to stand by any of these five predictions over the long haul and expect to be wrong. With that, let’s take a look into the far future. All the way past the year 2000.

In the Year 2012, Apple Will Buy Both Yahoo! and TBWA/Chiat Day, Simultaneous Entering Both the Internet Services and Ad Industries at the Same Time. I actually don’t think this one’s insane. Yahoo! continues to struggle against Google, the ad industry is in need of grounds-up reinvention, and Apple has more cash on hand than pretty much anyone else. At this point, Steve Jobs is running out of challenges in both Apple’s existing and immediately adjacent businesses. To cement his reputation as the best CEO of the next decade, he should create a juggernaut capable of challenging Google.

Apple has a ridiculously good run over the past ten years. But in true Apple fashion, I’m not here to rest on the laurels of the past but to look into the future. So sit back, relax, and take a daring look all the way into the year 2010. Here are the five things that Apple must do to thrive in 2010.

Although our record is sullied by a few occasional missteps generally caused by a lone rumor- monger tickling our plush, erogenous wishful thinking zones, the Internet’s grown remarkably adept at seeing new Apple products coming. Most gadget bloggers and tech pundits would be willing to part with a digit if Apple doesn’t at least announce a tablet next year: there are just too many supply reports, patent and trademark filings and industry insiders telling us to expect one. The same was true with the iPhone: we all knew an Apple phone was coming. We were just laughably wrong about what the iPhone turned out to be.

It’s worth keeping that in mind as we come up on January’s presumed announcement of Apple’s tablet: the chances of it being what we expect (a large iPhone) are probably as wrong as our belief that the iPhone would be just an iPod with a SIM card in it. To remind us all of exactly how wrong our predictions were, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken has posted up a fantastic speculative prehistory of the iPhone, correlating all of the earliest predictions about what the iPhone was going to be and then fact-checking them against reality.

Over at InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy has posted up his thoughts on the forthcoming Apple tablet, conservatively placed under the non-confrontational headline, “Why Apple’s rumored iTablet will fail big time.”

Kennedy’s points are all good ones, if a bit petulantly phrased. First, he points out the history of the tablet PC, noting that every major computer manufacturer has experimented with tablets, with all experiments ending in failure, because tablets are underpowered and awkward to use on anything but a desk or table Kennedy then points out that for most of us, typing on a hardware keyboard is simply faster than using a pen or stylus. For regular computing, Kennedy says, a laptop or netbook is simply going to do anything a tablet can do, quicker, more efficiently and more precisely.

Those aren’t bad points, but Kennedy is ignoring the fact that all past tablets have failed precisely because they weren’t fully realized products.

It’s that time of year again folks.

Last December, we asked you to nominate your favorite new desktop apps of 2008. Popular choices back then included Evernote, Dropbox, 1Password and Things.

But what new stuff has grabbed your attention during 2009?

This was supposed to be my Nook review. I ordered two way back in early November. I was supposed to be telling you all about the Nook’s awesome-touchiness, fast page turning, loaning books to friends and even giving a short primer on how you can check out books from your local library and read them on your Nook, something Amazon’s Kindle could never do with its proprietary formats.

But I’m not, because it ain’t here.

It isn’t here, despite being assured it would arrive by Dec 12th, then reassured it would get here by the 18th–and then further assured when it didn’t ship Monday, that BN.com was gonna ship it super-expedited-over-night-air to make it on time.

It isn’t here and it isn’t gonna be on Friday.

Of course they did ship yesterday, if you call strapping it to the back of a turtle and pointing him in the direction of my house shipping it.

I am assured by BN customer service it will get here Monday, just one business day after their revised, revised again, and yes we really mean it this time, promised date –unfortunately that will be one day too long; since me and my little ones will be heading off to Grandmas house Sunday.

Barnes & Noble, you totally Grinched my Christmas, and I wrote this just for you:

(sung to Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie”)

It came into this world as a prospect
Look into its screen
You can see the covers of your books
Loan ‘em to your friends
Read ‘em in the store
Every page you turn makes you want it even more

But Hey I think about the day
Barnes & Noble ran away with my pay
When it came delivery day
Now it’s stuck in transit in that truck
And I’m just a sucker with a lump of coal

Hey, like a chump… Hey, like a chump… Hey, like a chump

[Chorus]
I did it all for the Nookie
C’mon
The Nookie
C’mon
So you can take that bookie
And stick it up your, yeah!!
Stick it up your, yeah!!
Stick it up your, yeah!!

Why did it take so long?
Why did I wait so long, huh?
To ship it out? but you didn’t
And I’m not the only one underneath the sun who didn’t get it

Let’s assume, just for a moment, that the rumors of an Apple tablet device are true.

And let’s also assume, just for the length of this post, that Apple wants to use this tablet to do the same to publishing that it did to music: turn everything upside down.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBL2h3GgyKM

Microsoft has a rather ignoble history when it comes to trying to counter Apple’s hyper-effective and popular “Get a Mac” campaign. Their first efforts were just embarrassing: a series of advertisements featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates awkwardly mumbling non sequiturs at one another. That desperate bid for hipness failed, and so Microsoft launched their Laptop Hunter ads, which were comparatively straightforward: a camera crew followed “real” computer shoppers as they looked for new machines, and documented their ultimate choice of Windows laptops. Simple, pleasant and marginally effective… even if they did repeat all of the old, stupid fallacies about Apple computers costing significantly more than similarly specced Windows machines.

Pretty soon, though, controversy hit. Lauren deLong, an adorable red ead featured in the “Laptop Hunter” ads, turned out to be an actress with a filmography of ten movies to her credit. Since Microsoft’s ads purported to be following “real computer shoppers,” that made the ads’ truthfulness somewhat dubious.

So here’s the question: were the Laptop Hunters ads what the proclaimed themselves to be, or completely fictional? The “behind-the-scenes” footage of the Laptop Hunter ads shoot, as embedded above and first posted back in September, baldly asserts that participants were not told they were in a commercial until after they had picked their machines.

I’m not buying it. Not only are the individuals in the ads just a little too pointed in their dismissal of Apple products — I think a more common response to why a PC users would reject a Mac would be “I’ve always used Windows machines!” and not “It really seems like you’re paying for the aesthetics” — but surely, a professional actress like Ms. deLong would be savvy enough recognize the financial opportunity that had just presented itself if a film crew that had followed her around all day told her she’d be in a national campaign for Microsoft. The next thing she would have said is, “I have to call my agent,” not “How’s my hair?”

What do you guys think?

[Thanks, David!]