The new iPad runs the iPhone OS -- and that's the problem Discussion

I'd assume it's Apple's own design. That they've licensed an ARM instruction set but done their own CPU. I wouldn't expect it to be much different in performance than an equivalent ARM design though, whether it's A8 or A9 or whatever.

And I could be wrong...it could just be a rebadged A8 or A9 core or whatever.

Yeah, see that's the thing, and I've had someone talk about it in comparison to the Kindle. Well, the DRM activation will probably be better, but the hardware? It's physically larger and heavier. The screen may well be worse. Battery life is probably worse. No hardware buttons.

I mean I'd love to be given one and try a book on it...but it seems like it's probably inferior, and yet it costs double.

It's worse than a laptop for most anything where you want a real computer. It's worse than an iPod for anything where you need pocketable portability. It's just so limited.

If they had released it with an ARM CPU and real OS X for $500, THAT would have been cool. It could have still run Mobile OS X programs, and could have still had stuff like a special version of iWorks for it, and an alternative (probably default) tablet interface that's toggleable. All that could have been done for the same price.

I mean...we don't know how much RAM it has, but at worst they just would have swapped their dinky ARM CPU for an Atom, and bumped the RAM from whatever it is (it would be a minimum of 256MB, but could possibly have 512-1GB). At worst they would have just bumped the RAM a bit, and...easily could have sold it for the same price.

I mean there are people going "oh, but that would cost more!" And it's like, no, it would not. $500 is super pricing for a 'netbook', and those already have more expensive hardware.

 

You'd have to jailbreak it somehow PLUS someone would have to maintain a Linux distribution for it, which would be an effort. And even then, most people would much rather be running real OS X or Windows on it than Linux.

 

I'd have definately gotten one of this was running OS X, i would actually use it in every day life.

Jailbreaking will allow this thing to function (Sorry apple, you deserve it this time!)

Potentially this device could have been an everyday thing, i'd work on transport for crying out loud, but they made it a giant kids toy :'(

But i'm happy i went out and bought the N900, does much more then this iPAD.

 

it's funny that Jobs says netbooks are too slow, then releases the 'netbook killer' which is even slower.

 

You know, I hadn't thought about it like that! That is hilarious "Those netbooks are too slow and limited! Here, buy this much slower, 100x more limited device instead!"

 

It's more sad and pathetic than funny. Apple fans and people who don't know any better *will* buy it.

 

it is hard to do thanks to ARM. Apple has protected his device from intervention

 

If netbook makers didn't do this, the device never would have survived. That is what the market wanted. Netbooks were originally created to fill a niche that didn't really need filling, and instead were shoehorned into another niche that was previously filled by old used laptops--the cheap computer niche.

And in my opinion, that's where netbooks (and CULV notebooks) should be. They're a damn sight more practical than a gigantic twenty-ton budget 15" laptop with a gutless single-core Celeron or Athlon processor. And they have vastly superior battery life.

I don't think the iPad (god, what an unfortunate name) has any niche of its own. It would excel as a portable video player, except for several problems: it has a 4:3 aspect ratio, it can't handle h.264 above the main 3.1 profile, it can't deal with more than 8 reference frames, it has no support for the MKV container format and it does not display rendered soft subtitles.

Anyone wanting to load up their iPad with video would have to spend a protracted period of time transcoding their video to the iPad's liking (suffering a loss of image and sound quality in the process).

 

I dunno about that. I had the Panasonic W5 version with similar CPU (single core 1.2 ghz and Win XP) and I remember it being:
1) relatively slow, and
2) definitely choked if asked to do more than one thing at a time

The Apple OS is much simpler and "lighter" so should be more friendly towards multitasking than trying to run XP on a single core pentium.

 

Not quite. What netbooks really did was to democratize a very old and established niche: ultraportable computers, such as made by Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Panasonic for many years. These had been mostly limited to Japanese market and were exported grey market for enthusiasts, "road warriors" and geeks who had the MONEY to afford them.

But the NEED for ultrportable computing had always been there. For many types of people eg the university student who carries a bag full of books all day and needs to keep the weight down, the non-geek who uses the computer at home lightly to read weather, news, book tickets etc.

For me the netbook concept was confirmed as the democratization of ultraportables, a long time ago when I saw a taxi driver in Berlin using one with a USB 3G modem. He was reading news and cacthing up on e-mail while waiting for customers at a taxi stand. That no-limits portability and battery life is what we old timers used to spend $2,000 on not that long before. Now anyone with $300 could get 90% of the functionality we had.

The ipad or whatever its called just takes this concept further, honing in on the folks who own PCs and mostly consume media, not produce it. The Apple folks would have seen what I immediately got after just a couple weeks with the Iphone 3GS: nice in a pinch as a walkman on steroids, but in that phone size of device you cant really enjoy consuming media or even typing urls to get that media. On the other hand netbooks were a good first point, but too cheap and nasty in most cases.

So Apple is taking another approach to evolve the netbook - and also their macBook air BTW. One could consider this ipad to be the "macbook airSlate" taken downmarket and engineered down in price/positioning with the use of the iphone OS.

This is the new home PC for the middle class IMO. It will sell well in that capacity. I wouldnt be surprised if Apple builds on this by augmenting further their Apple TV into a combo home server and/or expanding the MobileMe to anchor this unit here.

Its not a product I would necessarily buy, but it makes sense and it will sell - very well.

 

Odd, i could multitask nicely on my 98 with a 1.2ghz athlon, 256 mb of ram and no GPU?

That w5 must have been pretty bad,

From what the iphone can do though, the device should be very capable with the upgrades, but the form of what it was released in (BIIIIG IPOD TOUCH!) its just not right for what the device is capable of, its almost awkward lol.

The only way apple could build on this is creating an OS purely for the device, or creating an optimised OS X for it, that way the device would be so much better.

 

Who here thinks Android would make a better OS for a slate/pad type thingy... it has Flash and multi-tasking support at least... I think the IPhone OS is just getting a little long in the tooth.

guess this is something like what im talking about

http://www.brighthand.com/default.a...ogle+Android+OS+MSI+Apple+iPad+NVIDIA+Tegra+2

 

You have missed the point by a wide margin.

The iPad is designed to consume information of many different types. It excels at that.

Why do you expect it to have a phone or a camera? Makes no sense.

Your next comments are so surprisingly uniformed that it is obvious you have never used an iPhone and know nothing about the OS used in these devices.

The iPhone and the iPad do in fact multi-task but only between Apple apps not third party apps. Of course the OS is multi-threaded, its Unix that has to control multiple aspects of the OS, services, apps, and user interface elements. Stating it is not multithreading is tells me you simply don't know what that means, how Unix works, or how the iPhone/iPad OS works. You can of course use data and voice at the same time on GSM networks.

No Flash is fine with me. Its unstable and a resource pig. Where you get the idea that HTML 5 will be available months or years from now is also extremely uninformed. You Tube is already using it and intends to expand its use, and Google just released Google Voice for the iPhone using HTML 5. All current version of major browsers can use HTML 5. The only people who really like Flash are Adobe and those who make their living making Flash videos. Pretty much everyone else would like to see it go away.

iBooks are but one way of putting books on this device. There are many others including Kindle reader and open source books.

Version 4 of the OS is coming soon and may be why the iPad won't be available for a month. Expected features include full instead of limited multi-tasking among other things.

You should really do a modicum of research before posting articles that have so many inaccuracies.

I have observed the release of the 1st Mac in 1984 which I owned as well as many other Apple devices including the iPod and the iPhone as well as OS X which people said would never go anywhere. They were all wrong and they will all be wrong in this case.

Oh and as far as your criticisms of the icons I suggest you actually use the device. Apple is the preeminent designer of user interfaces and the iPad is no exception.

 

Funny.

Android is half baked in many ways and is slow with so far awful UI's and ability manage multiple types of media.. Not to mention its tiny several hundred MB for app installs.

 

Agreed, your best off with Maemo 5 or 6, fast, light on rescources, fantastic browser and flash support(Not a hog either), great multitasking,

Partially agree with all your points darwin, but at present time the device pretty much isn't anywhere near a need-able level compared to its smaller brothers, The fact stands that this is the version of the oS, not 4, we can only speculate on that.

But if Apple are doing their research, they'l know what to add, and relatively fast .

 

Does it? It's not as good at media as either a laptop running a real OS, or an iPod when you need something portable, or probably a Kindle/Sony device for eBooks, etc.

No, I'm sure almost all if not all of us know it's Unix, and know under the hood it's doing multitasking, but obviously the point we're making is it doesn't multitask as far as the user is concerned. Even having to switch from email to a web browser is a huge pain on Mobile OS X. It's poorly done on the iPod/iPhone. It's laughable on a $500 device with a 10" screen.

It does eat up resources, but it's not unstable. And regardless, it's necessary for today's web. The things it's competing with for that price and size aren't going to have issues doing flash (aside from maybe HD video playback for some of them). And that's another area where the iPad is NOT good at consuming media.

Again, for TODAY'S WEB flash is a necessary evil.

Which still doesn't replace a dedicated program...which the iPad can't get because of Apple's proprietary, closed platform. Which is yet ANOTHER way competing devices slaughter this thing.

IF it's replaced with something better, but that doesn't change that today it's a requirement to really get the "full web".

If that was the case, why didn't they show it off? That's a HUGE issue with the device, and presumably they'd want to show it in the best light for it's unveiling?

Leaving out the Apple TV, Newton, etc. I see. What is the point of this device? Who is it for? Why would you choose it over competing devices, including the iPod?

In your opinion. I think their stuff's solid, competent enough, but I like Windows' interface better. I would NEVER call them the "preeminent designer of user interfaces".

And I can't believe you're claiming the iPad is some sort of cutting edge interface design. It's TERRIBLE. It's just the exact same thing the iPod already had, and the iPod is already TERRIBLE compared to what Palm was doing 10 years ago, on the mobile device side, or what Microsoft (or Apple) do on the computer side.

 

Really I think Apple priced it out of the category that it would most fit under. As an oversized ebook reader and PMP it really should have been priced at $499 (maybe $599 accounting the "Apple Tax") for the 64GB model with 3G. As it stands right now you're better off paying for an iphone and taking advantage of the ebook store.

 

I'm confused...it is priced at $499 (for the cheapest one).

I think it should have started at $300 max. For that price I could see people being more interested. For $499, it should have been running real OS X.

 

I think you're missing the point that the iphone OS can't multitask.

 

Sorry, but until the iPad fails even as a media consumption device.

Why?

It doesn't have HDMI. It has no support for the MKV container format which everyone uses. It can't decode 1080p. It can't decode h.264 encoded above the main 3.1 profile. It can't handle more than 8 reference frames. It can't render soft subtitles. It has no expandable memory, so you can't pop in an SDHC card full of movies. It can't even display 720p resolutions. It doesn't have an e-Ink display, so it's no better to read ebooks on than any other computer.

Seriously the iPad's intended niche is incredibly, ridiculously small. The only actual use I can see it being good for is as a coffee table web browser. But wait... it doesn't even support Flash. Wow.

This thing is useless. Utterly and totally useless.

If Apple really wanted to hit one out of the park, they should have waited...

... and built a razor-thin 10" form factor tablet style netbook with a multitouch 1024x600 display, 6-cell battery, an Atom N470 1.83GHz processor, 2GB of DDR3-1066, a (reasonably fast) 32-64GB SSD loaded with Snow Leopard... and sold it for $600.

They'd sell a bajillion of them.

 

Please post that in the Apple forum Synaesthetic, they need to hear that.

 

If I do, I won't make it out of there alive. >.>;

I've already told several of my Applehead friends essentially the same thing and was basically met with blank stares and protests about how unimaginative and dumb a super-efficient Asus T91MT with OSX would be.

Hmm...

 

people hear what they want to hear.

 

If its going to be a "couch PC" - which is basically what Apple is saying it is - then you need to be able to do video calling eg Skype. This is clear as can be.

This is an obvious sandbagging move designed to create "upgradeitis" next year, when Apple comes out with a 4G-equipped model. Somewhat distateful practice if you ask me.

 

@J.R.Nelson

Speak for yourself, a lot of people I know use webcam quite often, so that "most people don't use webcam" statement is not really correct.

and the iPad is not comparable to a netbook, a netbook is still a full fledged, independent computer, this iPad thing is not, it relies on a desktop or laptop running iTunes to manage and refresh its media content. I am not sure that iPad even have a file browser to manage files on its own.

So iPad is an expensive, locked-down media accessory, which only support media sourced through Apple.

 

Saw this on another forum I visit and couldn't help but laugh. It's so true (at least for me)

 

I think we should say THANK YOU to Apple, so they made publicity for TABLET section and make it possible for other companies to deliver good products this year (giving them time atleast until next gen apple tablet). It is nice that this product is not good enough, so real competition will be fair (its all about hardware features, not who already have user and developers base).

 

Current tablets run circles around this thing. And they will easily replace a laptop.

I just don't see where this device is going to find a strong market. It's a very niche device. A victim of its overhype. It reminds me of the Foleo. No one wants to carry yet another device.

For a REAL replacement device, get yourself a tm2, X200T or an XT2.

 

What happened to those <$500 Atom based tablets we were supposed to see? I thought one was introduced a year ago, but I've never seen it for sale.

It blows my mind how Apple fanboys will talk about how it has to be like this to save costs, and it's like...but all the features you're talking about are actually available on 'netbooks' for hundreds LESS than the Apple tablet. Seems like someone should be able to do one of those in tablet form factor, and instantly you've got a potentially more useful device in the same form factor for the same price (or possibly less).

Either way though, I'm excited to see that unreleased HP Tablet, and the Android Dell 5" thing. It's just nuts-by rights either of those should be getting the hype as both seem potentially more useful than Apple's 10" iPod.

 

There's at least two. The Asus EEE PC T91/T91 MT-The MT model has multitouch. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/658683-REG/ASUS_T91MT_PU17_BK_Eee_PC_T91MT_PU17_Tablet.html

And systems based on Intel's "Classmate PC" reference design: http://www.ctlcorp.com/v4/p-715-ctl...let-with-hard-drive-with-windows-xp-home.aspx

A bit cheaper at BJ's: http://shop.bjs.com/productName_stcVVproductId84739395VVviewprod.htm?productID=84739395&sc_cid=DF

 

Oh wow, thanks! I had no idea Asus actually released that.

Sooooooo umm....why would I want Apple's thing over Asus' slightly cheaper, actual full PC? I mean I guess the battery life is much worse maybe, although assuming you can find a source for them, it also has replaceable batteries.

 

As an Iphone user/lover, I see a lot of merit and uses for the iPad, BUT outside of the e-ink display critique (you can't have a nice IPS screen and an e-ink screen) you are 100% spot on with your criticisms.

I said it elsewhere that the lack of multitasking and true HD support are major concerns and while I see many uses, I'm not really in the mood to plunk down $800+ and $30/mo to surf the web on the go which I do on my iPhone atm. I would love the bigger screen, and I am not a fan of netbooks at all and think the approach to tablet computing is spot on with the iPad but too many deficiencies renders this "1.0," not good enough IMHO.

 

Is the iPad screen IPS????

 

Yep, the iPad screen is IPS.

 

Can't wait until it runs Linux.

 

Hmmm a smartphone OS for a larger then netbook tablet....I guess I missed the meeting where this being a good idea was discussed.

 

It's like the Foleo. A solution in search of a problem.

 

It is like the Foleo. If anyone else had introduced it...

 

You have totally missed the point of, and the audience for the iPad. It is for consuming information not creating it. Yes you can attach a keyboard and use iWorks but I seriously doubt Apple has any intention for this to replace an Laptop. Why anyone would want a camera in something of this size is beyond me. Anyway its going to sell like crazy and redefine the tablet market which to this point has been moribund.

People who say it is like the Foleo obviously don't know what the Foleo was.

Windows on a tablet has been done many times and gone nowhere. Windows 7 on a tablet will do the same.

Having been an Apple watcher since the late 70's it is always amusing to see them discounted by yet another generation of people who don't get it.

 

It amazes me how fast people come to conclusions on Internet.

An average user has no idea what a "netbook" is and why or what the difference is between such and a notebook or a laptop (by the way anyone knows the difference between the latter two?), it is not (yet) part of his vocabulary. All he knows is that that thing (iPad) is supposedly a 1) a kind of computer 2) has some kind of internet connection, from where he jumps to an obvious conclusion that, using it, he can 1) watch his pictures and videos and 2) "surf the Internet".

What I am getting at is that once this user buys the iPad, regardless whether he knows what to call it, he eventually will want to "surf the Internet" AND be able to talk to his grandparents or his children or his lover not only using the microphone (which amazingly(!) is included!) but also a web camera, because he can see that web cameras exist for other computers. It is exactly because he doesn't know what to expect, unless he is a total nerd like me and you, he simply takes the iPad for a computer and expects it to offer more or less the same functionality as other computers do. This is the power of reality and human associative thinking. So you can BET that this user will sooner or later try to find a web camera lens (to no avail, currently) and as users are always right, the question is legitimate.

Last but not least, before you suggest that this user then buy a notebook instead if he expects a web camera - I state again, that for him the iPad IS a notebook, only smaller and lighter and much more elegant - indeed something any user would welcome and prefer over a bulkier computer. Particularly those who don't play World of Warcraft, which most average mobile users don't.

 

It doesn't replace the laptop, yet people don't want to carry another device. Sounds exactly like the Foleo to me. A solution in search of a problem.

 

It's never been done inexpensively in a decent form factor. We're close to maybe getting that.

Apple's done all kinds of things that have been huge flops. This will hardly be the first if it doesn't go anywhere.

Yep. It's hard to figure out what it's for.