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The iPad doesn't seem that... necessary. It seems like a flashier netbook, but costs more than a netbook.
This idea seems interesting to me, if you want a tablet -- it has an add-on that turns the tablet into a laptop, with a different operating system and a faster processor running the laptop functionality. It's a gadget that can be turned into a tool. The iPad is just the gadget part.
I'm sure lots of people will buy them and be very happy with them, and that's cool. Maybe in the future I'll see the appeal and be interested in one of my own. It just doesn't do anything for me right now.
But then, almost anyone buying v1 of an Apple product (or most other companies' tech products, for that matter) is only getting 60% of the device in my mind. Once this is set up with decent integration, it could be a great mobile device for watching baseball and chatting about it online . . .
Larry happy.
And does less than a netbook.
If you're pretty much an Apple fanboy, and you're having a hard time understanding the appeal, then the odds are pretty decent that people won't buy it and like it.
At 1.5 lbs, this isn't the sort of device you will want to hold in your hand(s) as you use it.
But a lot of fanboys are turned off.
Well they're playing catch-up there. Implementation of EMR systems that use complex GUIs is well underway. I can't see very many in that niche cutting bait on large hardware, software and training investments that they've made in just the last year or two.
The whole point of devices like the Kindle, the Sony Reader (which I have), the Nook, and so forth is the eInk screen, which doesn't have a backlight, is sunlight-readable, and which allows a battery life measured in days. Anything with an LCD screen is going to be an entirely different sort of reading device. An eInk screen is in the ballpark of reading print on paper, an LCD isn't and can't be. Apples and oranges. Closer will be something with a Pixel Qi screen. At least one such device has already been announced, so we'll see a tablet with a better screen for ebooks some time later this year.
If you want a smaller tablet, Archos has sold one for a couple of years now.
Overall, the iPad is a convergence device: a worse ebook reader than an ebook reader, a worse laptop than a netbook, a worse tablet than a business tablet that supports a stylus, a worse iPod than an iPod, a worse media player than something that runs Flash. But it can sort of fill all of those roles.
I helped administrate an EMR program in Boston, and the verdict on the hardware was that RN's do not want to carry tablet PCs around with them. But maybe this one will be designed more effectively.
I could see the iPad working as just a laid-back net-surfing device, for when you're just sitting on the couch and want to catch up on blogs and stuff, but it's just not that much better than a smallish laptop.
Hey, I work with Epic and Logician all day! As a researcher, the problem with a lot of EMR stuff is that the data on them is just a mess. Missing pathology reports, random notes that don't make any sense - it makes research on health care really time-consuming and expensive.
But there are probably a lot of people out there who would prefer the resolution and color of an LCD to the eInk screen for a reading device. Maybe "better" was the wrong adjective -- I think it's an alternative to the Kindle that appeals to a different segment of the market. I think there are a lot of consumers who will be happy to trade the long battery life and the other benefits of the kindle for the ability to watch movies, look at photos, surf the web, etc.
Pretty much this. I have an iPhone and I love it, but I'm not really sure what the iPad does for me that I can't do on my iPhone. If it had multitasking, I could see using it as a sort of superportable PC, but right now, it looks too much like a really, really heavy iPhone. Without the phone.
I like the idea of it, but it doesn't have the functionality to meet any needs I can't fill with a good smartphone.
Couple of guys I work with seem to think it will be very useful for an older generation. It gives them a nice big, easy to use interface to do simple operations (email, ebay, web browser, weather, stocks, etc); without any of the troubles of maintaining a desktop or laptop with updates, anti-virus, glitches, etc. I'm not sure I agree, just a thought.
I think the device offers little to nothing personally for me. I don't use netbooks, but if I was going to make a small portable PC purchase, netbooks generally cost less and do more than the iPad.
It does less than an iphone.
Of course, the same thing is true of actual books. They don't have a backlight, you can read them in the sun just fine, and the battery lasts forever.
I guess my problem is that I don't see a real advantage of e-readers in general. I like looking at public domain stuff from Project Gutenberg on my lunch hour as much as the next guy, but why spend hundreds of dollars on an e-reader and then pay full price for online-only files, when you can read more for less (without restrictions on content usage) by taking advantage of libraries and used book sales?
Unless you're talking about the Kindle DX rather than the regular Kindle; the iPad is a better version of that and is closer to the same price range. But I never quite saw the use for a Kindle DX either. As you say, it's too big. And the price point isn't there; I can't see spending $500 to read books. Fine, so the iPad does a lot more, but I still need to carry my iPhone, so how much value added is that? And if I actually want to do real work, I would think I need a laptop.
I could see a lot of possibilities for artists, architects, designers, etc.
If they incoporate an SD reader, it could be very useful for photographers as an electronic portfolio and photo viewer.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a huge reader, and love tech stuff, but why do I need an e-reader? I read a physical book, finish it, then read another. E-readers seem like the techie equivalent of Bisquick, saving me from only minor inconveniences. I suppose if they were used in schools, instead of textbooks, that might make sense (and save a whole generation from back problems). But I'm happy to carry a physical book around.
The e-reader industry seems to have music as its model: when books give way to e-books, whoever's developed the e-book market will reap the rewards. But the problem with that model is the one you have noted: actual books are a terrific technology that continues to be perfectly viable. Recorded music is pretty much the same product whether it's on piano roll, wax cylinder, acetate, vinyl, tape, CD, digital file, or whatever comes next: you need the record and you need a player. But a book is qualitatively different: it's a fused form of content and delivery system that needs no player. That's not going to be easily displaced.
No way, given the size. That's been my main ebook problem, staring at those tiny screens gives me a headache.
I think that unlike the iPhone, which took off like a shot and never stopped, I think this one is going to start off slowly and haltingly, but gain a lot of momentum over the next two years and 2nd and 3rd-gen releases. I mean, this is solely a psychology supposition, but I really think there are a lot of people who use those netbooks for nothing at all except surfing. And to be honest, as an interface and experience for a more common and less-involved bell-curve I think this device and subsequent releases will really appeal.
As I CANNOT STAND the cramped use of any smartphone, iPhone, or iTouch, if this gives me e-reader, surfing, email, MLB at-bat with video, and the continued adding-on of apps, I can't see why I wouldn't want to use it. Does it lack? Definitely. Although if you read some tech blogs, I have to say I have NEVER in my life seen a larger group of whining, spoiled tech users in my entire life.
(That being said, I'm still a physical-book guy. But I'm wiling to try and adapt, just to see if I like it.)
I love my Sony Reader and yet mostly agree with you. I'd never buy content for it, at least not until there was some guarantee that the files would work on future devices. That's fine for me, because my reading tastes run towards Project Gutenberg (often as formatted by the lovely people at the Mobileread forums). There are other reasons I got it, relating to shelf space (none remaining) and the bus ride required to get to the public library (long, with a transfer).
The thing I really like about it is that I can carry hundreds of "books" around with me all of the time. There are a lot of books that are nice to refer to, or dip into, whenever you think of it: the King James Bible, innumerable books of poetry, and so forth. Without the bulk of hauling around a laptop or the monthly expense of a cell phone with web access.
But it only does one of those at a time. Want MLB at-bat with the internet? Not happening. Want internet with twitter or Pandora? Not happening. That's a big flaw.
I love my Kindle, but I got the smaller version so that I could carry it around more easily.
I'm a huge reader, and love tech stuff, but why do I need an e-reader? I read a physical book, finish it, then read another. E-readers seem like the techie equivalent of Bisquick, saving me from only minor inconveniences. I suppose if they were used in schools, instead of textbooks, that might make sense (and save a whole generation from back problems). But I'm happy to carry a physical book around.
See, I'm happy not to have to carry a physical book around. I just got a real copy of the 8 volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I don't want to have to carry around volume 1 with me everywhere, it's huge. Plus, what do I do when I'm getting close to finishing volume 1? Carry around volume 2 so that it's ready?
Minor inconveniences? Probably, but they're real.
Also, the books tend to be cheaper for the Kindle copy than the real one. [EDIT: Of course, Dock's correct in that used books are still cheaper than Kindle ones}
Socialist!
For the iPad, the lack of flash is a problem, but things change fast enough that it may not be an issue much longer, if widespread use of html5 or some other protocol becomes the standard. Lack of mult-tasking is huge, though. It's one thing to lack multi-tasking on a iPhone (a product that I love). But how can you compute and communicate like you can on a laptop without multitasking? The other thing I don't get is how this is supposed to "take over" the role of the home computer, as some (though I didn't hear Jobs say it) have suggested. I still need to a computer to load all that content on my iPad.
And get it off. There's no USB and no HDMI
Oooh, I forgot about this. The Kindle doesn't have touch, but the built-in dictionary is really, really nice. Especially for reading older books where the terms are no longer in use.
Funny, I have the same experience for precisely opposite reasons. Because I bump up the text size, less content fits on the screen. Books seem more digestable to me because I'm turning the page more often and never feel stuck halfway through a page.
Less filling!
Tastes great!
LESS FILLING.
(Actually, I'm reading this on my Kindle right now.)
My mother has a Sony eReader, and loves it.
She's a voracious reader at home and on vacation (a paperback book a week).
With her eReader, she's been able to check out digital copies of books from her public library (for 2 week expiration dates) for free. She's only allowed to have two books checked out at a time, but that's good enough for her.
She's also bought a few books as well, so when she headed off to Florida for a few weeks, instead of bringing 4 or 5 paperbacks, she had her eReader in her purse and saved a lot of space/weight.
This is true, to an extent. Sure, if I'm reading a novel I only have one "in process" at a time. But at the moment I'm also taking a class that has both a textbook and and assigned reading book. So if I want to read A Study in Scarlet in my spare time, the assigned book when the chapter is assigned, and the textbook in class or for studying, I end up lugging around multiple books. The Kindle means I just need to bring one thing with me.
But I do agree that it's a minor improvement over books and not a revolutionary one like mp3 players.
It's a pretty long read, but one of his main points is simply that when people hold and use the device, a lot of the tech-savvy-population yapping goes away. I will be prepared to be WAY off, but I do think that this will be a successful device for the general public.
Ah, the heck with it, here's the opening, and the rest just gets better, even if you don't agree with what he says, he says it really well:
Doesn't mean I'm not going to run over to an Apple store when it's available and try it out, though.
And it's a really expensive purchase to not know from the get go what the use is
Thing is, there's an almost limitless market for style over substance.
Oh my. I wonder if there will be any posthumous publishing?
The iPhone's big advantages were that (a) it was in many ways unlike anything else out there, and (b) the industry was not positioned to do anything about it in the short run. For a while there, the iPhone had effectively no competition. Honestly, I can't imagine it would take long to produce a souped-up Kindle that could do everything an iPad can do plus more.
No wonder TCM kept running Field of Dreams.
This letter is fun -- Salinger talks about how Holden Caulfield is "unactable," and says (jokingly) that he might leave the screen/stage rights to his wife and daughter.
Considering how ugly and limited a Kindle is, I'd doubt it.
I really think people have a misplaced sense of how easy it is to create something so advanced technologically in the first run. I mean, I personally have no idea, but considering how much tech folk (not that you are, I have no idea, but in general) complain about EVERY SINGLE ITEM that is ever released the instant it is (even the iPod and iPhone), it really seems like it just can't be as easy to do everything everyone says they want or, you know, someone would have actually done it.
This letter is fun
Very gracious, well-reasoned, and self-deprecating, not really at all what I expected.
Exactly. The problem is that Apple has to have something really innovative software-wise in the pipe in order for this device to succeed. It had those things with the iPhone--they created the market for smart-phone-with-necessary apps-and-new-touchscreen-tech--but they aren't going to be able to go to that well again, because of how similar this new device is. The iPad has a "been there, done that" quality to it that Apple is really going to have to innovate to overcome. They might do it--if anybody can, it's Apple (or Google)--but it's going to be an uphill climb unless they already have a killer app that's only really usable on an iPad, ready to roll out the door at launch.
I really think people have a misplaced sense of how easy it is to create something so advanced technologically in the first run.
This is very true. I have no doubt the ipad is very technologically advanced, and that's great for them, but it doesn't mean it's going to sell. And they easily could dominate its market - although a lot of people are saying its most useful feature is as a reader, which the Kindle and Sony already do well. But, Apple still hasn't told me why I need it instead of my phone. Or my phone and a cheap laptop. I just bought a laptop last year that is a real computer, for only $150 more than the most expensive ipad. Yes, portability is nice, but if I have to give up a ton of functions and workability, portability just doesn't matter that much.
No, no, no. You need it in addition to your phone.
Well, my phone runs more than 1 app at a time, so I don't really need it. i guess if I were limited to 1 app per device I would then.
Without the iPhone explosion, smartphones don't drop as significantly in price across the board, and what I really want (email and web on my mobile) doesn't get cheap enough to come free with my near-minimum contract.
[65] So you're saying that Apple is kind of like the DOD.
I'll be just fine with my three year old laptop and my Blackberry Curve 8300. I'm still amazed at what I can do on THAT phone. I don't think my brain could handle anything better.
I think that techy people are often highly critical of Apple products rather than everything new in general. I think a lot of this is because Apple tends to emphasize things that techy people don't value. Apple's great strength is in making pretty products with relatively simple, unified interfaces. Their products tend to be more expensive than their competitors, and often lack any hardware advantages over their competition.
The famous first review of the iPod on Slashdot ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.") is the great example of this. At that point a real geek was running his mp3 player from a text command line in Linux, so what did he care about pretty interfaces? He just wanted as much storage space as he could get. He wanted maximum hardware for the price, and something relatively malleable, and neither of those are what you usually get from Apple. To the geek in 2001, the Nomad was, objectively, a better device than the iPod. No question about it. The 2001 non-geek might have been interested in having something that didn't require him to type something like "mount -t vfat /dev/hda2" every time he wanted to start using it, but that's irrelevant to the 2001 geek. The difference today is less extreme, but the idea is similar.
Really? I think Apple gets a pass on lots of stuff that Microsoft and Google could never do.
Yeah, those Zunes sure were awesome. What ever happened to them?
Does it? Maybe this is just a product of the sources we're looking at, but I see a whole lot of criticism of Apple and its products. Not as much as of Microsoft, but then Apple hasn't been able to behave monopolistically, and hasn't released anything as disasterous as Vista in recent memory. Google gets hammered over privacy and China, but it's also loved because it's attempts at making an OS are Linux-based.
The lack of multi-tasking in the iPad surprises me. It's not like it is a cutting edge technology that no one has figured out how to implement successfully. It seems like this device takes a step back feature-wise, which is a really unusual thing for an Apple product to do.
That could be true. It's been a while since I've been in school, but $500 sounds like about one term's worth of textbooks.
The iPhone has a free Kindle app, and I do all my reading on it now. It's great for novels; textbooks, not so much. I have one textbook on sound engineering, and the graphs are fuzzy and difficult to read. I'm betting they're much better on a bigger screen. But everything else about reading on the iPhone is great. Fonts are scaleable, as is the text color, which means I can read in bed w/o the light bothering my wife. And, as I'm reading Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, I can hit my Wiki app for instant clarification of obscure historical events, or one of my dictionary apps if I need a quick definition. I'm definitely a book guy, but with limited shelf space in the condo and an irregular reading sched (ie no library trips for me), the iPhone Kindle is something of a breakthrough.
You're still going to have buy the text book after you drop the money for the ipad.
Apple does not make overpriced products anymore.
That's debatable. Buy a laptop with similar specs to a macbook from HP, Lenovo, or some other manufacturer, and you're looking at spending 30-40% less. As Microsoft pointed out last year, buying an Apple for less than $1k is not easy, buying a non-Apple for less than $1k is pretty easy.
You can debate whether Apple hardware and the OS is worth the price increase, but their cost is higher for comparable hardware. By a significant margin.
I agree with the first part of this statement (lower production costs) but I don't think the textbook industry gets money from the resale of these books.
Cripes, you can hardly sell the printed books anymore either. They seem to have a shelf life of one semester minus one week. "Sorry, that's the Ninth Edition of Calculus for the Faint-Hearted, they're using the Eleventh now." Because there have been so many innovations in the differential calculus since last August.
note that Cowen, of my original quote, is an author of a textbook himself. as a consumer of textbooks in my former life as a student, there is a lot that is attractive about being able to carry around all my books in one 1.5 pound device. so if there's a demand for it, and there's technology for it, i have to believe that somehow publishers will figure it out. surely there is more than one publisher of a CHEM 101 textbook? wouldn't you want to be first to market with your e-book for tablet?
side note - this thing, more than any other product i can think of, seems closest to the "desks" of the novel Ender's Game, doesn't it?
it isn't hard to imagine future generations of this device featuring a much higher screen resolution (1024 x 768 for that size screen isn't very good; the iPhone, at 163 pixels per inch, has a clearer screen than the iPad at 132 ppi), more processing power, and greater ability to capture written or spoken input. i certainly wouldn't want an e-textbook without the ability to make notes in the margin.
all the griping to me bespeaks how successful apple has been over the last 10 years. their products are so wonderful that they set an incredibly high expectation bar that inevitably disappoints on first inspection but ultimately proves compelling. who of the iphone owners here haven't shown off some cool feature to a parent or friend?
I'm going to accidentally knock it off a chair onto a hard floor, breaking it? Glad to know that before I shell out the dough for one.
Don't many people end up buying more computer than they actually need? What percentage of people use their laptops for much more than web-browsing, word-processing, maybe a little gaming? The high-end Apples are high-end in ways that many (most) people who bought them for the cachet don't actually make use of. Unused capabilities might as well not exist and paying the Mac premium for those capabilities is profligate.
The technology was incorporated into every cell phone.
Outside of professional quality video editing (where Apple is king anyway) and high-end gaming (where you need a Windows machine), what does all that extra stuff get you? You can get a PC laptop for $650-700 where nearly everything a regular user cares to do outside of having twelve browser windows open and not protecting yourself from malware is as fast as your internet allows.
Music. The Macbook is a magical device for production, performance and innovation. It's like being in the future, or something.
I'd rather have the textbooks. You can bookmark pages, make notes in the margins and highlight important sections. It can be an interactive document. At this moment unless these e-reader thingies have a fully functional pdf editer installed you can't do that. It becomes static and it's usefullness for textbooks limited.
Half the textbooks I used at University I still use for reference and are loaded down with bookmarks and notations.
Yeah, you can. A £500 pc laptop will have better or exactly the same hardware than a £1200 mac laptop. The only difference between the two now is form and OS.
For iPods / iPhones the price think isn't valid so much, they are about the same price as comparable name branded products.
As for the ipad i echo the sentiment of "what do you use it for?". The e-reader market is pretty limited, unless you spend hours upon hours on public transport commuting or sat on business travel where having lots of books available is maybe handy it seems a bit pointless.
However, saying that, one of the most humourous things I've ever witnessed was someone attempting to use an e-reader on the tube during rush-hour.
Anyway, for this kind of thing we really need to wait a few years from Samsung et al to get FOLED display devices perfected (and cheap).
I have a Kindle and I've never seen the other readers. But you can bookmark pages, make notes tied to places in the book, and highlight sections on the Kindle. All of your annotations then get uploaded and stored in your account so they're permanent. And they sync across your media so if you then look at the book on the Kindle on the PC, you see your bookmarks, notes, and highlights there as well. It doesn't have a pdf editer.
This. Hence my comparable hardware statement.
For iPods / iPhones the price think isn't valid so much, they are about the same price as comparable name branded products.
The iphone contract with AT&T;is pretty expensive compared to an Android phone. And then AT&T;charges extra for text and GPS turn-by-turn. That's not really Apple's fault, but the exclusivity of AT&T;does make the cost of having an iphone more expensive.
(*) A quick check of Apple's website confirms this; the model that costs £1,200 only costs $1,500 here, which would be about £900, so that's a 25% premium for that particular model. Still, that only explains part of the gap you're talking about; the rest is explained, I think, by the fact that your claim is an exaggeration.
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