Apple has apparently introduced a larger iPhone it calls the iPad, which has all of the features of a touchscreen kiosk from a couple of decades ago… but it has a cooler design, better graphics, and, apparently, Steve Jobs likes it so you need it to be a real neo-geek.
My older brother will probably buy one. He also has a Beta Max VCR and a laser disc player. What can I say, he lives in Southern California.
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Established: 21 November 2004
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22 comments
I totally don’t get the point. When I travel, I have my iPhone and my 13.3″ MacBook Pro. That’s all I need. What is this tablet supposed to do for me? Read eBooks? I have my MBP for that! And to top it all off, it won’t make regular voice phone calls, so I can’t just leave my iPhone behind either.
Now one thing I will say is that the iPhone’s screen is way too small for my poor tired old beady penguin eyes. If they’d introduced a tablet that was basically a bigger iPhone, maybe with a 5″ screen, but could be pocketed in a pocket of my cargo pants, and that could make regular phone calls not just data calls, I probably would have retired my iPhone and bought that instead, then I’d still be at two devices (phone, and laptop) but I could use the iBigPhone to read ebooks and stuff without opening up the Macbook. But this thing? Puhleeze! I’ll buy a Sony Pocket Reader first, at least the Sony Pocket Reader will fit in a pocket of my cargo pants and thanks to an e-Ink display has a battery that’ll last two weeks, instead of 6 hours. (Yes, I know Steve says 8, but that’s a crock too).
.-= last blog ..Hopes dashed =-.
It is too small to be a real computer replacement and too big to be a phone replacement, if it would make voice calls.
So, it is a nice way to show pictures of your kids, and maybe look at a couple of web sites.
Yeah, the iPhone finally convinced my brother he needed bifocals.
It’s just another way for Jobs/Gates to put a nice bump in the revenue curve to keep the punters happy for another quarter or two. Happens every time sales begins to slow because there are only so many fools out there that will buy stuff just because it’s cool, l33t, and/or Apple. 😆
I still have my T I made years ago that says (front) ‘Love the Mac!’ (back) ‘Hate the Apple!” And I do get asked occasionally where I got it when I wear it in public. 😉 I should find a local company to produce some. Could make a tidy sum. (Lot’s of people love Mac’s, and if they ever had to deal with Apple, hate them).
Oh, yes, Apple times these introduction whenever the sales flag on the last “best thing ever”.
Cut another deal with AT&T to use it? Not if you are sane.
It’s apparently a big iPod with some built-in networking, and an e-book reader for the products from the iBook site.
Apple certainly knows how to tie people into their closed system.
“What can I say…he lives in Southern California”….
hey, now. ;-)~
.-= last blog ..Santa Barbara’s The Eagle Inn =-.
Jill, you live north of LA, so that’s not really SoCal.
He lives in Del Mar, and that really is.
Frankly, I’d rather have one of the e-ink ebook readers than the AppleTampax iMaxiPad. The ebook readers are small enough to fit in the pouch on the side of my laptop case, and you can read all day and most of the night on them on one battery charge because the e-ink display uses ridiculously little power (only uses power when you flip the page). The only real issue I have is the DRM, but the iMaxiPad is going to have that problem too, and it’s too friggin *big* and the battery life is going to be too short (6 hours in real life, which ain’t much when you’re on a long multi-hop airline trip).
I still say “meh”. A few fanatical Apple fanboys might buy the thing. But they’re the same ones who bought the original iPhone, the one that sucked because it didn’t have 3G. Suckers.
As for Apple being evil: Yes and no. Look at the customer service problems B&N is having with their Nook e-reader, which has been an utter fiasco. Apple, on the other hand, has ridiculously good customer service, if your Mac breaks under warranty they fix it without arguing that you somehow voided the warranty. On the other hand, you do it the Apple way. Or else. And hand over your wallet in the process, because they don’t give their stuff away, especially the good stuff like the Macbook Pro and the iPhone. Still, compared to the Beast of Redmond…
– Badtux the MacPenguin
I still prefer paper for reading. If the aircraft goes down you can’t use an e-book to start a fire, or clean up after the call of nature.
Apple 2.0 products tend to be better for what they are intended to be. I spent too many years having to be on the leading edge for business reasons, to want to stay out there, but there are a lot of people who will buy it.
I realize that part of the Apple’s value is their tight control of what goes into their products, but I don’t have to be happy about it. OTOH, you can spend a little less money for the stuff Bill sells, and get something that not only doesn’t work, but that they refuse to fix. Not much of a trade off.
Bryan, the problem is that I’m a very fast reader. I can read a typical 350 page novel in about four hours. So if I’m on a trip that includes 16 hours on tin cans and another 16 hours hanging around in hotel rooms ’cause I sure the f*** am not going to go outside in Buffalo or Cleveland at this time of year except to proceed very gingerly to my rental car then drive carefully to the customer site, then back again at the end of the day, that’s 8 books that I’m going to want to read during the trip. And with the Department of Vaterland Security Theater doing what they do and the airlines charging for checked baggage now, it’s hard to fit 8 books into my carry-on luggage anymore.
I can fit eight books on my Sony Pocket Reader without any issues at all. Of course, the supply is limited — Baen Books appears to be the only publisher selling non-DRM’ed ePubs — but WTF, I just have to learn to like mil-scifi, sigh! But it’ll also read PDF’s, so I have all my Apple Logic manuals on there. That would be roughly 3,000 pages of paper if printed out, so that’ll keep me reading for a while ;).
– Badtux the Reader Penguin
I know Apple, the corporation, from being on the inside as Service Manager for Vic for over 2 years until I decided my health couldn’t stand them any longer. Helping the
suckerscustomers was pretty low on the list of the priorities. I was forced to spend more time justifying myself to the powers-that-be for every customer I actually helped than i did helping customers. I would have been fired after a year, except that a couple of the major buyers in Vic stuck by me, and the service people I trained consistently scored the max 150% on the stupid support scale that Apple devised that measured *customer satisfaction* (but actually measured lowest expense to apple for supporting customers). 50% meant that you got 75% of the service payment for warranty work, 100% meant you got the full payment, and 150% meant you got an extra 50% on top of the payment. Considering a service center was paid $75 to repair an iPod, and it took 2 – 3 days to even diagnose faults, let alone repair them, meant that NOBODY wanted to repair iPods! Even with a svc score of 150% it wasn’t worth it! In the end, we just told everyone to send them at Apples cost to the Apple HQ in Sydney and let them deal with it. 😀 Apple didn’t like me much, but it was mutual, so it was OK. I had one teacher who had a nice new iBook she’d saved herself to get (even with education discounts they were still pretty pricey), and it failed in 6 weeks. It was repaired, and it failed again in a month, repaired, failed again. Apple have a *secret* (the don’t want anyone to know about) rule that if a product has a fault or fails 3 times within the warranty period, it’s to be replaced. I told all the Svc people this. (and didn’t that piss off Apple!) Apple refused to replace it. As luck had it, she was off to Sydney to visit family for Xmas. I told her to take the iBook, with the full svc report, and sit in Apple’s reception area and don’t budge until she got a new iBook, and tell everyone who came in why she was so upset. Apple finally relented after 5 hours.We also had to repair every brand new Intel MacBook Pro before they could be sent to customers! They overheated badly after an hour. The moron who programmed the assembly robot in the plant had it apply way to much thermal goo to the CPU/heat-sink and it was useless. The CPU’s would burn out in a month or less. Apple wouldn’t shut down the assembly line to fix the problem. Was easier to have all their service people fix the problem. After all, we had nothing better to do. Apple actually redesigned them twice in the first year, but you would only know if you understood the barcode. Apple isn’t big on letting people know their failures. But trust me, they have a lot! Apple treat their customers as beta testers just like M$ and the others do. All the service people knew the unwritten rule, never buy the first 2 versions of any product from Apple! 🙂 You’ll never catch an Apple sales or service person buying anything until it’s been proven to work (unless they get it virtually free, which does happen).
And I did work for M$ years ago, and I like them less! But that doesn’t justify Apple either. 🙂
Must be a difference between the U.S. service organization and the Aussie one for Apple, then. Or maybe between how Apple treats resellers and how they work through their own stores — note that I’ve only dealt with the Apple Store for service (i.e., their 100% Apple-owned stores), so I wouldn’t know what happens with independent resellers. In any event, the service that I and everybody I know has received through the Apple Store has been top notch — never a flinch at fixing anything that comes up during warranty or during the Applecare extended warranty even if you’ve opened up your laptop and added a larger hard drive or more memory. Try that with Best Buy (a U.S. electronics chain) on some generic HP laptop. HAH! They’ll claim you invalidated the warranty by sneezing on it or some crap like that, and refuse to fix it until you file the lawsuit in small claims court against them. It’s their corporate policy, apparently, to never honor their warranties unless a court orders them to do so. It is to laugh…
– Badtux the Service Penguin
.-= last blog ..Hopes dashed =-.
That could be. 🙂 My primary job was supposed to be to manage the service dep’s of the ‘Apple Centres’ and to train the service personnel. I’d actually worked for Apple in the 80’s, and I really enjoyed it. I won an award actually (and a trip to Apple HQ in Cupertino) because I’d developed a system to more easily and quickly diagnose and fix a certain prevalent problem with Sony trinitron CRT’s. That’s why I decided to take this job. But it was a far different company. It really did dissolution me, and with Gates buying a huge share, and Apple going Intel (thanks to IBM/Motorola being idiots). And yes, you can get good local Apple service, if you get a place that has a manager that understands how things actually work and gives a damn about their customers. But the internal Apple *ethic* has changed markedly, sadly. I’m sure each regional Apple HQ is different, some better, some worse. Apple here got so peeved at the number of warranty claims in 2005, that they decided suddenly that their parts warehouse needed renovating and they couldn’t supply parts for over 3 months! True, I swear! I had friends inside also, I’m pretty good with people. 😉 And I was told what was actually going on. A lot of good people resigned in 06-07, not just here either.
Spent 4 years with HP (from 91-95) and they are the worst company I ever worked for. the internal politics makes anything in Washington seem very tame. I’ve seen major potential sales get killed off simple because one division wanted it for themselves, or didn’t want some other division to get the result for whatever reason, and communication between divisions and even sections was laughable at best. We even had HP Departments from other Countries coming in and screwing stuff up (happened to me once from a snr consultant from the Canadian server division who arrived one morning on my project and announced he was here to *help (ie, take over). Nobody asked for his *help* and I told him to piss off, and a royal fight began. Basically, there was a piece of software we wanted to use, and it had been developed by this Canadian division, and they felt they owned it and nobody else could use it properly). HP’s consumer products are not designed or built to last, I know for a fact. 🙂
I’m letting you guys hammer this out, but the HP reference reminded by of a comment by a former HP person who heard that former CEO Carly Fiorina was running for the Senate in California – if she wins she’ll push for the US to buy Albania as a sure way of balancing the budget.
[He was around for the Compaq purchase.]
Nothing to *hammer out* m8! 😀
tux has a different perspective to me, and how could he not? 🙂 I respect that and realize our experiences will be different. *shrug* way it is. 🙂 It’s interesting for me to get other perspectives. this is a 3-D world. Nobody can understand it or parts of it with a 2-D view. 😉
I have never, and never will, simply expect anyone to just agree with me or my view. But I won’t argue the point either. I know what I know, and I know what I have seen. *shrug* 🙂
“Hammer out” was probably too strong, but discuss is so lifeless.
“My mileage varied” a lot because I was acquainted with a lot of the “founding fathers”, from back in the hobby days, and I was connected to one of the biggest retailers in SoCal in multiple ways. That’s why I don’t expect my experience to be typical. I hated to recommend places for service, because I knew that people were not going to get the same type of service I received. Hell, I had the shop diagnostic software for almost everything I bought, so my trouble reports were a bit more detailed than the average user, and I save the techs a lot of time. If I took it in, it was broken.
Oh, I expect everyone to agree with me because my point are always so brilliantly argued and based on unassailable facts… mostly… OK, sometimes. Of course, sometimes I’m just being a PITA. 😈
Oh… I reserve the right to be a royal PITA as often as possible! 😈
I’ve definitely paid my dues in this life, and definitely own that right! 😆
(PS. Just so the regulars don’t think I’m just some smug b*stard… I do concede that I’m not *always* correct. 😉 Amazing how *facts* and *truth* can be annoyingly variable at the most inconvenient times! Perhaps I should preface statements with “This was the fact/truth as I knew it at the time.” with a date and time stamp.) 😆 🙄
We are all creatures of out times and experience, no matter how objective we like to think we are. My of the things we now find totally immoral and unethical were quite routine and accepted in other times and places. People learn at different rates and in different ways. What is obvious to some, may not be clear to others, just based on the personal system of judgment that each of us has.
My first thought was, “Apple is selling the Star Trek Data Pad”. Why we need one of those is unclear… but Trek Data Pad it is!
More Dreck than Trek.
A larger iPod with wireless capabilities.
No camera, no telephone, relatively limited on-board storage, AT&T lock-in…
And… Just to prove Apple is different to M$… (well.. not so much):
Apple Sent iPads to ‘Important’ Writers Weeks Before Launch
You have to love teh wonderful irony of this comment:
Well… he’d certainly know! 😆
And the money quote:
But of course… The Dweeb’s massive bailout and share ownership of Apple hasn’t impacted Apple, or the way it does business, at all. Right? 😉
Then again… there is always this:
Apple launches iPad for that time of iMonth
😆
CEOs all went to the same limited number of business schools, and thus all corporations act in the same way, they even share from the same limited pool of directors for their boards.