If the media downloads are going to be proprietary from Apple then this thing only further enslaves users to Apple it doesn't free them up.
Apple created the successful online model for music downloads and changed the face of the music industry. No one else did. They didn’t even get it at the time. You’re about to see the same with other media, any time, anyhwere. And still, no one else gets it.
It’s also a USB peripheral device, not a hub. That’s a difference that is not appreciated, yet. It’s the first out-of-the-box completely untethered device with enough screen real estate to provide some approximation of the full “internet” experience. It’s about as large as you’re going to get with a fully portable device. Combine all this with the best touchscreen interface in the industry, and there are quite a few interesting possibilities.
Say what you will about Jobs, he’s a control freak, he’s this or he’s that, but one thing he’s remained true to for his entire professional life is the philosophy that he espoused with the original Mac. He’s fundamentally subversive in favor of putting computing power in the hands of people. That does not always mean literal computing power, or peripherals, or any established construct. It can mean a disruptive, innovative application of existing technologies and networks.
There’s a Zen aspect with the man; he prefers elegance in the sense of idealized form with no excess. You’ve seen it with the then-bold move, of removing the floppy disk drive. You’re seeing the same squawking today and for the same reason. There’s nothing there with this device that does not need to be there, with the exception of 3G. I question the absence of it, but there are product rollout schedules to uphold and federal agencies move in their own time, so I suppose I understand.
Wait and see.
Nah. You could always rip your CDs and use them. Jobs lobbied the music industry for a couple of years to drop the DRM and they finally agreed so the iTunes music store was able to drop DRM quite a while back.
“Does all the media, songs mostly, have to come through I-tunes due to RMA restrictions? I have never bought an Ipod for that reason. I have an MP3 player that cost me fifty bucks and can play any music I put on it.”
You need to do more research before passing up superior products. The iPod can play any old MP3, and in fact almost all the music sold through iTunes has no copy protection these days. Apple felt it held things back.
As to books, there’s already a Kindle app that’ll let you read Kindle content on the iPad. You’re not limited to Apple for content. It’ll also access all non-Flash/Java content on the Web.
You also asked what the reasons were to get it instead of a netbook or subnotebook. The main one is form factor. You can read the iPad comfortably anywhere you can read a book. A laptop is just not a great reading device. Also, there’ll be a lot of exclusive content, mainly apps, that’ll only be available on iPad. I’d also add that if you want to read color material, or watch movies on a small form factor device, the iPad is very hard to beat. Early reviews indicate twelve(!) hours of battery life for movie watching.
I had starting ripping my CD’s to disk back in the 90’s. Have close to 3K songs. Any new CD gets ripped first thing when I get home. When I first got my iPhone and had to install iTunes, I told iTunes where my music library was and that was that. When it synced my iPhone it transferred the whole library to the device. iTunes purchases through the iPhone, get synced back to the library. Oh and they are, or should be DRM free as Jobs forced the issue with the record labels.
The cool thing about iTunes on the iphones was: when you’re watching a movie or tv show and you like a particular song or artist, you can whip out the iPhone and look it up in iTunes. If you really like the song and they have it, you can downloaded right then and there.
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If burn CDs to my computer, put them in iTunes, then download the songs from iTunes to my iPhone or iPod. I have never bought music from Apple. I have copied music from cassette tapes that I have put on my iPod.
I have a riding lawn mower that cost me $1500.00, when I could have had a weed hook for only 4 bucks, what a waste. I am dumping that dang Lawn mower for sure.
iTunes songs no longer have the digital rights management restrictions they once had. You can also rip MP3s from your own CDs to iTunes with no restrictions and put them on an iPod or iPad...