Posted on 01/20/2011 9:58:08 AM PST by artificial intelligence
To the average consumer, the war between iPhone and Android is probably very confusing.
Most people don’t know there’s a difference between a “Droid” and an “Android” phone or why these new phones are so different from what came before.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocunwired.ocregister.com ...
As a user, being able to instantly download nearly any song I want is more convenient than prowling around Limewire or buying a CD and taking it home to rip. Apple's business model made that possible.
At one time Macs came with a bunch of ports, Apple Desktop Bus, AppleTalk and SCSI. Apple made a lot of people mad by dumping all of that for this new-fangled port called "USB." And then Apple dumped the almighty floppy drive, causing conniptions. Did you know no Apple product has shipped with a VGA port for years? Seriously limited connectivity.
You're a genius. I'm in. I think we can corner this new market you've just envisioned. We'll leave that old, outdated market of thin and light tablets to Apple.
There are laptops already. They’re the ones with the screen on the top, with the keyboard and the computer on the bottom, and they fold apart.
I’m talking about a tablet. A tablet is pretty much a laptop, but instead of 2 necessary sections - a screen and a keyboard - it has a touchscreen. No reason that a tablet has to lack basic functionality because the people at apple want to sell a tablet and a real computer. More connectors for the tablet - check. Bigger mechanical hard drive. Maybe yes, maybe no, doesn’t matter. And, yes, obviously some people find it a little bit easier to type on real keyboards, so you would want to support a usb keyboard and a usb mouse, but it probably wouldn’t be attached to the tablet. But the tablet, with the 10 inch touchscreen, or the 7 inch screen does not have to be thin or light.
What makes a tablet a tablet isn’t the thinness, or the lightness, but the touchscreen. Making a tablet too thin or too light means you have to sacrifice functionality.
But most of the apple people I know really don’t do much of anything with their apples except feel good about themselves for owning them. I’m a windows person, never owned an apple, but the apple owners I know have me teach them how to use their computers when they have a problem.
That’s right, Limewire. That’s the place that the apple people had to go to get their free music. For years, it’s been incredibly easy for people who didn’t own macs to get free music. And I never really understood why people used Limewire, but apparently it was one of the few that was available to apple people.
I advised a friend of mine who wanted to look cool to buy a mac mini. He did. He was happy with it. He bought a used Apple monitor. Unfortunately, the particular Apple monitor was not immediately compatible with the mac mini, and he had to buy a very expensive adapter to get the monitor to work. He was one of the “help me fix my mac” people. And he didn’t consult with me first before buying the monitor.
So, yes, Apples limited connectivity options end up costing their customers a lot of extra money. Way back when, when apple was apparently using a bunch of proprietary connectors, it certainly was a step in the right direction for them to use usb.
I’d anticipate an android with an identical size and weight as the ipad, costing less, and doing a little more, a lighter thinner android doing the same as the ipad, and a heavier, thicker android that completely rules performance wise. I think the android will be strong in a 3 arbitrary categories, but the one that I’m personally looking most closely at is the
super performance version - the portable desktop replacement with the touch screen which might be twice as thick as the ipad, but is a real computer. And that would be a great tablet. If its got a 7 inch screen and is twice as thick as the ipad, it’s going to be more portable than the ipad. Thick is ok. Can I put it in a big jacket pocket? Most of the pockets in my jackets, and all of my clothes really, can fit a 1 inch thick device in them if they can fit a 1/2 inch device. The problem with pockets is when you have device with a 10 inch screen. You can keep making that device thinner and thinner and you still aren’t going to fit that thing in your pocket. I just don’t get the obsession with thinness. It doesn’t offer any additional functionality that I can see.
Light and thin costs money. It will be extremely difficult to get lighter and thinner than the iPad while remaining as capable and costing less. People constantly compare other laptops to Apple's citing their lower cost, but then we usually see that they are about twice as large as the Apple.
If its got a 7 inch screen and is twice as thick as the ipad, it’s going to be more portable than the ipad.
Apple has said that less than ten inches doesn't make for a good tablet. I haven't tried to verify this myself, but Apple is not known for doing things related to user experience without extensive testing behind it. Remember, this is the company that obsessed over every icon on the iPhone, checking every single pixel with a magnifier. This is the company that built multiple mock stores and paid people to go through them as a test when designing the Apple Stores. This is the company that meticulously tests the consumer's experience in unboxing their products.
I just don’t get the obsession with thinness. It doesn’t offer any additional functionality that I can see.
People have always wanted thinner and smaller portable devices. I remember this back in the AM radio days, then the cassette players, then CD players...
Let's say I buy a new HP PC with DVI video out and a used HP monitor with VGA. I'm the dumb one, not HP.
The Mac Mini includes the latest in computer display connectivity, DisplayPort (prior to this latest model, it was DVI). As a nod to people likely using them as media PCs, Apple even includes an HDMI port instead of requiring people to buy a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter.
Apple even includes a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter with the Mac Mini. Given that all Apple displays for years have used either DVI or DisplayPort, either he got a really old display, or something's wrong with the story.
Here were the connectors/protocols:
Apple Data Bus: There was no equivalent on the PC, on Apple since the 80s. It allowed daisy-chaining of serial devices with no configuration. USB was the first mass-market device to do this AFAIK.
AppleTalk was Apple's zero-configuration networking introduced in 1984. Literally, plugging several Macs into each other created a functioning network. There was no PC equivalent, and still really isn't. Apple has tried to replace this with Ethernet plus Bonjour networking utilities.
SCSI: Industry standard for high-speed devices.
So you see, there was a reason for holding onto these proprietary connectors for so long. What would you have proposed for Apple instead of ADB? Good old RS-232 serial with all its problems and manual configuration? That was the PC equivalent. At the time Apple used AppleTalk, would you have preferred Token Ring or the Novell fun? What a PITA.
i’m familiar with scsi, not so much rhe other 2. I know 10-15 years ago scsi drives were approved, recommended for video capture. I’m thinking scsi raid arrays?
well, he got it used about 5 years ago and it didn’t have anywhere near the same look as the mac mini did then. So, maybe, in 2005, he got a monitor from 1998-2001 maybe?
I get that lighter and thinner costs more money. I guess I’d restate that and say lighter, thinner, same function, same price.
I disagree with the 10 vs 7. I know apple tests, but there are going to be some that prefer the 7 for whatever reason. A 7 basically fits in size between the ipod touch and the ipad.
Smaller than 7 - good
7 - bad
larger than 7 - good. nah, not having it.
I’m not saying that more people are going to want 7s than 10s, just that some will want 7s.
I really do like the idea of a powerful tablet desktop replace. In theory, I’d be using it as a desktop. I’d have it hooked up to a big LCD screen and using a mouse and a keyboard. Or I could, easily. But whenever I want to, I disconnect the cords and go.
In terms of miniaturization, there gets to be a point where its not functional to make it smaller. I think cell phones are too short. I prefer longer phones, where you are listening directly to a speaker and talking directly into a microphone. having the phone microphone at your cheekbone is not a plus.
Limewire isn't a "where." It's a Gnutella client, at one point the most popular one on both Mac and Windows; I think Morpheus has overtaken it on Win. Mac users have as many opportunities to steal music as Windows users do.
Why not make it 2" thick? Heck, make it 3" or 4"... You can fit in a heck a lot of batteries in that thickness and have it last a month! Maybe even toss in several two terabyte drives while you are at it... and why limit yourself to a seven inch screen? Go for a twelve or fifteen inch... or even a 17 inch screen touch screen... it would still be a tablet cause it's a touch screen that makes it a "tablet" by your definition! After all weight and thinness really don't matter, they are just "obsessions" that mean nothing and don't add any functionality that you can see. Your newly designed fully functional tablet would just require a wheelbarrow to tote around, but it would still be a "tablet" computer, wouldn't it?
Sorry... it is not specs and connectivity to everything under the sun that MIGHT possibly be required by geeks that sells tablets, but it is thinness, portability, and a feature set that stresses usability... and iPads have that in spades. The Androids don't, so far, offer all three in anywhere near as nice a package that works as well or as easily as the iPad. That IS the bottom line. Consumers are NOT looking for a thick, heavy luggable Windows tablet computer. Those have been around for years... and they've sold a few tens of thousands per year. That is a failure. Apple re-conceptualized the tablet computer and sold 15 million in 8 months. That is success.
None the less, TruthFreedom, I've passed your ideas on to the engineering team at Apple and they are working on the third generation iPad... and they have promised to incorporate your ideas into it.
I'd bet 2000-2004 at most. That would be the brief period Apple flirted with the Apple Data Connector: USB, DVI and 100 Watts of power all in one cable. That's so you could hook a monitor up to a computer with one cable, and plug your mouse and keyboard into the monitor. It cut down on clutter immensely. Apple had to abandon it as monitors started sucking more than 100W.
Overall for your friend though, dumb move to buy a computer and monitor without bothering to see if they actually connect to each other, regardless of manufacturer.
SCSI was mandatory for video capture for a very long time until ATA drives got fast and reliable enough. It was also required in the early days of CD burning, for the HDD and the CD burner. Back then a hiccup in the drive, burner or the connector could cause a buffer underrun, ruining a $15 blank CD-R.
But SCSI was a royal PITA.
There are plenty of excuses that Apple uses to explain why they can’t have flash on the ipad.
one of those is that flash drains the battery fast.
and my argument was simply - so, just make the battery bigger, there’s no reason why something should be thinner than it needs to be when you’re sacrificing functionality to make it thin.
I’m not saying make it bigger. I’m saying don’t skimp on the functionality because you want to shave an 1/8 of an inch from the depth of the device.
I made it clear that I may very well prefer a more portable 7 inch solution to a less portable 10 inch solution, even if the 7 inch solution is twice as thick.
Unless you have the new iJacket. it’s got a super thin, nearly invisible pocket covering the entire front of the iJacket. it’s so amazingly thin that only super thin apple products can fit in it.
Most people have normal jackets that my thicker 7 inch super powerful would fit in and the ipod wouldn’t.
Why would Apple want to follow my advice? They’re doing a fine job selling those products. I’m saying that I want functionality. I am aware that Apple fans, and there are a lot of em, like there are a lot of Democrats, don’t place a full feature set near the top of their list of important things in a device.
That’s why I like the android. There will be android devices just like I described. And android devices nothing at all like I described. A wide variety, offering any combination of features you want. To me, that’s all pretty exciting.
This was all before my time I think, by at least a couple of years. $15 blank Cd-r? I think I got a computer without cd-r in 99? or is that way off?
Back when the mac mini was coming out, this is 2005 maybe, he almost bought the mac mini on ebay for about $50-$100. Except it wasn’t the mac mini, it was instructions about how to get the mac mini for free. I actually read the whole ebay page, because I was curious why a mac mini would sell for less than $100. He was not curious about why that would be. Fortunately, he was outbid.
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