Official iPad Thread

[Quicksilver]

If it's true.............BOO Apple.

Apple's IPad Marketing Sparks Complaint to FTC - PCWorld

[brian5]

Originally Posted by Quicksilver

If it's true.............BOO Apple.

Apple's IPad Marketing Sparks Complaint to FTC - PCWorld

Wow, that's pretty interesting and not a good thing for Apple if it's true. I don't think it will hurt the sales of the iPad but "wilful false advertising" is never good for a company's image. If you've got a good product and a good fan base, a company shouldn't have to stoop to this.

Can you believe Adobe's claim that "... more than 70 percent of all games and 75 percent of all video on the Web uses Flash."? Those numbers just seem way too high.

[rayxi]

That's what happens when the a product gets taken over by the iDiots in the Marketing department. You get a crappy product name and misleading advertisement.

[Thunder22]

It's going to be fun watching how the Fujitsu trademark lawsuit turns out.

[MiCkEy]

it is going to be fun(ner?) when people find out 70% of the online games and videos will not run on the ipad's browser. Most still feel this will replace the note/netbooks.

Going to wait for v2.0. This is getting interesting.

[JCL]

Well, in the spirit of piling on.... This is being emailed around.

[Chris F.]

LOL....poor Apple they are getting beatup pretty bad. I agree Mick, we'll see what version 2.0 looks like....maybe we'll see revised iPads in June when the iPhone presentation is scheduled. I suppose thats way to early for version 2.0 but hey who knows...

[Quicksilver]

The iPad's future shock. "A technologist view".
The iPad's future shock | Laptop | iPhone Central | Macworld

I can't help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.

Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the "average person." I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilizing effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, medieval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They're demanding access to software. they're demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

People talk about Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, and I don't disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work."

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organizing the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

[nom3rcy]

HTML5 is part of the reason for the exclusion of Flash. APIs can do everything flash does and more and require far less bandwidth and processing power on the device.

I think we are only seeing the beginning here. Apple is pushing the market and positioning itself to dominate it. Once Flash is out of the way and all media is funneled through their stores they will be quite a force, even compared to how they are now. Once the iPad is put to the test by real world users and developers make apps to fill every niche imaginable it will create a niche in itself, regardless if we can see it or not.

I just wish it was closer to my niche, but in time even operating systems as we know them will be obsolete. Apple is taking a lot of heat now but down the road it will pay in huge dividends.

[Thunder22]

Originally Posted by nom3rcy

HTML5 is part of the reason for the exclusion of Flash. APIs can do everything flash does and more and require far less bandwidth and processing power on the device.

I think we are only seeing the beginning here. Apple is pushing the market and positioning itself to dominate it. Once Flash is out of the way and all media is funneled through their stores they will be quite a force, even compared to how they are now. Once the iPad is put to the test by real world users and developers make apps to fill every niche imaginable it will create a niche in itself, regardless if we can see it or not.

I just wish it was closer to my niche, but in time even operating systems as we know them will be obsolete. Apple is taking a lot of heat now but down the road it will pay in huge dividends.

Wait... what?