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Waiting on that wow moment, still basically just a huge ipod touch . . .
by aresant 17y ago
Waiting on that wow moment, still basically just a huge ipod touch . . .
- sdfx 17y agoI think the biggest wow moment might be the price: "pricing starts at $499" is probably something no one would have expected.
- timmaah 17y agoNice and locked down with only Apple approved apps. Do not want.
- noodle 17y agoi can only hope that either because this isn't a phone, a more robust modding community will develop around it, or that a more developer-friendly tablet will be released shortly.
- alttab 17y agoAnother wave of developers trying to make it rich by going through the AppStore. Let the nightmares begin? The minute there is no middle man on a competent mobile device (Android is getting there), Apple could lose a lot of business.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoThere are plenty of other MP3 players out there, but they haven't hurt the iPod (much). Google is great at certain things, but UI is not one of them. Their user experience suffers the Linux Problem: it's perpetually unfinished and incomplete, and regular computer users just don't like it. (Techs love it though.)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- akeefer 17y agoI'm guessing their target market for the iPad won't really care too much about that; plenty of non-technical laptop users already have enough trouble installing/uninstalling software, so something like the app store that makes it easy to find and install stuff, and safe to do so, is probably actually a win for those people.
- Timothee 17y agoSame here. But, considering how fast Steve Jobs went through the updates and basic description of the product (and pretty much covering all the rumors and leaks), I think there is time (and hope) for a "one more thing" that can blow our minds. So far, I wouldn't call what they showed "magical and revolutionary". edit: still following the pace of the event, it really feels to me like there will be more. A little slow-down of the presentation, Steve Jobs will sum up a little bit what they showed and then, starts smiling and say "but there's one more thing that makes the iPad revolutionary". So far, it's really too fast. It would be an unusual rhythm for an Apple keynote. if it kept going like this until the end. (wishful thinking?) 2nd edit: I guess not… not that the product is not super cool and impressive. It's just that I feel it's harder to justify when you have an iPhone and a laptop already. The Kindle is threatened though.
- aresant 17y agoFYI live streaming of event . . . http://www.ustream.tv/ http://www.ustream.tv/
- jodrellblank 17y agoI am quite surprised how poor the showing is for live coverage. Fox news had a very delayed high quality video feed which dropped several times. CNN had a feed which went to "back soon" as soon as I joined it. Ustream had a feed which was solid up to 16,500 viewers with good quality audio and awful video until it collapsed. Ars Technica had a "LiveCoverage" plugin thing which fell over all the time, their IRC server timed out twice. Even Engadget who are by far the best site I found failed to load several times. Twitter stayed up, but wasn't quite what I was looking for. I ended up with a Leo Laporte laptop/webcam stream restreamed via justin.tv with unusable video and near unusable audio. They claimed 90-150,000 viewers at times, so well done to them. What happened to 2010, broadband, P2P, multicast, memcached, cloud scalability? How can IRC crash with too many users? People have been shunting text around for several decades. If multimillion dollar media press companies can't do this properly what hope does everyone else have?
- CamperBob 17y agoI agree, mostly. I didn't want to see apps. I wanted to see packages. The NYT missed a huge opportunity to sell subscriptions just now, for example.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoHmm. So, we've got a handheld device with a slick UI, that can be used for video, audio, email, games, and reading, has a long battery life, and reasonable performance ... the first iteration of the mythical "tablet" that everyone's been talking about for two years now ... and the general reaction is that it's too much like a fancy Walkman?
- aresant 17y agoPoint well taken! But I'd argue that "the first iteration of the mythical "tablet" was the iphone 3GS. It's smaller form factor makes it the more exciting (and marketable) tool. BUT - reserving judgement for Steve's infamous WOW moment (fingers crossed). A dock, awesome multitouch, or something along those lines would help a lot.
- rinich 17y agoMore marketable? Hardly. My mother wants something that she can lie down on a couch with, read books, check email, be relaxed. You can't do that in the iPod comfortably. Note that Steve's doing all this in a comfy chair. That's what this is. It's a comfy chair device.
- unexpected 17y agoThis is basically a crunchpad - but it's probably be going to be $1000. Yes this device has a niche, but it depends on the price point...
- rinich 17y agoI know, right? TechCrunch has such an extensive history of creating brilliant, usable interfaces? But you're wrong. This doesn't have a niche. This is going to replace many, many niches. This is going to be what people buy instead of laptops. Unless I'm a hardcore user that needs pro tools, this will do everything I want a computer to do. And it will do it sexier, and sleeker, and it won't have any of the rough edges that my laptop does.
- GHFigs 17y agoYou mean it's still basically like devices that Apple sold about 10+ million of last quarter?
- waterlesscloud 17y agoYes, so why the attention to the 10 millionth and 1st? It's just more of the same.
- GHFigs 17y agoI don't understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying that because this new device builds on years of highly successful platform development that this is a bad thing. I disagree with that.
- borism 17y agoNo, he is suggesting that expectations on this one were way beyond what AAPL is delivering today.
- waterlesscloud 17y agoIt's not bad, but it is boring. This event was waaaaaayyyy overhyped.
- ugh 17y agoWell, the iPod touch is a damn impressive device.
- abstractbill 17y agoYes, it definitely is. But we've come to expect more of Apple than larger form-factor versions of existing products.
- ugh 17y agoUm? Um? UI blind? Making an iPod touch bigger is a hard task. As far as I can see Apple seems to have done well.
- raganwald 17y agoNo phone. Less computing power than a MacBook. Lame.
- iron_ball 17y agoI get the reference, but can you explain why people want something that is not easily portable in a pocket, but has fewer features than a laptop? If it's basically meant to be an extremely usable netbook (low price, web/email/etc), then I can get behind it.
- raganwald 17y agoWell, I'm not saying it IS better, until I play with it I'm just repeating the hype. But the proposition is that it will surf the net better than an iPhone and a MacBook. As I mentioned in another comment, I owned a Toshiba Portegé TabletPC and I can honestly say it was a KILLER web surfing device. Now I'm looking at the same ability to view web pages in portrait or landscape mode, weighing way less, and without a keyboard to get in the way. I could love such a device without ever taking it out of my house. Toss in the ability to watch all the movies and the entire Prisoner TV show collection I have in iTunes... That's fairly compelling, I can see myself using it in bed before going to sleep. Watching movies with someone in my living room requires the big screen TV. But watching movies on my laptop is not a great experience because of its battery life, I need to have an extra power adapter in my bedroom and run the cord across my floor. Finally, this could be a killer ebook platform. I won't say it's better than Kindle, but it seems like it could be awesome for viewing all the PDF and Gutenberg Project books I already have. So... I think there might be something to the idea of a device that does a few things (browsing the internet, personal movie watching, and reading ebooks) better than an iPhone or a MacBook.
- run4yourlives 17y agoPretty much the ideal "family" computer for all things consumer. Most people have no need for Macbook computing power.
- streblo 17y agoIn case anyone missed the reference: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107 http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...
- awa 17y ago$499 unlocked... cheaper than the unlocked iphone.. I say possibly wow!
- thaumaturgy 17y agoGood price for an unlimited plan, plus unlocked out-of-the-box. Also, I have good reason to believe that AT&T's exclusivity deal with Apple is ending around June. If that's the case, expect to see other data carriers run with this too.
- dabent 17y agoI wasn't impressed until I saw the price and the thought of paying $30/month for 3G without a contract. I can take this on a trip, use maps for navigating my route, get on the road and hand it back to the kids to watch a movie on iTunes on a reasonably sized screen. I can think of a bunch of ways I could use this. I also really don't like talking on the phone, so I don't really want voice anyway. :-)
- shpxnvz 17y agoThe 3G is almost compelling. However, lots of us already carry around a laptop with an expensive 3G account. I can only use one device at a time, and it's silly to me that I can't either tether to this with it's embedded 3G chip, or else use the same (capped) data plan for both. Since I can't, I'll stick with the laptop for everything. Of course that's the cell carrier's fault rather than Apple's, but it's still going to keep Apple from getting my money for one of these gadgets.
- noodle 17y agothere it is, i think. the no-contract 3G deal with AT&T, it being priced at $30/mo unlimited data, and then the price of the tablet itself starting at $500. that is pretty impressive.
- akirk 17y agoI could imagine this being the perfect device for my grandparents. They can't use a mouse properly, the iPhone screen is too small for surfing the web.