10 ms·

My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite bo

My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a "computer-savvy guy" who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it's broken. In other words, it's a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You're not the target audience.

jwhitlark 17y ago
The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn't control their device?! That's not revolutionary; that's a return to the bad old days...
- scott_s 17y ago
  Yes, because most people don't want a device. They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.
  - jwhitlark 17y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but the key is enabling. This device enables some things at the cost to many others. Mind you, I'm not saying it won't be cool, and I'm not saying it won't sell many units, (although I have my doubts). I'm just saying this isn't the logical conclusion to the personal computer revolution. A personal computer is, by definition, a general purpose computing device, which this most assuredly is not. Edit, reply to following comment: How is "it does what I tell it" a narrower definition of enable than "it does what it's allowed to do by the people I bought it from"? I'm not trying to be flip; I think it looks very sexy. However, it's just a narrow tool, not the end-all of computers.
    - mattmanser 17y ago
      Only if you accept your very limited definition of enabling. You mean so that you can program it. I'm guessing most other people think it means so it can do loads of cool stuff without me having to speak in 1s and 0s.
      - pyre 17y ago
        > You mean so that you can program it. Oh, so programming it is the only thing that Apple limits? Wow it's more open than the iPhone! I can wait to install the iPad version of Opera!
  - Scriptor 17y ago
    Netbooks, which are basically the same price or cheaper, can do the same as the above and are much less locked in. More immediately, they also have Flash support, multitasking, and USB ports. People still need more heavy-duty computers to do those other things as well as for non-leisure stuff. The advantage of an iPhone was that it was extremely portable and you could just pull it out on the bus to pass the time. The iPad is barely more portable than a laptop, and much less functional. I guess reliability of the machine is greater since it's so stripped down. Other than that, I don't see what's so special.
    - scott_s 17y ago
      The iPad is a living room computer, a couch computer, a coffee-table computer. It won't live on a desk, it will live in the places in a house that people live in. The goal is not to replace desktop computers, but to supplement them.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      > "can do the same as the above" I heartily disagree. There's a big difference, huge difference between "can barely" and "does it really fucking well". The iPad shoots for the latter (we'll see if it hits), the netbook's mere existence is predicated on the former. If your definition of "can do the same" means "someone willing to bang their head hard enough and willing to live with a substandard user experience can do it", sure. But IMHO we need to strive for a higher standard than that. After the iPod, the Mac, and the iPhone, I don't think geeks still get why Apple is successful: they build devices that normal people actually want. I think there is some collective head-in-the-sand in the geek community because what people apparently want is not at all like what geeks want. The average user doesn't want freedom, doesn't want an open kernel, doesn't give a shit about standards, they want to have a slick, usable, and intuitive user experience, and so far netbooks are failing hard at it. The average user doesn't want the ability to hunt down zip files on obscure websites, downloading the file, and being able to run whatever app is inside. They like having a central place where all apps in the universe reside. This may or may not be good for the industry as a whole, but it is what our users desire. IMHO the constant spec-based wankery is why nobody has yet caught up with Apple. I'm seeing a lot of internet chatter about how netbooks do more (does more, poorly), how the cost is too high, how the CPU is too slow, blah blah blah, but conveniently ignores what is IMHO the one defining reason Apple has succeeded in the last decade: user interface. "My Android phone isn't locked down!" <-- Your Android phone also crashes all the time, emits strange cryptic messages that only developers understand ("a process has been forced to exit"?)
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    Netbooks, to respond to the sibling comment, don't have large touchscreens.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    Agreed. Few people went on about how miserable and useless and limiting the pocket calculator was.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - eru 17y ago
      And then those few bought RPN calculators.
- Todd 17y ago
  I guess their 1984 ad campaign was more precient than Steve could have imagined. The surprise is that he is the old guy on the screen. Now, who's the woman throwing the hammer?
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    The king is dead! Long live the king!
- swannodette 17y ago
  I recommend you read this if you want a reminder about what the personal computer revolution is all about: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The point is to get to the point where people actually give a damn about computers. As much as I love esoteric computer languages and UNIX, I don't consider those to be the paragons of the promise of computers.
  - jwhitlark 17y ago
    That's not the point I get from the article. It talks about people being literate and able to create tools. It talks about power, not locked down narrow use tools. EDIT: "We would like the Dynabook to have the flexibility and generality of this second kind of item[paper or clay], combined with tools which have the power of the first kind[cars, television sets]." I'd say they were aiming for inspiration AND power. I'd also argue that inspiration without power is worthless...
    - swannodette 17y ago
      But you have to be inspired to make great tools- the medium itself must be inspiring. That was the whole point of Dynabook, tools that are inspiring enough to want to change them, figure out how they work. I'm sure there are many young hackers looking at the iPad thinking, "man I want to make some great stuff for that!". I know I'm thinking that. When I look at a shitty netbook what am I supposed to be inspired about? Tinkering with Linux is no future of computing- it's nigh time to get out of that pipe dream. Though, I expect and look forward to Linux to be installed on the thing within two weeks of it getting to the stores ;)
alex_c 17y ago
I still like to believe that openness and usability / polish / "shinyness" are not mutually exclusive. Maybe it's idealistic (I definitely can't point to any irrefutable examples), but insofar as we're part of the people shaping technology, I don't think it's a bad ideal to strive for.
- orangecat 17y ago
  I still like to believe that openness and usability / polish / "shinyness" are not mutually exclusive. Maybe it's idealistic (I definitely can't point to any irrefutable examples) Mac OS X itself is a good example. Normal users can just click on the dock icons and never need to have any awareness of the Unix layer underneath. In the mobile space, Android is 80% there.
aw3c2 17y ago
And how do you get that stuff on it without being able to plug in a USB drive?
- rodyancy 17y ago
  The iTunes stores! It is monopoly at its finest. Apple could eventually half the price if the masses by their books and software and rent or buy their movies all from Apple. Eventually, there will be an iPad to Apple TV interface, and they can cut out the cable companies too. Scary now that I think about it.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    It is monopoly In what market and by what definition?
    - Perceval 17y ago
      Grandparent is probably thinking along the lines of a local monopoly, analogous to an old company town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town The analogy is not perfect, since you can buy mp3s and movies and ebooks from other services. But on iPhones and iPads the barriers to getting content from non-iTunes sources is certainly higher than it otherwise would be on a regular Mac (or any other PC for that matter). full disclosure: lifelong Apple user
      - gfodor 17y ago
        Here's an idea: someone can come along and build something half has good as the iPhone ecosystem. Who's stopping them?
- GHFigs 17y ago
  How do you get the text you're reading right now on your computer without being able to plug in a USB drive?
  - 17y ago
david927 17y ago
My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos Oh, but they can't because those are on YouTube and it doesn't do Flash. Simple doesn't have to mean purposely disabled to make more money.
- tedunangst 17y ago
  My iPhone can watch YouTube videos and it doesn't have flash.
- blasdel 17y ago
  It doesn't need Flash to play h.264 video. There is, as they say, an app for that (just like the iPhone + iPod Touch)
- KirinDave 17y ago
  This would be a valid concern if it were true. If: 1. Youtube DIDN'T have an HTML5 video mode (both non-web and web). or: 2. Apple were somehow asking people to pay for Flash support and profiting from that. Since neither is true, your concern here seems unsupported.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  There is an app for watching YouTube videos. In my opinion the app is even better than the YouTube website itself with its ads and trashy comments.
lambda 17y ago
The thing is, without an open platform, the new, innovative ways of working with this machine will never be invented. This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It's about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you're missing; people won't bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on. Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it's not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?
- mattmanser 17y ago
  This is alarmist nonsense. The App store and the iPhone have fostered a colossal amount of innovation, and made a lot of normal non-techy people very, very happy. And a bunch of techies too. And in the end I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim, but it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it's all gone wrong again and can I talk through 3 hours of trying to fix the damn thing.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim Installing vim isn't mutually exclusive from having a usable system.
    - telemachos 17y ago
      Some of us might argue that installing Vim is the sine qua non for a (truly) usable system. (For what it's worth, I just love me some Vim. Overall, I'm on the "this device is perfect for most people" side of this actual argument.)
    - rythie 17y ago
      Doesn't a Mac run Vim and is usable by normal people too?
mcantelon 17y ago
Mac OS X is quite user friendly, yet isn't locked down. No need to lock a system down to make it usable.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  The problem is that the iPad doesn't run Mac OS X, it runs the locked down iPhone OS. You can't run just anything on the iPad.
  - mcantelon 17y ago
    Agreed. The locking down is unnecessary. It hinders power users and prevents those who would become power users from having the option to do so.
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      Define "power users".
      - mcantelon 17y ago
        At the minimum, people who wnat to use software more powerful than iPhone apps (Photoshop, music production, programming, etc.).
        GHFigs 17y ago
        I don't understand. How does buying an iPad prevent people from using other computers for those purposes, or wanting to, aside from the opportunity cost of actually buying the device? You seem to be talking about things that machines can do, but you're referring to people. If a machine is limited it does not follow to say that the person is limited.
        NathanKP 17y ago
        Of course the person is limited. They are limited because they can't for example, install Firefox on the iPad and use it as the browser rather than Safari. The person is limited because the locked nature of the device limits them.
duhprey 17y ago
The fact that developers are not the target audience is, I think, a problem. It means that apps will be created that developers think people would want to buy, NOT apps that developers would want to use. I must use a different machine to build applications for this, which means on the gradient of iphone to macbook, it's much closer to the iphone. If the only niche it fills is for grandmothers, secretaries and managers, how will the developers ever really grok it? It seems like they'd only be monetarily driven... and that just sounds like iFart.
- holygoat 17y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but: developers are people too.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
Right, and all that goodness would be destroyed for your family if others could run Ruby scripts on the device. I imagine you should be able to see the difference between not targeting a particular audience and doing everything to lock that particular audience out.
Raphael_Amiard 17y ago
The problem in what you're saying is that it wouldn't have been THAT hard to do a product that does both : Add an usb port and add the ability to install custom software, even if hidden in the bottom of the OS where your grandma doesn't even notices it, and you have a device that pleases everyone. I still don't really get why they wouldn't do such a thing. EDIT: I'm kind of getting sick of this. Basically all the posts on this thread sum up to this: Some guy say "Yeah but my grandma can use it !". And gets tremendously upvoted, so ok guys we get the point. And some other guy says "Yeah ok, but what prevents this slick grandma-friendly platform to be open at the same time", and the guy get less upvoted, like the very point of this Ipad is that it be user friendly, like we hackers don't care at all about openness, denying the very point of this article, wich IS : "Why can't we have a platform that is BOTH user friendly and slick, and open"
roedog88 17y ago
I can see the ease of use argument, and that Apple products certainly do well at that. But, thinking on a longer time line, isn't that target audience shrinking. What is the life expectancy of the pre-computer literate population? How big is this audience now? I'm just asking. I have no idea. On the other hand, a much larger audience would be the vast unwashed masses in the third world who use cell phones to access the internet. The sales volumes are higher, while the price point is lower... I wonder if Apple would go there, or would they leave that market to others.
jakez 17y ago
I've actually been meaning to get an iMac or Macbook for my parents to replace the old desktop at home. BUT when I checked out the iPad today, everything just clicked into place - this device is perfect for them! First of all, its cheap compared to a mac laptop or desktop. Secondly, it is great for surfing and checking emails, which is what my parents do 99% of the time on the computer. Any laptop or desktop would be an overkill for their use case. Thirdly, the iPad's zooming functionality is the best in the market now, and would be extremely useful for older folks with bad eyesight. The small screens on netbooks just do not cut it. I think apple has again come up with a device that will revolutionize the way we use computers, just not the way all of us tech minded geeks wanted it to.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
statictype 17y ago
>but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You're not the target audience. Fair enough. But a not-insignificant chunk of that 99% is the friend or relative who asks you to write a small piece of software to do some calculation for them or some quick script or tool to automate some repetitive task. And then you have to sit and explain to them that this thing they bought isn't a real computer in the same way that their desktop was.

jwhitlark 17y ago

The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn't control their device?! That's not revolutionary; that's a return to the bad old days...

scott_s 17y ago
Yes, because most people don't want a device. They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.
- jwhitlark 17y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but the key is enabling. This device enables some things at the cost to many others. Mind you, I'm not saying it won't be cool, and I'm not saying it won't sell many units, (although I have my doubts). I'm just saying this isn't the logical conclusion to the personal computer revolution. A personal computer is, by definition, a general purpose computing device, which this most assuredly is not. Edit, reply to following comment: How is "it does what I tell it" a narrower definition of enable than "it does what it's allowed to do by the people I bought it from"? I'm not trying to be flip; I think it looks very sexy. However, it's just a narrow tool, not the end-all of computers.
  - mattmanser 17y ago
    Only if you accept your very limited definition of enabling. You mean so that you can program it. I'm guessing most other people think it means so it can do loads of cool stuff without me having to speak in 1s and 0s.
    - pyre 17y ago
      > You mean so that you can program it. Oh, so programming it is the only thing that Apple limits? Wow it's more open than the iPhone! I can wait to install the iPad version of Opera!
- Scriptor 17y ago
  Netbooks, which are basically the same price or cheaper, can do the same as the above and are much less locked in. More immediately, they also have Flash support, multitasking, and USB ports. People still need more heavy-duty computers to do those other things as well as for non-leisure stuff. The advantage of an iPhone was that it was extremely portable and you could just pull it out on the bus to pass the time. The iPad is barely more portable than a laptop, and much less functional. I guess reliability of the machine is greater since it's so stripped down. Other than that, I don't see what's so special.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    The iPad is a living room computer, a couch computer, a coffee-table computer. It won't live on a desk, it will live in the places in a house that people live in. The goal is not to replace desktop computers, but to supplement them.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    > "can do the same as the above" I heartily disagree. There's a big difference, huge difference between "can barely" and "does it really fucking well". The iPad shoots for the latter (we'll see if it hits), the netbook's mere existence is predicated on the former. If your definition of "can do the same" means "someone willing to bang their head hard enough and willing to live with a substandard user experience can do it", sure. But IMHO we need to strive for a higher standard than that. After the iPod, the Mac, and the iPhone, I don't think geeks still get why Apple is successful: they build devices that normal people actually want. I think there is some collective head-in-the-sand in the geek community because what people apparently want is not at all like what geeks want. The average user doesn't want freedom, doesn't want an open kernel, doesn't give a shit about standards, they want to have a slick, usable, and intuitive user experience, and so far netbooks are failing hard at it. The average user doesn't want the ability to hunt down zip files on obscure websites, downloading the file, and being able to run whatever app is inside. They like having a central place where all apps in the universe reside. This may or may not be good for the industry as a whole, but it is what our users desire. IMHO the constant spec-based wankery is why nobody has yet caught up with Apple. I'm seeing a lot of internet chatter about how netbooks do more (does more, poorly), how the cost is too high, how the CPU is too slow, blah blah blah, but conveniently ignores what is IMHO the one defining reason Apple has succeeded in the last decade: user interface. "My Android phone isn't locked down!" <-- Your Android phone also crashes all the time, emits strange cryptic messages that only developers understand ("a process has been forced to exit"?)
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  Netbooks, to respond to the sibling comment, don't have large touchscreens.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Agreed. Few people went on about how miserable and useless and limiting the pocket calculator was.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - eru 17y ago
    And then those few bought RPN calculators.
Todd 17y ago
I guess their 1984 ad campaign was more precient than Steve could have imagined. The surprise is that he is the old guy on the screen. Now, who's the woman throwing the hammer?
- Hexstream 17y ago
  The king is dead! Long live the king!
swannodette 17y ago
I recommend you read this if you want a reminder about what the personal computer revolution is all about: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The point is to get to the point where people actually give a damn about computers. As much as I love esoteric computer languages and UNIX, I don't consider those to be the paragons of the promise of computers.
- jwhitlark 17y ago
  That's not the point I get from the article. It talks about people being literate and able to create tools. It talks about power, not locked down narrow use tools. EDIT: "We would like the Dynabook to have the flexibility and generality of this second kind of item[paper or clay], combined with tools which have the power of the first kind[cars, television sets]." I'd say they were aiming for inspiration AND power. I'd also argue that inspiration without power is worthless...
  - swannodette 17y ago
    But you have to be inspired to make great tools- the medium itself must be inspiring. That was the whole point of Dynabook, tools that are inspiring enough to want to change them, figure out how they work. I'm sure there are many young hackers looking at the iPad thinking, "man I want to make some great stuff for that!". I know I'm thinking that. When I look at a shitty netbook what am I supposed to be inspired about? Tinkering with Linux is no future of computing- it's nigh time to get out of that pipe dream. Though, I expect and look forward to Linux to be installed on the thing within two weeks of it getting to the stores ;)

alex_c 17y ago

I still like to believe that openness and usability / polish / "shinyness" are not mutually exclusive. Maybe it's idealistic (I definitely can't point to any irrefutable examples), but insofar as we're part of the people shaping technology, I don't think it's a bad ideal to strive for.

orangecat 17y ago
I still like to believe that openness and usability / polish / "shinyness" are not mutually exclusive. Maybe it's idealistic (I definitely can't point to any irrefutable examples) Mac OS X itself is a good example. Normal users can just click on the dock icons and never need to have any awareness of the Unix layer underneath. In the mobile space, Android is 80% there.

aw3c2 17y ago

And how do you get that stuff on it without being able to plug in a USB drive?

rodyancy 17y ago
The iTunes stores! It is monopoly at its finest. Apple could eventually half the price if the masses by their books and software and rent or buy their movies all from Apple. Eventually, there will be an iPad to Apple TV interface, and they can cut out the cable companies too. Scary now that I think about it.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  It is monopoly In what market and by what definition?
  - Perceval 17y ago
    Grandparent is probably thinking along the lines of a local monopoly, analogous to an old company town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town The analogy is not perfect, since you can buy mp3s and movies and ebooks from other services. But on iPhones and iPads the barriers to getting content from non-iTunes sources is certainly higher than it otherwise would be on a regular Mac (or any other PC for that matter). full disclosure: lifelong Apple user
    - gfodor 17y ago
      Here's an idea: someone can come along and build something half has good as the iPhone ecosystem. Who's stopping them?
GHFigs 17y ago
How do you get the text you're reading right now on your computer without being able to plug in a USB drive?
- 17y ago

david927 17y ago

My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos Oh, but they can't because those are on YouTube and it doesn't do Flash. Simple doesn't have to mean purposely disabled to make more money.

tedunangst 17y ago
My iPhone can watch YouTube videos and it doesn't have flash.
blasdel 17y ago
It doesn't need Flash to play h.264 video. There is, as they say, an app for that (just like the iPhone + iPod Touch)
KirinDave 17y ago
This would be a valid concern if it were true. If: 1. Youtube DIDN'T have an HTML5 video mode (both non-web and web). or: 2. Apple were somehow asking people to pay for Flash support and profiting from that. Since neither is true, your concern here seems unsupported.
NathanKP 17y ago
There is an app for watching YouTube videos. In my opinion the app is even better than the YouTube website itself with its ads and trashy comments.

lambda 17y ago

The thing is, without an open platform, the new, innovative ways of working with this machine will never be invented. This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It's about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you're missing; people won't bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on. Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it's not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?

mattmanser 17y ago
This is alarmist nonsense. The App store and the iPhone have fostered a colossal amount of innovation, and made a lot of normal non-techy people very, very happy. And a bunch of techies too. And in the end I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim, but it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it's all gone wrong again and can I talk through 3 hours of trying to fix the damn thing.
- andreyf 17y ago
  I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim Installing vim isn't mutually exclusive from having a usable system.
  - telemachos 17y ago
    Some of us might argue that installing Vim is the sine qua non for a (truly) usable system. (For what it's worth, I just love me some Vim. Overall, I'm on the "this device is perfect for most people" side of this actual argument.)
  - rythie 17y ago
    Doesn't a Mac run Vim and is usable by normal people too?

mcantelon 17y ago

Mac OS X is quite user friendly, yet isn't locked down. No need to lock a system down to make it usable.

NathanKP 17y ago
The problem is that the iPad doesn't run Mac OS X, it runs the locked down iPhone OS. You can't run just anything on the iPad.
- mcantelon 17y ago
  Agreed. The locking down is unnecessary. It hinders power users and prevents those who would become power users from having the option to do so.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Define "power users".
    - mcantelon 17y ago
      At the minimum, people who wnat to use software more powerful than iPhone apps (Photoshop, music production, programming, etc.).
      - GHFigs 17y ago
        I don't understand. How does buying an iPad prevent people from using other computers for those purposes, or wanting to, aside from the opportunity cost of actually buying the device? You seem to be talking about things that machines can do, but you're referring to people. If a machine is limited it does not follow to say that the person is limited.
        NathanKP 17y ago
        Of course the person is limited. They are limited because they can't for example, install Firefox on the iPad and use it as the browser rather than Safari. The person is limited because the locked nature of the device limits them.

duhprey 17y ago

The fact that developers are not the target audience is, I think, a problem. It means that apps will be created that developers think people would want to buy, NOT apps that developers would want to use. I must use a different machine to build applications for this, which means on the gradient of iphone to macbook, it's much closer to the iphone. If the only niche it fills is for grandmothers, secretaries and managers, how will the developers ever really grok it? It seems like they'd only be monetarily driven... and that just sounds like iFart.

holygoat 17y ago
I mostly agree with you, but: developers are people too.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

Right, and all that goodness would be destroyed for your family if others could run Ruby scripts on the device. I imagine you should be able to see the difference between not targeting a particular audience and doing everything to lock that particular audience out.

Raphael_Amiard 17y ago

The problem in what you're saying is that it wouldn't have been THAT hard to do a product that does both : Add an usb port and add the ability to install custom software, even if hidden in the bottom of the OS where your grandma doesn't even notices it, and you have a device that pleases everyone. I still don't really get why they wouldn't do such a thing. EDIT: I'm kind of getting sick of this. Basically all the posts on this thread sum up to this: Some guy say "Yeah but my grandma can use it !". And gets tremendously upvoted, so ok guys we get the point. And some other guy says "Yeah ok, but what prevents this slick grandma-friendly platform to be open at the same time", and the guy get less upvoted, like the very point of this Ipad is that it be user friendly, like we hackers don't care at all about openness, denying the very point of this article, wich IS : "Why can't we have a platform that is BOTH user friendly and slick, and open"

roedog88 17y ago

I can see the ease of use argument, and that Apple products certainly do well at that. But, thinking on a longer time line, isn't that target audience shrinking. What is the life expectancy of the pre-computer literate population? How big is this audience now? I'm just asking. I have no idea. On the other hand, a much larger audience would be the vast unwashed masses in the third world who use cell phones to access the internet. The sales volumes are higher, while the price point is lower... I wonder if Apple would go there, or would they leave that market to others.

jakez 17y ago

I've actually been meaning to get an iMac or Macbook for my parents to replace the old desktop at home. BUT when I checked out the iPad today, everything just clicked into place - this device is perfect for them! First of all, its cheap compared to a mac laptop or desktop. Secondly, it is great for surfing and checking emails, which is what my parents do 99% of the time on the computer. Any laptop or desktop would be an overkill for their use case. Thirdly, the iPad's zooming functionality is the best in the market now, and would be extremely useful for older folks with bad eyesight. The small screens on netbooks just do not cut it. I think apple has again come up with a device that will revolutionize the way we use computers, just not the way all of us tech minded geeks wanted it to.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

statictype 17y ago

>but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You're not the target audience. Fair enough. But a not-insignificant chunk of that 99% is the friend or relative who asks you to write a small piece of software to do some calculation for them or some quick script or tool to automate some repetitive task. And then you have to sit and explain to them that this thing they bought isn't a real computer in the same way that their desktop was.