5 ms·

it's just the beta version people! Eventually, it'll have a camera and multi-tasking. For crying out loud! In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one

by fnid2 17y ago

it's just the beta version people! Eventually, it'll have a camera and multi-tasking. For crying out loud! In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one has any empathy for a company releasing a new product without all the bells and whistles. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy here from a group that espouses "Release early, release often."

ynniv 17y ago
I would be even more critical of the HN crowd nay-saying the device. Its too soon to tell, but I think that Apple may have made Something That People Want. To say that it sucks because the highly specialized group people that we belong to thinks that it is "wrong" is to miss the point of entrepreneurship entirely. And really, any time that you say "I won't use one... but I might get one for my Mom" should set off The Bells And Whistles On High.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  And really, any time that you say "I won't use one... but I might get one for my Mom" should set off The Bells And Whistles On High. I think that's a little unfair. I would characterize most of the negative responses I've seen on HN as more like "I won't use one... if it had a camera at least I could get one for my Mom to use Skype on... maybe rev 2 will be better".
gamble 17y ago
One can hope. The Apple TV is an obvious counter-example. Despite being on the market for nearly three years, Apple hardly updates it and has yet to add any truly compelling features like divx/xvid support or DVR functionality despite obvious demand. The iPad may not suffer the same fate, if only because Apple seems more concerned about its success at the moment. I'll need to wait for iPhone OS 4.0 before making a call. Honestly, there's rarely been a modern Apple product that demanded waiting for the second generation more than the iPad.
- jdietrich 17y ago
  Maybe it's hindsight, but the Apple TV seems more like a peripheral than a platform - the Airport Express streams music and the Apple TV streams video. I don't think it was ever intended to be a big hit, but an Applishly elegant solution to a specific problem. Viewed from that perspective, it wasn't really a failure - they sold plenty of units and have many happy customers. The fanboys may be let down that it didn't revolutionise television, but I don't think Apple had any such aspirations for the device. I think the same gap in expectations applies to the iPad - we were expecting a conventional tablet and Apple delivered something that was tailored to a smaller, more specific set of tasks. Although as geeks we naturally prefer devices with lots of functionality, Apple prefer to deliver something that does one thing well. My mind is naturally drawn back to the Slashdot thread on the iPod - people criticised the lack of features, but the iPod came to dominate the market because it did one thing better than anything else could.
  - gamble 17y ago
    I think you've actually identified the key problem with the iPad - it doesn't do anything better than other devices. In contrast, the iPod had the scroll wheel - an interface so superior to the alternatives at browsing large collections of music that every iPod since has stuck with it. Similarly, the iPhone had a killer feature - a mobile web browser that actually worked. Also, both products were polished versions of devices whose commercial viability had been established for decades. The iPad lacks a selling point. It plays music, but it's too large to replace a portable music player. It doesn't support the codecs that 99% of the video files people view today are encoded with, and has a poor aspect ratio for watching 16:9 TV or movies. It has a fancy ebook reader application, but I'm betting that glossy LCD screen will be unreadable in direct sunlight. And it has a web browser that works well on a phone, but will probably feel very constraining on a full-size device. It seems as if Apple believes the touch interface itself is the compelling feature that justifies the iPad, rather than anything you might do with it. I'm skeptical - touch-based computers have been disappointing marketeers for the last twenty years. They have a certain cachet, but other interfaces are less frustrating in practice. The iPhone is probably the best-case scenario for touch, and yet there's still a huge market for phones with a physical keyboard. In short, I'm still waiting to see a reason why someone would buy an iPad over a task-specific device or a laptop. (Particularly for $500+ a pop) Nothing in iPhone OS 3.2 is compelling enough to sell to a mainstream audience, IMO. Of course, the iPod and iPhone had significant issues in their first iteration as well, but Apple addressed them in subsequent generations and they'll hopefully apply the same treatment to the iPad. The difference is that the iPad starts at a disadvantage so long as it launches without a killer application.
pyre 17y ago
> Eventually, it'll have a camera and multi-tasking Maybe the camera, but the multi-tasking might not happen. The reason they don't allow multi-tasking on the iPhone is due to battery life issues (or so they claim). I would assume that they might leave multi-tasking out in order to deliver longer battery life to their customers (or else allow it only on apps that have been vetted for their power usage during the AppStore approval process).
- glhaynes 17y ago
  And it helps allow them to not use a virtual memory swapfile. This makes performance much more constant and predictable. One of the things you don't see nearly as much of on iPhone OS is beachballs/hourglasses and random interface-freezing lag. This not only improves the experience, it makes it easier to use: lag that makes the UI unresponsive can be really confusing to users. "Why didn't my button click do anything this time?"
  - gamble 17y ago
    Obviously you aren't using an iPhone 3G. Unbelievable lag at times...
    - glhaynes 17y ago
      This is when an app is tied up doing something CPU-intensive. There's just plain no way around that one (though the app "should", when possible, be doing its work on another thread so that the UI stays responsive). If there were several more apps in the background all further tying up the CPU, it'd be way worse.
      - gamble 17y ago
        My 3G is unresponsive regardless of what app is running or whether an app is using the CPU. Even the springboard locks up at times. It's the OS itself (or the 3G hardware, more likely) that's the problem. Not saying that multitasking wouldn't make things worse, but don't give any props to iPhone OS for avoiding delays. OS 3.0 is embarrassingly laggy on the 3G.
jcromartie 17y ago
I hope it doesn't get application multitasking. We know by now that multitasking is a myth. Yes, your computer can do it very well, but you are not a computer. You are a human being, and you can't really multitask (even if you tell me that you can, I won't believe you). Now, iPhone OS is actually perfectly capable of multitasking, and it does run many processes in the background, but the one-application-at-a-time choice is a UI experiment. It is the idea that people can only do one thing at a time applied. There are certainly cases for leaving running applications in the background, but those are mostly limited to power-users. As a developer I need to be running a shell and a text editor and a database server all at the same time, but anybody can stop watching a YouTube video to write an email.
- chime 17y ago
  I am filling a web form on Safari/iPhone and I need to enter 3 emergency contact phone numbers (relative, friend1, friend2). I don't remember all the numbers but I have them in my phone's contact list. How can I do this on iPhone/iPad if it doesn't let me run two apps at once?
  - jcromartie 17y ago
    It seems like they could improve that case by selectively allowing objects to be transferred from one place to another. The Address Book API already allows apps to pop up a people picker and choose contact details from it. It's too bad Safari doesn't use this. A general solution would allow apps to advertise the data that they want make available between applications. A developer is already working on something like this: http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/ http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    When you come back to Safari, the page will still be there, with form fields as they were. [Though if the device runs low on memory in the interim, it may send a low-memory warning signal to Safari, which causes it to dump the current states of your pages.]
- dagw 17y ago
TrevorJ 17y ago
I guess I don't see the need to pay 400 bucks for a piece of 'beta' hardware. I do see your point, and you are right, I think it will get better in V 2.0, but it's expensive and it is hardware so I think the example only goes so far.
DannoHung 17y ago
I don't even think they need full multitasking. What they really need is some sort of API that lets you run a tiny cooperative process that can do some simple things like keep a socket open or send a push notification to the GUI. Little stuff like that. And then a manager makes sure that none of those co-processes hog resources. Keep app startup times down, which people should be doing anyway, and the rest of the whinging about Multitasking goes away. Supporting quick application shutdown and startup is a better way to make apps in any case.
- jws 17y ago
  Until the dollar and power cost of RAM is so low it doesn't matter. Then you can forget about those hoops. Though one nice side effect of those hoops is that your app appears to survive a reboot.
  - Periodic 17y ago
    I don't think it really has much to do with the total size of your RAM, and more to do with how it ends up getting used. Sure, we can get more RAM so everything we have fits in it, but then everything in the next generation will just use more. It's about guarantees. We want to guarantee that one application bug doesn't bring the whole system to its knees. If that app you downloaded gets into some crazy polling loop and starts hogging all the CPU, making your iPhone run hot and run out of battery in 1 hour, you won't be happy and you won't have a good way to figure out what's going on and fix it.
- Periodic 17y ago
  Simply having fast app startup times doesn't not solve the problem. For example, very often I will want to quickly check my email or chat session while a page is loading, but if it stops loading that page when I switch applications I don't gain that benefit. I also like to have chat sessions open and get small notifications (usually a sound or on-screen indicator) when I have new messages even if I'm in the middle of reading a large article in my browser. Without background applications, neither of these usage scenarios is viable. It is this sort of usage that sets it apart from a general-purpose computing device and makes it into an appliance for me.
pyre 17y ago
> In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one has any empathy for a company releasing a new product without all the bells and whistles. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy here from a group that espouses "Release early, release often." Part of the problem may be that Apple does not present it's products as half-done. They may improve certain features that you're looking for; they may not. You don't know. There's no roadmap for future development, and the only feedback that users get about what features that Apple is focusing on comes at these SteveNotes. Even when they release a product that is half-done (e.g. the original iPhone; no MMS, no SDK, etc) they try to present it to the world as a complete and final product (i.e. "We don't need a SDK! You can make everything a webapp!"). It's little wonder that people get upset (i.e. With the original iPhone people were upset at the lack of a SDK and Apple/Steve trying to push the "all iPhone apps are webapps" angle didn't give people a solid clue that they would eventually release a SDK).

by fnid2 17y ago

ynniv 17y ago

I would be even more critical of the HN crowd nay-saying the device. Its too soon to tell, but I think that Apple may have made Something That People Want. To say that it sucks because the highly specialized group people that we belong to thinks that it is "wrong" is to miss the point of entrepreneurship entirely. And really, any time that you say "I won't use one... but I might get one for my Mom" should set off The Bells And Whistles On High.

abstractbill 17y ago
And really, any time that you say "I won't use one... but I might get one for my Mom" should set off The Bells And Whistles On High. I think that's a little unfair. I would characterize most of the negative responses I've seen on HN as more like "I won't use one... if it had a camera at least I could get one for my Mom to use Skype on... maybe rev 2 will be better".

gamble 17y ago

One can hope. The Apple TV is an obvious counter-example. Despite being on the market for nearly three years, Apple hardly updates it and has yet to add any truly compelling features like divx/xvid support or DVR functionality despite obvious demand. The iPad may not suffer the same fate, if only because Apple seems more concerned about its success at the moment. I'll need to wait for iPhone OS 4.0 before making a call. Honestly, there's rarely been a modern Apple product that demanded waiting for the second generation more than the iPad.

jdietrich 17y ago
Maybe it's hindsight, but the Apple TV seems more like a peripheral than a platform - the Airport Express streams music and the Apple TV streams video. I don't think it was ever intended to be a big hit, but an Applishly elegant solution to a specific problem. Viewed from that perspective, it wasn't really a failure - they sold plenty of units and have many happy customers. The fanboys may be let down that it didn't revolutionise television, but I don't think Apple had any such aspirations for the device. I think the same gap in expectations applies to the iPad - we were expecting a conventional tablet and Apple delivered something that was tailored to a smaller, more specific set of tasks. Although as geeks we naturally prefer devices with lots of functionality, Apple prefer to deliver something that does one thing well. My mind is naturally drawn back to the Slashdot thread on the iPod - people criticised the lack of features, but the iPod came to dominate the market because it did one thing better than anything else could.
- gamble 17y ago
  I think you've actually identified the key problem with the iPad - it doesn't do anything better than other devices. In contrast, the iPod had the scroll wheel - an interface so superior to the alternatives at browsing large collections of music that every iPod since has stuck with it. Similarly, the iPhone had a killer feature - a mobile web browser that actually worked. Also, both products were polished versions of devices whose commercial viability had been established for decades. The iPad lacks a selling point. It plays music, but it's too large to replace a portable music player. It doesn't support the codecs that 99% of the video files people view today are encoded with, and has a poor aspect ratio for watching 16:9 TV or movies. It has a fancy ebook reader application, but I'm betting that glossy LCD screen will be unreadable in direct sunlight. And it has a web browser that works well on a phone, but will probably feel very constraining on a full-size device. It seems as if Apple believes the touch interface itself is the compelling feature that justifies the iPad, rather than anything you might do with it. I'm skeptical - touch-based computers have been disappointing marketeers for the last twenty years. They have a certain cachet, but other interfaces are less frustrating in practice. The iPhone is probably the best-case scenario for touch, and yet there's still a huge market for phones with a physical keyboard. In short, I'm still waiting to see a reason why someone would buy an iPad over a task-specific device or a laptop. (Particularly for $500+ a pop) Nothing in iPhone OS 3.2 is compelling enough to sell to a mainstream audience, IMO. Of course, the iPod and iPhone had significant issues in their first iteration as well, but Apple addressed them in subsequent generations and they'll hopefully apply the same treatment to the iPad. The difference is that the iPad starts at a disadvantage so long as it launches without a killer application.

pyre 17y ago

> Eventually, it'll have a camera and multi-tasking Maybe the camera, but the multi-tasking might not happen. The reason they don't allow multi-tasking on the iPhone is due to battery life issues (or so they claim). I would assume that they might leave multi-tasking out in order to deliver longer battery life to their customers (or else allow it only on apps that have been vetted for their power usage during the AppStore approval process).

glhaynes 17y ago
And it helps allow them to not use a virtual memory swapfile. This makes performance much more constant and predictable. One of the things you don't see nearly as much of on iPhone OS is beachballs/hourglasses and random interface-freezing lag. This not only improves the experience, it makes it easier to use: lag that makes the UI unresponsive can be really confusing to users. "Why didn't my button click do anything this time?"
- gamble 17y ago
  Obviously you aren't using an iPhone 3G. Unbelievable lag at times...
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    This is when an app is tied up doing something CPU-intensive. There's just plain no way around that one (though the app "should", when possible, be doing its work on another thread so that the UI stays responsive). If there were several more apps in the background all further tying up the CPU, it'd be way worse.
    - gamble 17y ago
      My 3G is unresponsive regardless of what app is running or whether an app is using the CPU. Even the springboard locks up at times. It's the OS itself (or the 3G hardware, more likely) that's the problem. Not saying that multitasking wouldn't make things worse, but don't give any props to iPhone OS for avoiding delays. OS 3.0 is embarrassingly laggy on the 3G.

jcromartie 17y ago

I hope it doesn't get application multitasking. We know by now that multitasking is a myth. Yes, your computer can do it very well, but you are not a computer. You are a human being, and you can't really multitask (even if you tell me that you can, I won't believe you). Now, iPhone OS is actually perfectly capable of multitasking, and it does run many processes in the background, but the one-application-at-a-time choice is a UI experiment. It is the idea that people can only do one thing at a time applied. There are certainly cases for leaving running applications in the background, but those are mostly limited to power-users. As a developer I need to be running a shell and a text editor and a database server all at the same time, but anybody can stop watching a YouTube video to write an email.

chime 17y ago
I am filling a web form on Safari/iPhone and I need to enter 3 emergency contact phone numbers (relative, friend1, friend2). I don't remember all the numbers but I have them in my phone's contact list. How can I do this on iPhone/iPad if it doesn't let me run two apps at once?
- jcromartie 17y ago
  It seems like they could improve that case by selectively allowing objects to be transferred from one place to another. The Address Book API already allows apps to pop up a people picker and choose contact details from it. It's too bad Safari doesn't use this. A general solution would allow apps to advertise the data that they want make available between applications. A developer is already working on something like this: http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/ http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/
- glhaynes 17y ago
  When you come back to Safari, the page will still be there, with form fields as they were. [Though if the device runs low on memory in the interim, it may send a low-memory warning signal to Safari, which causes it to dump the current states of your pages.]
dagw 17y ago

TrevorJ 17y ago

I guess I don't see the need to pay 400 bucks for a piece of 'beta' hardware. I do see your point, and you are right, I think it will get better in V 2.0, but it's expensive and it is hardware so I think the example only goes so far.

DannoHung 17y ago

I don't even think they need full multitasking. What they really need is some sort of API that lets you run a tiny cooperative process that can do some simple things like keep a socket open or send a push notification to the GUI. Little stuff like that. And then a manager makes sure that none of those co-processes hog resources. Keep app startup times down, which people should be doing anyway, and the rest of the whinging about Multitasking goes away. Supporting quick application shutdown and startup is a better way to make apps in any case.

jws 17y ago
Until the dollar and power cost of RAM is so low it doesn't matter. Then you can forget about those hoops. Though one nice side effect of those hoops is that your app appears to survive a reboot.
- Periodic 17y ago
  I don't think it really has much to do with the total size of your RAM, and more to do with how it ends up getting used. Sure, we can get more RAM so everything we have fits in it, but then everything in the next generation will just use more. It's about guarantees. We want to guarantee that one application bug doesn't bring the whole system to its knees. If that app you downloaded gets into some crazy polling loop and starts hogging all the CPU, making your iPhone run hot and run out of battery in 1 hour, you won't be happy and you won't have a good way to figure out what's going on and fix it.
Periodic 17y ago
Simply having fast app startup times doesn't not solve the problem. For example, very often I will want to quickly check my email or chat session while a page is loading, but if it stops loading that page when I switch applications I don't gain that benefit. I also like to have chat sessions open and get small notifications (usually a sound or on-screen indicator) when I have new messages even if I'm in the middle of reading a large article in my browser. Without background applications, neither of these usage scenarios is viable. It is this sort of usage that sets it apart from a general-purpose computing device and makes it into an appliance for me.

pyre 17y ago

> In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one has any empathy for a company releasing a new product without all the bells and whistles. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy here from a group that espouses "Release early, release often." Part of the problem may be that Apple does not present it's products as half-done. They may improve certain features that you're looking for; they may not. You don't know. There's no roadmap for future development, and the only feedback that users get about what features that Apple is focusing on comes at these SteveNotes. Even when they release a product that is half-done (e.g. the original iPhone; no MMS, no SDK, etc) they try to present it to the world as a complete and final product (i.e. "We don't need a SDK! You can make everything a webapp!"). It's little wonder that people get upset (i.e. With the original iPhone people were upset at the lack of a SDK and Apple/Steve trying to push the "all iPhone apps are webapps" angle didn't give people a solid clue that they would eventually release a SDK).