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Steve Wozniak on iPad
- ComputerGuru 17y agoWhat an engineer! The pragmatic appeal of his actions is incredible: By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone. Really? Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I'm talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.
- teilo 17y agoThis totally cracked me up. It reminded me of this guy I know who wanted a computer to take with him when he visits his lake cabin up north. Laptop you say? No no no. He only wants to use it IN the cabin, where He already has an old monitor, keyboard, and mouse. So he bolts a metal handle to the top of his mini-tower. "This is my portable!" He was so proud.
- _delirium 17y agoThe Apple //c was pretty much made for that purpose, though it seems that with the advent of affordable real laptops, nobody makes the luggable-with-a-handle form factor anymore.
- sp332 17y agoYou need a Frag Box from Falcon NW: http://www.falcon-nw.com/images/FragBox_OrangeFlames_hi.jpg http://www.falcon-nw.com/images/FragBox_OrangeFlames_hi.jpg Well, you probably don't need one, but you definitely want it!
- nimbix 17y agoHa! A while ago I suggested on Twitter that the solution to iPad's lack of multitasking is buying multiple iPads, but people thought I was joking. Maybe it wasn't such a bad Idea after all. :)
- derefr 17y agoIt makes complete sense to me—remember the scenes in Star Trek where someone is sitting at a desk absolutely covered in PADDs, each doing one little thing? We just need to wait for the price to come down :)
- jodrellblank 17y agoMy boss does this. Sounds fairly sensible if you often talk on the phone (and don't have a headset so you can talk on one and look at it at the same time). Would be nice if you could tether an iPod touch to one as a cheaper sidekick for data while talking on the phone one. I guess that will be less desirable with a 3G iPad as sidekick.
- huhtenberg 17y ago> I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other Oh, that's just a rehash of a double dishwasher idea :)
- zitterbewegung 17y agoI have two droids since I got one at a GTUG meeting. Since I'm on verizon's network I can talk and browse the web at the same time!
- gcb 17y agothat sounds even smarter if you take into account that he probably has dividend shares on apple
- rbanffy 17y agoThat's nothing new ;-) By the 80's, when I was developing courseware for Apple IIs I had 2 on my desk. The development environment (GPLE + somehting else I don't remember now) took very long to start and having a second computer to reboot every time I had a testable disk multiplied my productivity by more than 2. I remember I used a row-optimize function (&ROP) to compress the program so that it would fit in the memory of the target machine (it had to fit under Take 1 Programmer's Toolkit)
- viraptor 17y ago> Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don't want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing. They can go to college and someone may have a whacked-out $6,000 laptop, but the guy with the iPad will get all the attention. Good to know that the main reason for having a computer in college now is about showing off a gadget with a known logo. And not about silly things like reading, writing coursework, sharing information, taking notes, communicating with others... (where iPad is almost useless in most of these cases) Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?
- CamperBob 17y ago(where iPad is almost useless in most of these cases) That remains to be seen.
- viraptor 17y agoIt can be used for reading. I agree. Writing coursework - do you really want to write more than a couple of lines of text on a device that doesn't have a physical keyboard? (you cannot rest your fingers on the screen without causing "touch") Same argument works for taking notes. I cannot possibly imagine working with a spreadsheet or graphs on the iPad. Sharing information - you cannot run more than one non-stock application at once. I expect it's hard to share anything in that kind of environment. Communicating with others - by default you're left with IM. Unless you buy an additional Apple-approved camera (cheapest laptops include webcams these days). Doing any proper research - that needs at least a browser and text editor running at the same time. (unless you take notes on paper) There are additional keyboards of course, cameras, etc. but why bother? Any half-decent netbook is much better suited for learning purposes than iPad. I can understand not being able to spend $6k on a laptop. Not sure what the situation is like in US, but in UK you can get both 3G dongle and laptop on a 2 year contract for £35/mth. That's just above $1k spread over 2 years (with internet included). Are we talking about education, or are we talking about expensive toys?
- DougBTX 17y ago
- sown 17y agoSometimes I think that the iPad is what netbooks should have been.
- alanthonyc 17y agoApparently, that's what Steve Jobs thinks too.
- mgcross 17y agoNah, I think a mac netbook is what the iPad should have been!
- 10ren 17y agoJobs said there was no business case for an apple netbook, because they're too cheap for Apple-sized margins. Though Sony's vaio is still surviving at a much higher price-point. The latest model has has 3G.
- glhaynes 17y agoI don't recall him saying that; I do recall him saying that he didn't know how to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk and that Apple doesn't do that.
- jrockway 17y agoUnusable for anything but reading pre-approved ebooks, light web browsing, and posting to Twitter?
- alanthonyc 17y agoI met him on the BART once, when I was 14 years old. I shook his hand, then walked away. I am such a nerd.
- smoody 17y ago"Who else is the target audience for this? My wife's parents — they're not ready for the complicated computer world. They have these old computers." How much is Woz worth? And even with that kind of money, he won't spring for a couple of iMac for his wife's parents??? :-)
- froo 17y agoMy grandmother. She had asked about the internet and emailing and I decided to purchase one of these for her. It was a tossup between a PC with all the peripherals or the ipad where she just touches the screen. I thought the latter would be easier for her and a much less threatening. (That being said, I haven't purchased one for myself. I already have enough devices that are adequate that perform the job the ipad does, so I don't see the need for one yet. Maybe in the future if I need to replace a few things)
- Angostura 17y agoI'm in pretty much the same position with my parents. The main issue as I see it is getting the thing to drive a printer since they will occasionally want to print documents or photos. Let's see what's in iPhone OS 4.0
- eogas 17y agoWhy does he need two extra navigation systems in his car that has a built in navigation system?
- gcheong 17y agoMinority report?
- cfinke 17y agoIt's like the space shuttle. They use three decision-making computers for redundancy. If two say "turn left" and one says "turn right", you turn right.
- dkokelley 17y agoI'm not sure if you meant to say 'you turn left' or if you were just being funny. Coming from someone who just completed 10 hours of driving (and has another 6 tomorrow) while using GPS systems, I'm inclined to think you meant what you said. :P
- theDeveloper 17y agoTaken from the article: "What's your favorite phone? The iPhone, because of the apps. By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone." Did Woz jailbrake his iPhone? :))
- gcheong 17y agoI wonder if he ever visits Steve Jobs, whips out his Nexus one and says "Man this thing is awesome!".
- chanux 17y agoSo iPhone and iPad should come in double packs to actually be useful?
- mahmud 17y agoI have two iPhones, a [Google] Nexus One, a [Motorola] Droid, plus a Garmin [GPS] and TomTom [GPS]. I turn them all on at the same time, plus the navigation system in my Prius. I find that .. sad.
- froo 17y agoWhat? That the guy who basically invented the PC by hacking together parts of other devices likes to carry lots of technology with him? I don't see the problem at all, it fits his profile. Now if it was someone like your average soccer mum who had this, then there is a problem.
- jsz0 17y agoI would find it difficult to go back to using only one SmartPhone. I carry two phones (work/personal) and often use both at the same time for different reasons. Usually it's as simple as needing to look at one e-mail for reference and write another -- or I run IM on one and browse the web on another. Even though the Android phone multi-tasks it's too bulky and unusable to really jump between apps for multi-tasking mostly due to the lack of a taskbar or dock but also because the built-in apps simply aren't friendly to it. You can't "alt-tab" between two e-mail messages for example. The app simply isn't designed for that. Network redundancy has saved me a couple times too. I can be pretty confident I won't be without coverage anywhere I go.
- mclin 17y agoHold 'home' on android to 'alt-tab' between running apps.
- bensummers 17y agoThe layout of the page is terible: Gallery, in a box Byline Sharing widgets First paragraph SUBSCRIBE link Rest of article Maybe I'm being dim, but it took me a very long time to work out where the article text was. It's positioned where the comments are in every other article, and the gallery in a box at the top looks like the actual content of the page.