7 ms·

My verdict after one day of using the iPad

61 points by glower 17y ago

Osiris 17y ago
I really like the last paragraph: "I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. " That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions to really make this kind of product shine. I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how could they install them?
- ojbyrne 17y ago
  Most notable omission is a camera. Skype video is the killer app for this machine.
  - mos1 17y ago
    people keep saying this, and i keep thinking it'll be shot from a truly horrible angle and will be really unflattering.
    - ojbyrne 17y ago
      If you're talking to a close friend or family member (that's the use case), it doesn't matter.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - grinich 17y ago
      And a wobbly image. I'd like to see some good image stabilization using face-tracking.
      - celoyd 17y ago
        Apple’s photo software already has face recognition and its video software already has good image stabilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were spin-offs of work towards precisely this.
    - electromagnetic 17y ago
      Bad angle, really? This is freaking Apple we're talking about if Jobs can't resolve something as simple as a camera angle (hello dozen phones that came out last year with a swivel mounted camera to directly resolve this problem) then he should resign as an incompetent fool. He managed to bring Apple back from the brink and revolutionize the industry, if he can't resolve a camera angle issue he's a complete fraud with more luck than Jesus crossed with that air stewardess who fell from flight altitude crossed with the bastard child of Anakin Skywalker and Yoda. I'm sorry, bad camera angle is the biggest piece of piss poor excuse I've ever heard. I'd honestly be more appeased if Apple simply said "sorry, things got missed out that we wanted to implement, shit happens - that's life".
  - bmalicoat 17y ago
    Andy Ihnatko mentioned something about this the other day. Since the device is orientation-less (for the most part), Apple could make an iSight that plugged into the dock connector and you just held it upside-down. They probably won't, but it is possible.
- KC8ZKF 17y ago
  The "Enterprise" developer program includes in-house deployment capabilities.
  - umjames 17y ago
    I really wish Apple didn't require a 500-employee headcount and a D&B number to be an enterprise customer. They should relax the constraints so that small businesses can start making internal apps.
    - aristus 17y ago
      That would become a backdoor app economy. If any little company could install apps on their employee's phones, I'd start making apps to sell them without the 30% cut to Apple.
ojbyrne 17y ago
"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls." It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them. Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.
- warwick 17y ago
  If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print ad rates. It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."
  - btipling 17y ago
    I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the New York Times.
  - ojbyrne 17y ago
    Indeed. If they had put the effort into getting premium rates from advertisers starting the day they went online, they'd be there now. Instead recent experimentation with new insterstitial formats suggests its just beginning.
- KC8ZKF 17y ago
  I don't think the general public is interested in a reverse-chronological view of the entire news stream to begin with.
modoc 17y ago
Having played with my friend's iPad a bunch today I am extremely impressed. I can't wait for my 3g one to arrive. He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural." My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.
- MartinCron 17y ago
  That echoes my experience. No single WOW thing (well, maybe looking at my photos, but that may be because my photos are awesome). Everything is very fast and crisp and right. The browser on the iPhone always felt like a last-browser-of-desperation except for sites specifically tuned to it. On iPad, it's actually usable. The sites that I work on all look great (with the exception of embedded flash video, naturally)
aaronbrethorst 17y ago
"The usual fanboy rebuttal is that [the iPad] is not designed for what I do." How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. So what? Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.
- kvs 17y ago
  Yes. iPad is for consumption not for production. Don't know when some of these guys will realize it and stop making a big fuzz. I don't see the point of it.
  - aaronbrethorst 17y ago
    Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if the iPad was just as good for production as consumption. My girlfriend (a university professor) is in the process of finishing her first book, and would love to do the rest of her writing and revising on the iPad in Pages, but she doesn't see it as being realistic. She's still really excited about being able to watch Battlestar Galactica on the iPad. (regarding BSG: yes, I am lucky.) I spend all of my time writing code in Ruby and Objective C. I'd love to be able to get access to MRI, the Rails gems, MySQL and TextMate on the iPad in order to do my work there, but it's just not realistic. And that's ok: because I am unbelievably excited about the web browsing experience and the games on the iPad. Edit: I amend my comments above with a Tweet from the author of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air: http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495 http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - xenophanes 17y ago
      They are barriers because if Apple added an "advanced" button somewhere that gives you root, then tons of ordinary users would press it (perhaps after being instructed to by an online tutorial, or by a scam), break things, and find that their iPod does not "just work" and be unhappy. Apple would be adding a button that you can press to enable your device to get malware, and that will confuse and harm lots of people. It's not obvious how to add an advanced button that the right people will press, and others won't. You can hide it, but it will get reported on websites that newbies see, with simple instructions. But that said, I'm sure there's a solution, and I hope Apple finds it. I think the development effort from Apple to enable stuff which would only be used by a fraction of the audience -- even done to Apple's high standards of polish -- is a secondary and more minor issue. Apple can afford it, and Apple knows that developers are worth the expense. However, in terms of development time rather than money (which aren't equivalent because finding, hiring, and training good programmers is hard), this has to be lower priority than enabling multiple programs to run at once and some other stuff, so maybe it'll be a while.
kwamenum86 17y ago
My favorite paragraph: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneDay.html#p6 http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneD...
- CamperBob 17y ago
  The thing that nobody seems to acknowledge is that iTunes really has gotten a lot better over the last year.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    How so?
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      The Quicktime-based GUI has become a lot more responsive, even as they've added more features. That was my main complaint -- the idea that a 2D UI should bring a 3 GHz processor to its knees.
  - nooneelse 17y ago
    At this point it should be called iHydra, given how many separate roles have been shoehorned into it.
jsz0 17y ago
I'm not quite sure why all these iPad articles are framed with the assumption you're going to use the iPad instead of something else. I've been working on a project in Logic most of the night on my Mac with the iPad sitting on my desk for browsing, music, and video. It's a fantastic setup. Nice break from keyboard & mousing. The display is stunning and multi-touch web browsing on this size screen is such a natural experience. Something about the portrait view is very compelling to me. I popped it over to landscape for a bit and some of the magic disappeared. I wonder if part of the appeal of the iPad is simply that it's the first mainstream computing device to use portrait orientation so effectively.
- randrews 17y ago
  They're framed with that assumption because of the other articles that call it "the future of computing". If something's the future of computing, it's supposed to supplant the present of computing, right?
  - bombs 17y ago
    Why can't the future be something that augments instead of supplants?
    - pkulak 17y ago
      By definition?
      - swombat 17y ago
        Yes, because there totally aren't any sailboats around now that steamboats and motorboats got invented. And people definitely don't go and watch plays and operas live anymore now that they can do so in their living room with a TV. You need a better dictionary..
        krainboltgreene 17y ago
        Sailboats are luxury items, dude. People aren't forced to use sailboats. In fact, instead of 100% of ships being sailboats, I'd gander only 5% or less are sailboats.
jamiequint 17y ago
Reminded me of this Chris Dixon article: "the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”" http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
- gloob 17y ago
  I feel that it's important, from time to time, to remember that plenty of things that aren't the next big thing are also variously laughed at, ignored, dismissed, and so on. I'm not making any predictions about how the iPad will do (sitting and waiting will get me better information than pulling a guess out of the air), to make sure that's clear. Just reminding myself that it possible that perhaps Apple will produce a product that won't change the world.
  - techiferous 17y ago
    "a product that won't change the world." Like MobileMe? :)
    - bmalicoat 17y ago
      I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe, only problem is the cost of course. In the same vein though Apple TV isn't a game changer, but it could become more relevant as time goes by.
      - techiferous 17y ago
        "I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe." I was an early adopter and got burned. It never worked for me. After fighting for hours with configuration and bad Apple support (which is uncharacteristic), I realized that the time it would potentially save me was being burned up in setting it up, so I abandoned it. In the end I ended up losing $99 and gaining nothing. I'm guessing from what you said that they've worked the kinks out now, though.
ErrantX 17y ago
It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. Hmm, I think he is possibly incorrect here. A lot of people do multi task; but my parents close every application when they start a new one. If they are sending emails they close Word - and vice versa. My gran did this, my brother used to do this till a few years ago, most of the people on my uni course (electrical engineering) who were not computery people tended to do this, all my friends generally do this as well. Indeed the only thing I have seen people traditionally leave on is music (which can be done on the iPad) and chat (which currently cannot).
ComputerGuru 17y ago
Would it be rude to say that I don't care what anyone has to say about the iPad after only a single day of use? It's not a new laptop, it's a new mobile device entirely. It'll take more than one day to really get the iPad, for better or for worse.
- ovi256 17y ago
  Yes, and no. Let me explain: if it would be a new laptop, the differences from existing laptops would be mostly subtle. A day may be too short to see them. With a device of a new class, you'll feel the differences right away. Being able to analyze and articulate them takes some time though, even if you do that for a living. This is why I dislike all this rash of articles about the iPad. They're all speculation, as the facts have not sunk in yet.

61 points by glower 17y ago

I really like the last paragraph: "I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. " That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions to really make this kind of product shine. I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how could they install them?

ojbyrne 17y ago
Most notable omission is a camera. Skype video is the killer app for this machine.
- mos1 17y ago
  people keep saying this, and i keep thinking it'll be shot from a truly horrible angle and will be really unflattering.
  - ojbyrne 17y ago
    If you're talking to a close friend or family member (that's the use case), it doesn't matter.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - grinich 17y ago
    And a wobbly image. I'd like to see some good image stabilization using face-tracking.
    - celoyd 17y ago
      Apple’s photo software already has face recognition and its video software already has good image stabilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were spin-offs of work towards precisely this.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    Bad angle, really? This is freaking Apple we're talking about if Jobs can't resolve something as simple as a camera angle (hello dozen phones that came out last year with a swivel mounted camera to directly resolve this problem) then he should resign as an incompetent fool. He managed to bring Apple back from the brink and revolutionize the industry, if he can't resolve a camera angle issue he's a complete fraud with more luck than Jesus crossed with that air stewardess who fell from flight altitude crossed with the bastard child of Anakin Skywalker and Yoda. I'm sorry, bad camera angle is the biggest piece of piss poor excuse I've ever heard. I'd honestly be more appeased if Apple simply said "sorry, things got missed out that we wanted to implement, shit happens - that's life".
- bmalicoat 17y ago
  Andy Ihnatko mentioned something about this the other day. Since the device is orientation-less (for the most part), Apple could make an iSight that plugged into the dock connector and you just held it upside-down. They probably won't, but it is possible.
KC8ZKF 17y ago
The "Enterprise" developer program includes in-house deployment capabilities.
- umjames 17y ago
  I really wish Apple didn't require a 500-employee headcount and a D&B number to be an enterprise customer. They should relax the constraints so that small businesses can start making internal apps.
  - aristus 17y ago
    That would become a backdoor app economy. If any little company could install apps on their employee's phones, I'd start making apps to sell them without the 30% cut to Apple.

ojbyrne 17y ago

"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls." It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them. Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.

warwick 17y ago
If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print ad rates. It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."
- btipling 17y ago
  I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the New York Times.
- ojbyrne 17y ago
  Indeed. If they had put the effort into getting premium rates from advertisers starting the day they went online, they'd be there now. Instead recent experimentation with new insterstitial formats suggests its just beginning.
KC8ZKF 17y ago
I don't think the general public is interested in a reverse-chronological view of the entire news stream to begin with.

modoc 17y ago

Having played with my friend's iPad a bunch today I am extremely impressed. I can't wait for my 3g one to arrive. He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural." My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.

MartinCron 17y ago
That echoes my experience. No single WOW thing (well, maybe looking at my photos, but that may be because my photos are awesome). Everything is very fast and crisp and right. The browser on the iPhone always felt like a last-browser-of-desperation except for sites specifically tuned to it. On iPad, it's actually usable. The sites that I work on all look great (with the exception of embedded flash video, naturally)

aaronbrethorst 17y ago

"The usual fanboy rebuttal is that [the iPad] is not designed for what I do." How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. So what? Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.

kvs 17y ago
Yes. iPad is for consumption not for production. Don't know when some of these guys will realize it and stop making a big fuzz. I don't see the point of it.
- aaronbrethorst 17y ago
  Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if the iPad was just as good for production as consumption. My girlfriend (a university professor) is in the process of finishing her first book, and would love to do the rest of her writing and revising on the iPad in Pages, but she doesn't see it as being realistic. She's still really excited about being able to watch Battlestar Galactica on the iPad. (regarding BSG: yes, I am lucky.) I spend all of my time writing code in Ruby and Objective C. I'd love to be able to get access to MRI, the Rails gems, MySQL and TextMate on the iPad in order to do my work there, but it's just not realistic. And that's ok: because I am unbelievably excited about the web browsing experience and the games on the iPad. Edit: I amend my comments above with a Tweet from the author of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air: http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495 http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    They are barriers because if Apple added an "advanced" button somewhere that gives you root, then tons of ordinary users would press it (perhaps after being instructed to by an online tutorial, or by a scam), break things, and find that their iPod does not "just work" and be unhappy. Apple would be adding a button that you can press to enable your device to get malware, and that will confuse and harm lots of people. It's not obvious how to add an advanced button that the right people will press, and others won't. You can hide it, but it will get reported on websites that newbies see, with simple instructions. But that said, I'm sure there's a solution, and I hope Apple finds it. I think the development effort from Apple to enable stuff which would only be used by a fraction of the audience -- even done to Apple's high standards of polish -- is a secondary and more minor issue. Apple can afford it, and Apple knows that developers are worth the expense. However, in terms of development time rather than money (which aren't equivalent because finding, hiring, and training good programmers is hard), this has to be lower priority than enabling multiple programs to run at once and some other stuff, so maybe it'll be a while.

kwamenum86 17y ago

My favorite paragraph: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneDay.html#p6 http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneD...

CamperBob 17y ago
The thing that nobody seems to acknowledge is that iTunes really has gotten a lot better over the last year.
- Tichy 17y ago
  How so?
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    The Quicktime-based GUI has become a lot more responsive, even as they've added more features. That was my main complaint -- the idea that a 2D UI should bring a 3 GHz processor to its knees.
- nooneelse 17y ago
  At this point it should be called iHydra, given how many separate roles have been shoehorned into it.

jsz0 17y ago

I'm not quite sure why all these iPad articles are framed with the assumption you're going to use the iPad instead of something else. I've been working on a project in Logic most of the night on my Mac with the iPad sitting on my desk for browsing, music, and video. It's a fantastic setup. Nice break from keyboard & mousing. The display is stunning and multi-touch web browsing on this size screen is such a natural experience. Something about the portrait view is very compelling to me. I popped it over to landscape for a bit and some of the magic disappeared. I wonder if part of the appeal of the iPad is simply that it's the first mainstream computing device to use portrait orientation so effectively.

randrews 17y ago
They're framed with that assumption because of the other articles that call it "the future of computing". If something's the future of computing, it's supposed to supplant the present of computing, right?
- bombs 17y ago
  Why can't the future be something that augments instead of supplants?
  - pkulak 17y ago
    By definition?
    - swombat 17y ago
      Yes, because there totally aren't any sailboats around now that steamboats and motorboats got invented. And people definitely don't go and watch plays and operas live anymore now that they can do so in their living room with a TV. You need a better dictionary..
      - krainboltgreene 17y ago
        Sailboats are luxury items, dude. People aren't forced to use sailboats. In fact, instead of 100% of ships being sailboats, I'd gander only 5% or less are sailboats.

jamiequint 17y ago

Reminded me of this Chris Dixon article: "the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”" http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...

gloob 17y ago
I feel that it's important, from time to time, to remember that plenty of things that aren't the next big thing are also variously laughed at, ignored, dismissed, and so on. I'm not making any predictions about how the iPad will do (sitting and waiting will get me better information than pulling a guess out of the air), to make sure that's clear. Just reminding myself that it possible that perhaps Apple will produce a product that won't change the world.
- techiferous 17y ago
  "a product that won't change the world." Like MobileMe? :)
  - bmalicoat 17y ago
    I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe, only problem is the cost of course. In the same vein though Apple TV isn't a game changer, but it could become more relevant as time goes by.
    - techiferous 17y ago
      "I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe." I was an early adopter and got burned. It never worked for me. After fighting for hours with configuration and bad Apple support (which is uncharacteristic), I realized that the time it would potentially save me was being burned up in setting it up, so I abandoned it. In the end I ended up losing $99 and gaining nothing. I'm guessing from what you said that they've worked the kinks out now, though.

ErrantX 17y ago

It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. Hmm, I think he is possibly incorrect here. A lot of people do multi task; but my parents close every application when they start a new one. If they are sending emails they close Word - and vice versa. My gran did this, my brother used to do this till a few years ago, most of the people on my uni course (electrical engineering) who were not computery people tended to do this, all my friends generally do this as well. Indeed the only thing I have seen people traditionally leave on is music (which can be done on the iPad) and chat (which currently cannot).

ComputerGuru 17y ago

Would it be rude to say that I don't care what anyone has to say about the iPad after only a single day of use? It's not a new laptop, it's a new mobile device entirely. It'll take more than one day to really get the iPad, for better or for worse.

ovi256 17y ago
Yes, and no. Let me explain: if it would be a new laptop, the differences from existing laptops would be mostly subtle. A day may be too short to see them. With a device of a new class, you'll feel the differences right away. Being able to analyze and articulate them takes some time though, even if you do that for a living. This is why I dislike all this rash of articles about the iPad. They're all speculation, as the facts have not sunk in yet.