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This really surprised me. It's not that I didn't expect the IPad to be a success. I mean, it's a sexy piece of hardware. The mobile processors mean that we fin

This really surprised me. It's not that I didn't expect the IPad to be a success. I mean, it's a sexy piece of hardware. The mobile processors mean that we finally have enough firepower in this small of a case. However, hasn't anyone learned yet not to buy the first Apple implementation of anything? Next year will be a new IPad and it will have a camera, a faster processor, and who knows what else that will make everyone go, "I don't really have the money, and I have this one, but that's really cool! I wish I had waited."

lr 16y ago
As a friend of mine said when it was mentioned to him that the next generation would be even better, "I'll buy that one, too."
- markbao 16y ago
  Me too. Damnit, Apple. How do you do this.
  - discipline 16y ago
    Design, design, design. Oh, yeah, and marketing, too.
  - dflock 16y ago
    Perhaps you do it to yourself? I doesn't appear to happen to everyone ;)
ghshephard 16y ago
We're only on earth for a limited period of time. Waiting would have meant giving up the last two months of just a wonderful experience interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before. Plus, I get another 10 months of this before the next one is released. I look at it completely differently - In one year, my $800 iPad, which I've kept in pristine condition, will have a resale value of around $400. The question I need to ask myself is - Did I get $400 worth of value out of the iPad in a year. That's a no-brainer for me.
- fr0man 16y ago
  That good of an experience? I'm genuinely curious, how is it "interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before"? Is it not still just Safari Mobile? That's just a web browser. Without a keyboard. I love Safari mobile on my wife's iPhone, but I still prefer having a keyboard and spending half as much for a netbook that does everything the iPad does and more.
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    I'm a pessimist in general, about technology, and typically not a big fan of the Apple hype. I make it a point to never watch Steve Jobs hype his latest gadget and get people excited over some rudimentary (and painfully obvious) incremental new feature he's pasting onto his foundation. I think I'm the _only_ person in the office who refuses to carry his iPad into meetings with him - It's just not the right tool for a highly multi-tasking and textually intense environment. But, with all those caveats aside, there is just something strangely social and engaging with the iPad that I never really got from a Laptop. A few use cases: o Walking to Work/Dropping in to a restaurant for breakfast - I would never consider yanking out a laptop to read a newspaper, and the iPhone just never really worked for me in that medium - so I would typically drop some change into the Newspaper Box and read/discard a mound of paper. Now - every morning, I walk to work reading the WSJ, or, if I'm waiting for a friend to show up for breakfast, I can pop it out and get caught up. o At a restaurant, or Movie Theater, we have a 10-15 minutes - I frequently spend time flipping through photos of events, sharing face book pages, etc.. I guarantee you I never have (and never will) do that with a laptop. And there is something about sharing pictures on a 9" screen that makes is viscerally different from doing so on a iPhone. It's small enough that I always carry it with me, but large enough that reading on it doesn't feel awkward. I'm a luddite, in that I don't like change, and I have zero intention in replacing my laptop use with an iPad, but, I have zero doubt that having some time of slate/tablet (whether it be Apple, Android, WEBOS) will be a permanent part of my life going forward. And yes, future versions will be much better. I would _kill_ for a stylus capable device - and not the crappy capacitance low-resolution stylus that I use with my iPad, but something that I can actually draw, and take notes with. Do you know how silly I feel about taking out pens and napkins to sketch out a drawing while carrying an iPad equipped with SketchBook Pro? Syncing is still too slow - USB 3 or some other gigabit+ sync would be much appreciated. And, for low-volume syncs, over-the-air syncing would be nice. It's early, it will get better, but it's definitely here to stay. And it's definitely made my life better. Increased the quality of social interaction. Allows me to dynamically share memories and experiences in a richer, more meaningful form.
hop 16y ago
Its only $499 and you can easily sell it on ebay for most of its value if you don't want it. At least that was my thought process when getting one.
alextgordon 16y ago
There's always a rev N+1. Holding off buying hardware at the start of a cycle because of what could come next year is a recipe for never buying anything.
- jacabado 16y ago
  It's interesting to see all the replies, they show the interest on the iPad, but to be fair with the parent he said the first generation. I'm with him, as I am with the rest of you. I bought a first generation Macbook: battery problems who led to hard drive problem (tic tic tic no more hard drive) and fan noise problems. The worst of all? Dealing with Apple support. Horrible here in Portugal, paying premium for subpar service really gets you angry. Am I buying an iPad? Yes, but I will at least check for problems with the batch I'll be buying. It's not expectable to see the regular consumer having this behavior but you should.
- teilo 16y ago
  If that were the only parameter in the argument, that would be true. However, there are two things, in this case, that make the OP's point valid: First, N=1. This is, for all practical purposes, a Gen 1 device. There really will be a significant improvement in Gen 2, annoyances removed, etc. I learned this the hard way with the G1, a phone I could not honestly recommend anyone buy. But I would council anyone to buy a Nexus One now, even though there will be something better later. Second - By the time Gen 2 comes around, the apps will exist to make this device ever so much more usable and useful than it is today. Again, this is an N=1 problem that does not apply to N+1 where N>1.
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    So, to some degree, we're actually at N=3 or 4, with the iPhone 3,3G, 3GS and various incarnations of the iPod Touch being where Apple finessed many of their elements like copy/paste. Also, the mature application development environment, and the 150,000+ Applications would not be what you'd typically find on a Generation 1 device. What's ironic is that for the longest time, the major hit against Apple was that it didn't put much effort into providing backward compatibility with it's platform, unlike, say, Microsoft that would let you run your DOS Application in an operating system built 30 years later. Now, the tables have turned, and almost all of your original iPhone applications run just fine on your iPad. It actually drives me crazy how friends of mine ignore the newer iPad apps so they can play the old school iPhone games that I transferred from my iPhone.
rauljara 16y ago
This argument could eternally be applied to computers. Why buy now? In just 18 short months, there will be one that is twice as fast. Are the 18 short months up? If you waited just 18 more, you'd get doubly as fast again!
jwr 16y ago
And the year after that, there will be an even better iPad, with more bells, doodads and whistles, and thingamajigs, too. With that approach, you end up waiting forever.
- zandorg 16y ago
  I say "When the CPU is 10x faster and it costs less than $150, then I buy". Not putting it off forever, just skipping a couple of early generations.
  - tl 16y ago
    So you're going to wait 5 iterations of Moore's law, or 6.5 years? (8x speed and 1/4 price)
    - chollida1 16y ago
      I don't think that's so weird or different. Laptops came out in the 80's and started becoming practical in the mid 90s and I dind't get one until until 2000. That's longer than 6.5 years.
CamperBob 16y ago
However, hasn't anyone learned yet not to buy the first Apple implementation of anything? I don't know what you're talking about. I bought the first iPhone model, and while it was a deeply flawed device in several ways, the overall ownership experience was amazing. Besides being the most solid example of "1.0" hardware I'd purchased in a long time, it just kept getting better after the sale, with various new features and performance improvements coming out every few weeks. Almost every complaint I had, from stability to the lack of an SDK, was eventually remedied. Apple seemed to be committed to the overall ownership experience to an extent that was unlike any other hardware vendor I'd ever dealt with. It was only much later that they started removing features, enforcing absurd contract terms, micromanaging the scope of the user's experience, and generally acting like a company run by Mormons and led by Tipper Gore. I'd say the early iPhone ownership experience was a solid 9/10 on the warm-fuzziness scale, and now it's a 4 at best. For its part, the first-gen iPad contains no revolutionary or untried technologies that weren't already shipped in the iPhone, and its only real problem is inadequate WiFi reception. There have been some complaints about the iPad's charger damaging iPhones as well. Other than that, the iPad delivers exactly what it says on the box. It doesn't really need a faster processor, but I imagine a lot of people will find a front-facing camera useful.

lr 16y ago

As a friend of mine said when it was mentioned to him that the next generation would be even better, "I'll buy that one, too."

markbao 16y ago
Me too. Damnit, Apple. How do you do this.
- discipline 16y ago
  Design, design, design. Oh, yeah, and marketing, too.
- dflock 16y ago
  Perhaps you do it to yourself? I doesn't appear to happen to everyone ;)

ghshephard 16y ago

We're only on earth for a limited period of time. Waiting would have meant giving up the last two months of just a wonderful experience interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before. Plus, I get another 10 months of this before the next one is released. I look at it completely differently - In one year, my $800 iPad, which I've kept in pristine condition, will have a resale value of around $400. The question I need to ask myself is - Did I get $400 worth of value out of the iPad in a year. That's a no-brainer for me.

fr0man 16y ago
That good of an experience? I'm genuinely curious, how is it "interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before"? Is it not still just Safari Mobile? That's just a web browser. Without a keyboard. I love Safari mobile on my wife's iPhone, but I still prefer having a keyboard and spending half as much for a netbook that does everything the iPad does and more.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  I'm a pessimist in general, about technology, and typically not a big fan of the Apple hype. I make it a point to never watch Steve Jobs hype his latest gadget and get people excited over some rudimentary (and painfully obvious) incremental new feature he's pasting onto his foundation. I think I'm the _only_ person in the office who refuses to carry his iPad into meetings with him - It's just not the right tool for a highly multi-tasking and textually intense environment. But, with all those caveats aside, there is just something strangely social and engaging with the iPad that I never really got from a Laptop. A few use cases: o Walking to Work/Dropping in to a restaurant for breakfast - I would never consider yanking out a laptop to read a newspaper, and the iPhone just never really worked for me in that medium - so I would typically drop some change into the Newspaper Box and read/discard a mound of paper. Now - every morning, I walk to work reading the WSJ, or, if I'm waiting for a friend to show up for breakfast, I can pop it out and get caught up. o At a restaurant, or Movie Theater, we have a 10-15 minutes - I frequently spend time flipping through photos of events, sharing face book pages, etc.. I guarantee you I never have (and never will) do that with a laptop. And there is something about sharing pictures on a 9" screen that makes is viscerally different from doing so on a iPhone. It's small enough that I always carry it with me, but large enough that reading on it doesn't feel awkward. I'm a luddite, in that I don't like change, and I have zero intention in replacing my laptop use with an iPad, but, I have zero doubt that having some time of slate/tablet (whether it be Apple, Android, WEBOS) will be a permanent part of my life going forward. And yes, future versions will be much better. I would _kill_ for a stylus capable device - and not the crappy capacitance low-resolution stylus that I use with my iPad, but something that I can actually draw, and take notes with. Do you know how silly I feel about taking out pens and napkins to sketch out a drawing while carrying an iPad equipped with SketchBook Pro? Syncing is still too slow - USB 3 or some other gigabit+ sync would be much appreciated. And, for low-volume syncs, over-the-air syncing would be nice. It's early, it will get better, but it's definitely here to stay. And it's definitely made my life better. Increased the quality of social interaction. Allows me to dynamically share memories and experiences in a richer, more meaningful form.

hop 16y ago

Its only $499 and you can easily sell it on ebay for most of its value if you don't want it. At least that was my thought process when getting one.

alextgordon 16y ago

There's always a rev N+1. Holding off buying hardware at the start of a cycle because of what could come next year is a recipe for never buying anything.

jacabado 16y ago
It's interesting to see all the replies, they show the interest on the iPad, but to be fair with the parent he said the first generation. I'm with him, as I am with the rest of you. I bought a first generation Macbook: battery problems who led to hard drive problem (tic tic tic no more hard drive) and fan noise problems. The worst of all? Dealing with Apple support. Horrible here in Portugal, paying premium for subpar service really gets you angry. Am I buying an iPad? Yes, but I will at least check for problems with the batch I'll be buying. It's not expectable to see the regular consumer having this behavior but you should.
teilo 16y ago
If that were the only parameter in the argument, that would be true. However, there are two things, in this case, that make the OP's point valid: First, N=1. This is, for all practical purposes, a Gen 1 device. There really will be a significant improvement in Gen 2, annoyances removed, etc. I learned this the hard way with the G1, a phone I could not honestly recommend anyone buy. But I would council anyone to buy a Nexus One now, even though there will be something better later. Second - By the time Gen 2 comes around, the apps will exist to make this device ever so much more usable and useful than it is today. Again, this is an N=1 problem that does not apply to N+1 where N>1.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  So, to some degree, we're actually at N=3 or 4, with the iPhone 3,3G, 3GS and various incarnations of the iPod Touch being where Apple finessed many of their elements like copy/paste. Also, the mature application development environment, and the 150,000+ Applications would not be what you'd typically find on a Generation 1 device. What's ironic is that for the longest time, the major hit against Apple was that it didn't put much effort into providing backward compatibility with it's platform, unlike, say, Microsoft that would let you run your DOS Application in an operating system built 30 years later. Now, the tables have turned, and almost all of your original iPhone applications run just fine on your iPad. It actually drives me crazy how friends of mine ignore the newer iPad apps so they can play the old school iPhone games that I transferred from my iPhone.

rauljara 16y ago

This argument could eternally be applied to computers. Why buy now? In just 18 short months, there will be one that is twice as fast. Are the 18 short months up? If you waited just 18 more, you'd get doubly as fast again!

jwr 16y ago

And the year after that, there will be an even better iPad, with more bells, doodads and whistles, and thingamajigs, too. With that approach, you end up waiting forever.

zandorg 16y ago
I say "When the CPU is 10x faster and it costs less than $150, then I buy". Not putting it off forever, just skipping a couple of early generations.
- tl 16y ago
  So you're going to wait 5 iterations of Moore's law, or 6.5 years? (8x speed and 1/4 price)
  - chollida1 16y ago
    I don't think that's so weird or different. Laptops came out in the 80's and started becoming practical in the mid 90s and I dind't get one until until 2000. That's longer than 6.5 years.

CamperBob 16y ago

However, hasn't anyone learned yet not to buy the first Apple implementation of anything? I don't know what you're talking about. I bought the first iPhone model, and while it was a deeply flawed device in several ways, the overall ownership experience was amazing. Besides being the most solid example of "1.0" hardware I'd purchased in a long time, it just kept getting better after the sale, with various new features and performance improvements coming out every few weeks. Almost every complaint I had, from stability to the lack of an SDK, was eventually remedied. Apple seemed to be committed to the overall ownership experience to an extent that was unlike any other hardware vendor I'd ever dealt with. It was only much later that they started removing features, enforcing absurd contract terms, micromanaging the scope of the user's experience, and generally acting like a company run by Mormons and led by Tipper Gore. I'd say the early iPhone ownership experience was a solid 9/10 on the warm-fuzziness scale, and now it's a 4 at best. For its part, the first-gen iPad contains no revolutionary or untried technologies that weren't already shipped in the iPhone, and its only real problem is inadequate WiFi reception. There have been some complaints about the iPad's charger damaging iPhones as well. Other than that, the iPad delivers exactly what it says on the box. It doesn't really need a faster processor, but I imagine a lot of people will find a front-facing camera useful.