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<grouch>An announcement that the announcement is next week is of interest to hackers without being even remotely something that gratifies one's intellectual cur

<grouch>An announcement that the announcement is next week is of interest to hackers without being even remotely something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.</grounch> That being said... No doubt 99% of the comments will be repeating the same speculation, leaks, and purported confirmations going around for the last month. I’m interested in the remaining 1%: How will this “change everything?” What markets could this disrupt? What (if any) new kinds of software would a retina display (for example) make possible that were non-starters on an iPad 2?

hullo 15y ago
I imagine Siri will make the cut - to the extent that the iPad is a home computer replacement device, having intelligent voice control on your principle computer is indeed a paradigm shift for the mass market.
- samstave 15y ago
  Totally - Wait till we have a wifi device that we can attach to things (ala X10) that will accept commands from Siri. "Siri, turn on the bedroom lights" "Siri, set the oven to 400 degrees" "Siri, put on HBO at 9:30pm tonight" "Siri, set the temp to 70 degrees" THIS is what I want. Shit - who on HN wants to work on this?
  - Arelius 15y ago
    The moment that Apple releases a decent Siri API is the moment I hack something to work with my existing X10 system.
danilocampos 15y ago
> <grouch>An announcement that the announcement is next week is of interest to hackers without being even remotely something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.</grounch> I expect so much better from you, sir raganwald. This is a reply to you but it's addressed to HN's growing number of pedantic, obnoxious content police at large. At the time of this posting, 38 people disagree with your assessment. You've got the flag tool to register your opinion. What is contributed to the discussion by griping about content the community obviously believes is worthy of the front page? Who benefits from this? From a completely practical perspective, this particular post is useful because it suggests very strongly that the Retina display rumors are true. For those who are building content for iOS, the head-start on getting iPad Retina graphics ready is likely much appreciated. (It certainly is by me.)
- raganwald 15y ago
  For those who are building content for iOS, the head-start on getting iPad Retina graphics ready is likely much appreciated. (It certainly is by me.) That was precisely what I was looking for. As you can see from my comment, after grouching, I got down to business and appealed for something interesting in the way of commentary. As a general rule, if you can read it in the general media, it doesn’t belong here. If you can read the post in the general media but the comments here have a unique perspective, that’s a worthy exception. If you can read it in the general media and the comments here are indistinguishable from comments everywhere else, I would absolutely flag the post. My comment was intended to inspire us to avoid the trap of rehashing the same things that have already whizzed through the blogosphere and twitterverse 42 times in quick succession.
  - sambeau 15y ago
    While the announcement may not belong here the interesting, informed discussion that will hopefully accompany it surely does. I certainly have nowhere else to discuss this announcement sensibly and in depth.
    - wmf 15y ago
      It would be a lot easier to discuss the announcement after the announcement.
      - sambeau 15y ago
        Indeed, although I was referring to the announcement of the announcement. Is there anything wrong with a little speculation beforehand? While not exactly 'science' this kind of discussion does allow us to test our prediction skills, debate our understanding of our industry, exchange ideas on related topics and come up with interesting (and sometimes inspiring) insight about where our industry is going. After all, the iPad 3 has the potential to effect (in both positive and negative ways) every startup associated to HN.
flyt 15y ago
Apple is the most valuable company in the entire US economy, sets hardware and software trends for our industry, and is interesting to the broader news media for their brand value and widespread products people use every day. Everything they do is relevant in some way, and there's nothing wrong with covering them in a one-line story on a software discussion site like this.
- 6ren 15y ago
  It's "industry news" rather than something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Although "News" is in its name, I think HN would be far more interesting without it. News includes industry gossip - and HN has more and more of that. And pg's guidelines don't actually mention news. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Certainly, the iPad 3 is covered on TV news. Don't get me wrong: I'm interested in it, but I can get this news everywhere. e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/apple http://www.reddit.com/r/apple
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
From a consumer point it won't change anything except that a bunch of people will throw their money at Apple just to satisfy their latest consumer fix. The Apple evangelists will hallelujah for a few weeks about the retina display or whatever the new life-changing feature is. A more pertinent discussion is on how Apple manages to whip up the media into a frenzy before each one of these iterative product launches that if coming from any other company would be an absolute snooze-fest. They certainly perfected the art of conjuring up some sexy behind normally nerdy events.
- glenra 15y ago
  Apple gets attention for their events mainly by not squandering their goodwill - they don't have an event unless there's something significant (and of visual interest) to show. When they have such an event the pitch has been polished to perfection; they always have a coherent story to tell, something to demo that will ship soon, and a few interesting surprises. And they don't waste anybody's time on platitudes. If Apple ever got in the habit of giving demos that weren't legitimately newsworthy, they'd stop getting news coverage.
  - mladenkovacevic 15y ago
    Fair point, their announcements are like clockwork and always involve a major product release. But at the end of the day isn't it just another gadget? Smartphones and tablets have been mainstream for a few years now and can you honestly say that our lives are so drastically different/better in any meaningful way? They do have a large amount of goodwill coming from their customer but they don't create that goodwill by building anything significantly different from all the other hardware manufacturers. They do it by packaging it very nicely and making the keynotes into events that are very consumable by the media as well as Joe Shmoe the consumer. It certainly doesn't hurt that these events don't have to appeal to h/w distributors at all since Apple has all the distribution channels by the balls way before their products are even announced.
anigbrowl 15y ago
How will this “change everything?” What markets could this disrupt? Not change so much, but if 'touch' refers to some sort of localized haptic feedback mechanism (eg you can close your eyes and feel the position of individual icons/controls as if the screen were slightly bumpy) then it will cement the iPad's dominance as a musical performance tool. Imagine, for example, being able to strum a virtual guitar and feel approximately where the strings are, rather than receiving different messages from your fingers and your eyes. It doesn't have to be perfect, just suggestive and consistent, which will provide enough novelty to keep people busy until the iPad 4 appears :-) I have a strong hunch that that Apple has stolen a march on the competition here. When I first picked up an iPad, one thing I looked at was some sort of space shooter game (Galaxy on Fire or something). I played for 2 or 3 minutes, and was impressed by both the graphics and the vibration every time my ship took a hit, like the controller for a videogame console. Later I got an Android Honeycomb tablet, and one day I noticed the same game was available, so I installed it. Everything was fine, except that there was no vibration. It seems that since large tablets are not phones, few, if any, manufacturers saw a need to include a vibration feature and so Apple has had several years to develop both the technology and a coherent set of UI conventions to employ it. I know virtually nothing about haptic technology, but I have a guess about how it might work. Imagine two vibrating motors at right angles to each other, whose periods are fixed and proportional to the ratio of the device's width:height. Now imagine a second motor for each of the pair, which vibrates at up to double the speed of the first; by varying the speed of the second motor in each of 2 dimensions, interference patterns are created in similar fashion to the beating that occurs between two sine waves of different frequencies. Where the periods of sinusoidal sound waves stand in neat integer relationships to each other, you get the familiar notes of the musical scale (warning: drastic oversimplification of musical tuning theory). I speculate that people are so intuitively used to this - sound being just a more sensitive version of touch - that it may allow a tactile illusion of up to 12 identifiable 'zones' in each screen dimension, resulting in a grid of up to 144 'touxels'. If I turn out to be more than half-right about this, then I feel it ought to be worth some sort of nominally compensated blue-sky consulting gig :-) EDIT: of course you could go on and on with the other applications. A lightweight keyboard for blind people, new models of games interaction, interactive multidimensional graphing/modelling tools where constraints are proxied by 'resistance' and so on.
6ren 15y ago
textbooks - this was a flaw in the kindle for technical books, and Apple has a textbook business in place consoles - although we might need to wait for the next generation for matching GPU power

hullo 15y ago

I imagine Siri will make the cut - to the extent that the iPad is a home computer replacement device, having intelligent voice control on your principle computer is indeed a paradigm shift for the mass market.

samstave 15y ago
Totally - Wait till we have a wifi device that we can attach to things (ala X10) that will accept commands from Siri. "Siri, turn on the bedroom lights" "Siri, set the oven to 400 degrees" "Siri, put on HBO at 9:30pm tonight" "Siri, set the temp to 70 degrees" THIS is what I want. Shit - who on HN wants to work on this?
- Arelius 15y ago
  The moment that Apple releases a decent Siri API is the moment I hack something to work with my existing X10 system.

danilocampos 15y ago

> <grouch>An announcement that the announcement is next week is of interest to hackers without being even remotely something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.</grounch> I expect so much better from you, sir raganwald. This is a reply to you but it's addressed to HN's growing number of pedantic, obnoxious content police at large. At the time of this posting, 38 people disagree with your assessment. You've got the flag tool to register your opinion. What is contributed to the discussion by griping about content the community obviously believes is worthy of the front page? Who benefits from this? From a completely practical perspective, this particular post is useful because it suggests very strongly that the Retina display rumors are true. For those who are building content for iOS, the head-start on getting iPad Retina graphics ready is likely much appreciated. (It certainly is by me.)

raganwald 15y ago
For those who are building content for iOS, the head-start on getting iPad Retina graphics ready is likely much appreciated. (It certainly is by me.) That was precisely what I was looking for. As you can see from my comment, after grouching, I got down to business and appealed for something interesting in the way of commentary. As a general rule, if you can read it in the general media, it doesn’t belong here. If you can read the post in the general media but the comments here have a unique perspective, that’s a worthy exception. If you can read it in the general media and the comments here are indistinguishable from comments everywhere else, I would absolutely flag the post. My comment was intended to inspire us to avoid the trap of rehashing the same things that have already whizzed through the blogosphere and twitterverse 42 times in quick succession.
- sambeau 15y ago
  While the announcement may not belong here the interesting, informed discussion that will hopefully accompany it surely does. I certainly have nowhere else to discuss this announcement sensibly and in depth.
  - wmf 15y ago
    It would be a lot easier to discuss the announcement after the announcement.
    - sambeau 15y ago
      Indeed, although I was referring to the announcement of the announcement. Is there anything wrong with a little speculation beforehand? While not exactly 'science' this kind of discussion does allow us to test our prediction skills, debate our understanding of our industry, exchange ideas on related topics and come up with interesting (and sometimes inspiring) insight about where our industry is going. After all, the iPad 3 has the potential to effect (in both positive and negative ways) every startup associated to HN.

flyt 15y ago

Apple is the most valuable company in the entire US economy, sets hardware and software trends for our industry, and is interesting to the broader news media for their brand value and widespread products people use every day. Everything they do is relevant in some way, and there's nothing wrong with covering them in a one-line story on a software discussion site like this.

6ren 15y ago
It's "industry news" rather than something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Although "News" is in its name, I think HN would be far more interesting without it. News includes industry gossip - and HN has more and more of that. And pg's guidelines don't actually mention news. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Certainly, the iPad 3 is covered on TV news. Don't get me wrong: I'm interested in it, but I can get this news everywhere. e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/apple http://www.reddit.com/r/apple

mladenkovacevic 15y ago

From a consumer point it won't change anything except that a bunch of people will throw their money at Apple just to satisfy their latest consumer fix. The Apple evangelists will hallelujah for a few weeks about the retina display or whatever the new life-changing feature is. A more pertinent discussion is on how Apple manages to whip up the media into a frenzy before each one of these iterative product launches that if coming from any other company would be an absolute snooze-fest. They certainly perfected the art of conjuring up some sexy behind normally nerdy events.

glenra 15y ago
Apple gets attention for their events mainly by not squandering their goodwill - they don't have an event unless there's something significant (and of visual interest) to show. When they have such an event the pitch has been polished to perfection; they always have a coherent story to tell, something to demo that will ship soon, and a few interesting surprises. And they don't waste anybody's time on platitudes. If Apple ever got in the habit of giving demos that weren't legitimately newsworthy, they'd stop getting news coverage.
- mladenkovacevic 15y ago
  Fair point, their announcements are like clockwork and always involve a major product release. But at the end of the day isn't it just another gadget? Smartphones and tablets have been mainstream for a few years now and can you honestly say that our lives are so drastically different/better in any meaningful way? They do have a large amount of goodwill coming from their customer but they don't create that goodwill by building anything significantly different from all the other hardware manufacturers. They do it by packaging it very nicely and making the keynotes into events that are very consumable by the media as well as Joe Shmoe the consumer. It certainly doesn't hurt that these events don't have to appeal to h/w distributors at all since Apple has all the distribution channels by the balls way before their products are even announced.

anigbrowl 15y ago

How will this “change everything?” What markets could this disrupt? Not change so much, but if 'touch' refers to some sort of localized haptic feedback mechanism (eg you can close your eyes and feel the position of individual icons/controls as if the screen were slightly bumpy) then it will cement the iPad's dominance as a musical performance tool. Imagine, for example, being able to strum a virtual guitar and feel approximately where the strings are, rather than receiving different messages from your fingers and your eyes. It doesn't have to be perfect, just suggestive and consistent, which will provide enough novelty to keep people busy until the iPad 4 appears :-) I have a strong hunch that that Apple has stolen a march on the competition here. When I first picked up an iPad, one thing I looked at was some sort of space shooter game (Galaxy on Fire or something). I played for 2 or 3 minutes, and was impressed by both the graphics and the vibration every time my ship took a hit, like the controller for a videogame console. Later I got an Android Honeycomb tablet, and one day I noticed the same game was available, so I installed it. Everything was fine, except that there was no vibration. It seems that since large tablets are not phones, few, if any, manufacturers saw a need to include a vibration feature and so Apple has had several years to develop both the technology and a coherent set of UI conventions to employ it. I know virtually nothing about haptic technology, but I have a guess about how it might work. Imagine two vibrating motors at right angles to each other, whose periods are fixed and proportional to the ratio of the device's width:height. Now imagine a second motor for each of the pair, which vibrates at up to double the speed of the first; by varying the speed of the second motor in each of 2 dimensions, interference patterns are created in similar fashion to the beating that occurs between two sine waves of different frequencies. Where the periods of sinusoidal sound waves stand in neat integer relationships to each other, you get the familiar notes of the musical scale (warning: drastic oversimplification of musical tuning theory). I speculate that people are so intuitively used to this - sound being just a more sensitive version of touch - that it may allow a tactile illusion of up to 12 identifiable 'zones' in each screen dimension, resulting in a grid of up to 144 'touxels'. If I turn out to be more than half-right about this, then I feel it ought to be worth some sort of nominally compensated blue-sky consulting gig :-) EDIT: of course you could go on and on with the other applications. A lightweight keyboard for blind people, new models of games interaction, interactive multidimensional graphing/modelling tools where constraints are proxied by 'resistance' and so on.

6ren 15y ago

textbooks - this was a flaw in the kindle for technical books, and Apple has a textbook business in place consoles - although we might need to wait for the next generation for matching GPU power