The Apple iPad
 

So, another Apple press event has come and gone, and left us with a thing that supposed to change everything we know about computing, for the last time, again.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Yes, the iPad is supposed to change our lives, because it has an Apple logo on it, and it's shiny.

But as I was looking this thing over, an odd thought worked it's way into my head, slowly taking over my thought processes, in that way that Apple is famous for. "Self," I said, "Wouldn't this be great if NI came up with a Labview app?"

Think about it, multi touch programming, dragging icons around and spawning menus with a couple taps. Zooming in minority report style to detangle the wires, then tapping out to see the big picture. Tapping into the VGA port to dual monitor, throwing up a sub vi or a front panel, and swapping out with a virtual button. And all that screen real estate and processing power that the iPhone/iPod Touch cannot offer. Guys, this could be big.

Re: The Apple iPad
 

Just needs more cpu oomph :)

(a usb hole would be helpful too)

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Meh.

Sure, as per apples usual, it looks great.

However, this time they don't even really attempt to call it revolutionary. It is an overgrown iPod touch.

I could go way more into this, but wont. I would much rather have a kindle (10oz, will last for 1-2 weeks) over an iPad (1.5lbs, 10hrs max) anyday, and would much rather use a laptop for everything else. That way Im not limited to what apps can provide, amongst other advantages.

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Eh, I'm sure Texas Instruments would release a dock connector adapter to interface with supported hardware.

I still like the idea of an iPad, I wish it was more native towards OS X rather then a slightly extended iPhone firmware. I'm quite disappointed but if I'm in the market for a netbook like device the iPad would be in the top part of the list.

I think the true revolution of this device will be it's 2nd gen model after Apple has observed the impacts on peoples lives with this device (hey remember back to iPhone 3G?).

Last but not least - "iPad" - seriously Apple? I was hoping the name wouldn't be any of the rumoured choices.

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I am writing this post on the second gen iPad. It fits in my pocket, has pretty much every feature, plus a camera and phone too! And it's only $200! (It's an iPhone...)

I think iPhones and iPads alike would be useful for scouting, if I had infinite money. The phone in particular is a scouting machine; camera for photos or video, text input for comments, multi touch for stat tracking, wireless support...

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I like the time travel feature

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So like this one?

I like the idea of the product, but I'm not a huge fan of the name - not a factor to me, though - and I think that Apple seriously overlooked a few things. The next generations will probably be more worth it (and I'll have more time to save money for it!). To quote Gizmodo...

"Are you saying I can't listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can't have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can't have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me?"

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what about the flux capacitor? :D

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That only $200 iPhone comes with a hefty monthly fee for two years, the 4 iPhone family plan we just signed comes out to over $6,000 for the next two years.

As for wireless (802.11) scouting, don't forget that you are not allowed to use them at events.

Wetzel

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Yeah, I know. As a previous iPod owner, I am a little annoyed not at the fact that it's a big iPod Touch, but that they marketed it as a revolution. This may be the rumor mill and the reality distortion field interfering with each other, but I think that's a bit too derivative of the iPod Touch to be considered "revolutionary". And yeah, it has a market, even outside the Apple heads, but iPhones have been around for 3 generations, and there have been tablets since more or less the dawn of mobile computing. Granted, I'm sure the iPad will be Apple's darling, and "just work" to Jobs' specifications, but Apple, don't resell your stuff in family size just to squeeze in more adjectives. Actively make me want a tablet, give me a killer app. Something I specifically need a big screen for, and cannot accept substitutions on.

And what really gets me is that the really cool stuff, iWork, the keyboard dock, SD input, VGA output, and the a la carte 3G, are all things they could have easily put out for the iPhone form factor, but didn't/wont/"will, but not just yet" specifically to sell us their new revolution of the month flavor. These are not things specific to a tablet, do not make them specific to your tablet.

And when Apple does invents time travel, it would come with an upload of Steve's brain to work out the paradoxes for you.

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I'm discrediting Gizmodo here simply because Pandora is vastly inferior to last.fm in pretty much every way. :p

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*spits on something leaving a stock sound effect* Them be fightin' words around these parts here.

Plus Firefox scrobblers are a dime a dozen, so it's no big deal either way.

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I think I'll just stick with my HP Pavillion tx 2500 tablet PC thank you.

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I was specifically referring the quality of both of their internet radio services. Once you couple the scrobbling and profile capabilities with that, it makes my point even more true.

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iPad? <yawn>

Call me in a couple years.

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Anybody else realize that their share price went down $8.59 since the release of the iPad? Ouch.

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I actually like Pandora a lot better. It actually stays in the general genre that I start with, instead of starting me with Lily Allen and ending up with something like Ke$ha.

(and still...I believe that last.fm wouldn't run at the same time as anything else, either :P)

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I wish Pandora was allowed in Canadia, darn music industry with their DMCA and DRM and a whole bunch of other acronyms.

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Does Grooveshark work in Canada?

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Apparently! Thanks, it looks great!

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With Pandora you end up getting large amounts of repeats, Last.fm is better for us adventurous types.

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What's amazing to me is that Apple's practically trying to brainwash everyone into thinking it's the best piece of crap they've ever put out. Quote from the iPad front page: "...best experience on the web .... hands down".

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That's what most PR and advertising departments try to do. Apple is just a bit more... extreme.

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All right, does Archos or someone else have any Android-based tablets coming out in the future, cause a lot of manufacturers working with an open-source developing platform has to lead to a good thing at some point.

That and the Reality Distortion Field is starting to sink in, and I require the power of software-libre to fight it.

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I hope they sell a billion of them - Of course I am biased by having bought a small (literally) dollop of Apple stock back in the 90s - Investing when you are young is a good thing - Buying and holding (of good companies) is a good thing.

OK - Now back to alternately demonizing and adoring this shiny new non-phone, non-computer, gizmo and its imagined successors. :)

Blake

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What are you using to base your radio? Artists? Tags? I find Pandora's radio to be far less accurate and varied, and not to take into consideration when an artist changes their style over the length of their career (and thus smack a track of hip-hop Beastie Boys in a punk station simply because they used to play punk).


More on topic, here's a review of the original Apple iPod in 2001. Maybe we might just need to wait and see with the iPad.

http://news.cnet.com/Apples-iPod-spu..._3-274821.html

I won't be an early adopter. I don't even have a smartphone, let alone an iPhone. I don't have a netbook. I'm not their target market. But give it a couple years to mature and maybe I'll be interested.

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To put it simply, Last.fm said I would enjoy Jet, and The Killers. Kind of a deal breaker there.

That's an important point. The third generation iPod is the one that really started to catch on, though part of that was due to the previous model's Mac-only limitation. I think people are too used to iPhone-style launches.

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What sold iPod though, ultimately, was iTunes. The iPod was a nice piece on engineering, but once iTunes came out of the Mac only club, and had every song ever for $.99 that only worked with the iPod, it suddenly got wheels.

iPad, however, doesn't have an exclusive store and function to use with it. It is banking on the fact people want a big, internet tablet, and that Apple can throw enough momentum behind it to make it appealing to it. It has music, but you can get that anywhere cheap. Movies/TV, same. Apps? There's an iPod for that, has been. Apple is selling this device on a feeling, plain and simple, and hoping it will stick to the wall.

Plus Firewire? Really?

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I highly doubt that the iTunes Store is the source of the iPod's success, considering that there are large numbers of people who steal music or would prefer CDs. It certainly helped, though.

Hey, I liked FireWire! D:

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While I agree that the iTunes store is not the sole source of the iPod's popularity (and also like Firewire), I do think it was a very important factor. iTunes is now the largest place for music sales in America (if not the world) and represents a very large chunk of how mainstream America gets their music. While younger and more tech-saavy groups turn to other means on the internet, and some still holdout to various physical formats (I have a rapidly growing record collection), iTunes has offered a very large, easy-to-use market for millions of people.

That being said, the iPad will have an extensive market that will only be available to Apple products (the app store). And many apps will become iPad exclusives and/or have more functionality on the iPad than they do on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple isn't trying to win over the netbook user, they're trying to win over the user that has never really thought about the netbook. And the app store is going to give them the advantage over the countless competitors that are also on the horizon (Android-based tablets [including the Dell mini], HP Slate, and eventually the ChromeOS).

The fact that Apple is far from the only company investing heavily in this type of device shows something. These guys all see the potential in this market, and the likelyhood of this market exploding. All of these devices will likely have their early stumbled, including the iPad, but give it a couple years and see what happens. And who knows, maybe Apple is working on another game changer like the iTunes store.

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Still can't buy Let It Be, Back in the U.S.S.R., With A Little Help From My Friends or the rest of the entire Beatles discography.

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iTunes still regularly crashes on Windows. It's such a pain that it's the ONLY way to put music on an iPhone. Had I even thought about that before I bought it, I'm not so sure I would have purchased it.

I think a Slashdot user said it best:

"If you get an iAnything, it will be like life in a beautiful flower garden: a walled-in, no-way-to-get-out thorny garden. All aboard the DRM failboat!"

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To be fair you can't seem to buy any digital copy of The Beatles anywhere...-_-

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iTunes hasn't crashed for me in awhile... and they don't sell DRM locked music anymore.

iTunes isn't _that bad_ unless you like FLACs.

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Really? I'm a recent Window's user (I got my first PC in 7 years this past August) and iTunes has yet to crash on me. It did crash occasionally (every few months) on my Powerbook, but I haven't had any problem with it on Windows.

(now watch it crash shortly after I submit this post :rolleyes:)

Oh, and the iTunes/iPod/iPad/iPhone/iTouch/etc. has been a consistent pain in the butt for me since my iPod magically got bent in half. I now listen to music from my enV Touch, but I have old iTunes DRMed music that I'm too lazy to CD-RW over into DRM free mp3s. :o

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iTunes is bloatware on Windows, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. (Need verification on the Mac end of things) Useful bloatware, mind, but bloatware nonetheless. And the day that the Desktop is entirely cut out of the transfer equation is the day I will become "happy soul."

Now, does anyone think that the SDK will be able to expand on that Camera Connecting USB port? Or anyone working outside the SDK kit, for that matter?

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My wife gave me her old ipod, so I kind of need itunes. I finally set up an extra internal hard drive that I can plug in to my computer to run a separate windows XP installation with itunes installed on it.

that way I don't have to have that apple stuff on my real hard drive.

I don't bother putting the cover on my computer case, I play wiht the insides too often.

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Look, I will say this to the iPad. I work there and ever since this baby has come out, I have been thinking of ways to make apps and connectors for our robot, our scouting program and even just stuff around the season. It is ridiculous for what it can do. I say by next season, 247 will be having one to show everything we need for our team and just to keep up with scouting.
If anyone was in the MI regional's or in the Curie division, there was a lime green laptop with the scouting program I made on it. I would love to down grade to an iPad. I am in the works of one for the iPhone. But this iPad, just made every scouters dreams come true.

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I normally start with an artist. While I do agree that Pandora isn't as varied, it's only that way if you don't "add variety" to the stations and "like" every song that comes off. If you don't do that, it starts changing things up a lot. Also very handy for Christmas music [:

iTunes crashes a lot for me, but I'm running it on a laptop that is running XP, has an almost-filled hard drive, and two versions of Age of Empires installed on it, so that may be the reason for the crashing. It certainly slows down the computer, though. And let's not get on the CDs vs. digital debate, but I do get most of my music from iTunes, when I can get the giftcards. Buying a 20-track album for $9.99 is much cheaper and more convenient than getting the same album from Borders (I also don't have the time or the car to go out and actually buy CDs, but I probably would if I could so that I could use the music elsewhere). I was just greatly disappointed when they raised a lot of the songs to $1.29 instead of $.99, it certainly drains my balance quickly.

iTunes is also not just for music any more: as new iPod models come out, more things become available, such as TV shows, Podcasts, Movies, and games. I'm not familiar with the app store - I don't have a Touch or an iPhone - but I agree that as the iPad evolves, a lot more things will become available, and they'll be iPad-exclusive.

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The "iTunes is bloatware" argument used to work when most people only had 512Mb RAM, since opening a decent-sized iTunes library with album art on could easily gobble up 250Mb on a PC. When most new computers are now sold with 2Gb, 3Gb, 4Gb+ RAM, 250Mb doesn't matter anymore.

Anyway, here's how performance of iTunes (with a pretty large library) versus Firefox (only eight tabs open, two of them YouTube videos) on OSX 10.6. Combined, these two programs only use 1/8 of the total system RAM.

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I said iTunes on Windows is bloatware, and I'll amend that as being from my perspective. It eats up way more processor and ram on my machine than I feel is necessary, and can easily tank an older PC. I don't have experience with a machine blessed by the Jobs, but I can imagine that who ever programmed iTunes knows their way around Unix better then Windows-based systems. Just saying.

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You are aware that iTunes no longer has DRM on their music, right?

CDs are digital.

Side note: Am I the only one who doesn't find Quicksilver that helpful? I've now given it two tries, and ended up uninstalling it both times.

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Fujitsu has had iPads forever, except they come with a real processor, a keyboard, a hard drive, more heft and a higher price tag. I find the idea of the iPad competing with netbooks rather amusing, since I have used my netbook as my only computer for the past 5 months and had no problem, while I see the iPad's lack of a real keyboard, processor, or actual interface ports getting old after a day. Flash is also nice to have, especially in a device intended for heavy entertainment usage.

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I giant iPod (which sucks...) that can't fit in my pocket but does the same exact things?

No.

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So is there scouting software for the ipad yet

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Back to the origional topic.

I have managed to use the iPad to control an FRC robot. Take a look at my uploaded pictures.