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RE: Bostonians won't be able to buy it
By ralniv on 1/30/2010 7:00:23 PM , Rating: 0
In some regards these accusations are accurate. This is because Apple wants to maintain consistency between iPod, iPhone and iPad. Content (including apps, games, music & videos) purchased on one of these should be portable to all of the others. These devices all use the same basic OS, SDK and similar ARM processors; although the iPad's proc is far more capable than the other devices.

Netbooks are only better at three things:
[1] multi-tasking
[2] Flash playback
[3] being cheap

Other than that, they offer crappy displays, crappy pointing devices (which is an important part of computing) and most have cramped keyboards.

What can the iPad do better than netbooks?:
[1] multi-touch and gestures (I personally love what this has done to computing)
[2] landscape or portrait orientations to suit your preferences
[3] high def video (although some newer and more expensive netbook models can get there)
[4] far thinner
[5] far lighter
[6] longer battery life for video playback

If you want to compare netbooks to iPads, you should be looking at high res netbooks that can support HD video. These cost more, weigh more and are less portable than the entry level $499 iPad. None of them offer multi-touch and none of them can flip between landscape and portrait by simply rotating the device.

If Apple can add better multi-tasking support with an OS upgrade, then the iPad will be better than netbooks on every front that matters to me (I personally don't care for Flash and have plug-ins on my computers to keep it in check). I prefer open protocols for online content.

By Alexstarfire on 1/31/2010 9:40:22 AM , Rating: 1
Most people don't care about multitouch, even those who have the ability to use it on their MacBook, like my father. Slightly more useful for zooming.... and that's it. Everything else can be done easier and quicker via mouse or keyboard. Granted that for a tablet I can't exactly say how it'll work out. Seeing a review would be nice, but we've still got a wait for that. Same about the battery life. It'd be great to see 10 hours of video playback, but somehow I seriously doubt that.

Landscape or portrait orientation is also a rather moot point as well since any tablet should function like that. I'm sure for many a tablet though that it'd involve having to change some video options, but they could have an application running to let you do it through the taskbar like they do on laptops.

I can give you thinner and lighter, but it's not a bother for me and it shouldn't be for most people. If you can't carry around 3 pounds then you probably have far bigger problems than what "computer" is best for you. I carry my "heavy" laptop around with my school books and have zero problems. I don't know the exact weight of my laptop including the charger but 5+ lbs seems pretty reasonable. Hell, it doesn't even weigh as much as most of my school books.

I'd rather not have this thing be thinner either, but that's cause it will be easier to break if someone happened to sit on it. I've had people sit on my laptop before and it's perfectly fine. If this thing or the MacBook Air got sat on I'm sure it'd be quite fucked up.

Although, I can say that if you're going to be playing videos, especially HD videos, you're likely not going to be going with the $499 iPad. 16 GB of HD video isn't very much by itself, let alone with other apps and music on there. And if you want to stream most of the time then you got to at least get 3G cause you can't get WiFi everywhere. The extra things you have to buy to make this tablet functional put it well above $499. I think $130 just to be able to pay for a 3G service is absurd, but Apple has always been that way to me. Even if you only go up to the 32GB model with no 3G you're up to $600 which put's you out of range on just about every netbook, likely all but I haven't looked in a while, and you get less functionality.

I don't see any good wins for Apple in there.

I would also like to point out that you are quite right that netbooks and most laptops in general have crappy displays. Laptops suffer in a similar fate to all of Apple's computer, lack of customization. Having a nice display would be great if we had the option, but we almost never do unless it's a top-of-the-line model.... and even then not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it since my laptop is not my primary device for anything. It does gaming, videos, and everything else my desktop does but I only use it when I have to. Like at school. I'm not exactly worried about how awesome my game or video looks when I'm only playing it for short periods of time. Games even less so since that was not the purpose of this laptop and henceforth sucks at playing many games. If, however, I was to use a mobile computer primarily to play videos, pictures, games, image editing, etc... that I would love ,and need, a great display. Very few people fall into that category though. As such any display that allows you to do all those things decently will do just fine. You may not feel that way, but you would just fall into the same category as all the graphics whores for games do, to me anyway.

Simple fact that you can't multitask should turn everyone away in this day and age. That's just inexcusable.


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