"...[tablets] are the future of the entire computing industry..."
That's more than a little hard to swallow...
The Next Six Months
71–80 of 228 posts
Re: The Next Six Months
#72Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…
I remember playing with one of intel's tablet prototype units way back in 2007. It was bulky and was running XP and used a stylus for input. Obviously it was more for testing feasibility of the platform more than anything but it was incredibly unusable and uninteresting at the time. They were aiming for a fall release which obviously never materialized.
So they have been thinking about the tablet space for a while, they just haven't been approaching it the same way as Apple has and I think realized that it would have been a shitty product if they had released it.
Re: The Next Six Months
#73Though I think Apple is the only one that can pull it off. I'm a bit surprised that they'll be able to keep to a one year product cycle with things like the iPhone/iPad when the rest of the market is hitting a new product every couple weeks. Not that they've been one to match the rest of the market, but a lot happens in a year. Then again, maybe the biggest lesson out of the touch screen revolution is that its not th…
The phone market is doing a new product every couple of weeks, but how about the individual companies? Most buyers are on contract, and can't change phones more frequently than once a year with a reduced subsidy or once every two years with full subsidy. If a phone company introduces a new phone, and then a few weeks later introduces a better phone, they've to some extent limited the market for the first one to the p…
That's a damn good point.
Re: The Next Six Months
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces. That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
What if Windows Phone apps also ran on Windows proper?
It's not just about having apps, it's about having good apps. Good mobile apps, in most cases, would not make good desktop apps and vice versa.
Re: The Next Six Months
#75I dont get why everybody is falling for the "end of pc era" hype that is surrounding tablets and smartphones.
Can someone explain to me why the ability to browse the web from the couch without sufficient text-entry possibilities is going to challenge the amount of pc's in a world where textentry is our main method of searching, sorting and creating data. Honestly, this is not a rhetorical question, i feel i'm missing some part of the picture here.
Re: The Next Six Months
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
While better specs certainly never hurt, I've never heard any iPad users complain processing power or RAM. iOS does memory management seamlessly (if I didn't understand how it worked, I probably wouldn't even notice it) and the interface is notably responsive. I'm sure the new version will have a spec bump. Whatever that ends up meaning (dual core, faster, more RAM), it will continue to be plenty.
Maybe no users complain, but as a developer I often think, god damn, why is there so few RAM in there. And no iOS doesn't do memory managment seamlessy, the responsiveness comes from developers working hard to constantly cache/unchache everything that might take up a few megs.
My guess is that it's related to supply constraints. They sold 14 million of them last year. That's a lot of chips.
Is their RAM special in some way that might make it a supply constraint big enough to warrant limiting the memory in the iPad so much?
Re: The Next Six Months
#77Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and…
I agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and imo took the scifi conception much more literally than their competitors, to bring tablets mainstream.
Re: The Next Six Months
#78"One startling omission from that list: Microsoft. Their former hardware partners are heading off into the touch-computing future without them. We could have four competing tablet platforms six months from now — iOS, Android, WebOS, and Playbook — and not one of them is from Microsoft" Microsoft clearly seems to have taken their own sweet time to make an entry but they clearly have an intent and when they do, the big…
“A plethora of apps that are easy to port”? Windows compatibility implies a terribly inadequate offering, just like every previous Windows Tablet PC to date. How is that competing? Metro/Win Phone 7 doesn’t have a “plethora of apps” ready to be tweaked for tablet size, so I’m baffled by your reasoning.
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Re: The Next Six Months
#79"One startling omission from that list: Microsoft. Their former hardware partners are heading off into the touch-computing future without them. We could have four competing tablet platforms six months from now — iOS, Android, WebOS, and Playbook — and not one of them is from Microsoft" Microsoft clearly seems to have taken their own sweet time to make an entry but they clearly have an intent and when they do, the big…
“A plethora of apps that are easy to port”? Windows compatibility implies a terribly inadequate offering, just like every previous Windows Tablet PC to date. How is that competing? Metro/Win Phone 7 doesn’t have a “plethora of apps” ready to be tweaked for tablet size, so I’m baffled by your reasoning.
You are assuming that interface is all that it takes to develop an app. A user interface is only but a small component of any native application. I am not saying that a current windows apps can be used as it is but with a bulk of the logic in place, changing just an interface to make it touch aware should not be a big deal.
Re: The Next Six Months
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the wrong time in the upgrade cycle for home TVs to do that - everyone just bought a new flatscreen LCD HDTV during the past two years and sales are flat in that sector. Introducing an AppleTV with screen would be an uphill battle to convince people to replace a device they're still pretty happy with (and still paying off.)
"everyone" didn't. I know a number of holdouts (myself included) who are still waiting. When the next big thing comes along, another portion of us will take the plunge.
Sure, but an increasingly small portion. And quite a few of you won't until the next big thing, and so on for quite a while; there will be people without a flatscreen in their residence in 2020 but I wouldn't recommend building a business on convincing them to change their mind. No, the situation in 2011 isn't like that, obviously; this is a rhetorical point made for seeing the situation I'm describing in a time when it is perfectly clear. Today isn't to that extreme, the point is that already that market has peaked.
Besides, an Apple TV that doesn't require HD, which would not be that much more effort, would also work for anyone with a TV, so it really doesn't make sense to me to only make this an integrated product.