Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Next Six Months

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 228 posts

Re: The Next Six Months

#171

Post by aperiodic »

guywithabike wrote: post #76
zyb09 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I doubt supply constraints are an issue. They're the single largest purchaser of flash memory in the world[1]. I imagine manufacturers would be bending over backwards for them, since their orders must all be quite large.

[1]:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/10/21/macboo...

Re: The Next Six Months

#172

Post by wazoox »

podperson wrote: post #114
tesseract wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the problem wasn't Microsoft entering the market too early so much as never really rethinking their approach to a platform. Their idea for PDAs/phones was a tiny version of desktop windows (compare that to Apple's Newton, with all its flaws). Their idea for tablets was a pen based version of desktop windows. Microsoft has NEVER really originated a UI paradigm or OS, they just copied/bought/stole stuff from ot…

> We're just lucky they didn't try to put a tiny version of DOS on PDAs and a pen driven version of DOS on tablets.

There were a number of pocket-size DOS computers, like the Atari Portfolio.

Re: The Next Six Months

#173

Post by silvestrov »

guywithabike wrote: post #76
zyb09 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think they did everything to get the price down to $499 - including removing camera and reducing RAM. I'm guessing they thought that the $499 price point was required to make iPad a hit.

$499 is a very symbolic price.

Re: The Next Six Months

#174

Post by sxtxixtxcxh »

unp3rs0n wrote: post #152
mjfern wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.

you are missing the xbox.

... which uses a PowerPC chip, likely (and ironically) the reason Apple switched to Intel.

Re: The Next Six Months

#175

Post by krolley »

cletus wrote: post #132

I mostly agree with Gruber but disagree on a couple of major points: 1. Releasing the iPad in September makes no sense simply because it was such a massive hit in the holiday season. Generally speaking, you want to spread out your demand as much as possible. It took 2 months to get the previous iPad from the US to the first round of international markets and another 3-4 months to do the full round. You can only produ…

I think you make a very good point. The iPhone 4 was released in June, but in Europe we didn't see any real availability for many months afterwards, even into October. If Apple had released an iPhone 4GS in September, it would have delayed many peoples plans to buy an iPhone, I would think.

Re: The Next Six Months

#176

Post by thomas11 »

gamble wrote: post #170
joeyo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm watching this space very, very closely (i.e. tablets specifically for reading PDFs of articles). There are a lot of options but none are quite perfect: * iPad Pros: - Color screen - Can zoom to exact size desired - Multi-touch - Papers.app (easy sync/organization for PDFs) Cons: - Not e-ink - Battery life - Not as light/thin as Kindle * Kindle 3 Pros: - E-ink - Amazing battery life Cons: - Zoom is limited to a co…

I'm not sure e-ink is an asset in a PDF reader. I use my iPad for a lot of technical papers and books. It's much faster than an e-ink display would be, and the page turning lag is still annoying. E-ink would be insufferable.

My Kindle 3 turns PDF pages about as fast as I could turn a page in a book or a stapled article printout. Not lightning fast, but good enough for me.

Re: The Next Six Months

#177

Post by ugh »

dschobel wrote: post #145

"The next six months are going to set the foundation for the future of personal computing." Gruber needs to make the leap and become a political talking-head on cable news already. Unleashing lines like that without a hint of sarcasm or irony? You can't teach that, folks, that's god given.

I’m confident in predicting that tablets will be more than one third of unit sales to consumers of all PCs in Europe and North America within five years.

346 million PCs were sold worldwide in 2010, Apple sold 15 million iPads so far. That’s still a long way off but it is not impossible, especially with other manufacturers bringing their devices to the market.

This is a reasonable prediction. It might well be wrong but it is reasonable. Calling tablets “the future of personal computing” with such a prediction in mind seems perfectly justifiable to me. Don’t ridicule other reasonable opinions just because you disagree with them!

Re: The Next Six Months

#178

Post by jasonkester »

fierarul wrote: post #165
candeira wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does he manage without a Mac to use as a "dock" for the iPad? Sincere question, I am a linux user and have only seen an iPad a couple of times, but I understand you need to dock it via iTunes in order to do certain stuff with it.

There are few times when you need to connect to iTunes: * after the purchase (to "activate" it) -- which the store will do for you * if you want to update the OS * if you want to back it up * if you want to copy music/photos/videos/app data from your computer to the iPad. So, if you don't update the OS and you activated it at the store you'll just use it forever with the existing OS without ever touching a computer.…

And when it randomly crashes hard, leaving you looking at the dreaded "Connect to iTunes" screen.

It somehow knows to do this at the moment you're furthest from being able to find a computer with iTunes. My iPod Touch did it when I was on the Pacific coast of Colombia for a month (note the complete absence of roads and towns along said coast).

Getting to a place where I could listen to music again involved an overnight trip on a cargo boat through pirate-infested waters.

But I suspect that was an edge case that Apple didn't have in mind when they designed that feature.

Re: The Next Six Months

#179

Post by oozcitak »

larrywright wrote: post #135
sofuture wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn . Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary t…

This is all anecdotal, but I know a number of people who bought their parents iPads for Christmas. In all those cases, their parents haven't touched their home computer since they got the iPad. The iPad, along with its competitors, are all the computer a good segment of the population needs.

So true. My father-in-law needs a computer to check his email and FaceBook only. That's all he does. Even the iPad is too much for him.

Re: The Next Six Months

#180

Post by jasonkester »

seabee wrote: post #147
philwelch wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple bought the multi-touch stuff I didn't know that they bought or licensed the entire UI paradigm from someone else. Or do you just mean the low level parts? Because there's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. So, if it's just the screen tech that Apple bought and not the interaction software, I would count multi-touch as an Apple-originated UI paradigm, just as you credit the desktop GUI to Xerox, not St…

Well count yourself wrong: http://www.amazon.com/Fingerworks-IGESTURENUMPAD-iGesture-Pa... That thing even let you switch between apps with gestures. The iPod scroll wheel isn't an Apple paradigm either; jog dials for menu selection existed years before the iPod. I remember seeing it on the minidisc recorder in our school's music department.

Yeah, the rotating jog wheels on VCRs were the inspiration, but the touch wheel itself was pure awesome.

Don't forget, other companies were still scrambling to find a legal way to clone it right up until the day when Apple released the iPhone.

Post reply on HN