How much more would it have cost to put an extra 256MB in the original iPad? Apple has more money in the bank than they know what to do with; over $100B. It might be a better use of the money to give a little extra RAM to make their devices run better.
Apple didn't get that money taking low margins on hardware. Overall this probably helps their new iPad sales, the vocal minority complain and everyone else probably either stays on ios5 or upgrades.
The iPad 1
81–90 of 103 posts
Re: The iPad 1
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be pretty well known by now that upgradable components in hand-held devices is a losing strategy. The mass populace of Consumers just don't care, they wan't something that Just Works , that's simple, pretty and light with a long battery life. Which appears to align with Apple's focus perfectly. I think it's safe to assume that iOS devices aren't going to come with upgradeable internal components. They've go…
What about the 20 seconds it takes to replace a battery on my Samsung Galaxy III S? That isn't being upgradable, but at least fixable. Same with putting in a chip before going to Europe, etc.
People really appreciate things they don't have to fuss with.
Re: The iPad 1
#83The disappointment, to me, isn't with the iPad alone. It's with the new move in the industry to non-upgradable devices and internet-dependent software. I've enjoyed my iPad 1 since the day I bought it, and I haven't seen any need to replace it with a newer model. Neither the Retina Display nor the camera were particularly important to me, and I didn't have much need for more storage or memory. Would I like to use iOS…
What annoys me: the expensive to replace batteries on iOS devices. My wife and I have new Samsung Galaxy III S phones and I was giving her a little lecture on recharging strategies for maximizing battery life (same lecture as for our iPads, BTW). Then I checked out how incredibly cheap Samsung replacement batteries are on Amazon. Husband fail, but recovery :-) So, I asked her to be careful of her iPad recharging stra…
Re: The iPad 1
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I can't blame Apple for feeling the same way. When they originally released iPad 1, they probably didn't quite anticipate how graphical and visual the user interfaces would eventually turn out to be. Oh yeah ? Apple has always skimped out on ram on every single device and made you pay a premium to get more. That wasn't a real problem on macs in the past because it wasn't difficult to add ram yourself, but now wi…
I really don't know where to start with this ridiculous diatribe. Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine. Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is s…
What the hell are you smoking. Safari with multiple tabs will eat all the remaining memory. The whole system itself took 1,4 gb, there was only 700 mb left after startup on a CLEAN system, formatted and reinstalled without a single program running in the background (Mountain Lion).
> And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.
Two years old actually. It's a late 2010 MBA. And I'm not complaining, I'm actually saying that I could have sold it for more but didn't bother and sold it myself for 200 euros to get rid of it faster AND to avoid the feeling of ripping off someone (which I would have felt if I had sold it for more, because I consider it a DEAD machine. A useless machine. You can't add ram and the base system is already overloaded with its 2gb. Selling it for what I could have gotten from it (you should look up what people can actually get from selling Apple devices even when they suck) would have been ripping off someone else.)
>Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?
I just did that, right now. Am I not free to speak my mind on Apple just like you did when you called those laptops "nasty" ?
> Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.
Putting mobile phone hardware inside an iPad's case is not a great "feat of engineering". I would have agreed with you if you called iOS a great feat of (software) engineering, and its user interface revolutionary for the time. But there is nothing special about the iPad's hardware. We got mobile phones today that are far more powerful than the first iPad and many mobile phone at the time had hardware similar to the iPad, it's not like Apple did anything special there, they just put a big screen and battery inside an aluminum case, where in the flying fuck do you see a great feat of engineering ? the bullshit, it hurts.
Ultimately, what's attractive about apple is what their software engineers do. And what's pushing me off is their business practice, closedness, cheapening out on specs to create planned obscolescence.
iOS was what made the iPad great and possible, as it did for the iPhone. And OS X used to be a great OS, until they added so much bloat it couldn't run on 2gb of ram. No apple fanboy here is going to admit it, but the iPad had 256mb of ram to ensure that people would upgrade to the next iPad, end of the line. Just like the first iPhone didn't have 3g even when top of the line phones from competitors had 3g, to make the early adopters spend even more money the year after.
Apple has been ripping off its customers since forever, it's just the last straw. Do you remember the days of the cd-writer/dvd reader combo you could find on many Macs even when the cheapeast PCs had DVD writers ? I do. Apple is a cheap company, that sells cheap hardware with an expensive case. It's hard not to think so, I can recall so many examples of them behaving that way. Do you know the price difference there was even back in the days of the combo drives in the mac between a combo and a dvd writer ? Nothing, it was practically nothing, a matter of a few euros. But to get a mac with a dvd writer inside you had to buy the one that cost much more in the lineup with a better processor and so on. Ridiculous. I can't believe we, as in the collective of Apple customers around the world, put up with so much shit for so long.
The only thing that saves Apple is the software, and it won't last for long, because the competition is getting much better at this. Windows 7 is stable and really nice to use, Android Jelly Bean runs as smooth on my Nexus 7 as iOS did on my iPad 2. Goodbye Apple, it was fun while it lasted.
Re: The iPad 1
#85The disappointment, to me, isn't with the iPad alone. It's with the new move in the industry to non-upgradable devices and internet-dependent software. I've enjoyed my iPad 1 since the day I bought it, and I haven't seen any need to replace it with a newer model. Neither the Retina Display nor the camera were particularly important to me, and I didn't have much need for more storage or memory. Would I like to use iOS…
FWIW, that's what I thought about my iPad1 when iPad2 came out, and again when New iPad came out. I'm perfectly happy to upgrade when needed (I bought mine early on when they launched here in Australia, so it's over 2 years old now, which is a fairly acceptable lifespan for tech gadgets for me), but so far I've still not bumped into any app I want to run but can't, at least not anything compelling enough to push me to spend money to upgrade. I suspect if I were more of a gamer, I'd be running into performance problems, but for all my use cases, iPad1 seems to be perfectly happy to run that apps I want - and short of some category-changing new app idea, I'm pretty sure all the apps I use will continue to work for quite some time yet, even if they get updated with new versions which require iOS6 which I'll miss out on.
I'm strongly suspecting now that the battery will need replacing before the device becomes unusable due to newer OS and/or software requirements.
Re: The iPad 1
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't know where to start with this ridiculous diatribe. Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine. Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is s…
I am going to have to agree with Nicole060 here. I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros for work - non retina, 4GB RAM. It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with. Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their onli…
On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X apps (Terminal, Activity Monitor, Console, Safari, Mail, Preview, Emacs, X11, Script Debugger, and several resident utilities like Alfred and SizeUp), and have no problem dipping in and out of larger apps like Illustrator and Photoshop as needed with few performance problems beyond short (no more than a second or two) delays when switching to a long-inactive app. Do my 8GB MBP work more smoothly? Undoubtedly. But I'm running a much larger Windows (Server 2012, 64-bit) VM on this, and often another Windows, FreeBSD, or Linux VM, and I rarely quit anything unless I'm updating it or rebooting, so I generally have all of the above open plus iTunes, Xcode, Transmit, Excel, QuickBooks, and half of CS6. The only time I see even minor delays is when I nearly overcommit RAM or CPU cores in VMware, open insanely large files (in Photoshop, say), concurrently run several large, parallel compilations that manage to peg nearly an entire core in kernel mode, or go to town with live output from frequently fired dtrace probes.
Were you, by chance, swapping to a mechanical hard drive? If so, and for anyone else whose Mac "crawls" with lots of apps loaded, the single best way to make your machine usable is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. All recent MacBooks that don't come with "built-in flash storage" have user-replaceable hard drives (as in, "easy directions in the manual and doesn't void AppleCare"); the Sandy and Ivy Bridge models even support 6Gbps drives at full speed.
As for the iPad 1, I thought it was slow even on iOS 3.2. It was still quite usable and useful, however.
Re: The iPad 1
#87When the iPad 1 launched in germany, i bought a 64GB model with 3G. I payed more than 800 Euros. And now Apple tells me "it's to old, go and sell it on eBay for 150 bucks". Are you fucking kidding me? I'm a Apple user for ages, i have two Mac Pros, three MacBook Pros (family), one MacBook Air and all iPhones that Apple ever made. I sold every old piece of hardware or replaced it when i needed a faster or newer model.…
Mine is ~28 months old now. Personally I'm not all that unhappy with that sort of support lifespan for what to me was pretty much bought as a "tech toy", admittedly and expensive one, but I never expected decades of support for it… (I've got a friend who bought her iPad1 about 5 weeks before the iPad2 came out, she's somewhat less happy than I am…)
Re: The iPad 1
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I can't blame Apple for feeling the same way. When they originally released iPad 1, they probably didn't quite anticipate how graphical and visual the user interfaces would eventually turn out to be. Oh yeah ? Apple has always skimped out on ram on every single device and made you pay a premium to get more. That wasn't a real problem on macs in the past because it wasn't difficult to add ram yourself, but now wi…
I really don't know where to start with this ridiculous diatribe. Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine. Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is s…
This wasn't true for me on my 2GB 2006 Macbook running Snow Leopard in 2009, so I don't see how it could be true now.
Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor.
Marco is spot-on here, though: many reviewers commented on the frequent page reloading in Safari, claiming (correctly) that the RAM would be an issue in the future. This was the main issue preventing me from getting an iPad 1.
Re: The iPad 1
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ? The device still works on iOS5 and will still run 99% of the apps available today and over the next few years. Most developers are still going to be targeting iOS4+ for a while to come.
Eleven good reasons: mfincham@desktop:~/Desktop$ grep "Subject:" Those bugs will never be fixed for iPad 1 users. Furthermore, "next few years" seems quite optimistic to me. There's no harm in unlocking these unsupported devices, then people can EITHER run iOS 4/5 and live with the flaws OR run their own code. Nobody loses! (Note as well that the bugs are things like "loading a web page could result in arbitrary code…
Re: The iPad 1
#90The RAM thing is a nice theory until you consider the 4th gen iPod touch has a similar number of pixels as iPad 1, also has 256MB of RAM and also gets iOS6 support. They're still selling it now (just about), so that's probably why. I'm sure with a bit of engineering effort, the memory footprint of iOS could be drastically reduced. (Hire some game programmers who have worked on console games! A 1st gen iPad has about…
> But let's face it, that's not going to improve their bottom line, whereas telling everyone to buy a new iPad every 24 months is. That kind of short-term thinking is what gets companies into trouble. No, it won't help the bottom line now, but when the next purchase rolls around, don't you think premature obsolescence (or the lack thereof) of the device being upgraded will factor into what replacement to get? It's ce…