iPad Calculus

January 28th, 2010

Yes, the fuck­ing iPad is finally

iPad: When Myth Becomes Reality

So what does this horse look like. You can read the offi­cial fea­ture list here, the tech specs here, and the pric­ing break­down here

  • Custom Apple built proces­sor which is appar­ently crazy fast
  • Available in 16, 32 and 64 GB configurations
  • Apparently runs a close vari­ant of the iPhone OS
  • Can run most extant iPhone appli­ca­tions either in a 1 to 1 pixel map­ping or a pixel dou­bled mode.
  • Accompanied by a new iPhone OS SDK to allow devel­op­ers to lever­age iPad spe­cific features.
  • 802.11n stan­dard on all models
  • 3G avail­able as an option on all models
  • 3G ser­vice by AT&T in the U.S. on a non-contract pay as you go basis
  • Bluetooth (includ­ing the abil­ity to use a BT keyboard)
  • All of the var­i­ous crap that peo­ple com­plain about regard­ing the iPhone and iPod Touch remains the case
  • OMG No camera!

alter­na­tive.

The $10,000 Question

Of course, the only ques­tion that really

Angry Mac Bastardsreally replace that for me.

do on my iPhone is cre­ate con­tent or do inten­sive web brows­ing. Sure, the iPhone can do

So, what do I want? Between my iMac and my iPhone there are two basic gaps. The first is the read­ing com­po­nent. I hate

wantalready too fucked up, last thing I need is typ­ing on a netbook.

alter­na­tive I think the iPad is won­der­ful. It has just enough of the horse­power, and very lit­tle of the over­head of a Macbook. Now, some­one click the Paypal but­ton and send me $830.

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  • http://twitter.com/dillinger23 dillinger23

    Bing Winner. And i also dont want to carry my fuck­ing lap­top around when im doig 2 – 3 hour walk­through of 50-100k sq ft ware­houses and i get a call that some­one cant fig­ure out where they saved their fuck­ing word doc­u­ment.

    Add comic read­ing to that and im a happy person.

  • http://twitter.com/mikeeyes Michael Marino

    The fact that I’ll be able to read more eas­ily on this device is the clincher for me. I read a lot on my iPhone between emails, RSS feeds, and news web­sites. I also read paper books and mag­a­zines. I’ll soon be able to do all that on one easy to read device.

    Also, 40 is just around the cor­ner for me, and that iPhone print isn’t get­ting any big­ger. I’m get­ting the 16GB WiFi ver­sion as soon as it’s available.

  • http://haggersnash.wordpress.com/ hag­ger­snash

    Bingo. The “it’s just a big iPod Touch” crowd don’t under­stand that. They are judg­ing the iPad through the nar­row lens of what com­po­nents it con­tains and what they wanted, not what it could be used for and by whom else.

    The iPad is a big­ger can­vas, and I don’t just mean “in pixels”.

  • joe c

    I only ever use my lap­top when I’m walk­ing around the house, trav­el­ling, or doing some research at the library. And I really don’t need any of my big exist­ing desk­top apps like the Adobe Suite for that. This thing really is a lap­top alter­na­tive that looks like it should work out perfectly.

  • Ya huh

    I dunno if I’d call that a nar­row lens but that’s just me. They just wanted a lit­tle more than what was there. In regards to the use-case that spawned the net­book, peo­ple were look­ing for a cheap lap­top. The net­book solu­tion was sim­ple, do more for less. The iPad’s solu­tion is to do less for more in a large scale ver­sion of iPhone’s OS.

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/PACMan3000/ Paul A. Chapel

    I’ve haven’t really been sur­prised that the geeks are dis­ap­pointed by the iPad. They always claim to be dis­ap­pointed by Apple prod­ucts, but I’m a lit­tle taken back by the level of anger I’ve seen on the net. You would think Apple came by their houses and raped their pet dog, the way geeks have been act­ing.

    I also see this as a per­fect solu­tion for the chore that is brows­ing on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Browsing on a three inch screen hurts. The 3G com­po­nent totally wipes out the need for a cell phone con­tract in my opin­ion. I already use Skype over Wi-Fi on my Touch. If I get the iPad, I can make VoIP calls any­where. This is very attrac­tive to me and I’m sur­prised that more peo­ple haven’t picked up on it. Apple just removed the restric­tion on mak­ing VoIP calls over 3G. This is a huge deal.

    The geeks are too obsessed with find­ing their stu­pid HDMI and SD cards slots to pay attention.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    “in regards to the use-case that spawned the net­book, peo­ple were look­ing for a cheap lap­top.“

    Says you. What most peo­ple obvi­ously fail to get is that there are actu­ally two mar­kets for net­books. One is the “cheap lap­top” chumps you ref­er­ence, the other is peo­ple look­ing for an ultra­portable machine. Go back and read John Negroponte’s early state­ments regard­ing the One Laptop per Child stuff, that was the true gen­e­sis of net­books, and cheap was one of many fac­tors.

    “The iPad’s solu­tion is to do less for more in a large scale ver­sion of iPhone’s OS.“

    This “the iPad is just a big expen­sive iPod Touch” crap is already played out just a day in. Get back to me when you’ve actu­ally used one.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    I’ve haven’t really been sur­prised that the geeks are dis­ap­pointed by the iPad. They always claim to be dis­ap­pointed by Apple prod­ucts, but I’m a lit­tle taken back by the level of anger I’ve seen on the net. You would think Apple came by their houses and raped their pet dog, the way geeks have been acting.



    This is noth­ing new; the same thing hap­pened with the iPhone release. The greater dorkos­phere cre­ates a prod­uct in their col­lec­tive nog­gins that Prometheus him­self couldn’t deliver, the freaks the fuck out when real­ity sets in. The fun part is that they will all own one in six months and be pon­tif­i­cat­ing about how they knew that the iPad was “game changer” all along.

  • james­bai­ley

    Hmm, I’ve been using a lap­top for years because it takes care of all of my use cases for com­puter use. I’ve always bought rel­a­tively small lap­tops with decent per­for­mance. I dock them for desk­top use with a large mon­i­tor. I can unplug and go in a few sec­onds. Since I just use a lap­top for every­thing, I don’t have to worry about sync­ing any­thing. And since the intro­duc­tion of the x86 line, per­for­mance has never been an issue. I had a Titanium G4 before the first 15″ MacBook Pro that was get­ting to be a lit­tle bit under per­form­ing. But it was never really a big prob­lem. Now I have a 13″ MacBook (alu­minum) that eas­ily exceeds my needs per­for­mance wise.

    Having said all that, in most cases I do not really need a lap­top. It nor­mally sits on my desk in my home office. Even if I take it to work, I gen­er­ally don’t use it much (depend­ing on the job.) So, can I con­vince myself to get an iPad for those times when I need a com­puter when away from my desk at home? I’m not sure.

    My last con­tract (I’m a soft­ware devel­oper) was at a place where I could use my own lap­top for Java devel­op­ment. Using my own com­puter was far supe­rior to the piece of junk 3 GHz Pentium 5 they gave me to use. That thing was so slow it was hard to imag­ine that the CPU could really have been the 3 GHz that Windows claimed it was. So in that case, the lap­top was invalu­able to me but that sit­u­a­tion has never hap­pened before or since so I don’t think it is a com­mon use case for me at all.

    This is going to take some thought but luck­ily the iPad with 3G isn’t due until spring so I have time to consider.

  • Viswakarma

    The iPad is good for exec­u­tives, trav­el­ing sales per­sons, etc. who don’t need a lot of horse­power that lap­tops pro­vide. Further, it has iWork that pro­vides enough power to make pre­sen­ta­tions, write memos, cap­ture expenses etc. that is more than ade­quate for peo­ple who travel a lot. With 3G they don’t need to be teth­ered to a wired con­nec­tion to com­mu­ni­cate with their more com­put­ing power that is avail­able back at their bases.

  • Gatesbasher

    Plus, remem­ber half the inter­net trash­ing the iPhone because it had a cam­era, and would get con­fis­cated at the secu­rity desk at a lot of com­pa­nies? Now they’re in a froth about the iPad not hav­ing a cam­era. Getting your phone nicked would be annoy­ing, but what if it was your iPad you were going to make your Keynote pre­sen­ta­tion from? Oopsie doodle!

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/PACMan3000/ Paul A. Chapel

    I find it amus­ing that geeks crit­i­cize the iPad for being just like the iPhone, as if it were a huge fail­ure. And then you have these peo­ple who wanted the Mac OS on the thing. The iPhone is what every­one on the inter­net has been con­stantly talk­ing about for three years. It has a but­t­load of devel­op­ers and 140,000 apps. Why the heck would Apple go with any­thing else?

  • hav­ochaos

    Let’s be hon­est, the iPad was really made for one thing. Reading crap while tak­ing one. No one wants a lap­top in the bath­room and an iPhone is a bit tedious, plus you could lose it in the bowl far too eas­ily. iPad fills the void. :)

  • hav­ochaos

    Let’s be hon­est, the iPad was really made for one thing. Reading crap while tak­ing one. No one wants a lap­top in the bath­room and an iPhone is a bit tedious, plus you could lose it in the bowl far too eas­ily. iPad fills the void. :)

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