Apple iPad Thread

[[Phill]]

Originally Posted by kerowo

Well enjoy your future of cheap ****ty tablets.

To think the low scale budget end of the market isn't important misses the lessons of the phone market.

A cheap Android phone will do 95%+ of what an iPhone can do. It's worse, but for most users not in a significant way. Cheap Androids tablets will be the same. The amount of people in this thread talking about how useable the iPad 1 still is, let alone how they aren't upgrading to the new iPad from the 2 sums up nicely how most users aren't the power users who need to be at the edge of development.

[blackchilli]

Top end android devices can be more expensive than apple stuff. Some are doing very well. Android has the ability to capture a wider market for sure.

[kerowo]

Originally Posted by [Phill]

To think the low scale budget end of the market isn't important misses the lessons of the phone market.

A cheap Android phone will do 95%+ of what an iPhone can do. It's worse, but for most users not in a significant way. Cheap Androids tablets will be the same. The amount of people in this thread talking about how useable the iPad 1 still is, let alone how they aren't upgrading to the new iPad from the 2 sums up nicely how most users aren't the power users who need to be at the edge of development.

And yet no Android device will ever sell 3 million units in 3 days. Apple barely cares about the low end of the market, saving it for their old technology which they discount when new versions come out. There is no margin at the low end of the market so you end up with cheap underpowered devices that have crappy user experiences. Look at the number of Android phone users who aren't going to buy another Android phone compared to Apple users. Apple doesn't have as much market share in smart phones because Android phones are at more price points but Apple has the lion's share of the profit being made from smart phones. Until that changes there is no need for Apple to race to low end of the market.

[[Phill]]

I was never suggesting that Apple should race to the bottom. Just that Android will always have a place there which is why its simply ridiculous to assume "Android tablets do not have much time left".

That said its just wrong to say there are no margins in the low end and that you end up underpowered devices.
This is where the future of Android is stuff like http://www.storageoptions.com/produc...scroll-extreme and when a companies can make this quality (nearly identical specs to the iPad2 running the most up to date Android OS) at this price point (removing UK taxes at the current exchange rate brings you in at around the $200 mark) and if you combine it with with great marketing (which has long been a problem for Android manufacturers) - with the Nexus Tab coming out this summer being a likely example to get this all right - Android tablets will start eating up market share rapidly.

And yes as blackchilli says there will be lots of stuff like the ASUS transformer line that will be of extremely high quality that will try and find the mark on the upper end diversifying themselves from the iPad either in pure stats or with USPs like the keyboard battery combo dock.

I mean its dumb to think there will ever be an iPad "killer" in the current paradigm but its equally dumb to say Android is going to be squeezed out by iPad and Win8, which was the original point, when they are the only ones selling across the entire price range of the market and they are already on course to pass Apple in unit sales within 4 years.

[kerowo]

I do find it amusing that there are no apple fanboys tarding up the Android thread but there seems to be a lot of Andrama in the Apple thread. How the tables have turned.

[Jusbe]

Saying something positive about someone else is not necessarily trolling or tarding. In fact, if you read it again it had nothing to do with Apple and he wasn't even bit negative about Apple.

I, on the other hand, find it amusing that someone can be so delusional and get so defensive about things like that. Nothing wrong with fanboyism, but jesus.

Probably getting my first ever iPad sometime next week, they launch on the 23rd.

[EvilSteve]

I just now figured out what the "Reader" button that appears in the URL of certain pages on Safari does. Never thought to click on it before, and I would tap on the text I was trying to read to size it correctly so it filled the screen, then try to scroll in a straight line to avoid drifting into other sections of the page. So in case anyone else was equally clueless, that's what the Reader button is for. Took me over a year to realize this.

[EvilSteve]

And another thing that maybe should be obvious but wasn't for me. If you want to get back to the top of a long web page (ie browsing 2p2), you don't have to scroll all the way up manually. Just tap the status bar at the top of the iPad. More tips here.

http://www.danrodney.com/iphone/index.html

[kerowo]

Originally Posted by Jusbe

Saying something positive about someone else is not necessarily trolling or tarding. In fact, if you read it again it had nothing to do with Apple and he wasn't even bit negative about Apple.

I, on the other hand, find it amusing that someone can be so delusional and get so defensive about things like that. Nothing wrong with fanboyism, but jesus.

Probably getting my first ever iPad sometime next week, they launch on the 23rd.

If I go into a Chevy thread and say nothing about Chevy but only extol the virtues of Fords then that is, in fact, tarding up the Chevy thread.

I don't really care about it, because it is so funny listening to the Fandroids go on about the vaporware that will be as good as an iPad. I do think it is funny that there aren't apple fanbois in the Android thread talking about how much better the iPad or iPhone is at this or that. A few years ago if anyone said something disparaging about Apple there would be huge amounts of butthurt flaming, now it appears that role is being filled by the Android guys.

[Tony_P]

do you just sit and refresh this thread all day waiting for criticisms of apple so you can jump in and defend them?

[27offsuit]

shut it fanboy

[Nicholasp27]

The main thing holding ipad back right now is the price...everyone wants one but can't all afford them yet...but as people go to replace their laptop and decide that they can get by with an iPad instead then you will see the numbers increase greatly to where 60M iPads sold in a year looks laughably small...it will be similar to when people started deciding to make their next pc purchase a laptop instead of a desktop...this will happen faster than with laptops because iPad is already good enough for a high enough % of mainstream use cases and price is already on par with laptops

You can buy a standard laptop for 4-500 to replace your existing or buy an ipad for 4-500 and keep existing for the times you must have a pc...it took until 1995 for laptops to outsell desktops and at the time laptops were over 1k while desktops were at $700...iPads are already on par with standard laptops and half the price of ultraportable ones

Quote from 1999 regarding why laptops make more sense than desktops for average person (gizmodo writer's dad): "as someone who uses a computer mostly for news, email, music, etc - like a significant part of the population - he was actually being intensely rational. A laptop would do everything he needs simply and wirelessly, with a negligible price difference from a functionally equivalent desktop. If he wants a monitor, keyboard and mouse, he can just attach them. Choosing a desktop of wouldn't just be a not-quite-as-good choice - it'd be a bad one."

That is very similar to how it will play out for tablets. And news, music, social networks, etc are in many cases BETTER on the iPad than on a pc. Already you see main drivers like twitter creating the optimal experience in iPad app first and then copying it to their website. Flipboard, pulse and other news readers on tablets will beat pc experience for news and you also have magazines and ebooks and textbooks and PDFs being better on iPad than pc.

When family members come to my house they never use our laptops, just the iPads...not bc it's cool or new but bc it's just more convenient and easier to use when sitting on the couch and easier to share and many apps are superior to the website version

We helped my sis in law with taxes this year and used turbo tax on ipad for it bc we airplayed the screen to the tv so all 4 of us could see the questions and discuss the answers much easier than huddling around a laptop

[dknightx]

Originally Posted by Nicholasp27

That is very similar to how it will play out for tablets. And news, music, social networks, etc are in many cases BETTER on the iPad than on a pc. Already you see main drivers like twitter creating the optimal experience in iPad app first and then copying it to their website. Flipboard, pulse and other news readers on tablets will beat pc experience for news and you also have magazines and ebooks and textbooks and PDFs being better on iPad than pc.

I tend to disagree. Any app written for a tablet can be exactly the same for a PC. There's no functionality available on a tablet that can't be duplicated on a PC. This trend to try to move all productivity to a tablet is a bad idea because although you can do plenty of things on a tablet, I don't think there is a single person who can type faster on an iPad then they can on a notebook (unless you type incredibly slow in both cases). Just given that (and the fact that the keyboard takes up 1/2 the screen on a tablet) means that moving to a tablet form factor is a step *backwards* in productivity. The smaller size, and ease of "share-ability" isn't necessarily a good or necessary thing. (Can you imagine using dual 24" tablets vs dual 24" monitors + keyboard?)

When family members come to my house they never use our laptops, just the iPads...not bc it's cool or new but bc it's just more convenient and easier to use when sitting on the couch and easier to share and many apps are superior to the website version

Agreed, native apps has always been the way to go, but I have a hunch that in 5-10 years, that won't be the case. Its always going to be easier to develop something one time and have it work on *any* device. Unfortunately, even simple HTML/JS/CSS doesn't work the same on different browsers, but hopefully the rise of WebKit based browsers will fix that problem.

We helped my sis in law with taxes this year and used turbo tax on ipad for it bc we airplayed the screen to the tv so all 4 of us could see the questions and discuss the answers much easier than huddling around a laptop

I don't see why you couldn't do this on a MBA. Your use case is not unique to the tablet form factor and it would seem like much more of an annoyance filling out forms using the tablet keyboard.

[Aloysius]

Good 2 posts above^^

Maybe too reductive, but here is my observation (basically what dk wrote): from a productivity standpoint, the limiting factors to the iPad (and let's say by extension, a tablet as we understand it today) are 1) screen size (too small) and 2) input method (too cumbersome)

My question - do most people feel that way? From a quick strawpoll of my team (we do business strategy, so use Office products alot, some db stuff) - 100% of them feel that way

If most people (w/r/t productivity) do feel that way - what changes where a tablet moves into the productivity realm?

[dknightx]

Oh, and until I can play Diablo3 and Dota2 on a tablet I'm never getting rid of my laptop. Sure there are a lot of fun games on the iPad, but those will almost always pale in comparison to what is possible on a laptop. In fact I find most iPad/mobile games are boring and tedious (angry birds anyone?)

(just another example of why this trend to replace PCs with tablets is a bad idea imo)