are you seriously hating on the ipod and the iphone--two of the most popular consumer electronics devices in the last decade?

i would like to bet one 64GB iPad with 3G, that at least one person will literally buy an iPad in spite of not having multitasking. reply booked.

iPad killer?

well, the iphone already has this. i mean you can quit a note-taking application while typing, go browse the web, select-and-copy whatever you want, then go back to the note-taking app virtually in the same place you left off, and paste.

backgrounder actually shows that apps like EMail are always in the background, because Apple designed them so, so going back to email opens whatever screen you were last looking at. perhaps they will let Pages and Numbers to run in the background similarly. only time will tell.

whatever, I confused my triple negatives

if you think that lack of multitasking won't stop a single person from buying this thing, ok.

That looks pretty sweet, though I doubt it will be an I-pad killer cause Apple is a master at marketing to the masses. However, the existence of competition like that is very good news for more advanced users like a lot of people in this thread.

it hasn't stopped iphone and itouch users, and i am betting it won't stop ipad sales. that's all i am saying.

huh?

you really think that it hasn't stopped anyone from buying it?

I mean this debate is so silly

either way, your argument is "my go cart doesn't have power steering, I don't see why anyone would want it in a car either"

2 different devices with different use cases = 2 different levels of acceptable features (for at least some people)

why did apple add an ebook reader to this device? b/c at some level they understand it needs to do more stuff than an Iphone (and they kept hammering this point during the presentation). but I guess this only applies to some things.

hating on what they were labeled as...by apple. none of the devices they release are revolutionary. rarely are they even evolutionary. i will give them credit where credit is due, though. the iphone is a fun, sleek phone, and its easy to use. it is not, however, the end-all be-all of mobile devices. there are other products out there that do the same thing the iphone does, or a macbook does, or an ipod does...for far less money. the company in itself is just evil. never before in my life have i seen a company take advantage of its customers so blatantly! obviously other businesses do this as well, but nobody does it as abdundantly, and dare i say proudly, as apple. this is one of the many reasons ive never owned an apple product, and until they change their business ethics while actually releasing a device that is not only revolutionary, but worth what it ****ing costs, i never will.

but back to the topic at hand...the ipad is a complete joke. its a $500 paperweight. or a $750 paperweight if you want 3G and a keyboard. i just cant possibly see any scenarios where this thing would be an equal replacement to a laptop or tablet. what exactly is apple shooting for here? its too large to carry in your pocket unless youre a member of the trenchcoat mafia, its too small to replace a desktop computer...seems more like a fashion statement if anything. id be willing to bet that females and young teenagers will be the target market demographic with this device, as i cant see any man (hetero at least) walking around with one of these things, unless they have a sweet fanny pack or man purse to lug it around in.

"bruce! is that an ipad in your fanny pack or are you just happy to see me?"

"oh sssteven, you ssso sssilly. itss like, obvioussly an ipad. but i think im getting a raging hardon too."

sure, it has stopped some, but it's a drop in a bucket. some analysts are estimating 6 million iPads sold in 2010. i don't know if they will sell 6, but they will probably sell 3 million. which is a ton. how many more units would they sell if it had multi-tasking? i don't know but that number is probably low. every time the iphone was released, there was a waiting list.

iphone/itouch already has several e-reader apps. it's called the amazon kindle app. there's also the barnes&noble eReader app. there's also stanza, and a bunch more.

stopped reading there. please excuse yourself from this thread.

my iphone is incredibly liberating. before it, i had a treo, an ipod, and a bluetooth gps receiver. the iphone replaced all three, does things i could never do before, and it's shiny to boot.

A few things:

I am 100% confident this forum would be better off without MGShputnik. Specifically stating that you have no experiences with the devices you are ripping makes YOU look dumb, not the fanboys youre "dissing" or whatever.

I would consider myself a huge Apple fanboy. Have an iMac and a MacBook, iPod Touch and even bought the Magic Mouse when it came out, but there is basically 0 reason I would want this. It obviously fits somewhere between my ipod touch/droid and my macbook, but do we really need a phone, a tablet, a laptop AND a desktop? come on.

That preview posted on page 1 is what I thought the tablet was going to look like. I was told it had a forward facing camera and a PVR about a month ago, and was excited about those. But now it looks like the only place I will be able to get content is from the apple store since it can't do flash stuff or take input from other devices.

The size of the device makes me feel like Apple didn't really find a target audience here. Who is going to be carrying this thing around? College students would be afraid to drop their 600 dollar ipod, businesses wouldn't want to pay for it, etc. It's too big to take anywhere and too small for home use where you could be using a laptop. Also, how a company sells an HD media player and doesnt include an HDMI out is just shocking.

Finally, I noticed something kind of strange lately. My former roommate was babbling about all kind of **** about magic and how as an engineer he wished he could make more magical products. Steve mentioned this and even that guy who kind of looks like Patrik Antonius who does all the Apple hype release videos kept talking about how they made something "magical". This is basically the biggest ******o hype machine ever. Apple basically build a larger iphone and call it "magic"? Seriously guys come on.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/#video

That guy is in every single apple product hype video and is probably the biggest user of hyperbole I have witnessed. He kind of tilts the **** out of me.

tl;dr: Apple fanboy thinks the iPad is Apple's first fail in a long time.

so lemme get this straight...you read somewhere that some idiot analyst who was probably paid by apple said that the ipad will sell 6 million units...then you use some kind of gorilla logic that we'll never understand the meaning of to come up with a nice round number of 3 million units. "which is a ton".

its people like you, who have absolutely zero knowledge of the tech industry or computers in general, that are fueling the apple rocketship. what youre failing to understand is that this ISNT the iphone or the ipod. its like, bigger and stuff! you cannot carry this device with you in your pocket, you cannot make phone calls with it, and you cant do most of the things you can do on a normal laptop with it. its a worthless, useless device. but theyre labeling it as some new, different device...but its the same. exactly the same. just different....think different. apple.

Actually, the original estimate was 2 million iPads sold this year and they upped it to 4 when the pricing came out. MGS, we get it, you hate Apple. Thanks for playing.

Spot on, pittm.

It seems like the features that iPad has makes it look great, and it would be fun to use it for those features (similar to the good things about iPhone/iTouch), but the features it's missing make it unnecessary.

i never said i didnt have experiences with the devices...you should read a little more carefully before posting a response like that. i stated that ive never OWNED an apple product. ive used friends iphones, macbooks, and ipods. more than once. it doesnt take a genius to figure out the in's and out's of an apple product, so while i havent spend hours, or days worth of time with apple devices, i have used them.

i do find it funny that while you rip on me, you also made some of the same points i did in your post. apple's target demographic is confusing with this device to say the least. i cant see people walking around with these things under their arms all day, and they obviously do not fit in pockets. are people going to buy special $100 apple branded "ipacks" to carry around their $500 ($650 with 3G) ipads? thats getting very pricey for a touchscreen paperweight that has little to no practial use.

yes, to each their own...some people like shelling out the extra dough for apple stuff because they feel like theyre actually getting a superior, revolutionary product. most mac users will admit that theyre probably paying too much for whatever it is theyre buying, but as long as they can somehow justify paying that price in their own head, they dont have a problem doing so. the success or failure of this device will ultimately come down to how they market it, which is the going theme with apple products. they could stick a pentium 3 with 128mb of ram into a shiny black plastic dildo and tell you its a revolution, and youd pay out the ass to have that thing in your ass.

i got a dell mini for christmas. if the ipad was already out, i would have bought that instead.

this would be spot on, if it wasn't so completely wrong. i won't list my qualifications, because really why bother? but i am an engineer in the high tech industry, and like a lot of other engineers, i have and love my iphone.

everything you say is true of another already popular device. how many people are on the commuter rail/subway every day with kindles? the iPad blows the kindle out of the water. the kindle cost $350 originally, and it's $260 now. of course they will have to cut it further. at these prices, the iPad is much better. if you don't agree, that's fine. you are just wrong is all.

it's good to now you have authority on this issue. you may not own an apple but you do own plenty of dildos.

well, you can synch it with an existing itunes library on another PC/Mac.

but if you, ahem, acquire media in ways other than Itunes (which is me 99% of the time) you will need to put it on another PC then synch it to the ipad, just like you would with an ipod. it certainly would be nicer if that step was eliminated, it would make this thing much more laptoppy vs. ipoddy. I guess that's what my problem boils down to, the Ipad is 95% Iphone/Touch and 5% laptop when a 50/50 split would be something truly unique

Can we just ban this troll already?

here, man. i didnt even type this one up. got it from another forum post. pretty much sums up what i wanted to say initially, just without all of my anti-apple propaganda. i rant too much sometimes....


"I get it, they're somewhere in between smartphones and netbooks...but why is the pricing more expensive, functionality worse, mediocre battery life, no handwriting recognition, no Flash...etc. Kindle is a very simple eBook device...but can also get a WEEK of functional battery life. what's the point of long standby life?

At this point I'm in doubt of productivity. I expect the true motive behind this is eBook support, and revenue generated from iPad specific software. Steve wants to grab some of Amazon's fat profit."

Yep. I have a 3gs and haven't even bothered jailbreaking it because lack of multitasking, while annoying, isn't a dealbreaker because it's only a phone/internet device. I can't imagine a "serious" computing device such as the iPad not having multitasking.

(Although rumor is that v.4 of the OS will have multitasking.)

That's a silly statement. The reason the iPhone became popular was because it was better than the competition. Yes, the competition has caught up/surpassed it, but you can't pretend that the original iPhone wasn't better than the Blackberries/Windows Mobile devices of the time.

The target market for this is the people who primarily use their computers for email and surfing. The eReader market may have been in there as well from the start but didn't need to be. The price point is perfect positioned to get people to start thinking about spending a little more than for a Kindle and get a color screen and all the rest of "big iPhone" experience at the cost of some battery life which isn't so difficult to overcome that it's a deal breaker. These filled a gap in Apples product line between iTouch and Mini pretty well. If you need more power than an iPad Apple has something for just a little more money.

thank you mgs, couldn't agree more with you. unbelievable to see how there are people who gonna spent so much money on so little technical value. And yeah, steve jobs is obviously scam.