iPad is Amazing: new Apple ad touts iOS 4.2 features

You have to wonder why no one else ever seems interested in showing their devices actually doing stuff. They show pretty people hooking up, weird displays of cybernetic power, cities transformed, trippy reveries across candy colored skies, and transformer cartoons.

But they don't seem very interested in showing their devices doing things. And that's pretty much all Apple does.

What would have been even more amazing is if Apple wouldn't have disabled the shared printer option just before they released iOS 4.2

Or enabled AirPlay for more apps.

Still, you have to figure they're trying to make sure everything turned on works well and that more printers and AirPlay apps will be coming.

Apple did in seven months what an entire PC industry in 20 years could not deliver successfully - a portable, well-built, user-friendly tablet that is actually pleasant to use, and its success still shows no end in sight.

It just shows that the true old-school visionaries of our time were the garage tinkerers the likes of Jobs/Woz, Hewlett & Packard, and even Bill Gates himself. All those Ivy-league CEO's running tech companies nowadays really do not have the grass-roots insight to know what it's like to start from an idea with zero funding and turn it into a multi-billion dollar corporation.

I suspect Apple products will be wrapped and waiting under a lot of trees.

I presume Santa has a corporate credit-line with Apple?

There is an easy workaround for airplay and nonsupported printers, at least for macs. I'm still holding out for the forward facing camera.

meh

I guess it is amazing when compared to HP's effort - is that windows on a tablet - AGAIN

However, I just can't go past an 11" screen that runs OS X and has a
K E Y B O A R D

C'mon Apple I ordered my Air yesterday - I want it yesterday.

I don't profess to have any inside information, but I'm sure it took Apple longer than seven months. If I recall correctly, Apple worked on the Newton some 15-20 years ago. The Newton aside, the iPad isnt so magical that it invented itself.

I'm not referring to R&D time. But by all means, what other tablet form-factor that has been introduced, sold to the extent that the iPad did? I'm only guessing but I would think that if we combined all sales of other tablets for the last 20 years, it would not reach what the iPad has done since it was introduced. If so, it would be a slim margin.

One of my inside sources told me a tablet was coming out in 2001, this was probably around August. Subsequently my understanding is that the tablet wasn't considered good enough but it was essential to get a handhold device in to the market to build the platform ready for when the hardware was capable of handheld computing. Steve had the previous year expressed interest in building a phone but again I understand Apple didn't feel capable of correcting enough of the defects with phones at the time. iPod was of course what we got and at first a bit of a bodge, of all things Apple licensed the OS!

When Steve Jobs said If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing" read the quote as he said it and understand what he means when he speaks. Most commentators and pundits including some who post here interpret that as a negative thing to say but most dictionaries have several definition for the verb to milk and the pundits chose that which suits their purpose best. Use leverage in place of milk and it becomes proper business language, which is why Steve didn't use leverage. Milk = get all possible advantage from. Leverage = the power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome.

So Steve was working on the iPad long before he was iCEO.

Why do you think Gates (boss of the lawyer company pretending to be a software company) kept on coming out and saying the tablet was going to be the next big thing? Because Steve told him and he always copies Steve.

If you still can't work it all out and want to go and read what Steve said about not watching video on PMPs and why the iPod video wasn't a contradiction.

Also from Steve:

"You know, I've got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can't say any more than that it's the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me."
-- Fortune, Sept. 18, 1995


(Yeah I know it's considered bad form to reply to oneself but think different, sometimes anyway.)

Airplay works great with all the third party apps I've tested, especially Safari. Here's a video I made using Safari:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDKuYlHEB8A

You can share YouTube videos from the phone... you can share Pandora or iHeartradio... you can share alot actually.

There is a new 60 Minutes app that has video... if you find a segment in there that you like... you can send it to your new appletv...

very useful...

Oh, I just tried the Fox News app on the iphone... it has a video section... I started a video and was able to send it to the appletv... again, very cool...

iPad was outdated when it came out since it was a 10" iPod Touch. It is getting better with software, but from the very beginning I felt that v2 of the iPad was going to be better. I am still waiting for the "better". It is worth the wait to me.

What was that astronomy app in the video?? The one where it showed the layers of Jupiter

Can't argue with that.

It would be cool if the video about iPad ran inline on an iPad.

This article's over a year old And you can't even get to it, so I can't show you that you CAN view it on an iPad

I feel the same way sometimes, there is however really great software on the iPad that defiantly makes it worth while. That being said I really hope Apple makes the iPad more like my Macbook Air. I got a Asus Slider over Christmas and the OS is defiantly more traditional and powerful then Apples offering. Well here's hoping that Apple makes a Macbook tablet.

Question:

What does your Asus Slider do/offer that the iPad 2 does not?

Well like I mentioned before the OS is more traditional like OSX or Windows. The home page is much more customizable, I can put icons on top of each other making a apps folder. Lots of widgets to display just about anything, plus custom widget makers. I can uninstall any app by simply dragging it to the trash can. I can completely theme the Desktop, icons and all.

Multitasking is much better on the Asus, I'm always running a torrent client, music stream, web server in the background not to mention about 10 - 20 apps at any giving time and it still runs like a champ. Doing this on my iPad will bring it to it's knees. The live task viewer is a must, to close a app all I have to do is right click over the app in the live view or swipe my finger to the left.

There is a real filemanager that can access every directory and file on the internal drive. You can mount network drives and external drives via the command line or filemanager without any additional apps. Out of the box I was able to mount my storage appliance in under 1 minute without having to download or buy any additional apps. Out of the box I can connect to my company's VPN and mount it as a directory. Apps can save it's data where I ever I choose, for instance I prefer to save my movies and music to the miniSD drive and my office data to the cloud.

The CLI or command line is NIX so I can use commands like, cp, mv, rm, awk, ps, ssh ect. There is support for many scripting languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and soon Pearl. Which means I could write a script that logins into a server grabs an entire directory, use RAR, GZIP, ZIP, TAR to compress it and download it to a local directory. Then explode the directory, put some files in one directory and some into others and I can do all of this with a crontab.

Media codecs, I can play just about anything I want out of the box. I still use DIVX to convert my DVD's and Blueray Disks to files. I can stream any media to my TV, cell phone or tablet wireless with DLNA, very, very cool. There is no Airplay but I do have a very cool Creative Labs speaker with subwoofer that connects via bluetooth.

I got one year free for Asus Webstorage, it's unlimited online storage with cloud software. I have uploaded my entire DVD collection, over 600 GB. I can watch them directly online, the interface converts the DIVX files to Flash on the fly. Now that is amazingly cool or I can stream the movie to my media player. It also has a online Word Processor to edit your Office files, it's very close to Microsoft's online offering. I can also backup my internal drive. There's many other features like online eBook reader and virtual desktop support where I can manipulate my tablet online. So far Apples iCloud offering doesn't come close to what Asus offers but Apples iCoud is new and that will change.

I run X11 to display my Linux desktop on my tablet. Yes you can do this with the iPad but with Android I can save the remote apps data to my local machine and not to just one folder either, anywhere. This is the same with Citrix.

I can back up the entire tablet and turn the backup into a rom, so if anything ever goes wrong with the machine all I have to do is get a replacement and flash the rom to the new machine and I will have an exact copy. I can even create backup times to run in the background.

Hardware wise the iPad is much thinner and lighter but the Asus Slider does have a keyboard, a full size USB and miniSD. I thinks that's the biggest fail with Apples iPad, no miniSD, if Apple is seriously about iBooks they better include one in the new iPad3. These books take up a lot of room. I also have a dual boot system running Android OS 4.0 and Ubuntu 11.10 on my Asus, how cool is that.. The Asus is also more stable, I have a app crash at least 5 times a week on my iPad, more if I'm doing serious audio editing. I've only had two in the last two months with my Asus. I think this has a lot to do with memory, 512mb vs 1gb.

There are many more things but you get the point. I love my iPad because of the looks and it's apps. The music creation apps are awesome and I have invested way to much money in accessories for those music apps that I will rock a iPad for a long time. I just hope that the iPad OS get's a little more powerful for it's next revision.

Thanks for a "real" reply.

Personally I can't answer to much of the above but at least you've given others a serious answer that they can digest at will.

Hey I wanted to ask an honest question. It's been a couple of years now since the iPad has been released and Flash is still relevant. I know Adobe has ceased development for mobile devices but sites are still using Flash. I bought a Google Chromebook last November, hey I'm a sucker for new gadgets that try to change the way we do things..

Anyway a lot of the web apps for the Chromebook are made with Flash, even the newer apps. Check this site out http://www.audiotool.com/app, on your Mac of course and try and tell me that's it's not the coolest web app you have ever seen.

So my question is do iPad users still miss Flash? I do, that site address I just gave you is a complete solution to make music and it's top notch. That isn't the only one either their are still thousands of sites and web apps that use Flash. I think Apple has abused their power here to try and take down a piece of technology simplly because they don't like it or have a problem with the developer.

I really hope Apple doesn't make a trend of this in the future. The consumer should decide what's best for them and not a corporation. I understand if Apple thinks they have a better way of doing something but it should be added as a feature and not the only solution.

Here's another audio tool that I think is amazing that was written in Flash http://www.audiosauna.com/studio/

You were on a roll there. Don't ruin it by trying to defend Flash. Even Adobe had to admit that it's a dead technology. In 2000 there were still a lot of computers being made with floppy disks. Jobs saw the future and dropped the floppy port. Would you say that the floppy should be supported or was it obvious it was a dead technology? Apple was ahead of the curve, if the floppy was actually a valuable tool then the pc makers would have continued with it, it wasn't Apple that killed it and it's not Apple that is killing Flash now. Adobe has killed it.

Flash is old tech and anyone who wants to hang onto is more than free to do so. You do have a choice. It's just not Apple if you prefer Flash on your mobile devices (and, soon, it won't be on any mobile device).

Oh thanks for that your sweet. I wasn't defending Flash. It's just when I got my Asus Slider I forgot how many sites still use Flash. I live in Switzerland but I enjoy American shows and the sites that stream them do so using Flash. In fact I'm yet to see a HTML5 site. Sites like Hulu still use Flash, yes you can get a app to stream from their site but where are is all those HTML5 sites that we were promised. NBC, CBS, ABS all have streaming but it's Flash to. Again you can watch it but you need a special app. With my Asus Slider I simply point the browser to the site and watch.

I'm sure soon they will all change over to HTML5 but the iPad was released two years ago, Apple could have given us a Flash plugin in the mean time. They chose not to so we iPad users would be forced to purchase our media content from iTunes. It's the same reason why I can't watch my Divx, WMV or any other codec that's not supported by iTunes.

Ok I'm sorry for complaining I now have a new device where I can fill that need and I am so happy with it. I've transferred all of my media to my Asus and will use that as my movie, tv and music box.

Do you think Apple will make a iPad with a keyboard like the Asus Slider or Transformer Prime because that would be great. I have the Logitech keyboard that fits underneath but I would really appreciate a fixed one.