Steve Jobs was ‘annoyed and depressed’ over initial reaction to iPad launch - Page 4

Gazillions- especially retail shopping, art, and porn- any site that requires you the rotation of the image. And many European sites especially. I have to constantly put on the Mac to view them.

tablets with a 'real' os have been out for years. they ran Windows and they were turds. go use your windows 'real' os device and enjoy the smell.

Then you've already solved the problem. You don't use the iPad for purposes that it isn't suitable for.

That doesn't justify turning the iPad into a POS machine by installing Flash just so you can view your porn.

Err... You spelled Steve Jobs' name as: "Steve Jobs's".

I suspect that there are people for whom home movies and porn are the same thing...

Just a few thoughts on the writings of DED:

Whether you agree or disagree (or simply take with a grain of salt) it is hard to deny the sheer enthusiasm that radiates from the words, sentences, and paragraphs written. Sure there's a reality distortion field, but doesn't that make sense when you're covering Apple? Passion always makes an interesting read. While they style is noticeably different, I'd compare DED to my favorite columnist: Bill Simmons from Grantland.com.

*presses button, slide projector moves forward*

"And here're my cousins and I at Niagara Falls. We were going to be the first to, well, you know, while going over, but they chickened out.

*presses button, slide projector moves forward*

And here's the family reunion. Good times.

*presses button, slide projector moves forward*

More of the reunion. We set a record that day, but I guess you can see that.

*presses button, slide projector moves forward*

Oh, and here's our daughter's first day of high school. No idea what all the fuss was about.

*presses button, slide projector moves forward*

"There. So, what do you think?"

*The people that were watching are huddled in the corner furthest from the projectionist.*

I don't know about European sites but I know for a FACT (LOL) that there are plenty of porn sites with video for the iPad. And some of those sites offer HTML5 web apps that you can bookmark to your screen just like a native app.

Daniel, thanks for writing this up and taking the usual flack. I needed to hear it said, even though I'm in "non-spoiler mode" (Gruber's phrase) when it comes to this forthcoming book. I'm skipping all the leak articles that I can.

But this one. Of course Jobs would be disgusted, infuriated, hurt, baffled by the narrowness, meanness, stupidity the tablet was greeted with. To say nothing of worse that came out of posters to forums like this one. He put his heart into it and it was like his child, for goddess's sake, and the consensus was "fail." Of course he cared what people think.

I got mine on the first day, now about a year and a half ago. I still use it for hours every day, all over the house, in the car in traffic jams, in any kind of line at Starbucks or the bank or whatever. While the iKols of this world were (so he says) sitting it out waiting for their stupid multitasking or whatever, I was learning thousands of things on my iPad, a year's worth of history, archeology, ethnopharmacology and much else. I was not "consuming" any fucking content, I was learning things. I have never played games on it, have a few apps that I hardly ever use, I just use it as a tool, an instrument for learning.

I didn't know this was going to happen. I got the Pad because I knew it would be the greatest portable video player ever for my own videos, and it is. Who knew it would be full of books and PDFs as well? (Answer: Steve Jobs.)

Daniel, thanks for flushing out the perennial left-brainers who still don't get it. They're the reason I had to join this forum though, so their ignorant kindling does keep the fire going around here, I suppose.

By the way, the lame non-replaceable battery still gets through a full day of on and off use, probably 8 hours or so. I'm going to be 70 years old soon; we'll see who wears out first.

Jeez, and I was going to congratulate him on getting the possessive of Steve Jobs's name right for a change, at least according to the Chicago Manual of Style that we used 40 years ago.

But I was also going to rag on him for that long tale in the last sentence. But then anybody who lives in Brighton is my frien' -- know what I'm sayin'?

Thoughtful, well written, and biting editorial. Great job...thanks.

Strunk & White and the NY Times style books allow both usages of the possessive.

And again, just because the device isn't what your wife or daughter want, does not make it a failure.

Our iPad is one of the first iPads ever ordered (we were in the 4,000 on the morning it was available on the site (3minutes if anyone is interested)) and even this morning the wife has used ours for a couple of hours. As I've said before, ours gets used 3-4 hours a day, everyday, for the last 18 months or so.

So please don't fall into this trap that because one or two people don't see the need for it, that everyone won't see the need for it. In the same way, we find ours useful, you didn't find yours useful - that's life and everyone is different.

Then, "Steve Jobs's... " would be pronounced: Jobs-ez...


Edit: Of course, if we continue this discussion, we will appear to be making complete asses's mistakes...

...or we could incur the gods's anger...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/12/sev...he-apple-ipad/

Apart from the modded Macbook, i haven't heard of or seen one of these in real life.

Did they make it to production? Do they actually exist?

Macbook Air...

Correct. It's a possessive noun which requires an apostrophe and an optional s. I prefer to include the s, which is recommended in some circles.

. . . or the mods' anger. Plurals just get a '. Jobs weren't no plural, unfortunately.

On "Jobs-es," as the French say, fait l'elision, make the elision, let it slide into "Jobs name" if it bothers you, but of course the pedants (like me) would make it two syllables.

Better stop now, like you say . . . I never use a possessive of asses . . . "the pasture where we keep the asses" . . . help . . . stop me . . .

So how is that even valid criticism in the first place? Of course it was a giant iPod Touch and it still is. It is a larger version of the same device with the same operating system. The difference is in the uses for large screen versus small screen. You can't just say that you don't need the iPad because you have an iPod, or an iPhone for that matter. The size difference is what makes them different from a functional standpoint, phone functionality aside of course. Early on, many people just couldn't imagine what they would use a tablet for and the prospect of an Apple device actually failing was obviously exciting to the media. What a great story that would have made and they all would have been in on the beginning. Instead, they only demonstrated the lack of imagination that so seriously hampers our media today.

So there's actually people who think a tablet running OSX would have been a better move, or would have been better received/more successful than the iPad? You're absolutely insane.

From developers' perspectives (notice how I did that the iPad is much more than a big iPod Touch.

The SDK provided additional APIs to help the developers exploit the iPad's larger screen.

You had to completely rethink your app, and usually re-implement it, to take intelligent advantage of the additional real estate.


The iPad mail app is a good example of this where 2 columns are concurrently displayed:
-- a left-hand column (list) of emails showing: From; Subject; and 3 lines of the body
-- a right-hand column displaying the content of the email selected in the left column,

There is no way to do that on the smaller screen!

And, it makes a world of difference from a usability standpoint -- you can much, much more easily navigate, delete and move messages (without losing your place or train of thought).


True, Apple allowed apps designed for the smaller screen to be displayed actual size (or double size) for backwards compatibility -- and that was a necessary good thing.

But users were quick to demand (and get) apps that exploited the large screen.

And, trust me -- while it is easy to change the overall display size of an iPhone/Touch app... it usually made the app work worse on the large screen than on the small...

Instead of being intuitive, it becomes awkward -- leaving the user thinking: "Why didn't they..."


AIR, there were more than 1,000 apps designed (or redesigned) specifically for the iPad, available on the day of iPad's release.


By contrast, it appears that Android wants to go in another direction -- According to Andy Rubin:

I dont think there should be apps specific to a tablet.


Andy Rubin: I dont think there should be apps specific to a tablet

Good reply. I agree with this. What the people who keep saying the iPad is not useful because it doesn't run "full desktop apps" are forgetting is that what they want has been on the market for nearly 20 years in the Windows Tablet PCs. It's been tried. Microsoft has been trying to crack the tablet PC market for years. And there will always be a slice of the market that needs full desktop in a tablet. If these people aren't already using a Windows Tablet PC, or UMPC, and they're posting how crappy iPad is because it doesn't run desktop apps, then they aren't really interested in running desktop apps; they just want to whine about iPad.

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Thanks for that, well said.

Here here to both comments.

Loved your post. I m rather younger (i m in my thirties) but I hope I ll be as forward thinking and curious when I get to your age. I too use the iPad for learning. iTunes and podcasts are a joy, keeping reference material on the iPad and a large portion of my library is a joy too. read it later with all my daily to reads autocategorized, ins tapper for my longer stories and articles, early edition picking up all the news I d like to read from rss, voice reading apps for when my eyes are tired...you name it.

God bless Steve's soul, I wish he were here, I am writing this and my eyes fill with tears, because death, this ultimate equaliser, doesn't make exceptions to anyone.

The fact is that the iPad is a giant iPod Touch. What the market has proven is that a giant iPod Touch has many functions. Of course, with the iPad surpassing the iPod Touch in hardware specs quite a bit, we can now call the latter the Minipad.

Likewise, it is fair and true that the iPad is primarily consumption device (which was the other *criticism* that irked fanboys). There's no shame in that. Again, the market has proven that more than 50% of computer use is consumption.

Thanks, and a tip o' the Fool's cap to ya.

Learning is not consumption!!!! Or if it is, what are we consuming, knowledge? Have things come to such a sorry pass?

Probably the worst article ever written on AI.

Look, the media thought the iPad was a big iPod touch, but they were wrong - end of discussion.

Why so grumpy today?

Buts that's only. 1/3rd the solution- what about the other 2/3rds?

It's the full solution - apparently you're not able to understand.

You use the iPad for tasks that it is suitable for. Use the computer for tasks that the iPad is not suitable for. What part of that is beyond your comprehension?

Grumpy? Not really. This article is like it was written in a state of defensive paranoia. The media called the iPad a big iPod touch when it came out originally because that's what they actually believed. This teenage angst/rebellion feeling from everyone of Dilger's articles becomes tiring. He's got it all wrong. He needs to try some wine or orange juice.

Exactly the point I was making!

Rubin says:

“I don’t think there should be apps specific to a tablet,” he said. He also added that “if someone makes an ICS app it’s going to run on phones and it’s going to run on tablets.” Now, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think there shouldn’t be apps optimized for larger screens, it just means that ICS will continue to work like Honeycomb, with a single app scaling differently to different screen sizes."

That says to me:
1) the app will look and work exactly the same on all screens some larger some smaller
2) there will be no provision for additional capabilities to take advantage of larger screen sizes
3) Android may not be a robust enough OS to handle the differences dictated by larger displays

The latter is an interesting thought.

Many posters, here and elsewhere, claim the iPad is just a big iPhone/iPod Touch and it doesn't run a proper OS.

When, in fact, the original iPhone and all the iDevices that followed do run a proper, desktop-class OS -- Mac OS X that has been skinnyed down to run on an iPhone. Most of the underlying UNIX constructs and OS X core enhancements run on the iOS devices.

That means that as the capability of the mobile hardware grows, over time, iOs can easily grow accordingly and become closer to the capabilities of Mac OS X running on the desktop.


No one else but Apple, has a desktop-class OS running on a phone!


Android, Windows Phone 7, WebOS, the QNX variant, etc. are written specifically for a phone class device.

They have no code bases to draw from to grow these limited phone OSes into tablet OSes that approach a desktop-class OS.


The fact that there are [modified] versions of desktop apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie running totally on the iPad illustrates my point.

It appears that others' phone/tablet OSes are too limited and must rely on the cloud to accomplish the equivalent of desktop apps.

MS, apparently, is going to partially implement limited desktop app capabilities on Windows 8 running on ARM...

I don't really know what that means... or what it means for the future of Windows Phone 7 (nor does MS, IMHO).

But, MS is the only Apple competitor out there with a desktop OS (and apps) that could be conceivably migrated to ARM phones/tablets to take advantage of their eventual convergence with their desktop OS...

But they are at least 4 years behind Apple!

Sales numbers were the "facts" that prove you wrong.
Nobody cares about your opinion.

I am guessing that you do not read much do you. The media in general is always been anti-apple. Period. And just like Daniel says, they over hype and complain that it does not do anti-gravity and does not look like a Windows machine.

But, constant success tends to make even the most skeptical, a little less skeptical.

just a thought,
en

The post I replied to was asking how many websites still use flash, not what other tasks I use my iPad for.

Besides, when I have work to do, I use a Mac. The iPad has got a long way to go before it would be possible for me to use one for work.


The question was about how many sites use flash. The answer still is, a lot of them. When it comes to children's content, there are very few that don't.

I care about his opinion. I value all opinions.