Dan_Dilger
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Editorial: How Steve Jobs' 'Thoughts On Flash' gave iPad a head start in tablets
You didn't notice the big ol' "Editorial:" at the beginning of the headline? It wasn't even just a category tag this time.fastasleep said:
I doubt Jobs ever actually thought Adobe would "fix" it:"And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X."
That is some shade
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Editorial: Steve Jobs shared secrets of Apple's iPad but nobody listened
First off, the comments are here for you to discuss the article and offer feedback, not to throw out as much slanderous, fact-free character assassination you can just to divert attention from the subject. Stop doing this.lmac said:One of DED's favorite forms of storytelling is rewriting history to make Apple and Jobs seem to have thought of everything, but let's remember that we don't write articles about flops. You never see DED defending the genius of Ping, the iTunes social network, or the Apple HiFi. Still, there are lots of things in this article that qualify as spin, or that are just plain false. 1) When the iPad came out, people were stunned that it was just a scaled up phone that couldn't make phone calls, and not a more capable device. They were correct about its early limitations. 2) The product name almost sunk the launch, with people comparing it to feminine hygiene products. 3) The predicted dominance of the eBook and magazine industry never came to pass. 4) Jobs totally missed the importance of the App Store and 3rd party apps, which came later, and really had much to do with the success of the device. 5) Job's insistence that a stylus and keyboard were unnecessary have since been reversed, so which is it? Is Apple on the wrong track today, or did Jobs get it wrong in the beginning? 6) The iPad push into the K12 classroom as a textbook replacement is over. Schools are replacing aging iPads with Chromebooks that cost less, are more rugged, easier to manage, and simply do more. 7) The one big thing Apple got right was to make the iPad the best tablet money can buy, and to keep making incremental improvements. Staying above the low-end competition is what Apple always does, but it paid off because the low end Android and Amazon tablets are clunky, sluggish, and non-intuitive in comparison.
Second, I have written about a series of unsuccessful concepts or product flops Apple has made, including Ping and iPod HiFi. There's even mention of Ping in this very article, making it a bizarre example for you to use in slandering what I write as "just plain false."
1) This subject is also mentioned in the article. You clearly didn't even bother to read it. The idea that "people" who thought iPad was just a scaled up phone "were correct about its early limitations" is probably the stupidest takeaway one could make about the iPad launch.
2) The fact that a few neanderthal trolls giggled to themselves about iPad sounding like "pad," as if the only meaning of pad were a feminine product, is incredibly stupid, at least in part because one the most popular and reputable notebook brands was IBM's ThinkPad, which nobody associated with a hygienic pad between 1992-2010. Nobody cared about what a few misogynistic idiots said, and it clearly had zero impact on iPad sales. So again, totally false claim on your part that "the product name almost sunk the launch." Quite embarrassing that you'd try. to claim that given that we know how well it sold.
3) True it didn't become the digital magazine Jobs imagined, but that was largely because magazines were already to dead to revive in any form. Nobody else had any better outcome in trying to build a market for digital content, and Apple's current News+ remains the best option there is. Not sure what point you have here.
4) Totally false. This is even discussed in the article.
5) Apple has always sold third party stylus tools for iOS screens, and Jobs comments about a stylus being "wrong" when he introduced iPhone in 2007 related to it being required to navigate the UI of a device, as it was for Newton and Palm Pilot and some smartphones. Jobs was obviously correct then as the market demonstrated, and Apple is performing well today by selling Pencil as a drawing device and not forcing users to have it just to make use of iPads, as the market is again demonstrating.
6) Sounds like all you know about Chromebooks is from Mark Gurman, who flat out lied in his reporting. I wrote about it, you should check it out.
7) This is meaningless to say, because CNET and the Verge were claiming that various waves of other tablets were the "the best tablet money can buy" across the last decade, and everyone was making incremental advancements. Windows tablets, Honeycomb, Nexus 9, and various other Android models have tried to compete in the high end with iPad like pricing, and they still failed.
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A4 to A5: How Apple outflanked its fragmented competition in silicon
The reason why it's not weird is that Jobs said that in 2010, which was 2 years before 2012 in historical terms of time.crowley said:Bit weird to cut the article on Jobs disparaging 7" tablets without mentioning the iPad Mini being released in 2012.
Jobs comments on 7" tablets did not apply to the iPad mini --it wasn't 7" (!) and it wasn't the 16:9 form factor that Samsung, RIM and Google and the rest all chose ot make, assuming that the primary use would be watching videos, and then abandoned after finding that it wasn't a good format for mobile apps, -- and Apple made sort of a production about detailing why (!).hypoluxa said:It's interesting to see how Jobs basically poo-pooed smaller form tablets, then after his passing Apple realized there was a market for them etc, and releases the mini. They have positioned their hardware into a three tier product line, just like in the late 90's (good/better/best). Makes perfect sense. -
ARM to A4: How Apple changed the climate in mobile silicon
That connectivity was also driven by silicon though. Apple focused on the CPU first, because there was the most potential for setting itself apart (the baseband chip has to follow industry standards, mostly locked up by Qualcomm SEP). But now Apple is venturing into developing its own baseband chips too.GeorgeBMac said:Yes, silicon was a critical factor. But equally critical were advances in communications technology.In the 80's & 90's dedicated lines enabled mainframes to operate in what is today known as "Cloud Computing" instead of simply being onsite monsters eating punched cards.
Meanwhile, during that same time period, it opened up the world of personal computing to email over dial-up lines and painfully slow modems.
Then a bit later, cable which had already transformed TV viewing was adapted to provide high speed communications to desktop computers which exponentially increased their power and functionality -- and suddenly we had streaming and large downloads. Eventually it even replaced the DVD.And, while the cable internet revolution was underway, cellular technology enabled car phones and then advances in it enabled smart phones to access the internet. And later, further advances in it changed the smart phone from being primarily a phone to mostly a pocket sized computer.
And today, we have 5G promising to provide high speed communications to IoT from medical devices to cars, industrial devices and mobile computers throughout the world.
We could have had A13's and I9's back in the 80's -- but they would not have made as a big dent (in their stand alone computers) as has communications and connecting those computers to the world.The companies that focused on baseband more than adding value to the CPU/GPU like to claim their "lead with 5G," but 5G is being delivered by everyone in pretty much the same rollout, so there won't be much opportunity to exploit. So by focusing on the Baseband, Huawei and Samsung ended up behind Apple in the Application Processor. Apple will have an easier time catching up than those companies will have in scaling up their AP ambitions, particularly because they lack much of a premium market willing to pay for higher-end devices with fast chips. -
ARM to A4: How Apple changed the climate in mobile silicon
Yes, Apple's UI work went beyond a lot of what engineers saw at PARC. But particularly in hardware, Apple had to develop something that was completely different than the Xerox hardware. Xerox invested $1M in Apple stock and gained some return for allowing Apple some access to see the work it had started.BigDann said:One slight correction Xerox PARC group only opened the eye's of Steve on what was possible!
Xerox corporate just didn't get what it had, as its focus was on copiers and printers. Not the composition aspect and even less interest in personal computers.
While I'm sure some moneys where given for the visits and some questions afterwards Xerox did not offer that much more to Apples Lisa project which gained what was learned and was the first graphical mass market computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
It's notable that a variety of other work at Xerox PARC went elsewhere with no investment by Xerox sharing in the outcome, including Postscript at Adobe, Ethernet at 3Com, and Word at Microsoft. But there was never a narrative or any movies crafting the idea that all these other companies pillaged Xerox PARC and hired away its engineers and didn't really deserve their success. That has been unique to Apple for some reason.
