There’s been quite a lot of road miles written about the new wonder product from Apple with the dodgy name. I watched chunks of the Steve Jobs evangelist gathering and product release. As I said somewhere on Unleashed that I smell a rat – and there’s a lot of self-serving hoopla assumptions by Apple that I would rather use their slick device to do the kind of mundane things that I can – but rarely – do on a Laptop or a Netbook.
I have been long in IT and related work. I have seen the next best things disappear without a trace many times before. Apple did it with the Lisa (which pushed a good idea – mouse-driven graphic user interface) over the top at huge cost and for an audience that apparently was supposed to be happy with something less useful than it’s predecessors. There was also a thing called “the Newton”. Disappeared, vanished, poof !
Anyway the more they hype it, the less I’m inclined to rush out. But if one of the Pig’s patrons were to say “It’s fantastic !”. That would be another thing and I’d have to check it out.
For now, here’s a tasteless clip for the patrons with thick skins – wherein ratbags ridiculed the iPad – in 2006 – four years before it went onto the market.
Crikey – it must be good !
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I feel strangely compelled to weigh in. In contrast to you clever blokes, I bought an early PC, in the eighties. Don’t know why. It did nothing. DOS was hopeless. It was little more than a word processor, and a bad one!
I now use an Imac, for the simple reason that it works, doesn’t crash and burn, doesn’t lose data whilst one is still writing, etc. I have never been up all night reformatting hard-drives, or what ever.
I do use Itunes and an old Ipod. I have a digital transport, which feeds my hifi system, producing sound quality which rivals many hi-end CD players. This is all via gigabit ethernet, as I don’t trust any of that ‘wifi’ stuff!
I don’t feel compelled to buy an iphone (can’t be bothered learning how to ‘text’ on the mobile), ipod ‘touch’, Ipad, or anything else. These devices seem to be designed to pull us in, so that we can maintain some shallow, ‘facebook’ level of contact with other people. My new mantra is “call me, don’t email/text/twit etc me, I’d like to talk, not text!”
Having said that, the only way I communicate with my adult children, often for weeks at a time, is via Facebook! Perhaps my mantra should be, “Do as I say….”
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Big M, In 1989 I got a job at a submarine manufacturing company as the OHS Nurse. My Intel based PC that I’m typing this message on has just caught up to the Mac that was on my desk back then.
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I was about to compose a witty retort, but, Mrs M wanted to watch the iPad movie!
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All those gadgets have in common an ever increasing speed of being obsolete. This is why permanence is the enemy of capitalism and temporarely the essence of allmost everything we buy except perhaps nice cheese or a tasty herring.Apple knows that and therefore tries to put sand into our eyes and have the latest gadget associated with the word ‘tablet’, almost something biblical. We need to fight them everywhere, those ratbags of wallet suckers. On the beaches, on the land but especially on our chairs. Smash them up, mulch them, Mulga them!
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What a great concept, gez. “I went out and mulga’d the crap out of them”
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Looks like a hypersteroidal phone display in a cheap plastic chassis and Apple aren’t going well with their displays and first generation build quality in the personal electronics area. Both the iPod and the iPhone had and still have display issues arising from their lack of roadability without being ensconced in their own air-ride case. The iPad is essentially an app specific GUI and not much else. If you’re a high end mobile note taking, iTunes using, web browsing, social networking online book reader, then maybe $500 isn’t a lot to pay for the convenience. But here’s the thing. I carry a little note book and pen, while I use iTunes I don’t have an iPod or an iPhone, I’m not with any social networking sites, most of my browsing goes on in the background while I work in the forground here at home, and I like the feel of the book in my hands, so maybe I’m not who this will be marketed to. For me, it’d wanna be bulletproof before I bought one. Like Voice, I think the kevlar coating won’t be with us until V2 or 3.
That having been said, as far as general computing goes, I wouldn’t move to the Wintel platform for quids. “Big G” and I are pals and one doesn’t let one’s pals down.
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Stop me if I’ve already talked about this -I tend to go over the same stories these days, even more frequently than before- but I remember buying the Apple IIC. A tiny computer with no memory and only a whole to shove a 4X4″ black floppy, which, from my depleted memory, you could plonk around 100k of memory. Then you’d flip the floppy over, nip the edge like on the other side and plonk another 100ks on it.
Bought that for $3,500 back in ’85, I think.
There were no Greek fonts around back then and being a teacher of VCE Greek, it would have been a great help. However, that little apple, gave one the ability to construct and edit a font!
I spent night after night for many nights until I completed this font -the Greek being extra difficult because one has to also deal with accents…
When I finished the project I made several copies for myself and then spent a whole weekend, downloading it onto the school’s computers, ready for the first Greek lesson. The kids were amazed! Suddenly they wanted to write love letters and letters to their parents, cousins, grand parents in Greece, it was one of the most involved and engaged classes I had.
But then the damned floppies used to crash so I had to buy (out of my pocket!) a whole lot of floppies and spend hours copying the damned font!
I couldn’t convince the Principal that I needed this for my classes and he wouldn’t come in to see the excitement it generated, how easy it was for the kids to accept my corrections and understand them, just as they were doing the writing; and being my own co ordinator, I could only agree with me and Mrs At!
But I loved that little machine. $3,500 bucks, (our own, of course, which I did enter in my tax form) but back then, to get $3,500 together was some achievement! Oh, and that was second hand from one of the students whose parents had bought it for her but she wanted nothing to do with it.
The IMBs, as they were called back then, were not even on my radar. One had to be a computer expert to get to use one of them. But they were half the price so schools were more likely to buy them than the apples.
I love my apples!
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that’s a “hole” not a “whole.” I’ve noticed making these silly blues more often these days and even more so when I get a bit excited. Forbearance, my dear pigmates!
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Hi ‘Mou.
Me too. I was working at CSIRO Division of Animal Production in the early 1980s. I bought two Apple Europluses into the Division and helped some of the scientists get started with them. One chap wrote a data capture routine in Basic and used VisiCalc – the first spreadsheet to crunch his data.
His time efficiency was such that two weeks of pen, paper and calculator work took about a half an hour on the Apple. He was over the moon – and the rest they say is history.
The Apples cost the Division $8,100 the pair (they had extra stuff like a CP/M card with a Z80 chip and a dinky Epson dot matrix printer) and the Division saved $250,000 in avoided mainframe fees in the first year. That gave another CSIRO Division the shits big time – Division of Maths stats, I think – who rented mainframe space – so they made a rule of “minimum mainframe charges” – but the writing was already on the wall.
Apple was great then, and sporadically since. The iPod – even the first few versions were revolutionary – imagine putting your whole record collection in your top pocket – but they’ve become an entertainment company now. And people tell me that the machines are so much more intuitive etc etc etc…. I say whatever you like is OK by me – but as Voice has said – no compelling reason to fall in love with the new toy.
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Where I was working in the late ’80s we had to argue long and hard to purchase a computer to run our survey programs on. We had what I think was an 086 which you booted up off a floppy disk. In the end company insisted that we not buy a clone and purchase a brand name (the prgrams ran on PCs). We purchased a Compac 386-20 with a 40 MB hard drive for $17,000. Shortly after the company policy changed and clones were purchased for significantly less, none however were as solid as the Compac.
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Classy
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I have neither the time nor money to fuss about with it. The two points for getting it would be if you are one of those people who like to be seen with the latest gadget, or if you want to get in on the ground floor writing apps for it. If indeed you need one to do that.
Otherwise, even if it is useful, Mark II is always significantly more reliable and better value.
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I noticed a pop up to the right saying Empower?
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Watt ? The power of one Emm.
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