I think you misunderstand how Apple works. They don’t compete, generally speaking, on price; they compete on ease-of-use, compatibility with the rest of their products, quality of design and manufacturing, and “experience”. If all you care about is price, Apple isn’t the line of products for you, typically.
The ‘tactic’ you describe is called releasing and iterating products. “It’s not like Apple couldn’t already be selling the iPad 3” is just a silly statement. Of course they couldn’t, because it hasn’t been made yet. I’m sure it’s in final engineering stages, but if you think they’re putting out the ipad2 now to milk consumers but the 3 is ready to go and they’re not releasing it due to greed, you’re plain wrong. If anything they’re rushing the 2 out to try and keep momentum going as best they can on the iPad line against the certain rush of Android devices.
As I think others have mentioned, it’s not “between a phone and a computer”. It’s not a phone. Its niche is content consumption and entertainment in a very ‘friendly’ form factor (touchscreen, reasonable size, excellent battery life, fantastic screen quality). Its niche would probably be better described as between an iPod Touch (or even a portable DVD player) and a laptop, but there’s no reason to really say it’s “in between” any two things like that – these aren’t linear progressions/spaces, it’s 2D, or even 3D, space if you needed to plot them.
If an iPad doesn’t work for you, no worries, don’t buy one. If it does, buy one if doing so will give you enjoyment commensurate to the cost. But misunderstanding how Apple designs and markets their products and then criticizing them based on your error isn’t helpful.
Yeah, the tablet computer market will boom as soon as it’s possible to get them at or around 100 bucks. There will be a gestalt shift towards content on these devices.
Nice! You got about a 70% discount even if it’s the base model Enjoy it!
As to your earlier remark, I don’t think you really WOULD want to commit to a tablet for the “full computer” functionality you spoke of. If for no other reason than the lack of a keyboard, which is often really useful (a “real” keyboard) for many “real computer” type tasks. (As soon as you connect a real keyboard to a tablet, such as the keyboard docking station for the ipad, it loses a bunch of the niftyness of a tablet, and invariably the keyboard isn’t as useful as it is on a real PC, so…)
Regarding the price of the iPad, the few competing products that have been released so far haven’t been cheaper than the iPad. And I’ve read articles suggesting that they won’t be cheaper, because Apple has contracted for something like 60% of existing touchscreen production.
Maybe you’re at a hotel or airport where they charge for wifi. Maybe you’re at your workplace or someone else’s, where they only allow authorized devices on the company WiFi network. Maybe you’re together at a rented vacation home. Maybe you’re at their house, and they don’t know how to add your iPad’s MAC address to their WiFi router’s access list because their son usually handles all that stuff. Such occasions come up surprisingly often.
I have the non-3G iPad, because if I need wireless, I can tether my iPhone (yes, it’s jailbroken).
As far as vacations, the iPad is a wonder. I do take hundreds of photos, but in my own personal use case, why would I want them on the iPad during vacation? I need to get them into Aperture and processed first, and then weeded out, and then geolocated, and then synced across the network.
My only complaint with Flash is that too many restaurants have stupid, Flash-only websites. I’ve hated those for years even on my proper PC. Luckily there are other resources for determining restaurants’ hours when I’m in a strange place.
For my own use (I point out again), it’s worth every penny that I paid for it.
All very possible. I never said you can always and easily transfer files. And while I know that ipod/iphone/ipad cords don’t universal exist everywhere, they’re not exactly uncommon. Those examples are still pretty much exceptions to the rule.
It may also be because the iPad is locked to the iTunes Store. Everything you buy on your iPad (apps, video, music, books) come from Apple’s online store, and Apple takes a 30% cut from all those sales, IIRC. So they benefit by selling the iPad at a low markup. But if you buy a Motorola Xoom, you won’t be purchasing any content from Motorola.
Re: the USB port issue, someone on a thread on my Facebook wall brought up an interesting point. A lot of people who have Ipads also have laptops (as previously stated), and those people could have USB internet sticks already for portable internet. The possibility of using this on the Ipad could very well undercut sales of its 3G models. Food for thought!
iOS is not a version of OSX, stripped down or otherwise.
Rather than vetting a massive file dump of dozens of pictures from someone on the iPad, you do what most people do, which is manage your own photos, put them online on Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, whatever, and let your friend do likewise. If there’s something that they put up that you really like, you can save it to the iPad for use in the rare times that you’re offline. I really cannot fathom why anyone would expect or want someone to give them 150 unedited photos to look at on an electronic device. Curate and use the cloud & web for what they’re meant for.
It depends on what the files are but almost every app, save iTunes, but including Pages and so on, has some mechanism by which you can email those files to whomever, including yourself.
Of course you can. You can buy songs, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks and apps from the iTunes Store, the App Store, get books from Amazon via the Kindle app, books from Barnes & Nobles via the Nook app, where did you get the idea that you couldn’t? You can do all that on the iPhone!
"I really cannot fathom why anyone would expect or want someone to give them 150 unedited photos to look at on an electronic device.’
I can think of any number of reasons myself, including simply being able to have a look at something without having to upload them all.
I use it all the time on my Eeepc as a way to get a brief preview of pictures Ive taken on a larger screen before getting home and its a major reason why I wouldnt get an Ipad as a replacement, I have no interest in buying peripherals for what I consider a basic function of a device capable of viewing pictures.
Probably not in its current version, but a lot of the API is identical, and even Apple used to say this: iPhone uses OS X, the world’s most advanced operating system. There’s no way iOS was started from scratch. I guess it depends on what one considers “is a version of.”
Why would you guess that? I can think of a lot more situations where a USB would help me swap data than situations where I can trust there to be WiFi available.
It is no less bothersome for iPad-haters to tell me why I don’t want one than for iPad-lovers to tell me why I do want one.
What bothers me about these threads is that anyone who likes the product being discussed is automatically a “fanboy” for the company that produces it. Not true at all.
Just for the record, my battery usually does last about 20 hours. Unless I’m watching videos, in which case it’s more like 5 hours. Or listening to music, in which case it’s well over 100 hours.
You have clearly not visited the vast majority of the world. Or even the United States.
I think that the real key to Apple’s prices on the iPad is that they do it all - no middleman buying wholesale and taking the retail markup as profit. Sure places like Best Buy and Walmart get to sell it, but I’d bet that they are selling at less than normal markup - but those sales are probably minor compared to the Apple Store sales.
You have clearly not visited the vast majority of the world. Or even the United States.
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That would pretty much be the definition of “going out of my way” now wouldn’t it? But seriously - in populated areas (i.e. not “out of the way”) wifi is pretty damn common. And with the new trend of phones acting as wifi hotspots, my statement becomes even more accurate.
Enjoy it!