Apple announced yet another revolutionary product yesterday- the iPad.
Patrick Rhone, a technology consultant and author of the minimalistMac blog had this to say about the negative reactions to “missing features” such as the lack of a camera, multitasking, and keyboard:
It may come as a shock to us geeks, but many people can’t handle multiple choices on a computing device. They learn the one way to do something and they always do it that way.
Furthermore, it is increasingly apparent that Apple feels that he moment you are presented with an option you are taken away from the experience and interaction with the device and that, my friends, is the secret sauce that Apple sells you. They have never been in the been about selling you a box. They sell you an experience and the more immersed you are in that experience, and the less choices you have to make, the more you can simply focus on what you need to get done.
John Gruber, software developer and noted author of the Daring Fireball, blogged about “The Big Picture”:
… the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”.
It is fast, fast, fast……
And so my takeaway from this — with the bragging about making their own CPUs and their annual revenue and their size compared to companies like Sony, Samsung, and Nokia — is that this is Apple’s way of asserting that they’re taking over the penthouse suite as the strongest and best company in the whole ones-and-zeroes racket.
And Gizmodo had this to say:
We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.
Head over to the Apple web site for detailed specs and videos,, and the keynote.
| 16GB | 32GB | 64GB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi | $499 | $599 | $699 |
| Wi-Fi + 3G | $629 | $729 | $829 |
- 1GHz Apple A4 processor (custom)
- 0.5″ thick
- 1.5 pounds
- 9.7″ Capacitive touch screen (1024×768)
- 16-64GB of SSD storage
- 3G available but not in all iPads
- $14.99 for 250MB, $29.99 for unlimited data on AT&T (no contract)
- 3G iPads are unlocked, have GSM micro SIMs
- Accelerometer, Compass
- 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1
- Runs iPhone apps in window or pixel doubling
- Hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics
- SDK out today
- $499 for 16GB base model, $830 for all maxed out
- Dock with hard keyboard available but it will also work with the Apple wireless keyboard