Sorry for this brief fit of tech blogging, but a $499 starting price for Apple’s new iPad? Wow. Top that, Microsoft.
Back to your regularly scheduled political ranting.
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Another category killers from those liberuls at Apple! Wait, I thought liberuls couldn’t run businesses?
I’m underwhelmed. The price is nice, though I think I’d rather pay a bit less for a netbook. I don’t see how this either validates or transcends the tablet category. Too big for a phone, too small for a real computer. That hasn’t changed.
iDon’tCare
I sure wish I’d bought 5,000 shares of AAPL back in ’03 when it was 7 bucks a share. That was one of my bigger screwups.
I don’t buy stuff like this. I have a 10-year-old car and a 12-year-old computer that runs on a POTS line that costs 10 bucks a month. I buy stocks. I would rather own 5 shares of CVX than an iPad or Kindle.
Does a $499 iPad send dividend checks to you in the mail? If it doesn’t, I’m not impressed.
Very cool but I doubt it’s as big a breakthrough in human factors tech as they’re touting..
But I said the same thing about the ipod.. eh.. just another mp3 player. Who’d wanna watch video on such a small screen?..
We’ll see..
3. N in Seattle spews:
I’m with you N in Seattle!
I imagine our 4 kids in their 20’s/30’s are standing in line for this shit.
I can see sending $499 to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, though. (I sent them a check recently, although not that much.) I think protecting the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary from Jap commercial whalers has more intrinsic value than weighing down your carry-on luggage with another electronic toy that you can’t play with in flight anyway.
@8 That’s still better than standing in line for 5 minutes with a horse.
@8 (continued) Like your Republican buddies in Enumclaw do.
I’m not sure I “get it”. This isn’t to replace my laptop (not full OS X you can install application on, just a iPhone apps). So I can’t use this to run iMovie, install PhotoShop and such. It’s just a big iPhone. But it’s not a phone, so I still have to carry my iPhone that already has all my games, email, web browsing and apps. So I carry my iPhone and this (just a giant iTouch which is an iPhone without the phone) too?
Too limited (not a full notebook) but just a big copy of my iPhone I already have. Plus, unlike my laptop or netbook, I have to pay ANOTHER monthly data fee (I already pay AT&T TOO much for my iPhone). What? Who’s the market?
By the way, the name? Really?
@Alki-it runs iWork (at a very reasonable price of $30 or $10 per component), so it’s more capable than an iPod touch, I suspect the iLife suite is not far behind, so iMovie in time for the holidays.
Apple is at 7x Dell’s market cap Roger, I’d love to see a quote from Michael Dell today about how the iPad will help or hurt Apple’s shareholders.
growing up sold
Alki @12,
You know what, I wasn’t sure I got it either, until I actually saw what was introduced.
It fills the exact same market niche as a netbook, in that it is a product aimed more at content consumption than creation. You’re not going to use iMovie or Photoshop on either of them, but you will surf the web, watch movies, listen to music, send email, etc., and they’re both perfectly adequate for light writing chores. And at the same time, the iPad makes a great portable gaming machine and ebook reader.
When I think of the way my daughter uses her computer, an iPad would be and better choice for 75% of what she does, and a serviceable replacement for another 15%. And it’s cheaper than buying her a MacBook.
Would I like one for myself? Sure. Will I buy one for myself? No, not now. But then, I’ve always been notoriously thrifty, even when I’ve had money. But I can imagine buying one eventually, kissing my laptop goodbye in favor of an iPad combined with a more robust, larger screened iMac.
$500 for a glorified iTouch? WOW SO AMAZING HOW DOES APPLE BE SO INVENTIVE.
Puh-lease. Touch keyboard only, no stylus, $10 per additional app. Yeah hardly a deal. Apple knows that it’s consumers are so stupid they will buy anything with an “i” in front of it. Just spend another few hundred bucks and buy an Apple laptop if you’re so determined to have an Apple computer. The iPad won’t be around long, mark my words.
iCovet
For electronic medical records, a mobile tablet like this will be great.
(Using my software, of course.)
@18
It will be interesting to see if the iPad is the device that delivers on the promise of the tablet form factor for businesses.
@13
I can’t believe nobody in Apple’s marketing department didn’t think this was a really bad name.
Do you use your iPad maxi on those “heavy flow” days?
@Jason, they released the SDK for it today, so get coding.
@Tyler, there is a meatspace keyboard available if you need one. And each additional price is set by each developer, many of them are a quite reasonable “free”. $10 for a spreadsheet app, $10 for a text editor, and $10 for a presentation app are much more reasonable than what is currently available from our semi-local Redmond software company (local for employees, a Nevada company for many taxable business concerns).
@Goldy, this device will be a bloggers delight. Perhaps HA the Magazine could make this work of yours actually support you and many other bloggers in Left Blogostan not underwritten by wingnut welfare.
@14 I wouldn’t buy Apple at this price, or any other stock riding the top of the wave, because it’s likely to be downhill from here. I like to catch them near the bottom and ride them up.
@16 “And it’s cheaper than buying her a MacBook.”
Checking out books from the public library is cheaper still.
@23 Get back to us when books do email and web-surfing.
@24 You can do email and web surfing on any old clunker computer with a 10-buck-a-month AOL connection.
@24 (continued) One more thing. The amount of email and web surfing you can do on an airplane is … none. You can, however, read a book on a plane. And the book won’t catch fire and burn up your carry-on bag.
RR @ 26
I thought Amazon’s Kindle was a pretty stupid idea. Then a coworker let me play with his. It’s way cool. Not cool enough for me to buy one. But I see the appeal.
I’ve been unloading the majority of my books and CDs. 100s of them given to Friends of the Seattle Library. Looking forward, I doubt very much that I’ll be buying much hard copy (dead trees, shiny coasters) content in the future.
Um, isn’t the iPad just a giant iPod Touch?
Required reading for the iPad fanboy…
http://i.gizmodo.com/5458382/
@Daddy- multitasking lack is a big check against, no question. Adapters is a small check, the other six are quibbles at most.
@Troll- bigger and better apps will run on this puppy, iWork is the trailblazer on this score- others will certainly follow, and they won’t be found on an iPod Touch. And Apple set the price for the iWork apps low and they very likely will end up being the standard price at $10.
But yeah, multitasking lack is is a big deal.
#14, #16
Oh, so it IS supposed to be a replacement for my small notebook or netbook. Thought earlier they said it wasn’t. So if it can ONLY run ‘apps’ and the specific iWorks suite, that’s not enough to replace an actual netbook running XP or Windows 7 (or Ubuntu). It’s just an iTouch, but bigger.
Again, NEAT! Except I have an iPhone, and this is only that, but bigger screen. Still not convinced it has a purpose. And unlike my notebook, I have to wipe the entire screen from fingerprints (like my iPhone). Nutty.
VERY pretty…but pointless.
want…………..
@Alki- Not sure where you got the idea that Apple said it wasn’t a replacement for the netbook, but Steve Jobs explicitly invoked the netbook as a poor solution the kinds of things they’re both used for. At the end of the event today he placed it in separate category between iPhone/Touch and the MacBook. Prior to today they haven’t talked about it all in public. You shouldn’t hold them responsible for what you thought. And multitasking is a big strike against it. But it is far from pointless as a working device for professionals and servicepeople & a notebook for students. It mY not be a universal solution, but anyone that thinks that Apple just makes stylish gewgaws has missed the true point of their appeal -that well designed technology is used and thus more useful.
@9
The current year is 2010. WWII has been over for a long time. To refer to Japanese commercial whalers today as “Jap commercial whalers” is a racial slur.
You purport to be an educated progressive, but we learned something else about you today.
I use my iPhone almost exclusively for personal computing. The shitbox my company has me use serves them pretty well.
The last year of college (I went back 20 years later to finish my degree) I used my iPhone for almost all of my research. Being able to drop my kid off at an after school class, and go into starbucks and pull up full PDF files and email them to myself was pretty sweet.
I wrote 3 to 5 page reports in emails to myself. At the end I would format the text on my old mac.
That said, I have little use for a bigger version of the itouch. IWork might be enough to get me there, and I could give up my old mac to my kids to play with.
I would want to tether the ipad to my iPhone and use the phone’s Internet 3G access. I have one unlimited data plan, I don’t need two.
Btw, I have days, and days, of music on my phone from the SPL. I have never purchase a song from iTunes.
Well of course Jobs said netbooks were a poor solution. He doesn’t make one. If he did, it would be the ideal solution. I agree the name is odd and the device is kind of a yawn. The only surprise here really is that Apple is offering the thing for an un-Apple like price (at least for the bare bones version).
Knowing Apple fans, I am sure Apple will sell many of these devices, but sorry Goldy, I doubt that Microsoft is overly concerned about this particular “one more thing.”
iPiddle, too little.
After ALL that hype …
low resolution touch means no character recognition
my Pre has more processing power … HOW in hell can APPLE sell a $4000 with no mem card or HD?
HP’s win-tablet is a LOT better deal.
If Goldy is so excited about the iPad, just wait till the iTampon comes out.
blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahAppleblahblahblablahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahPenisbreathblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahTrendoidblahblahblahblahblah….
Am I jealous? No, just amused at uSheep.
Roger @ 9:
I wouldn’t give Sea Shepherd two squirts of piss. After they threatened the Makah during their whale hunt back in the day (and yeah, ramming the hunters’ canoe with a steel ship constitutes a potentially lethal threat to me) I lost all respect for the loony critter-huggers of all stripes and spots. In so many words, they go in the same dumper as PETA – no matter how laudable the goal might be, any organization that devalues human life in preference to their desired goals, they’re nothing but terrorists to me.
@26 – You are living in the past, RR… many airlines have Wifi now (even our own little airline Alaska has it on a few planes, expanding to more this year). Fly Virgin or Delta and most planes are WiFi enabled. AA has 30% up now, etc.
You can post all the comments you like to HA in real time from 35,000 feet now, Roger! Assuming you are let out of your hutch during the flight.
(Cupertino)
Little notices at yesterday’s news conference was Apples announcement of the iSheet. iSHeets are mush tninner than iPads and intended for very brief use.
One iPad can dispense 400 iSheets.
There rumors that iSheets will not require a usage plan from AT&T. Apple also refused to comment on possible specialized forms of the iSheets as post-its or toilet paper.”
“Book” doesn’t sound like a feminine hygiene product either.
ipad is a fad.
its not a macbook killer.
its not an iphone killer.
maybe its an oversized ipod?
but who cares?
it was more important than the presidential state of the union but thats not saying much
obama and ipad will march into irrelevance together!