Man, you apple fanbots sicken me. Preordering and having wet dreams and you have no idea what the hell it is. Tell me, when Steve dies will you all commit suicide?
Man, you Apple fanboy haters sicken me. Pre-hating and having wet dreams about the insults you'll throw out when you have no idea what the hell Apple will come out with. Tell me, if Apple dies will you commit suicide because you have no one else to hate on?
In a serious note this post has zero value. It's just a bunch of vitriol. Quite frankly, you are threadcrapping. What is it to you if people want to spend their hard earned dollars on products that Apple makes? Did someone from Apple or some Apple fanboy come in and kick your dog? Does their spending money on Apple products somehow decrease your available spending money?
Any company can make a cool gadget like apple. All you have to do is make it, slap some glue on everything so nothing can be swapped out or replaced, remove all ports of any type and use aluminium.
Is that why tablets were so successful before Apple? Is that why GUI's were so prevalent before Apple popularized it on their Lisa and Macintosh computers? Is that why we had such great, from an ease of use standpoint, smartphones before Apple's iPhone? Is that why MP3 players had such great interfaces before the iPod?
So the other companies just let Apple do it first and get all the press, not to mention a large slice of the profits? I'm not saying Apple is the only company that can design great interfaces or create tight fitting well engineered designs but it does take talent and most companies are lacking in that department because they don't emphasize it. Apple has won numerous industrial design awards.
Hell, Google copied Apple's mobile phone GUI. Android is what it is today because it copied from iOS. Windows is what it is today because it copied largely from MacOS. Not that MS and Google hasn't added improvements. And MS has shown a greater emphasis on design lately with their Office ribbon interface and Windows Phone 7's GUI design. That takes a lot of money spent on research and development as well as talented designers.
Really, apple has not created anything that hasn't been done before. They just glue all together so it is small and thin and can not be upgraded or added on. My vibrant phone would be much thinner than the iPhone if Samsung just glued it all in a sealed package instead of allowing me to add memory or change my battery.
Apple is more of an integrator than an innovator but anyone who is impartial will admit that their designs are first class and arguably innovative. A lot of what they've done has not been done before. If it was so obvious and simple to integrate then someone else would have done it already. While the parts may not be new inventions, integrating the whole thing together can be innovative.
If it was so easy for Samsung to make a thinner phone then they would have done so. It takes talented designers. It takes a lot of engineering work to implement the designs. Apple puts as much emphasis on design as it does engineering. Samsung does not. It is nowhere near as easy as just "gluing it all together in a sealed package" as you want to put it. Look at all the products with more engineering and design work put in and you'll see a price tag similar to Apple's.
Look at Samsung's Macbook Air competitor. It's looking like a superbly designed, highly engineered laptop. It also has a price to match the Macbook Air because you can't just slap a motherboard between two pieces of aluminum or plastic and call it a laptop. So can Samsung (or other companies) do as good of an engineering job as Apple? Yes. But then you'll be hit with a higher price tag much like Apple does. It's not easy and it's not cheap. That thinner Vibrant would cost more than it does now.
No, its not. Not trying to derail my own thread here, but there's a lot of consumer devices that outsell the iPad, and will continue to outsell the iPad. Unfortunately, that Apple logo confuses a lot of people who believe it to be some mythical stamp of approval from God himself.
I think I'd change what Pliablemoose said as the iPad being the best consumer tablet device at the point of it's release and even arguably today. It's the best selling tablet to date which is far from being the best selling consumer device.
Everything the iPad does, other devices do better. Want to read books? Nooks and Kindles easily best the iPad with their e-ink screens and no data plan pricing. Incidentally, nooks/Kindles also win out on battery life, portability, and cost as well. Need a device to do work? Get an ultraportable notebook, gets the same battery life as the iPad, costs the same. No monthly data plan. The iPad sells because people are idiots. Its as simple as that. I'm just confused how people can impulse buy a 500+ dollar toy.
E-ink screens definitely improve readability over traditional LCD's by a lot. For those that plan to use iPads or Android tablets, I've found that inverting the color scheme (white text on black background) reduces eye fatigue by a lot.
The iPad does not require a monthly data plan either. It's just if you want online access away from a Wifi source, you'll need a monthly data plan but this is no different from what Android tablets will be.
The best highly portable device to get work done would be a netbook. Android and iOS tablets aren't going to change that. I think going forward and as iOS and Android matures, touchscreen tablets will give netbooks a run for the money though. Think about the iPad on release and how inadequate it was to get work related stuff done. Hell, you couldn't even print documents on it at the time of release.
The situation today is better but still not there yet. I think it'll take more improvements in the OS as well as apps that are built specifically to take advantage of a touchscreen device before it can become a more serious work device. There are more and more productivity apps being released for iOS. An example being specialized apps like onOne's DSLR remote software to control Canon or Nikon DSLR's.
Where the iPad does excel currently is as a media consumption device. This works better with a net connection obviously.
On Steve Job's passing away, every time he takes medical leave or there's even a rumor of a decline in his health, Apple stock drops. He may have had years to put together a team, but that runs counter to his philosophy of 'I control everything, you do what I say when I say it. I know best'. I'm sure there's a lot of competent people at Apple, but without Steve, Apple stock is going to drop by half.
Steve Jobs' motto has obviously been controlling every aspect of everything. Reports are that he is more delegating in his second around at Apple which is a good thing. He's still rules with an iron fist though. The good thing about Jobs is that for the most part he has a pretty good idea of what products will sell. He has a knack for seeing various technologies and putting it into a cohesive product. And that's why Apple's stock is going to drop by a lot after Jobs leaves permanently.
Tim Cook looks like he's the heir apparent to Jobs's throne but until he proves himself to be as much of a visionary as Jobs, investors will view anyone but Jobs helming Apple to be a negative.
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