New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

(the old thread was getting too big)

So January 26, 2010 is the big media event for the iSlate/iTablet/iWhatever. Rumors and lusting go here.

FWIW, Gruber has a decent analysis of the tablet here: http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/the_tablet

More commentary...

Desktops can use fast, cheap, power-hungry, high-capacity hardware and present your applications on giant screens. They can have lots of ports, accept lots of peripherals, and perform any possible computing role. Their interface is a keyboard and mouse, a desk, and a chair. They’re always internet-connected, they’re always plugged in, they always have their printers and scanners and other peripherals connected, and their in-use ergonomics can be excellent. But you can only use desktops when you’re at those desks.

iPhones use slow, low-capacity, ultra-low-power hardware on a tiny screen with almost no ports and very few compatible peripherals. They can do only a small (albeit useful) subset of general computing roles. They are poorly suited to text input of significant length, such as writing documents or composing nontrivial emails, or tasks requiring a mix of frequent, precise navigation and typing, such as editing a spreadsheet or writing code. But they’re always in your pocket, ready to be whipped out at any time for quick use, even if you’re standing, walking, riding in a vehicle, eating, or waiting on a line at the bank. You can carry one with you in nearly any circumstances without noticing its size or weight.

Laptops are a strange, inefficient tradeoff between an iPhone’s portability and a desktop’s capabilities. They don’t satisfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desktops than they are to iPhones. The usefulness and portability gap between a laptop and an iPhone is staggeringly vast (1:00). You don’t have them with you most of the time, they’re big and heavy (even the MacBook Air weighs 10 times as much and consumes about 10 times as much space as an iPhone 3GS), and they can only be practically used while sitting down (or standing at a tall ledge). Ergonomics are awful unless you effectively turn them into desktops with stands and external peripherals. But they can do nearly any computing task that desktops can do, and they’re able to replace desktops for many people.

Many devices (real, vapor, and theoretical) have tried to fill that vast portability gap between laptops and iPhones (even back when they were called PDAs and they didn’t have voice or wireless data capabilities and nobody bought them except rich people and geeks like me). Historically, this has never succeeded in a way that’s even close to mass-market penetration, including impressively forgettable eras as the “palmtop” computer and the Tablet PC.

Slate-type devices, like the thank-God-it-was-canned Smart Display and the it-might-be-released-now-but-who-cares JooJoo, have the limitations of keyboard-less design that make long text entry or complex editing impractical. But their screens are too large to comfortably use for frequent touch input. And they’re too big to fit in a pocket.

Tiny-keyboarded devices, like the thank-God-it-was-also-canned Palm Foleo and nearly every netbook, haven’t proven to be useful to most people because they’re simply smaller laptops, replicating nearly every laptop flaw while forcing compromises on laptop functionality. The keyboards are too small to be anywhere near as useful as a desktop’s or laptop’s, and the devices are far too large to be pocketed.

(I have no idea what the Microsoft Surface is for.)

The text-input mechanism seems to be the big hurdle required to bridge this portability-and-usefulness gap. So far, nobody has nailed it.

I don’t know what Apple has in mind for the Tablet, but they nailed it with the iPhone: after decades of clunky, awkward, mediocre pocket computers, I think it’s safe to say that the large touchscreen is the best input mechanism for them.

But the decision isn’t nearly as clear for a slate-type device with a 7-10” screen, which most people assume to be the Tablet’s form factor. There doesn’t seem to be a good solution. No device in this category has ever even been close to good. This — and Jobs’ toilet comment, as mentioned in John’s article — is what kept me doubting the Tablet’s existence for so long. But even the most conservative intelligence-gathering indicates that the Tablet project is extremely likely to be not only real, but close to release. (Although the late-January event seems a bit soon and could plausibly be for other products, like iLife.)

I see two possible outcomes: either Apple has come up with a radical new input method for this form-factor that will overcome the fundamental problems that made every other similar device suck, or the Tablet isn’t this form-factor.

(Sure, there’s a third possibility: that Apple is repeating the mistakes of similar products and making their own JooJoo or Foleo. But that’s too unlikely — and stupid — for me to take seriously.)

Given that the reliable information we have to go on is… absolutely nothing, either outcome seems equally likely. I predict the new-input-method solution. I have doubts that such a product could be as much of a replacement for general-purpose portable computing as John predicts, but I’m wrong a lot.

it is upon us

yeah I bumped the other thread today cos I thought the thing was today

VVVVVVV this poster is dumb

it's perhaps a sign of my fanboyism that I am already imagining how I'm gonna use this thing before it's even been announced

like I was thinking on the train today "hmm wouldn't it be nice if I had a nicely laid out electronic version of the times to page through at this very moment"

leaked/fake ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysW2T0kf4As&feature=player_embedded

For names, I am rooting for iPad.

http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/New-Commercial-Shows-Apple-iPad-Tablet.aspx

WHOA xpost. Yeah, that video.

carnival of stupid is in full swing already
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_vmIMIua4M5k/S131Zg4pM4I/AAAAAAAAAWQ/TtNaxyrxCko/picture-16.png

I'm ready to buy one just so I can use this: http://www.bitcartel.com/comicbooklover/

(comic book reader for iPhone and Mac that supports cbz and cbr files)

pretty sure steve's one more thing won't be the tablet but DUKE NUKEM FOREVER

I wonder if these guys who make these fake ads think they're gonna get a job in apple's advertising department as a a result

such a waste of fcp/motion skills

still think this guy should have got a gig
http://img.skitch.com/20100126-dhhynmssew6iwujmhjyq5pdc.jpg

Is the event tomorrow or Wednesday?

Wednesday

Momus has one

http://imomus.livejournal.com/520114.html

bah its fake!

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/01/tabletchart.png

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/26/the-apple-tablet-a-complete-history-supposedly/

Please let this thing run Serato.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/26/tablet

exciting

http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/5955/itablet.jpg

Dilute Dilute OK!

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0016/9762/files/angelpod500.png

Please let this thing run Serato.

― Spencer Chow, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:27 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Serato is actually the main interface to the OS

I hear the tablet is actually manufactured by Numark and will come with red racing stripes.

comes with a grounding wire

will also function as a fridge magnet iirc

you have to buy two of them to be a real tablet dj

like this guy:

http://www.fakesteve.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Moses-Jobs72.jpg

so amazing the amount that has been written (and illustrated) about this w/o apple publicly saying word one about it

i heard it can go up stairs by itself

I heard it doesn't have a name so death can't find it, it doesn't have a home or people to care for. it's not afraid of anything, men least of all. It's fast and strong like a big wind. It can hear for a hundred miles and see a hundred miles underwater. It can hide in the shadow of a noon sun. It could be right behind you and you wouldn't know it 'til you're dead.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/is-this-the-apple-tablet/

CANT WAIT TO NOT BUY THIS

haha fantastic post gukbe

yeah, good post, but from what I'm reading none of that is confirmed

i want to be jaded and w/e but i have a feeling that i'm really, really gonna want one of these immediately

ur a doctor qed

sike! me too

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y296/imomus/more/ipad2.jpg

Harvey Dent, he's at it again!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-tablet-latest-creation-event/

starting in 17 minutes

From that engadget post:

9:42AM Okay! We're in our seats and there's some Dylan playing on the sound system!

9:11AM Overall the mood is really jovial right now. It's basically a party in the U.S.A.

Well, now I know not to read that coverage.

basically a party in the U.S.A.

new board motto

tsk tsk you should be working, not playing on yr phone!!!

me too tbh

it's a shame their software is so fucking sloppy atm because the x is incredibly solid hardware

Still miss a headphone jack tbh

I asked for AirPods for chanukah, not because my SE lacks a headphone jack but bc I keep losing earbuds

I'll probably lose AirPods too but at least I'll feel guilty about it

honestly i thought the lack of a headphone jack would shit me to tears, but i don't catch headphones cables on door knobs and tear them off my skull and fire them across the room and into walls anymore so

xp the airpods are fantastic, apart from regular split-second dropouts that only seem to happen when they're paired to my iphone. no other bluetooth headphones do it, and the airpods don't do it when paired to my watch. assuming it's yet another ios 11 bug that will get fixed in ios 14.

I know I’m an easily amused tween at heart, but... animojis!

going to torture some friends now

I got an X at the weekend and it is a massive improvement over the 6plus. FaceID is highly functional and the gestures have become very natural, I wish there were more or more that you could cutomise - turning on reachability was pretty useful.

Apple Pay is a lot faster and more functional, particularly when I learnt you don't actually have to be looking at faceID when it's on the reader. Just Double click on the side, look and tap.

I'm also impressed that lock screen notifications say 'Notificaiotn' till you properly look at the screen.

face id is kind of slow but touchid got incrementally faster via software and near instant in the next model phone so I’m gonna day it’s already on the right track

(please do not save this and make me eat my words in a year)

FaceID works mostly fine (snappier especially after turning off the attention requirement) but once in a while the phone won’t unlock no matter how long I stare at it.
How do you activate reachability with the new gesture?

reachability: turn it on in settings, pull down on the bottom of the screen instead of up

It’s in the accessibility settings.

aha ok thanks - weird that they buried it in the settings. I used it all the time on my 6

about a month in face ID is the feature that noone wanted. appreciate the (almost) full screen, border-less design but face ID is a nuisance.

thinking that if they update the iphone SE this march as is rumored i may downgrade, but that's in the context of more broadly wanting to de-emphasize smartphones in my life

hm, just not working fast or what?

fails more often than touch ID, requires more thought as to ‘how am i gonna look at this thing til it unlocks’

I want there to be a new SE but I probably won't even buy it until I hit the end of the road on OS updates on the current one. Definitely trying to tune out from my smartphone as much as I can

feel like touch id, at least on the early ones where you had a learning curve of the timing and exactly how to get your finger on there and it became near effortless in the second gen

face id is a little tougher but I’ve already caught myself responding to the feedback curve of how to hold the phone, face angle, etc so it maybe fails once every other day

having to lift your head a little when grabbing your phone from bed is rude, though

not unlocking when on the table and youre looking down at it is the biggest offender. despite my attempts to machine learn it. with touchid the biggest fail point was wet/dirty hands or gloved hands but otherwise worked great

also with touch id you could give multiple people access to a phone (ie put yourself on yr parents phone for tech support purposes) - cant do that with faceid also fear that youll mess up the machine learning by having it scan the non-primary users face too often

Lame. Wonder if they’ll add the touchiD to the back of the phone for future versions like originally rumored?

so my SE just straight up shut down on me this morning, on 17% charge. though to its credit it politely faded out the music first. it was -4C outside where i was using it. is this the vaunted low-battery fakery switcheroo everyone was up in arms about a couple of months ago? i put it into my pocket to warm it up, then tried again and it gave me the "you gotta plug me in" animation. i put it back in my pocket, and because i'm addicted to my phone, took it out again 5 minutes later, this time inside a warm-ish bus, and it started up, though it only showed 7% charge, which dropped to 4% in less than a minute. but then, like a miracle, never went below 2% for the rest of my commute. thanks apple?

it qualifies for a £25 battery replacement until the end of 2018. not free but still pretty good.

if the battery is more than a couple of years old that's just life, especially in the cold. it's very difficult to accurately estimate how much is left in that situation.

i've had that happen in serious cold even with a relatively young battery

if it does it minus the cold, then worry IMO

I dunno my fb feed today has been full of (french) articles on how the cold will make your smartphone function badly

yeah my phone did that all the time when i lived in actually cold places

Yeah the switcheroo was designed to stop that happening.

cold fucks with batteries. my 6 would shut down at ~30% in 3˚ weather, and once i warmed it up it'd take a while (and a couple of restarts) for the phone to register that the battery was fine again.

btw night shift is pretty good, been using it in beta on ipad

does it make all the text brown/red when scrolling on purpose or is that just a visual artifact of how everything has been mellowed out

Night shift rules

i just got a new macbook air and night shift is not all that different from adopting the display profile of my 2009 macbook

what are you supposed to do distinguish between the two-finger page turn swipe and the two-finger notifications center swipe?

🚨 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/a-new-mac-mini-and-a-retina-macbook-air-are-imminent-report-says/ 🚨

They still make a MacBook Air??

I’ve stopped keeping tabs, I probably will never buy a personal laptop again, if I ever need to buy my own work computer it’s gonna be a locally assembled desktop and I’m gonna put like OpenBSD on it or some shit

Keeping personal stuff on my work computer would creep me out.

I have a work laptop that I literally never use. I don’t want to keep my personal stuff on a work computer, and I don’t want rhe hassle of two computers.

Oh I just meant that all my work is on my work computer and if I can’t see myself buying a new laptop just for personal stuff if my current one breaks. There are very few transactions I can’t do on my phone, i play games on Switch, all my other hobbies are selected specifically to be analog. There’s still times where I want to do recreational typing and printing at home but idk I bet I could mostly live without it.

playing a little mavis beacon as it were

Power Mac G5 benches at my son’s high school. They don’t probably see how fascinating this is. pic.twitter.com/ugm0I83pnY

— Naoki Hiroshima (@N) August 24, 2018

are they real empty cases or modelled after them? gonna go with the latter

someone is going to the trouble of making fake but realistic-looking Power Mac cases for use in furniture?

i mean there are lots of apple fanbois right?

hm i hadn't reckoned with how many insane people there are, true

A new MacMini would be nice, yes. (On my third now, and it just fell out of warranty the other week so bring on a refresh.)

Nobody watching this?

I fell asleep. Only woke up in time for the new camera stuff which tbf looks incredible. The Pixel 2 whipped the iPhone camera and this looks like a response to that.

We're on this thread now: Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

Perhaps a mod could lock this one?