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More seriously – do people seriously see a use for the iPad? For me, most of its pluses are minuses. If I want to read stuff, I _vastly prefer_ the zero animation just the plain text ma’am approach of your average e-book reader, to the hideous advertisements that I am sure will be bouncing from every page on the average iPad read (you think you’ll be able to download an AdBlock equivalent? think again). About the only positive thing I can say in the iPad’s favor is that it doesn’t do Flash.
{ 119 comments }
Kieran Healy 04.03.10 at 7:09 pm
Left on Wrong Side of History, Again. News at Eleven.
More seriously, I should say that right now I won’t be buying one because I do too much old-school stuff requiring old-school applications on my laptop, which is already very nice, with my phone filling in the rest. But the two pieces of anecdata I have are (1) No-one in my class of 45 undergrads was planning on buying one a month ago; and (2) Several of my computers-bore-me, I-have-no-time-for-gadgets friends and relations saw this thing and said “Holy crap this is exactly what I’ve been looking for” and put down cash money right away. If I had to guess, I’d say Apple is going to sell a metric shitload of them.
AntiAlias 04.03.10 at 7:18 pm
Its main use is to give something for iFans to lay their hands on something Mac-labeled during 2010, and ultimately to show the world the unlimited powers of branding. I never cease to admire the talent these guys have at selling their brand image, and they really make it work. More or less anyone with a little curiosity and an Internet connection knows the iPad is technically unsound – meaning its value for money is very low when talking about specs. But man, there is more to gadgets than their actual use and performance. Call it mystique. I’d personally never buy such a thing since I’m totally specs-driven when buying tech, but design+brand+Applesian je ne sais pas quoi holds its powerful allure. It stirs the little marketer in me.
As for serious reading, really, I hate to read computer screens, no matter how cool, edgy, designy they be. I really don’t see how are we expected to believe the iPad is anything but a hand-held, regular screen. Well, my very uncool PC at leasts holds the eye-straining thing for me, thanks.
Daniel 04.03.10 at 7:21 pm
I will buy it for the ebook capabilities. For my taste, the Kindle and the Nook offer lousy reading experiences, while I have enjoyed using the eReader application on the iPhone. I don’t like the way page transitions work on either the Kindle or the Nook. Only complaint with the iPone eReader is that the viewing screen is obviously small. Can’t wait to get the iPad.
Kieran Healy 04.03.10 at 7:34 pm
something for iFans to lay their hands on … ultimately to show the world the unlimited powers of branding. … the iPad is technically unsound – meaning its value for money is very low when talking about specs. … I’d personally never buy such a thing since I’m totally specs-driven when buying tech, but design+brand+Applesian je ne sais pas quoi holds its powerful allure.
I don’t really understand this point of view, at least insofar as people genuinely hold it (as opposed to posturing about fanbois or whatnot). Good design is not reducible to sharp branding. Or to put it another way, I don’t see how it makes sense for a “totally specs-driven” consumer to simultaneously ignore the question of whether the thing specc’d is actually put together right (I mean, functionally) or designed in a way that lets it be used properly.
Jonathan Dursi 04.03.10 at 7:50 pm
I travel a *lot*, and while I’m in transit, I have about a bazillion 8.5″x11″ – formatted PDFs to read (typically with lots of colour figures) as well as email to check, presentation slides to go over and make modest edits to, and notes to scribble down in some format that is easily searched for later. While in transit on planes, trains, busses, or taxis, notebooks or netbooks are not much fun to use, wheras pad-shaped things work fine. I’ve been on the lookout for a compelling tablet-format device for a while, and this is the first one I’ve seen; so yes, I’m very much looking forward to my iPad, and I’m a linux geek, not a Mac fanboi.
Es-tonea-pesta 04.03.10 at 8:11 pm
More or less anyone with a little curiosity and an Internet connection knows the iPad is technically unsound – meaning its value for money is very low when talking about specs.
What? Unsound? Specs? What are you talking about? Does your definition of “anyone with a little curiosity and an Internet connection” include more than a hundred thousand people worldwide?
nick s 04.03.10 at 8:17 pm
do people seriously see a use for the iPad?
Yes. Come back when you’re twenty years older, your fingers are arthritic and your eyes aren’t so good. Or when you’re your technophobe family members. I’m not among the first-day hordes, but if it really does get rid of the ancillary shit of computing, it has a very wide, very deep market. Count me in with Kieran’s ‘metric shitload’ brigade.
Loren Michael 04.03.10 at 8:21 pm
I don’t see a lot of use for an iPad, but “hideous advertisements that I am sure will be bouncing from every page on the average iPad read” seems like a comment made in complete ignorance of Apple’s aesthetic. What is the analogous Apple situation that makes this worry spring to mind? For all the bad Apple has associated with it (just take a cursory glance at Boingboing.net for an idea), it’s well-known minimalist, unobtrusive aesthetic is entirely laudable.
PJM 04.03.10 at 8:24 pm
I can see a use as a way to access online content without having to boot up the computer: Reading the papers, accessing facebook checking my daily newsfeeds. It also should work much better with pdfs and other such formats than e-readers do.
I doubt it will do the job for any kind of serious typing. Right now it looks a bit heavy, too expensive and too wrapped up in Apple’s trademark nannying for me but I’ll wait for the market to mature.
novakant 04.03.10 at 8:43 pm
His wholly irrational animus against Blu-ray and Flash leads me to the conclusion that Steve Jobs is slowly but surely losing it.
Metatone 04.03.10 at 8:48 pm
Three different questions muddled into one: do I see a use for the iPad? and will enough people see uses for Apple to make money off it? and will enough see uses to give it a userbase size to change how some media are consumed?
First up, I’m a geek of sorts, 2 linux servers, I still use emacs for some things and I’m reading and writing this on a laptop, away from a desk.
Note: many of the points below are not “iPad” specific, but apply to any “tablet” with the right screen and form factor… we’ll see how many companies get it right…
Most obvious use – casually reading things that are on the internet. There’s a lot to read on the internet that doesn’t involve commenting… it’d be a lot more relaxing to do that with a tablet. And the content is often designed for colour screens – taking the Kindle out of the equation. This is often not understood by academics, because they mostly read PDFs of papers that come from journals still printed on a Linotype Model 6.
Yes, I know e-ink say colour is just around the corner, but they have been saying that since 1998…
Commercially, for ordinary consumers… this points to another big possibility… the iPad is the first device that you can imagine replacing the paper versions of “Vogue” or “National Geographic” – we’ll see if it happens, but the iPad is potentially less the end of paper books than the end of paper magazines.
iPhone comics exist, but the small screen has pros and cons… I can see comics going iPad digital…
The fundamental issue here is that if layout matters in some way, then a standardised reader program can make a huge difference for the developer – this is the success of gaming consoles.
As for the content creation side… anyone whose job is to arrange dense patterns of words into poli sci papers needs a keyboard… so the iPad has nothing to offer… but the potential of an item that allows for easy manipulation of sketches and smaller amounts of text has attractions for others…
Finally, a note on the form factors of multiple devices and travelling. I don’t know for sure that the iPad would be enough for my last business trip, but it seems like it would. On that trip I didn’t need all the capabilities of my laptop – and not having to carry my laptop would have helped… same for journeys to meetings… of course, I have a smartphone (an iPhone in fact) but the screen is too small and input too clunky for many things. The promise of the iPad is that I could have typed this comment into it… which certainly isn’t the case with the iPhone.
Now will all this come to pass with the iPad? Depends how good it actually is – and we don’t really know yet. But kudos for Apple in trying.
Barry 04.03.10 at 9:06 pm
BTW, if a keyboard can be plugged into an iPad, that removes most of the problem. You can use it wihout the keyboard most of the time, but still have one when you need it.
alias3T 04.03.10 at 9:26 pm
I’ve been lurking here for years, enjoying Chris’s, Daniel’s, Henry’s and Kieran’s posts, enjoying their wit and the shape of their arguments and admiring some of the commenters and their brilliant retorts. Even the flame wars were of a superior kind. Somehow, I’ve been sure, this blog was contributing to my intellectual development and within me there lurked a Truly Brilliant Comment that would would one day emerge from gestation and astonish the blogosphere.
But only now, when Henry lobs a really low ball, an invitation to people like me who work and think less hard than the people who make this blog what it is, do I finally feel emboldened to venture an opinion.
So I’m the perfect iPad user. By turning the web into a pure consumer experience it allows me to continue that illusion of participation, but it relieves me from the reproachful presence of a keyboard. From now on, though, the self-hating legion of passive web consumers can be just that little bit more passive, retreating from their desks to the sofa, sinking ever further into self-hating inertia.
Thanks, Apple!
Metatone 04.03.10 at 9:27 pm
Barry – good point and in fact there are a couple of keyboard options already (Mac bluetooth KB and the stand thing) – but I do think that if I was going to carry a KB and iPad I’d probably carry my laptop… that’s why I concentrated on the keyboardless uses – if you’re doing heavy text wrangling you’re better off with a proper computer (so you can have all your programs, Endnote or whatever, running) – just as I’d never expect to do much photo-wrangling with an iPad. However, I can well imagine the iPad as a good device to skim through 300 photos to throw out the bad ones… no single use is compelling perhaps, but much like the Personal Computer, it can be the additive value of a number of small uses that propels purchase.
Saying that makes me wonder if people have become locked into a mode of analysis by the success of the iPod – it did one thing really well… and in doing so blew away competitors with many other features… it’s not clear (apart from digital magazines perhaps) what the iPad can do so well… the Kindle is the iPod of books… but the thing to consider is that the iPhone is much more of a general tool… as is a Macbook Pro… so maybe Apple has some ability to succeed in that manner too.
I’ve just realised I probably won’t buy one, because it’s not 5 yr old proof and it’s extremely attractive to my 5 yr old I’m sure… “I wanna watch Ooglies…”
Gareth Rees 04.03.10 at 9:34 pm
For me … If I … I … I am sure … About the only positive thing I can say
Could the answer be that the iPad is not about you?
Wrenkin 04.03.10 at 9:59 pm
If I want to read stuff, I vastly prefer the zero animation just the plain text ma’am approach of your average e-book reader, to the hideous advertisements that I am sure will be bouncing from every page on the average iPad read (you think you’ll be able to download an AdBlock equivalent? think again).
Instapaper.
Trey 04.03.10 at 10:15 pm
Ah, it must be about you, then.
ScentOfViolets 04.03.10 at 10:50 pm
The form factor combined with filling a closely-matched set of needs is the determinant as Metatone seems to indicate @11. And while the iPad may not be quite what the doctor ordered it seems clear that some sort of popular device class will be forthcoming in the next couple of years, cf Plastic Logics Que
I don’t know if it’s just me or my generation of old fogies, but while I can read books off of an iTouch-sized screen, I really prefer not to, especially in a professional context, say looking up a reference in Harris’ “Moduli of Curves”. Coupled with the requirement to read pdfs, some basic annotation capabilities, and the lack of need for big or fast number crunching (and of course, that cloud computing that’s coming Real Soon Now), and I think you’ve got something that’s going to fill a rather large and deep niche.
This is just one person’s guess, but I’d say that five years from now you’re going to see a lot of students carrying around something like this instead of manhandling forty pounds of textbooks between classes, and in ten years, this is going to be more like 90% of all students and professionals.
Bernard Yomtov 04.03.10 at 11:39 pm
This is just one person’s guess, but I’d say that five years from now you’re going to see a lot of students carrying around something like this instead of manhandling forty pounds of textbooks between classes, and in ten years, this is going to be more like 90% of all students and professionals.
Not to mention that those textbooks will cost a lot less in electronic form than they do today. Time for a new edition? Just make the revised material available for download.
marlys 04.03.10 at 11:41 pm
If you already have a primary home computer and an ebook reader and a smartphone (and maybe a laptop or MP3 player on top of it all), then one of these is not going to be for you. Maybe you whip out the Kindle if you want to read something, the laptop if you want to write something, or your cell if you want to communicate with someone. That sounds like a giant drag to me.
Something like an 3G iPad would hit a sweet spot for writing, reading, communicating, and goofing off — but as someone who’s avoided getting a laptop (and whose day job computer is FOI-able), there are a lot of things that have been just too annoying to do until I return home.
In particular, I’m interested in using this as a canvassing/voter registration tool, and the format seems so well suited to a particular task that I have in mind that it’s moved me to consider getting involved in making software again (which I haven’t done since I was an undergrad).
I am mystified that people who don’t want to buy iPads seem to be so expressive about it. I mean, I don’t want a Zune, I don’t want a new car, and I don’t celebrate Easter. Like I said, I’ve never had a laptop, but have never been moved to challenge others who use and enjoy them.
Martin Bento 04.03.10 at 11:59 pm
When I saw the ebook readers, I thought “how dumb!” Why would I want to carry something like that around in addition to my laptop. The ebook reader should also be able to function like a laptop, at least for web-browing, email, etc. Plus I might want to interweave reading, especially of non-fiction, with related research on the Web. Score one for the iPad.
And it should have color. What about comics or magazine photos? Score two.
But how does it beat the laptop? Applications. Why has application development migrated from the PC to social networks and phones? Two big reasons: 1) Microsoft tended to compete, often unfairly, with its own app developers, making that venue unappealing. Apple has done this too, on the Mac, though without unfairly leveraging its OS control to my knowledge. 2) The bigger reason, though, is that networked apps intrinsically have DRM. The problem of bootlegged software on personal computers was never really solved, so it is much more appealing for developers to put their talents elsewhere, now that such an elsewhere is at hand. In this respect, an iPad is like an iPhone, but with most of the capabilities of a laptop. It already inherits all the iPhone apps, but will attract a lot more because developers on this platform need not fear piracy. In a few years, I think people may be choosing the iPad over a PC largely for the apps.
Not supporting Flash is dumb though.
I guess I should add that I would like to see someone kick Apple off the perch on this, as they are too much the control freaks over at Infinite Loop. But they did approximate exactly what I saw too, so I think they will sell a zillion.
Substance McGravitas 04.04.10 at 12:08 am
Yes. I want it, but I want it open. No sale, something else will be along.
Jon H 04.04.10 at 12:15 am
My 78 year old father ran out and bought one today. He doesn’t have an iPhone. He does have a MacBook, and a kindle DX.
I think he’s getting a little suggestible.
kid bitzer 04.04.10 at 12:19 am
it can’tdo anything that i can’t already do on
my kaypro.
AntiAlias 04.04.10 at 12:25 am
Kieran Healy @ 4:
My opinion is admittedly an outsider’s. I think the iPad is a good product in that it is cleverly designed, branded and marketed, but it doesn’t look adequate for the use it has been mainly pitched for – since as an ebook reader, a backlit screen just won’t cut it IMHO. However I do agree it will sell by the ton, and I bet most buyers will get it to use as a reader.
I wasn’t meaning to do the usual fanboi-bahing, sorry if it read like that. I didn’t have Apple fanbois in mind, just fans of Apple products who look forward to each new release with expectation. Maybe some quite hardcore ones, but also very savvy and quite critical guys when buying gadgets. Since there have been no top Apple products launched since the iPhone (early 2007 in the US, 2009 elsewhere), the iPad looks like a bit of a temporal “fix”, kind of “give me something to release in 2010, lest we look less innovative”. Which by the way I think is a sound strategy for Apple in order to keep followers interested and excited, be consistent with their brand image, etc. I can also understand fans who expect something fresh from Apple on a regular basis.
It’s only that the iPad looks a bit half-baked to me. As I tried to say, not from the design or branding point of view, but from the “specs” approach – by which I mean, the “hard” features (well, to be honest, when I checked the iPad I was looking for something to read books and long documents on, so learning it was LCD really put me down). Put it another way, not as polished and finished a product as the iPod or iPhone were in their time (again, in “hard” terms). So I’m more interested in the iPad as a case study – I agree it will sell zillions, and mainly for the use which it is IMO the least suited. I find it interesting because it’s so conterintuitive it might as well mean some unexpected changes in its market. These mavericks I find appealing – and that’s brand, brand, brand.
ben w 04.04.10 at 12:58 am
Time for a new edition? Just make the revised material available for download.
That would make it much harder to justify gouging the students, though.
Tom Elrod 04.04.10 at 1:16 am
alias3T @ #13:
From now on, though, the self-hating legion of passive web consumers can be just that little bit more passive, retreating from their desks to the sofa, sinking ever further into self-hating inertia.
Nice. That was a comment worth waiting for.
Kieran Healy 04.04.10 at 1:32 am
the iPad looks like a bit of a temporal “fixâ€, kind of “give me something to release in 2010, lest we look less innovativeâ€.
I see your view, but I don’t think that Apple’s strategy has ever been to really innovate in terms of specs, or in terms of product types no-one has ever seen before — they haven’t done this since maybe the Newton, ironically enough, which of course was a commercial and cultural failure. Rather, they tend to come into a market space that’s already defined and then release a product that never “out-spec’s” the opposition but instead does (or tries to do) whatever Apple says it’s meant to do, as well as possible.
I think a lot of the fanboi stuff comes from some resentment that Apple has on several occasions successfully defined what it is a product in an already-existing niche should do. (This is the root of Rob Malda’s famous dismissal of the iPod — “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”.) I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t seen tablet-style form factors before, etc. People who don’t buy the Apple view (or their products) see that redefinition as the RDF or “brand brand brand”. People who do buy it see it as Apple picking out what people want and doing it more or less right.
As for the practicalities, I don’t want to judge what it’s like to read with, etc, until I use one myself.
tomslee 04.04.10 at 1:54 am
“Not to mention that those textbooks will cost a lot less in electronic form than they do today.”
Fancy a bet on that?
My guess is that they’ll be wrapped up with interactive features or subscription features to justify the price, but electronic formats remove competition from the second hand market and textbook publishers will find a way to keep the cost per course to students as high, or higher, than they are now.
JRoth 04.04.10 at 2:12 am
For a variety of contingent reasons, I don’t expect to buy a 1st gen iPad. But, as an architect who’s currently using a MacBook Pro as his primary computer, I can easily envision a future in which I have a much heavier-duty office computer paired with an iPad for meetings, presentations, and such. Portability is too valuable for me to go with only a tower, but I’d really be better off with a much lighter weight (literally and metaphorically) portable machine. A laptop is completely redundant with a tower (except for heavy-duty rendering on one side and portability on the other), whereas the iPod overlaps only insofar as I need it to (I am hoping against hope that my preferred CAD software will be ported in some form as an app, if only as a viewer).
As far as predicting market, my only doubt is that, for a lot of professionals, a $1000-1300 MacBook (Pro) is all the computer you need, at which point it’s hard to justify the iPad, which is probably not quite enough computer on its own (in contrast, I think people are nuts to think that a netbook is preferable to an iPad for most people who aren’t absolutely locked into the Windows world). But I think that Apple is not targeting MacBook buyers with the iPad.
As an aside, an interesting thing noted by Andy Inahtko: the iPad, sitting on its stand and powering a set of speakers, is in many ways preferable to a multiscreen off one CPU setup, because the non-work functions (web, music, non-critical email) are completely offloaded, yet completely handy (I’ve actually done this at times with my iPhone – get those distractions – and CPU cycles – away, yet I’m not actually isolated). It also maintains the grab-and-go function far better than a laptop hooked up to speaker, USB hub, extra monitor, etc. I think that’ll be a subsection of the market, but not an insignificant one – it’s a bonus available fairly cheap (by a lot of people’s standards, although not my own).
onymous 04.04.10 at 2:46 am
ben w, don’t you have a server to fix?
I know more and more textbooks that are being made freely available online in PDF format, but frequently they’re for fairly abstruse topics. On the other hand, it seems that it’s basic texts like calculus books, with their vast and growing numbers of homework exercises and study guides and computerwhatsits, that really drive the moneymaking game. My suspicion is that most of the bells and whistles don’t actually do much to help students learn.
Google turns up at least one apparently high-quality free online calculus book. I wonder what it would take to spur a collective effort to move to such things.
andrew 04.04.10 at 2:55 am
I’m not sure why, if everything course-related is online, the book format would remain preferable to other ways of structuring course readings and assignments. Obviously, this would depend on the subject or the course.
cs 04.04.10 at 2:57 am
Jonathan Dursi @5
8.5″ x 11″ — yes, exactly, this is important. Print format is vertical, laptop screens are horizontal. (Getting more so as they are “optimized” 16:9 to play DVDs.) As long as paper and print formats remain, the horizontal screen is a huge and barely acknowledged problem for those of us who work with them. On my desktop I have a Samsung display that can rotate from vertical to horizontal. 95% of the time it’s vertical. The orientation-agnostic thing is the one and only feature of the iPad that got my attention.
Bernard Yomtov 04.04.10 at 3:09 am
#29
Fancy a bet on that?
My guess is that they’ll be wrapped up with interactive features or subscription features to justify the price, but electronic formats remove competition from the second hand market and textbook publishers will find a way to keep the cost per course to students as high, or higher, than they are now.
Yes. I do fancy a bet. If nothing else the cost of paper, printing, and distribution (including returns, wasted inventory, and lots of other items) is gone, mostly, so it’s possible to make just as much money as today at lower prices.
Of course gouging, which Ben W. mentions at #26, won’t entirely disappear until faculty start paying attention to what textbooks cost, but that’s a different matter.
Bernard Yomtov 04.04.10 at 3:11 am
Sorry. The second paragraph is clearly quoted from tomslee at #29.
The Raven 04.04.10 at 3:22 am
Color. Portability. Ease of use. I don’t think the backlit screen is a big deal (who reads in direct sunlight, after all?) as long as the brightness is adequately controlled, and I expect it is. Likewise, most of us don’t have a problem with battery life unless we hike long distances away from electricity.
It’s not all that good at page-to-page animations (the graphics are not that fast), so that’s probably not going to be a problem. Generally, I dislike the closed character of the development environment and the app store. The development environment forces languages choices which I dislike.
…and isn’t porn a big moneymaker? I think Apple could have a bit of a problem there.
The Raven 04.04.10 at 3:24 am
Oh, yes. Inexpensive 3D. This one might be a huge win for construction and manufacturing.
onymous 04.04.10 at 3:29 am
who reads in direct sunlight, after all?
During an extended stay at a research institute in SoCal, I frequently found myself trying to work on my laptop in an outside courtyard. It was a struggle.
rob 04.04.10 at 4:10 am
iPod Touch with much greater screen real estate = awesome. I have my linux box, dell laptop, macbook pro and soon, a second-gen iPad. Maps, email, light web browsing, PDFs, etc… I also program various controllers using an application called TouchOSC and the vastly-improved real estate provides greater possibilities for controlling graphics and audio on a host machine in real-time. I suppose someone (like the original poster), who assumes that everyone uses computers as digital typewriters can’t see possibilities for new devices, that’s just lame. So, type away, dinosaur computer user, the rest of us have innovative work to do.
John Quiggin 04.04.10 at 4:18 am
Well, I’m very glad to see the iPad finally released, but only so it will clear the way for a new Macbook Pro. My current one is on its last legs, but the current Mac offering is overdue for a substantial upgrade.
My underlying reasoning is: I already have a Macbook and an iPhone. The iPad won’t replace either, so when am I going to use one? Maybe once it’s been out a while, this will become clear.
Hob 04.04.10 at 5:58 am
The Raven @36: I don’t get your point about porn. Are you saying Apple has a problem because they won’t be making money on the mountains of porn that people will undoubtedly be watching on iPads?
rageahol 04.04.10 at 6:50 am
Bernard Yomtov #19:
I think you’re being naive. As it paertains to students, yes, this thing is more appealing than carrying around 40 lbs of books. But it’s not going to make textbooks any cheaper. I would be surprised if it didnt make them more expensive overall, by squelching the used-textbook market. This is a consequence of the value system that produced a locked-down device like this.
Anecdata: a few years ago, I took a class that had a piece of software as a required purchase. This software was mainly a couple hours of video, was specialized and did not come with a textbook, and came on the form of a CDROM, totaling about 150MBs. It was just short of $80, and came with a key-code that meant it could not be resold or even transferred to another computer without the permission of the vendor. This will be the norm for textbook publishing with the iPad.
At least until some hackers jailbreak it, or whatever. Personally, I’m not going to spend my money on it even if it gets jailbroken. Like the esteemed Mr. McGravitas points out, there will be other, less locked-down devices in the future.
Neel Krishnaswami 04.04.10 at 7:53 am
I think Apple is making a China play with the iPad — this is exactly the sort of computer the Chinese government wants. Since the iPad is engineered to make sure that all software for it comes from a single centralized source, it becomes much easier for a government to ensure that the only software that is available from that source are programs that don’t worry it. I doubt Chinese iPad buyers will ever have the opportunity to install Tor on their iPads, and I expect that in five to ten years pseudo-computers like the iPad will be the default option in the West, and for the same reasons.
The iPad marks the end of the computer as a tool of liberation.
bad Jim 04.04.10 at 8:24 am
the rest of us have innovative work to do
No one was suggesting using it to scoop dogshit off the lawn, of course.
Farren Hayden 04.04.10 at 8:59 am
As this is being written, a a dev company company owned by a friend of mine is developing bespoke software to be rolled out on existing tablet PCs that no doubt cost half what an iPad costs, for an auction house. Software that will not run on an iPad.
I know Apple have a flare for design (the iPhone interface beat Windows mobile hands down and Microsoft have unsurprisingly changed course and copied the iPhone’s interface with their latest version), but count me out of the people who feel the need to shell out twice the price (at least here in South Africa) for products that are harder to self-upgrade and run only single vendor approved software. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the Apple user accounts of how they upgraded their own hardware, but there are two shops in walking distance from my house where I can get any piece of standard PC internal technology or peripheral. And who needs Safari when you’ve got Firefox?
There’s a case to be made for Apple tech. The company has a well-deserved reputation for reliability and design. But my Windows PC is now 4 years old, was very well priced and has served my every need. And if I wanted a gee-whiz graphics interface, a more limited range of software (albeit for free) and reliability I could have bought a linux box with 3D desktop 4 years ago instead. I can’t help feeling that Apple fans for the most part are either entranced by shiny objects, feel the need to be spoonfed (like some of the graphic designers I’ve worked with who recoiled with horror when faced with PCs running the same software even though the initial glitches they encountered took 4 minutes to sort out) or just have enough disposable income that they don’t mind paying a premium for devices that for the most part are only better on the prettiness and learning curve fronts. I had one tech-savvy developer/analyst boss who had a fetish for them but he was an anomoly, especially in a company that sensibly went Linux everything because their skilled workforce permitted it.
JoB 04.04.10 at 9:24 am
Yes-Yes but the really burning question is: What do Greenwald & Kerr have to say about it?
Martin Bento 04.04.10 at 10:14 am
Neel, that’s a good point, and one I have worried about as well. The thing is the current PC model does not give developers a good way to prevent piracy, so developers are moving to where they can, which has meant social network, that is to say, server-side, applications and phone apps. Now Apple has given them back more-or-less a PC, but without the piracy. If we want to keep the more open model as a viable option, we had better develop a technique to protect ownership of software without enforcing centralized control. Otherwise, centralized control will win precisely because it can enforce property rights.
Daniel 04.04.10 at 10:16 am
It’s not the hardware that’s unique — although it is nice and I’ll get to that in a bit — it’s the software that formats publications to the device while retaining the feel of the print version
I still don’t understand why everyone cares about this as much as everyone says everyone does. Who really looks at the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and thinks “wow what a beautiful thing! It’s such a shame that this limpid clarity can’t be reproduced on a screen”. I think the iPad looks pretty good and when someone brings out a version that isn’t made by Apple and has at least some sort of respect for open standards I’ll probably buy it. But it does make me wonder that the big selling points are that a) it’s a beautiful object and b) you can use it to read really ugly objects. I think it’s telling that this argument is most often made in magazines, usually in quite self-regarding ones that believe in the face of the evidence that they are really well-designed.
chris y 04.04.10 at 10:17 am
when someone brings out a version that isn’t made by Apple and has at least some sort of respect for open standards I’ll probably buy it.
Quite.
novakant 04.04.10 at 10:54 am
but the current Mac offering is overdue for a substantial upgrade.
Yep, Mac users should always check the Mac Rumors Buyer’s Guide before making a purchase decision – I want the new MacPro!
Tim Almond 04.04.10 at 11:13 am
Farren,
“As this is being written, a a dev company company owned by a friend of mine is developing bespoke software to be rolled out on existing tablet PCs that no doubt cost half what an iPad costs, for an auction house. Software that will not run on an iPad.”
It’s not just about the cost of the iPad. It’s also about how much control you have. If you update your software, you have to wait for Apple to review each version. If you don’t want it to be public, but provided to a limited number of customers then you have to go Enterprise, which means paying a higher license fee and having a minimum of 500 employess.
With Android and Windows you can just provide the application and let people install it. For business software, it makes a lot more sense.
Hidari 04.04.10 at 11:48 am
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html
tomslee 04.04.10 at 12:14 pm
Bernard @34: you’re on.
Not sure how we would test it since I have no clue who or where you are and, I presume, vice versa. But five years is probably a good timeframe and I’d choose a course like economics as a suitable testing ground. The price a student taking an economics course and using an electronic textbook pays for the instructional material will be at least as high as the price students using paper textbooks pay.
Daniel 04.04.10 at 12:23 pm
If nothing else the cost of paper, printing, and distribution (including returns, wasted inventory, and lots of other items) is gone, mostly, so it’s possible to make just as much money as today at lower prices
An economist writes: it’s also possible to make more money at the same prices.
Phillip Hallam-Baker 04.04.10 at 12:24 pm
I was in the Apple store yesterday buying a replacement for my iPhone. Even though it was late in the day, the iPads were not visible for the crowd five deep round the table.
It is not an iPhone competitor. But it may well be a laptop competitor. I doubt I will be trading in my MacBook Air though.
Hoagy27 04.04.10 at 1:50 pm
For me no job = no ipad.
If I “want” it or not, I cannot afford it.
gray 04.04.10 at 1:53 pm
“Open Standards” like HTML5 and ePub?
Jonathan Dursi 04.04.10 at 2:42 pm
You know, I’ve talked to people who believe this, and who believe that the iPad is a useless toy that no one will buy, and sometimes believe both of these things at the same time.
When the iPad has its worldwide release, no one is going to come and confiscate your, or my, linux servers and desktops. No one is going to be closing down sourceforge and github; Apple’s shock troops will not be storming through the doors of anyone contributing to GPL-licensed code (or CC-licensed books) and dragging them off to the dungeons at One Infinite Sorrow.
The iPad is a consumer electronics tool that some will buy and find very useful, and others won’t. It is way, way more locked down than a lot of people like, and I have some sympathy for that — I’d happily buy an android-powered alternative if it worked even remotely as well as my ipod touch, but it doesn’t, and I want a colour PDF reader with apps that I don’t have to be fixing all the time.
But even with that single-corporation control, there’s an open SDK anyone can program to; as gray@57 points out, it supports ePub (and, famously, HTML5) — if you want to release your free textbook for it, you can. (What, you’re not going to, but you’re just going to complain about how nameless others are going to have the gall to charge for *their* textbooks? Oh.) It’s a platform you can use, or not use, as you see fit.
tomslee 04.04.10 at 3:09 pm
Well, yes the iPad supports ePub, but more because Apple is second to the party than because of any commitment to open standards. I’d be willing to bet that if the Kindle did not exist, Apple would go proprietary. But that’s speculation of course. As for HTML 5, Microsoft shipping Internet Explorer as part of its OS looks quaint compared to the control smartphone platform owners, led by Apple, have over their platforms. You can’t even put an alternative browser on an un-jailbroken iPad, never mind get an even playing field for one.
And while it is true that “It’s a platform you can use, or not use, as you see fit”, there is also the issue that the rules of the platform are unspoken and changing, as the recent no-soft-porn-on-iPhone-unless-you’re-a-mainstream-American-magazine-publisher issue made clear.
So I think Neel Krishnaswami has it right in broad strokes: the iPad marks the end of the idea that there is a dichotomy between the old corporate mass media and the new wild-west, collaborative grass-roots internet: an idea that has been fraying at the seams for a few years anyway. And while I may well end up with an iPad next time around, the experience of using it will be more like using my TV than using my computer.
EWI 04.04.10 at 4:13 pm
@ AntiAlias
Since there have been no top Apple products launched since the iPhone (early 2007 in the US, 2009 elsewhere), the iPad looks like a bit of a temporal “fixâ€, kind of “give me something to release in 2010, lest we look less innovativeâ€.
*Ahem* Unibody MacBook/Pro, new iMacs, MacBook Air? (and I don’t own an iPhone, fwiw)
@ tomslee
Well, yes the iPad supports ePub, but more because Apple is second to the party than because of any commitment to open standards. I’d be willing to bet that if the Kindle did not exist, Apple would go proprietary.
And you base this on what, exactly? Because they did actually go with an open format in the real world, you know – and the Kindle was clearly going to be toast the day this came out (I’ll point you to the multitude of open specs and open source that Apple uses, promotes and contributes back to).
Jonathan Dursi 04.04.10 at 4:31 pm
Wait, seriously? iPad supports ePub, but that’s not good enough because you doubt the moral purity in their hearts when that decision was made?
I guess my main question is why is this new device is being held to such high openness standards. No one complained about the original blackberries not having other email readers available; no one rails against Nintendo having a sinister, possibly malevolent gatekeeper role in determing what Wii games can be sold, or agonizes over the fact that Sony could possibly pull support for some third-party PSP game at the drop of a hat. I can’t download new one-button applications for my microwave to improve its potato-cooking time calculations *at all*, and seriously, my microwave has no clue at all how to estimate potato-cooking times, despite the little button that says `potato’.
Yes, software developers have to go through a potentially arbitrary vetting process to run on this particularly platform, one which seems galling, but as an empirical question this seems to have been an enormous success for small indie developers to get niche products into the hands of large audiences.
As for content, as far as I know, anyone who wants to make their content available for users of this device can do so in a number of ways — ePub, HTML, PDF — and there is nothing in the software stack or hardware that in anyway hinders this. The main concern seems to be that this device makes it easy for content-creators to charge for content, but there’s nothing here at all that makes it more difficult to give it away CC-licensed should one wish. I guess the worry is that if people can charge for things, everyone will, and nothing will be free — but the history of opensource/CC seems to conclusively disprove this.
So why does a device like this one have to be so much more open than any comparable consumer electronics device for people to be happy? I think the legions of people loudly `working the refs’ by demanding more openness can only be a positive thing in the long run, but what is it about this device which arouses so many passions?
As to this:
well, that just seems sad. A lot of people are going to be creating a lot of things on iPads, whether books or art, and a lot of others (like me) will be using it extensively in the researching stage that comes before the creation of new academic or software works (the actual creation of which will require a keyboard, and likely linux boxes). Using it only as a TV seems like kind of a self-limiting choice.
Salient 04.04.10 at 4:46 pm
It’s a media consumption device.
Or, if you prefer, it’s one hell of a versatile, streamlined media consumption device.
I think one way to figure out if the iPad is right for you (vs. a laptop) is to count the number of keystrokes made on your keyboard, and divide this by the number of minutes your computer is in use. A result of less than one indicates the iPad could be quite wonderful for you, a result of more than ten says probably not.
The iPad marks the end of the computer as a tool of liberation.
Let’s instead say, the iPad is not a tool of liberation.
Neel Krishnaswami 04.04.10 at 4:47 pm
A high standard of openness is “as open as Debian”. The iPad fails the test of “as open as Microsoft Windows”. That is, the iPad is not open at all.
It’s a computer that users cannot install programs on without Apple’s explicit permission. It’s a computer for which programmers cannot write programs without getting a revokable cryptographic key from Apple, and whose developer agreement moves the Electronic Frontier Foundation to apoplexy. I figure the EFF kind of knows what they’re talking about when it comes to online freedom, you know?
Consumatopia 04.04.10 at 4:53 pm
I still lament that Apple never wanted to release a Tablet PC equivalent–with Mac OS X and Wacom pressure sensitivity. It would be such a blast to draw on.
But, yeah, I totally see what people find appealing about the iPad. If the only thing you want to do with computers is consume media, the iPad is absolutely perfect.
Jonathan Dursi 04.04.10 at 4:54 pm
Right, which makes it a lot like every game console out there — except one can easily get CC content on it with PDF/ePub/HTML, and it’s way cheaper and more open to develop software for. Again, I’m just genuinely asking; why are you on this forum denouncing the tyranny of the iPad, as vs. denoucning the Xbox (which started off life, after all, a windows PC with all the openness stripped out) as marking “the end of the computer as a tool of liberation”?
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 5:00 pm
At the risk of slightly distracting people from the iPad discussion, I have to say that I think Bernard Yomtov at #19 and further down is unjustifiably optimistic about the cost of textbooks. Textbook costs will never go down. Not ever ever. There’s no incentive to lower those costs because a) you’ve already got a captive audience, and b) that audience is already used to paying $100 for a new book. Moreover, professors, since they themselves do not incur any penalty for doing so, have no compunction against telling students to get the 13the edition of whatever textbook they’re using, even if the improvement over the 3rd edition is negligible. The fact that these textbooks will be available electronically means nothing (well, except the potential for piracy I guess).
Put me down as another person who can’t really see the use of the iPad, what with its closed OS and other shortcomings. I’ll stick with a netbook or something similar, and when someone makes a more open version of the iPad that doesn’t suck, I’ll probably get that.
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 5:01 pm
Sorry, when I said “costs” above, I meant “costs to students,” or perhaps even “prices.”
Salient 04.04.10 at 5:04 pm
If the only thing you want to do with computers is consume media, the iPad is absolutely perfect.
That’s probably not meant to be a jerky thing to say, but let me propose an alternative.
It’s inappropriate to say, of people who own TVs, that “the only thing they want to do with electronics is watch television.” That’s because it is possible to own both a TV and an computer. Likewise, it’s not horrifically impossible that people who own PCs would also want a dedicated media machine.
Advantages over a TV: it’s portable, and can present practically any variety of media (audio, video, etc).
Disadvantages: it’s not as big as a big TV.
It’s reasonable for many people, rather than say buy a single $1000 all-needs-met computer, to buy a $200 netbook which is dedicated to typing text (for email and internet and word processing needs), and also buy an iPad which is dedicated to media stuff which would clog up the netbook (video, streaming radio, oodles of photo albums, whatever). They could even be running at the same time.^1^ :)
^1^This in-joke won’t make sense to anybody over the Internet, so let me explain that I am often noticed typing on a laptop while listening to a walkman radio, which is apparently weird because I could stream that same radio audio through my laptop. (But then I would need to buy a more able laptop that isn’t already strained to the hilt running a couple Firefox windows, or to accept slower performance…)
tomslee 04.04.10 at 5:06 pm
OK, so “the iPad supports ePub, but more because Apple is second to the party than because of any commitment to open standards” is not provable. Agreed. But in general, everyone except market leaders is in favour of open standards, especially in natural oligopoly realms like Internet devices. iTunes debuted as a closed system, iBooks as standards-based; WebKit is an open source contribution, and the App Store is closed – and I don’t think it’s a stretch to see how these moves are consistent with a self-interested approach to open standards. In this case, Apple is on the side of the angels, but do you see Apple as a leader in the world of open standards more than, say, Microsoft or IBM or Google? They seem much of a muchness to me.
The question “why is this new device is being held to such high openness standards?” is an interesting one. Of course, some people don’t hold it so, and some people did complain about BlackBerry once it moved towards being an Internet device and not just a text-based pager, so there is an assumption there, but I agree there’s some truth too. My guess is that the standards issue has been so high profile because it is about what being a good Internet citizen means. The iPad, unlike the original BlackBerry, is designed first and foremost as an Internet device, and it enters an environment which has a spectrum of Internet devices, unlike five years ago, and our expectations of openness are evolving, which is a contentious process. We’ll all have views that shift as our perceptions of what an Internet device should do and be evolve, and I don’t see those shifting and perhaps even inconsistent views as being bad – and neither do you, it seems, so maybe we’re in agreement there.
PS. If you want to go from “the experience of using it will be more like using my TV than using my computer” to “Using it only as a TV” well you’re just looking for an argument, but the weather here is too sunny and warm for me to enter it. It’s obviously not what I said, and not what I meant.
Neel Krishnaswami 04.04.10 at 5:10 pm
I did my denouncing of the Xbox years ago, and gave money to the EFF to fight the attempt to backport this shit back to PCs (via Palladium and “trusted” computing) back in the day.
But since you ask: the iPad is in fact worse than either of these, since (a) it looks like a computer replacement in a way that the Xbox isn’t, and (b) it looks like it’s going to be a big hit. That is, Apple is importing the locked down closed spyware model of the game and phone companies to the world of computers, and a) they’re going to succeed, and b) this is bad news. Moreover, the sorts of people who would rightly be suspicious if Microsoft were doing it bend over backwards to defend Apple’s decisions.
I use a simple heuristic: the more Richard Stallman would hate it, the worse it is. Since he’s been completely correct years before anyone else continuously for 30 years now, I figure I should draw the appropriate inductive inference.
Substance McGravitas 04.04.10 at 5:24 pm
Mind you, there are crazies who set things like this up and further crazies who put together texts and articles for free.
Salient 04.04.10 at 5:27 pm
Moreover, professors, since they themselves do not incur any penalty for doing so, etc, etc
This sentiment is really weird to me. Maybe it’s because I teach and study at a truly awesome university in which lots of mathematics professors are hard at work designing books for the largest courses that present the content well — books which we intend to place online, for free, and sell in print basically at-cost. We even have NSF grants supporting this! And our three largest courses are already doing this.
There is the issue that for some courses, really amazingly good introductory textbooks exist. I wouldn’t want to be the professor trying to outwrite Stewart’s calculus text or Rudin’s introduction to real analysis. But then, these books are an excellent deal at $120, given what they contain.
I have a hard time with the notion that a very good textbook is not worth $120, in the same way that I have a hard time with the notion that a very good 40 minutes of recorded music is not worth $20. Sure, costs are costly, blah blah blah. But where is the persuasive argument that the widely used $120 textbooks are not worth $120?
I mean, I bought Krugman’s introduction to economics textbook for I think $105 online. As someone who wanted to survey the fundamentals of the discipline, and learn from a book in a kind of direct instruction format, I can affirm it was worth the price. It was easily worth not going to see 5-6 movies, or whatever comparison you prefer.
Now, for a student who doesn’t really want to take a class, and doesn’t take much interest in learning the topics or ideas to be taught, and could care less whether their textbook will or will not optimally support their learning, because they don’t plan to read it carefully… shucks, whatever. If you’re going to complain about that, complain about requiring students to take classes they don’t want to take, because that’s ought to be a more pressing issue to you.
I support the establishment and maintenance of university libraries which, by mandate, stocks several copies of the course textbook for in-library and overnight-loan use. Those students can just borrow the thing for free when they need to, or study in the library. Seriously, why would they want to buy it for any price?
And if the point of buying the textbook is convenience — e.g. not having to travel to the library or return the book within 48 hours — then I’m less sympathetic to students who complain of the price.
Salient 04.04.10 at 5:30 pm
Dangit, SMcG, I could’ve just waited two minutes before typing out a response and you’d have saved me all the work.
Consumatopia 04.04.10 at 5:46 pm
It’s inappropriate to say, of people who own TVs, that “the only thing they want to do with electronics is watch television.â€
That’s a good point, but just to be clear, I did not say “If you own an iPad, the only thing you want to do with computers is consume media”. I said “If the only thing you want to do with computers is consume media, the iPad is absolutely perfect.”
Note the difference between ownership and finding perfection, and note that A implies B does not mean B implies A.
My post was pretty short, I didn’t really emphasize this distinction, and in the context of this thread I can see why you’d read it the way you did.
Jonathan Dursi 04.04.10 at 5:49 pm
Be careful: did you know that every post Richard Stallman makes is carefully and potentially arbitrarily vetted by Richard Stallman, and subject to revokation by *the same Richard Stallman*? It’s true! (Which is a to say — why is being a reflexive Stallman fanboy better than being a reflexive Jobs fanboy?)
So there’s issues of DRM which I assume we can take as a given here that we all think is of the devil; having purchases you’ve made subject to arbitrary revokation is just not cool, to say nothing of the many other issues. Let’s just talk about hardware platforms for a second.
The iPad is manifestly way more open than the Kindle to which it’s so often compared; no one could program for the Kindle at all, as vs for the iPad where anyone with $50 or whatever it is and access to a Mac can write an iPhone/iPad app and submit it for possible acceptance to the Apple app store. But no one went around decrying the Kindle _as a platform_ as being horrifically unopen. But the iPad, which is way easier for anyone to develop for, is.
The unspoken argument seems to be that as soon as you open up a device to make it programmable, you have a moral requirement to let anyone distribute their software to users of your platform on an equal footing. I think the reason this argument is left unspoken is that it’s clearly unsupportable, and if it were mandated then the response would not be a huge increase in open platforms but a huge crackdown in the programmability of platforms so as to escape this requirement.
Your arguments why the iPad is worse tyrranic evil than gaming consoles is based entirely on your perceptions of appearences, so I’m not super convinced:
Especially for the PSP, people *do* read books on it, listen to music on it, and surf the web on it. So I don’t buy the argument that the iPad is fantastically different, but I don’t see the FSF leading the charge against Sony. I could see going after the iPad if Apple were supposed to be better somehow and there was unique disappointment about the iPad, but I can’t see that being the case either.
So why (other than `it looks more like a computer’ and `it looks to be successfull’) is the iPad really so much worse than the Kindle or the PSP?
Substance McGravitas 04.04.10 at 5:50 pm
Hmmm.
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 5:52 pm
Substance, I’m well aware of MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. It’s wonderful and I love it, but of course what makes it awesome is the “open” part. Otherwise, what would it be but another online textbook? So I’m not entirely sure how that ties in with anything that I said with regard to textbook prices.
To Salient: I was a math/physics undergrad at UC Berkeley, so I definitely have had the dubious pleasure of paying $120 for a copy of Rudin. I do not know what things were like at your school, but for example, like every physics undergrad, I took a stat mech class. It was taught out of the frankly execrable Kittel and Kroemer Thermal Physics book, but the homework was assigned out of the eighth edition and the library only had the fifth edition on file, in which the homework problems were different. So unless I wanted to photocopy the problem sets from others every week, I’d have to purchase the book. When I took quantum mechanics, instead of being able to buy a used copy of Griffiths (the standard undergrad text), I had to buy a brand new copy of Bransden and Joachain’s Quantum Mechanics because that’s what the professor used. I have plenty more examples of this kind, and frankly, I’m just kind of fed up with it. When I went to grad school, I had to purchase yet another quantum text (Shankar, for those who care), which promptly proceeded to fall apart in my hands halfway through the semester. In my less sober moments that year I contemplated driving down to Yale and personally demanding that Shankar stand behind the shoddy product that had his name on it.
This:
I simply disagree with. I don’t think any textbook today is worth $120. Sure, Rudin is excellent (Stewart, I think, less so) but $120 is a huge chunk of change to drop on a text. Fortunately, there are only like 3 editions of Rudin and the last one came out a long time ago, so you can probably get a used copy somewhere (I eventually, believe it or not, picked up a copy of Rudin at a used book store for something like $5 or $10). I don’t know that I can offer you any sort of persuasive argument about the inherent worth of the textbook, so I won’t try to do that, but I strongly believe that the only reason I had to pay $120 for Rudin is because that’s what the publishing industry dictates, not because Walter Rudin is making a fortune on it. If there were a way for me to have purchased an electronic copy of the book from Rudin directly and just pay him $30 (which I bet is more than he gets in royalties per book sale anyway) I would much rather do that, just like I’m happy to buy a CD from a band I went to see in concert for $10 but I won’t spend $20 on the same CD at the store.
Lastly, I’m not sure what your comment about not wanting to learn was geared towards, but that seems to me to be a separate discussion. I’m someone who does want to learn; I just don’t want to pay out the nose every time I want to learn about a new topic. It’s why I buy used Dover editions instead of new hardcovers.
Def Att 04.04.10 at 5:58 pm
I have a slow laptop. Why would I want a slow laptop without a keyboard?
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 6:07 pm
Jonathan Dursi:
Is there such a moral obligation? I would think not. But so what? Those of us who don’t like the fact that the iPad is not an open system are not required to abstain from criticism based on this fact. Of course Apple can do whatever it likes but if one feels (as Neel does) that the effects of its actions are deleterious, that seems like a pretty good basis for criticism without getting into an abstract moral debate.
Bernard Yomtov 04.04.10 at 6:11 pm
Daniel at #54:
An economist writes: it’s also possible to make more money at the same prices.
Well, if we’re going to bring economics in, it’s also possible to make more money at lower prices, even facing the same demand curve, when costs drop.
Jerry Vinokurov at #66:
It’s possible my optimism is unjustified, but I’m going to stick to it anyway.
I agree that faculty have too little incentive to care about textbook prices. I find it interesting for example, that in the US at least, textbooks often carry no cover prices, unlike virtually all other books. Why is that, do you suppose? Still, students do sometimes complain, and I doubt they will stay as inured to paying $100 a book as you think. The price of electronically distributed content in general is not high, and this will affect attitudes.
Tomslee,
Contact me at my first initial + lastname_1999 at yahoo and we can negotiate terms and conditions.
Salient 04.04.10 at 6:14 pm
…not because Walter Rudin is making a fortune on it.
Not that this matters much, relative to your other good points and very enjoyable-to-read assessment of Shankar’s physically shoddy book, but you do realize that Rudin has made a fortune on the intro book, right? I mean, The House Blue Rudin Built is pretty famous.
If there were a way for me to have purchased an electronic copy of the book from Rudin directly and just pay him $30 (which I bet is more than he gets in royalties per book sale anyway) I would much rather do that,
I would say you obviously don’t buy many photo-ready mathematics monologues, because if you did you’d know that crappy-versus-good editing is cruical, especially for books in translation. But you buy Dover editions of stuff, so surely you’ve encountered the ‘quality translation versus crap translation’ dynamic. So I don’t know what to say. Editors and quality editing matter. I dunno, maybe you’ve just gotten lucky regarding which Dover books you’ve bought.
What really confuses me is not the animosity toward publishing companies, it’s the price point. I’m curious, what is a textbook worth to you? (How many movies in the theater?) Like, would you pay $100 directly to Rudin for his book?
Salient 04.04.10 at 6:23 pm
It was taught out of the frankly execrable Kittel and Kroemer Thermal Physics book, but the homework was assigned out of the eighth edition and the library only had the fifth edition on file, in which the homework problems were different.
I sympathize with you. In fact I, as an undergraduate, became the only crazily over-active student member of the University Library Committee, trying to get a pledge to purchase one dozen copies of any textbook which is assigned to at least 120 students in any given semester. To no avail, as all the available funding was directed to a long-term storage facility for rare documents. (I kinda got myself in trouble for pointing out that the library was literally allowing itself to become a museum.)
Anyway, hopefully with the rise of electronic copies, libraries will be able to negotiate the right to provide their students online login access to textbooks, for a flat fee. (If anyone knows of a productive way to agitate for this, please share.)
And… (…flicking a nervous eye in Henry’s direction, as I went and let the discussion pretty far afield here, oops…) maybe students will be able to get electronic access to textbooks… on their iPad!
onymous 04.04.10 at 6:25 pm
I don’t think there’s any such thing as “the” standard undergrad quantum text. People seem to choose arbitrarily among a pretty big list: Griffiths, Shankar, Gasiorowicz, Liboff, ….
Anyway, my experience as an undergrad was that very few professors assigned homework out of textbooks. Maybe 4 out of the 15 or so math courses I took did this (and one of those was an algebraic topology class with the texts available freely on the web), and a slightly larger fraction of physics courses did. Very few people followed textbooks more than loosely, anyway. So it was rare that owning the book was a true requirement, rather than a book on the subject or access to a library with plenty of easily browsable books on the subject.
Maybe I’m wildly off base, but I think the expense problem (and the problem of frequent, unnecessary new editions of books) is most severe in the giant intro classes (calculus, intro econ, physics for premeds). And I think most academics appreciate the utility of free online content — hence the widespread move toward everyone posting their own work on the web for free — so I can’t imagine any strong obstacle to the adoption of free electronic textbooks, if they are available, and if they are well-publicized. Call me a foolish optimist, but I think this is just a matter of time.
NomadUK 04.04.10 at 6:25 pm
I don’t intend to purchase an iPad, as I have a quite serviceable MacBook Pro (though I can see why someone who spends a lot of time just Web-surfing or watching video would prefer the iPad, as it’s easier to carry around).
The thing I find saddening though, is that Apple had — and still has — the technology of the Newton, which was only waiting for the perfect hardware on which to run. The iPad is exactly that, and if I could scribble on it and have the thing really recognise my handwriting, be able to write symbolic equations and have it understand them and manipulate them — in short, have it do everything the Newton should have been able to do, in a form factor like a datapad out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I would be bugging my wife for permission to buy one.
Instead, what we get is a big iPhone, running Cocoa apps on Mac OS X. Feh.
Consumatopia 04.04.10 at 6:44 pm
The semi-closed iPhoneOS is scary for the same reason that the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism is scary–it’s open enough to make life tolerable, but closed enough to remind you who is and will always be in charge.
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 6:52 pm
There seems to be a great deal of variety in people’s experience with their undergraduate textbooks. I don’t know if this has some correlation with whether one attended a large public university or a smaller private one or a large private one or what have you. My experience was that most of my professors assigned problems directly from the books. The one class I had with a physics prof. that didn’t do that also (not coincidentally, I think) turned out to be the best physics class I ever took, but that was a one-off.
I guess I never bothered to learn the details of Rudin’s financial dealings :)
And you’d be right (although I assume you meant monographs rather than monologues, which I also do not buy many of either).
Maybe. I’ve certainly noticed this with books that are translated, but a lot of them are not, and for those I’m not sure how much editing really gets done to make them better. Those hardbacks are glossier and more polished but I haven’t really noticed that they provide necessarily better content.
$100, probably not, assuming I had other options (I mean, I obviously paid around $120 for it once, but that was before I held the views I hold now). A good textbook is probably worth around $50 at the top-most to me; more likely, it’s worth whatever it costs on the used market on average. Not to get all boo-hoo look at poor little me or anything, but hey, I’m a grad student, I don’t have a lot of money sitting around. I’m doing ok financially, much better than some other students I know, but if I need to spend on the order of $100 every time I am trying to learn a new topic, that pretty quickly gets to be prohibitive.
To bring this somewhat lengthy tangent back to the iPad, the advent of things like the iPad and other devices that can render PDFs faithfully is going to blow up the textbook market because as soon as those PDFs exist, you’ll be able to copy them from your friend. You can already get them if you know where to look, but for the less tech-savvy, it’s not as easy yet. It will be. And then the same thing that happened to music sharing will happen to textbooks and there will be lots of handwringing and whatnot, but that’s going to be the reality of things.
Salient 04.04.10 at 7:13 pm
:) If I was the only one amused by my automatic spell-checker’s substitution of monologues for monographs, would we call that monolaughs?
ScentOfViolets 04.04.10 at 7:27 pm
Be it as it may, the iPad isn’t The Last Tablet. I’m quite sure that something else will come along that will very much the look and feel of this device (that tends to happen with Apple products a lot), but will not have this disadvantage. It’s not a big deal, unless you think that iPad is going to enjoy the opportunities for monopolistic abuses that Windows had for so long.
ScentOfViolets 04.04.10 at 7:51 pm
Heh. There may be some observer bias at work here. If you’re like me, you probably learned your mathematics from the immortals – Rudin for analysis, say, Fulton or Harris for algebraic geometry, etc. Iow, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book whose last published edition was ever less than five years prior to my purchase, and more likely ten; anything more current and I’m overwhelmingly more likely to be reading a published paper or something out of a journal.
But I suspect that this is a highly unusual situation in a lot of instances . . . and don’t forget the significant differences between graduate vs undergraduate schooling.
Shouldn’t that be turned around – what makes you think that a $120 textbook is actually worth $120? Is this the sort of price it could fetch outside a captive non-academic clientele? In any event, again speaking just for the math world where I teach, it has been my experience that nothing has changed in the subject of “Introductory Algebra that You Should have Learned in High School” for a long, long time. But what our school does (University of Missouri – Columbia) is buy one new edition after the other rather than stick with one good instance once it has been found. I agree with my students that they shouldn’t have to fork over $120 (or more, quite frankly) for a book from which they will read perhaps 100 pages out of, and that only for examples for the exercises I have assigned. They will never crack the bubble pack which contains the extras like the CD-ROM, they don’t care whether or not the spiffy sidebars in all their glossy million-color glory included in the book, and certainly they will very seldom read them, etc. And this goes quite a ways up the ladder of sophistication in mathematics. Do we really need a 6th, a 7th, an 8th edition of Stewart? What was so terrible with the fifth edition that it needed correction?
Again, this is just with reference to the math world. I imagine that international studies, robotics, etc. might be subjects where the relevant updates come a little more frequently.
ScentOfViolets 04.04.10 at 7:56 pm
Off-Topic: I’ve heard of The House Stewart Built, but not anything similar for Rudin. What’s the story? Or am I misremembering and doing a name substitution?
Jerry Vinokurov 04.04.10 at 8:42 pm
Rudin’s house was apparently designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, as I just discovered. That would seem to almost have to predate the publication of his book, though, unless we’re talking about the very first edition.
Walt 04.04.10 at 8:53 pm
I was sure he meant Stewart’s house, but apparently Rudin’s house has its own Wikipedia page.
Also, Stewart’s book sucks.
ScentOfViolets 04.04.10 at 8:54 pm
Ah, this is different then and something I had not heard before. Stewart abides in An ‘Accordion’ of Wood and Glass :
Mathematicians are funny that way :-)
John gordon 04.04.10 at 9:19 pm
Can’t believe I fell for this ploy. Argghhhhh.
No virus. No file system. Stone simple. Pay as go access.
IPod.
It’s for my sister. Who is poor.
Yes, astonishingly, this is a poor persons computer. In case you don’t know any poor people, very few can keep a modern os running.
nick s 04.04.10 at 10:00 pm
I figure the EFF kind of knows what they’re talking about when it comes to online freedom, you know?
For a very cramped definition of ‘online freedom’ that’s focused on the underlying mechanisms of computing. That’s the EFF’s domain, so I’m not going to complain about them doing their job, but the freedom of not having to spend family gatherings doing tech support sounds pretty nice to me.
the more Richard Stallman would hate it, the worse it is.
There are so many cheap back-at-yas for that line, so I’ll let people supply their own.
Consumatopia 04.04.10 at 10:38 pm
For a very cramped definition of ‘online freedom’ that’s focused on the underlying mechanisms of computing.
Given the universal nature of computers, I see no way to care about privacy, free speech, security, transparency, creativity or accessibility without caring about the underlying economic and technical mechanisms.
clew 04.04.10 at 11:42 pm
I agree with both 94 and 96, which is more than a little depressing.
David 04.05.10 at 1:09 am
The sheer end-of-civilization-as-anyone-knows-it hyperbole of the anti-iPad crowd easily drowns the clamor (if this is mangled enough for H, I look forward to an inexpensive iApp that will mangle for me) of the so-called Apple Zombies. Amazing. I can confidently predict that at least one of the fervent denouncers on this thread will end up owning one.
clew 04.05.10 at 6:16 am
Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch.
Anyone know how open the Plastic Logic reader is likely to be? And what the heck is the Skiff, other than glorious FUD aimed at terrified publishers? I want a big ol’ reader that can show the plots in letter/A4 PDFs but not phone home to Elsevier every time I open one.
tomslee 04.05.10 at 11:30 am
David – calm down! I just reread the whole thread, and I don’t see the hyperbole you are talking about. Sure there are a few bold statements, but most of the thread is pretty moderate, and no stronger than other devices (Kindle for example) have called out. I’d say the overall tone is one of ambivalence – seeing the utility of the device, but wary of its closed nature.
NomadUK 04.05.10 at 12:11 pm
Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll get one after all!
NomadUK 04.05.10 at 12:13 pm
Oh, bugger. Never mind. Just noticed the date.
Consumatopia 04.05.10 at 12:51 pm
Yeah, just to further the spirit of ambivalence, it’s not clear to me that Chrome OS and it’s all-apps-are-cloud-apps model will actually be more “free” than the iPad’s walled garden of local apps.
Salient 04.05.10 at 2:09 pm
Textbook prices: I’ve overstated my case as well as my interest. One thing I’d like to see is the availability of subscription through university library portals. Subscribe to online editions of all your textbooks. Printing is forbidden or severely restricted, and your access is revoked after semester’s end; the tradeoff is cheap access to the content. I guess it’s Teh Evil to sell access to content rather than physical content, and I comprehend that and sympathize with that, but if buying “access” it makes sense anywhere, it makes sense in this context. That’s what students who buy and resell their textbooks are actually already doing.
I would think using university library resources as the subscription portal would allow for professors to customize the available content, e.g. highlight which problems are assigned. So that would be cool. Perhaps the folks at Blackboard can build the necessary infrastructure.
What I’d like to see is a world where it doesn’t matter if paper textbooks cost $100, because students can subscribe to their textbooks via their media consumption device of choice, with service fees included in tuition (just as library fees currently are absorbed). Those who want/need the books as a permanent resource could shell out the money.
Or not. Maybe I’m confused by the vociferous assertions that instructional material can’t possibly be worth $100, but on the other hand, I don’t have any stake in sustaining high prices. A course costs about $1100 for me, a textbook costs $110; let’s defray both those costs and make instruction cheap and accessible for all. I can definitely get behind that — and it strikes me that proliferation of increasingly versatile, easy-to-use, increasingly foolproof media consumption devices like Kindle and iPad will facilitate this transition.
Charly 04.05.10 at 3:56 pm
Consumatopia at #74:
“If the only thing you want to do with computers is consume media, the iPad is absolutely perfect.â€
Except if you want to use an SD card or MKV or flash. In fact i would argue that the ipad is totally unsuited to consume video
Keith 04.05.10 at 4:48 pm
Saying that you wouldn’t want an iPad because you already have a laptop is missing the point.The iPad isn’t the technological savvy or computer literate. It’ snot for Geeks who want to build websites int heir spare time. It’s is for people who don’t see a use for a laptop, because they only use desktop computers at work, to write reports or run spreadsheets and can’t imagine why anyone would want something to carry around that looks like work and doesn’t even have a mouse. It’s for people curious about this whole Youtube/twitter/facebook/ebook thing they keep hearing about. The iPad is cheaper than a laptop, and marketed as a thing that does simple stuff they want to do.
Tech savvy people can use it too, as a way to separate their social media playtime form their working on a laptop time, so it does grab that geeky, gadget fetish factor but that’s a secondary market. The iPad is the machine that will introduce your grandma to facebook or let your truck driving macho buddy who doesn’t do all that geeky computer stuff read an ebook. Neither will be stigmatized or scared by having to sit down at a computer because it isn’t a computer. it’s an iPad.
EWI 04.05.10 at 7:19 pm
@ Jonathan Dursi
I guess my main question is why is this new device is being held to such high openness standards.
Well, part of it is certainly concern-trolling by those with an iron in the fire (see The Register’s coverage of Google’s laudable efforts to resist censorship in China, for example, as an example of a particularly blatant practitioner of this in the tech press).
@ tomslee
iTunes debuted as a closed system
iTunes-the-program or iTunes-the-store? iTunes (the app) has always allowed you to rip from your CDs, add your own MP3s etc. (much to the displeasure of teh record companies). iTunes the music store sells music under conditions which are set by negotiation with same record companies.
David 04.05.10 at 10:17 pm
Krishnaswami is a little over the top, imho.
wp200 04.05.10 at 10:23 pm
I got an iPhone when it was time to replace my old phone. I like it a lot, and I use it more as a mediaplayer/web browser than as a phone, but still I only shelled out for the expensive contract because my old phone needed to be replaced.
I wonder what will have to crash before I get an iPad. My desktop? It’s obsolete, never use it anymore. My laptop? Can’t run an iPad without a computer running iTunes 9.0 (which, needless to say, my desktop can’t), so no laptop = no iPad. My TV? Only got one. Can’t have the entire family staring at my lap all the time. My landline phone?
I’d really like to have an iPad, it’s just that I can’t find a $500 justification. Maybe when the small $100 DVD-player breaks we use to keep the kids quiet on long trips. Or maybe when my eldest breaks his nintendo ds, and I break the DVD player.
Or maybe when the folks at Apple allow you to run your iPad without iTunes on a second computer. Why the 2nd computer? Why not just a 2nd hard disk and a TimeMachine app? Then you’d have a full new system (keyboard, backup disk, and iPad) for $600.
Anders Widebrant 04.06.10 at 5:45 am
The iPad is the dumb half of a netbook. No keyboard, no multitasking, not even tabbed browsing. “The best way to experience the web”, indeed.
Touting it as a computer for the masses misses the point entirely: the modern computer is primarily a communication tool (consider the growth curve of the mobile computing platform called the cellphone), and the iPad is technically and ergonomically deficient in that department.
It’s internally consistent, I suppose, being an “experience” (consumption-only) device, but it’s still a disappointing product from a company that should, by rights, have produced a tablet that enabled real creativity. I was stunned that the only drawing package that Apple could show at the launch was a third-party iPhone finger-painting app.
That screen looks gorgeous, though.
EWI 04.06.10 at 8:47 am
My TV? Only got one. Can’t have the entire family staring at my lap all the time.
Ah, but if you go with iTunes then you can shell out on an AppleTV…
John Meredith 04.06.10 at 8:56 am
The iPad is utterly pointless. And I speak with some authority having been one of he few people to point out, right from the start, that cameras on phones were a silly gimmick that would never catch on.
Ronald Brak 04.06.10 at 10:07 am
I think the iPad is great. It gives me a chance to see what sort of features the I can expect when I finally get round to buying a cheap knock off assembled in Nigeria with apps programmed in Cambodian sweat cubicles.
Ray 04.06.10 at 11:38 am
The iPad is cheaper than a laptop
If it was, in the $100-200 range, I could see the point. But $500 minimum, for 16Gb memory? I can get a laptop for half that, same screen size, with a 250Gb hard drive.
I haven’t seen anyone point out any good points of the iPad that go further than “Cool like the iPhone, but bigger!”, which was the OP. And the trouble is that “but bigger!” is not an unalloyed advantage. When you’re already carrying a phone around, a phone with a lot of new functions is great. An iPad is too big (and expensive, and breakable) to be casually portable. So you might as well just carry a laptop.
Martin 04.06.10 at 3:57 pm
I do not really understand why people tout the ipad as a media viewing miracle. Backlit screens are a disaster for reading long texts, so it won’t really replace an e-reader a la Kindle. Which leaves us with surfing the internet or watching videos. It will be a pain in the neck to surf the internet as it will have to lie flat on the table or your lap in order for you to tap on the links etc. Same for video: I can either hold it like a book for two hours or strain my neck looking down at the thing in my lap or on a table. A laptop with its built-in monitor stand seems to be much more comfortable in this respect. But maybe I am wrong.
Craig 04.06.10 at 7:51 pm
To be sure, the iPad is an iPod Touch that you can’t put in your pocket.
No Flash, no Java, no camera, no USB port for sharing files or connecting to a camera. Much less battery life than a good e-reader, if that sort of thing is your bag. And Apple now has to sign off on anything you want to look at or install.
People say the typing isn’t so bad, but I have to wonder: does anyone touch-type these days? I thought that was just something that you realized you needed to grow up and learn already once you hit your late teens and got tired of looking at the keyboard all day long. Can you touch-type on buttons you can’t actually feel?
How about they make a miniaturized version called the iPad Nano that shrinks it back down to the size of an iPhone, but doesn’t add back in the phone or camera? Talk about a new paradigm.
blah 04.07.10 at 8:29 pm
I don’t see why some people think the iPad will become an introduction to the wonders of computing for the ignorant and unwashed. It’s a high-end gadget for those with disposible income. Maybe later it will filter down to the riff-raff. But for the present, the higher-income brackets will drop cash on the iPad for the same reason they buy other fancy entertainment equipment and services. People with money can never have enough toys.
Craig 04.08.10 at 4:03 pm
To second “blah”–isn’t it true that the iPad is designed to work as a satellite device of a desktop computer “mothership,” much like the iPod? I mean, you want to download pictures or whatever, you synch it to home base via iTunes, do you not? So the very archtecture here argues against the usefulness of the iPad as a “starter computer” for the technologically inexperienced. It is designed to be a second computer for the tech-savvy.
J. Meader 04.09.10 at 1:25 pm
I think the Daily Mash has it about right
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/apple-to-fix-malfunctioning-ipad-customers-201004092628/
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