The Wired.com Gadget Lab posted an article about the 10 things that the iPad is missing. This article follows on their commentary, and some history as to why I switched to Apple after 25 years of being on a PC. Yep, that’s right. I have been using a PC and PC-like computers for 25 years [maybe longer, I'm scared to look back further]. I started on a TRS-80 in 5th grade, a KayPro-90, and didn’t like the Apple II because it looked too much like a kids toy… fast forward 25 years.
I am a new consumer to Apple products. I purchased my iPhone in March 2009 because I couldn’t use a Verizon RAZR v3m in Germany and had to rent a phone which ended up costing me $800 in charges and rental fees, nor in Ireland; but I could use my iPhone in both. I purchased my MacBook Pro in September 2009 because my HP Tablet was heavier and of horrible quality compared to the Apple product and I needed something fast, reliable, and high quality for my final MBA class and the future. The digitizer was resistive and would lose resolution towards the edges just like every other Tablet/UMPC/Slate that uses Resistive technology for the digitizer. And finally, I just purchased a Mac Mini which took 3 button clicks to take my Time Machine installation from my MacBook Pro and port it over to my Mac Mini; it connected to both WiFi and Ethernet without me having to customize anything (looking back, I had to change the machine name only because I didn’t want it named the same as my MacBook Pro with a “-2″ added to it, which was done automatically to keep continuity of the network), and I was up and running after it moved 125 GB’s of data from my Time Machine over USB 2.0 without me monitoring anything. You can’t do that on any PC I’ve ever had in my life. In my 25 years, I’ve had somewhere around 17 machines if you count a Timex Sinclair and its doodads as a computer. And, just to put a fine point on how easily it is to run an Apple product without having to get a bunch of other stuff: It even pulled monitor profiles automatically matching them to the two different models of monitor I have on my desk. Nothing ever did that before. Now you know a bit about my history with hardware consumption, now my take on the iPad and why the Gadget Lab has a different perception of the iPad and maybe can enlighten people as to what is important to consumers… everyday consumers, not technophiles [which I would call myself if not for the relative noobish consumption of things Apple.] Oh, at one point, I was driving a dual nVidia 280 powered PC with four 22″ monitors and a total of 8 TB’s of storage and 8GB’s of RAM. I was a power user of PC’s fully capable of building my own systems, LAN’s, SAN’s, PAN’s, and everything else.
On with the show, I’ll keep talking about how old I am if I don’t move on. Here are Gadget Lab’s 10 issues with the iPad, and my responses as a weathered consumer of all things tech, and new consumer of all things Apple.
Flash
Many people will bemoan the lack of support for Adobe’s interactive software, Flash. It wasn’t mentioned, but eagle-eyed viewers would have seen the missing plugin icon on the New York Times site during yesterday’s demo, and given that Apple clearly hates Flash as both a non-open web “standard” and as a buggy, CPU-hungry piece of code, it’s unlikely it will ever be added, unless Apple decides it wants to cut the battery life down to two hours.
Who needs Flash, anyway? YouTube and Vimeo have both switched to H.264 for video streaming (in Chrome and Safari, at least — Firefox doesn’t support it), and the rest of the world of Flash is painful to use.
In fact, we think the lack of Flash in the iPad will be the thing that finally kills Flash itself. If the iPad is as popular as the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flash-capable browsers will eventually be in the minority.
This is probably the only article that discusses the FLASH issue with a level head instead of hyperbole and what certainly comes across as anger. No one has really misses FLASH on the iPhone. I certainly don’t on websites. In fact, I hate it on websites. It is slow to load, and a resource hog even on the best of systems. The iPhone utilizes Applications to build a custom interface for a site if you want to, or you can use the built-in web browser. If a page doesn’t load fast enough, you lose a customer or client. I agree with the Gadget Lab.
OLED
One of the biggest rumors said that there would be two iPads, one with an OLED screen and one without. But as our own Apple-master Brian X Chen pointed out, an OLED panel of this size runs to around $400. Add in the rest of the hardware and even the top-end $830 model wouldn’t be making Apple much money.
OLED also has some dirty secrets. It may be more colorful, but it uses more power than an LED backlit screen when all the diodes are lit up (white on black text is where OLED energy savings shine). It is also rather dim in comparison, and making an e-reader that you can’t use outdoors would be a stupid move from Apple.
This too is one of those things that people wanted so bad but would have driven up the cost to that $1000 price point that everyone thought the iPad would land at. I certainly wanted something to be included… full iPhone capabilities. I would happily carried this around with a bluetooth headset hanging from the side of my head. yah, it screams butthead, but I want one device to rule them all. The LED backlit screen is good enough, and I agree with the Gadget Lab. The only way the iPad could have been superior, is if they purchased the IP for PixelQi technology and integrated that [along with a healthy evolution of the technology involved; my perception of PixelQi tech right now is that it is washed out on the color side].
USB
The iPad is meant to be an easy-to-use appliance, not an all-purpose computer. A USB port would mean installing drivers for printers, scanners and anything else you might hook up. But there is a workaround: the dock connector. Apple has already announced a camera connection kit, a $30 pair of adapters which will let you either plug the camera in direct or plug in an SD card to pull off the photos.
The subtle message here is that it’s not a feature for the pros: the lack of a Compact Flash slot in that adapter says “amateur photographers only.”
Expect a lot more of these kinds of accessories, most likely combined with software. How long can it be before, say, EyeTV makes an iPad-compatible TV tuner?
YES! Thank you, once again, I agree with the Gadget Lab. A USB port is an unnecessary feature, the 30-pin connection is designed to do everything the devices needs to do, from power to communication with the parent device. It would also require the edge to be considerably thicker in the area of the USB port. Who knows, perhaps someone will develop a 30-pin to USB connector. I doubt it, but who knows. There have been a lot of things made for the iPhone. But everyone thought the iPhone and the iPod were dumb too. Well, until it hit the market and now it has contributed to a $50 billion company.
GPS
Apple put a compass inside every iPad, so you’d think that there would be a GPS unit in there, too. The Wi-Fi-only models get nothing, just like the iPod Touch, but more surprising is that the 3G iPads come with Assisted GPS.
Assisted GPS can be one of two things, both of which which offload some work to internet servers and use cell-tower triangulation. The difference is that some AGPS units have real GPS too, and some don’t. We’ll know which the iPad has as soon as we get our hands on one.
The only difference between GPS and a-GPS is that the GPS module with assistance will use land based identifiers to facilitate location verification instead of pinging for satellites and draining the battery. It is still a full fledged GPS module. This is nearly a non-starter for discussion. We’re almost at 8.5 instead of 10 missing things if you count the USB thing as a half-non issue.
Multitasking
From the demonstrations at the Jobsnote it appears that, like the iPhone, we can’t run applications in the background. This will annoy many Wired readers, but it will not matter at all to the target user, who will be using the iPad to browse and consume media. In fact, this user will benefit, as the lack of CPU-cycle-sucking background processes is likely a large part of that ten-hour battery life.
If you are authoring content, like this post, then multiple browser windows, a text editor, a mail client and a photo editor all make sense. If you’re reading an e-book, not so much.
Yep. Agree! Basically, two things here. No one runs two applications at once. You can listen to your music, and surf; at least, until something needs the audio. I think the iPhone will do the same thing, but as soon as you surf to a site [haha, flash] that plays music, you lose your iTunes music. The benefit is indeed that you don’t have to worry about what is running in the background like you do with the Android platform. You don’t do this and that while on the iPhone and iPad, but there are hooks in the programming so you can attach a picture on the iPhone, and on the iPad I would imagine there is a means to pull the content from your synced library. Take a photograph, mail it to your account, or sync it, then pull it down from the cloud [which I hate as a name more than the iPad], and then insert it into whatever you are doing. It is identical on the PC or any platform. You perform a function, and use the result somewhere else. Except on the iPad; you use a different tool in your arsenal that is designed to produce instead of consume. Like a camera that isn’t 2MP or 6MP, but my cameras are 10MP or more and much more capable for photography in various elements. I do have to say that for the production of this article, I copied the content into the window, saved the draft, and went back to get the link to attach to the article on The Gadget Lab. Easy. No multitasking involved. Maybe a bit broken, but certainly doable.
Keyboard
Nobody really thought the iPad would have a physical keyboard. That won’t stop the whining, though. The difference, again, between the iPad and a MacBook is that one is a multi-purpose device and the other is a media player.
The fact that Apple actually has made an optional keyboard for it is the biggest surprise (apart from the iPad’s base $500 price). In fact, this little $70 keyboard will mean that, despite its simplified nature, the iPad is enough laptop for many people. Why bother with a $400 netbook when you can have this instead?
You can also use the Bluetooth keyboard that is sitting on a lot of consumers desktops right now. I don’t like bluetooth keyboards, they aren’t secure enough for my tastes. Leftovers from my Linux distro days. Yep, I have that as experience too. BBS’s were a lot of fun, understanding the various “Boxing” techniques were also fun. Anyway, the keyboard is another non-starter. It isn’t a production device, but you can produce on the soft keyboard, the docking keyboard, and the bluetooth keyboard. A jacket will be made that allows for you to have the keyboard on one side, and the iPad on the other. Problem solved. If you wanted a keyboard with a screen, you have the MacBook, MacBook Pro, or a PC laptop/Netbook. Then you have to deal with the same proprietary nature as Apple with a closed Windows environment. The reason there aren’t as many software developers is that the Apple platform has always been at a higher pricepoint.
Camera
No video camera, no stills camera, and no webcam. The first two will likely never make it into a future iPad, as we all have our iPhones or actual cameras with us, too. But the lack of a webcam is odd, as it closes off the possibility of using the iPad as a videophone.
I figure this is a cost-saving measure on Apple’s part. Too bad, though, as it is the only thing that stops me buying an iPad for my parents, whom I talk to on Skype. There seems to be no other reason not to have a webcam in the bezel other than price. We expect to see one in v2.0.
So, we’re really down to 7.5 things that the iPad is missing, and I really don’t count any of these things as “missing” since it isn’t designed to be the device that has everything a laptop has. What it does, it does well. And have a power hogging camera is definitely not in the cards at this point. The iPad is a book reader, a web consumption device. It isn’t designed to be a conference call tool. It may come in another edition, but why? No one wants to hold up a 10″, 1.5lb device to take a picture. It isn’t designed in the first place to be a telepresence device. It isn’t missing, people need to understand it isn’t intended to be the super-gizmo.
Verizon
iPhone users hate AT&T, but the only alternative is T-Mobile, whose coverage isn’t as good. Until Verizon switches to the world-standard GSM SIM card, don’t expect to see an Apple product on its network. You can forget all those Verizon iPhone rumors right now.
Yep. they do. This is probably the only thing that truly is an issue, and Verizon is not the solution. Having AT&T update their network for greater coverage and reliability is the solution and what is missing. Bringing Verizon into the mix will muddle the market. Increase costs since it requires a different set of hardware solutions. And frankly, instead of saying Verizon, you might as well have said it was missing cell phone capabilities. THAT is something I can stand behind. Verizon has never been good to me. AT&T hasn’t let me down, Yet.
16:9
The iPad screen is a relatively square, by today’s standards, with an old-school 4:3 screen aspect ratio. This is not ideal for watching widescreen movies: you get a thick black “letterbox” bar top and bottom. But take another look at the hardware: the Apple on the back, and the position of the home button both tell us that the iPad is meant to be used in portrait mode, at least most of the time. And a 16:9 aspect ratio in this orientation would look oddly tall and skinny, like an electronic Marilyn Manson.
It’s a compromise, and a good one. If you really do spend most of your time watching movies on the iPad, maybe you should think about buying, you know, a big TV.
Nice. Have you seen Marilyn Manson lately? And thank you for driving home the point that the 16:9 ratio is not something you can jam into a device in the shape of the iPad unless you want to walk around with a Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad shaped device. This was actually a device I wanted to make. I got in touch with a manufacturer, and I think they chuckled when they looked at my budget. A buck fitty.
HDMI
There will be video out, likely through the dock connector, as Jobs said during his presentation that you’ll be able to hook the iPad up to a projector. But no HDMI out? How do you hook it up to your HD monitor?
The short answer is that you don’t. The maximum audience for an iPad screening is two. You want more? Use your laptop and hook that up, or your desktop machine. Remember, there are two kinds of people who will buy the iPad. One, nerds like you and me, who care about things like HDMI and also already own a computer that can do that.
And two, people who are buying this instead of a computer. Those people will probably still have DVD collections, or even VCRs. They don’t even know what HDMI is. I think I can guess what Apple thought about putting another expensive connector into the machine just to please a few geeks.
What no one has said is this… you can finally share your content without issue. Until now, DRM has prevented you from porting content for anyone. Everyone wants to protect their content. Anyone who would suggest otherwise has their head buried in the sand. Sure, some produce work for everyone to consume, but it certainly isn’t for free. There is ALWAYS reciprocal benefit. Maybe I’m a bit jaded. The last time I tried to do something for everyone, without a thank you in return… I broke my hand on Christmas Eve. Maybe I’m bitter. I’ve still got 4 weeks of trying to get my hand back into shape. At least I can move it again. Anyway, HDMI is just another connection. That 30-pin connector MIGHT be able to produce the output, we’ll see.
Finally, people have a perception that this thing has everything. Calacanis didn’t help by throwing absurd capabilities into the channel of respected commentary. If you want to read the Gadget Lab article, you can follow this link. Or the one at the top.
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