The iPad is a Giant iPhone
By now, you’ve already heard about Apple’s new tablet device, the iPad. You know it’ll run the iPhone OS, it’ll have a 9.7 inch multitouch LCD screen, it’ll have a ten-hour battery life, and it’ll cost $499 up. Like the iPhone, it’ll be locked into the iTunes app store, and it won’t support Adobe Flash. Unlike the iPhone, it has no camera. You can check out Apple’s iPad product page for the rest of the specs.
As I watched Apple CEO Steve Jobs reveal the iPad yesterday, I felt like I was watching a parody video straight out of College Humor. He used words like “magical” and “revolutionary” to announce something that, stripped of such hyperbole, looks patently ridiculous: a giant iPhone. What’s more, this larger device actually lacks the camera of its smaller twin.
A Giant Leap Backwards
Steve hails the iPad as Apple’s most advanced technology ever. That’s funny; you’d think deminiaturizing a cellphone and taking away one of its biggest features would actually constitute a technological step backwards. For all intents and purposes, the iPhone 3G may as well be the iPad Nano.
Steve also boasts that 43 million iPhone owners will already know how to use the iPad. What he doesn’t address is why iPhone owners would want to buy a second cellular data plan for what is essentially a second, bigger iPhone. Sure, people get separate data plans for their laptops, but that’s because laptops are more flexible than cellphones. The iPad has all the restrictions of the iPhone, without the convenience or the camera.
As if this giant iPhone weren’t illogical enough, it uses an exotic micro SIM. iPhones use regular SIMs. Why a larger device would require a smaller SIM simply eludes common sense.
An Insult to Your Intelligence
The first official advertisement for the iPad itself sounds like a parody. The opening line would be a joke if it weren’t so insulting to your intelligence: “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.” Oh look, we can now browse the Web on a big screen! That far exceeds my puny ability to understand how things work! What a magical concept!
The iPad could easily have become so much more than a giant iPhone. It could have bundled a slim, multitouch version of Mac OS X. It could have been hailed as a really cool Mac tablet. The fact that Apple chose to put the iPhone OS on the iPad hints at something far more sinister than a mere lack of creativity.
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Im confused, why comparing the two, ipad and iphone only by size??
Is it really by size or something about the newer hardware and newer technology?
The author failed to compare the two in technological leaps but simply judged the two by size..I wonder whats the size of his brain hehe..
If the iPad’s hardware is so much better than the iPhone’s, then why is Apple running the iPhone OS on it? Why impose the limitations of a smartphone OS on a tablet?
Even the CEO of AT&T agrees: people don’t want to get a second data plan for the iPad.
That’s saying a lot, considering that A&T is the exclusive 3G provider for the iPad.
It’s like.. The hype over the iPad was built by the media and your common internet user. Things lead to other things. Rumors swell up and turn into an idealization of this “awesome” device that can play HD video, sports a customs iPhone OS and many other magical stuff. But in my mind folks at Apple wasn’t developing anything at all.
The iPad we’ve been presented could have been developed in weeks.. Without so much of a hint of any of the things that it was rumored to have. This release could have been awesome but the utter disappointment entangled with the cheezy introduction Job’s had during the keynote made me decide not to buy this gadget.
Fortunately for Apple, fantards will actually buy the product even though it’s obviously overpriced. Months later these guys will be screwed over ’cause Apple’s gonna release another one with all new features. Several of those could have been incorporated into the device in the first place. But it won’t totally be awesome. By the third release maybe. By then individuals would have bought the device three times already.
Lesson here? Wait for the second or third gen version to come out. There are even alternatives out there that offer more for the same price, or less. At its name won’t sound like a woman’s hygiene product.. And you get more for your money.
You’re absolutely right on all counts, fr0stbyte. Until the iPad has the capabilities of an actual tablet computer and not a giant voiceless smartphone, it’s simply overpriced and underpowered.
iPad is so stupid, or as i call, iShit. Even it isn’t a competitor to normal tablets!!
If the iPad really is Apple’s “most advanced technology ever”, then the company is at a technological dead end. All they’re really pushing now is further and further lock-in.