Science & TechnologyFrantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet
January 27, 2010 | Issue 46•04
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CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you’re running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write ‘tablet’ on this little strip of masking tape here and I’m golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.
Some of us have the wrong idea. This isn’t going to replace anything. This thing’s not a substitute for a laptop or a kindle. There’s no keyboard so it’s not really built for a lot of input like note taking in class or something. It’s backlit so it’s not good for reading long books because it hurts to stare directly into a light. (Kindles use e-ink which is not backlit.)
It’s a new kind of product. Handy little thing good for reading the news and other shorter readings, surfing the web, etc. You could take some notes on it. Run your allrecipes app and have it propped up on the counter with no keyboard to spill shit into. It’ll find its nieche and it will sell well and all the other companies who have already or will introduce the same thing will come along for the ride that Apple’s marketing has/will create.
Jobs made it a point to say that he thinks this is basically a netbook alternative.
Honestly, I don’t think his will sell. Internet tablets have been attempted SOOOO many times. Nokia tried it, Archos has (and still is). Aside from that other tablet PCs that have existed and never grew well. This is much better than the tablet PCs of a few years ago, but it still is just not good enough to replace a PC.
Fry, that picture of Koolaid is making me thirsty.
OT, this thing is crap. I was hoping for a full featured tablet with OSX, not an oversized ipod touch. This had the potential to murder the competition, instead Apple unveils a crappy device that doesn’t seem do anything really well.
In the presentation Jobs played down netbooks. The whole idea behind this conference was that this device was a revolution and they saw people have one of these to bring on the go and have at home which it just isnt. Tablet/Notebook combo PCs have this thing surpassed already other than the nifty touch interface.
I was just talking about how useful this device would be in the real world.
For my needs I would get rid of my macbook and replace it with an ipad and a mac mini.
The mac mini gets plugged into my home theater as a media server and server in general.
The ipad is my email / msg / surf tool and then I remote into my mac mini for all else.
I don’t need the ipad to multitask if I can remote into my mac mini and have a full OS at my fingertips.
I remote into systems from my iphone and don’t have much trouble controlling full os (windows and mac). It would be much better on a 10" screen.
a seamless user interface that is designed for the specific hardware, a full touchscreen, a better form factor, 1 month standby time, 10 hours of use time… and so on.
And keyboard. Am I missing something or is this too big to thumb-type? Can you actually 10-finger type on a touch pad? Or are people going to regress to hunt-and-peck typing?
when I got my iphone I was worried about typing… after about 3 days I was pretty quick. I’m not going to write a book, but for up to a paragraph it’s good enough. And this is on a 3.5" screen, not the ipad’s 10" screen.
also, a full keyboard is an optional plugin for if you want to get serious.
in the demo video on the website, it looked more like hunt and peck than full out typing. Not really a full on hunt a peck, but really only using 2-4 fingers
:lol: Anyone with an ipad and a plug in keyboard should be punched in the dick. They package those things together in a nice little unit called a laptop. :picard:
but seriously… If I didn’t have a laptop in my proposed setup, it would be nice to have a keyboard for that one time a month I have to write a lot of stuff from home. I wouldn’t use it 90% of the time.
Meh, Flash will be gone before you know it. There is still a lot of the web using flash video, which is why most people will be upset, but it’s only a matter of time before those make the switch (video is fully supported in HTML5, simply by using a video tag, just like images are supported by using the img tag).
IE5 is rarely supported by anyone these days nor should it be. Good front-end developers/designer plan for graceful degradation which allows a website to “degrade gracefully” in older browsers. You might lose some bells and whistles visually and functionally, but the content is still accessible.
