Apple's iPad Megathread

[Devils'Advocate]

Agreed FP.

Only virus I've ever gotten came from Mac Magazine as well. But it was printed on the back page of their magazine; the 'Honour System Virus'.

[Russic]

The iPad app guided tours are up. Some really cool features that I didn't know about in there, but the iWork apps are the ones that really blow me away. The image use in Pages, smart move in Keynote and the form filling in Numbers are just awesome in my eyes. The giraffe text auto-wrap thing blows my mind every time I see it.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/guided-tours/

[FurnaceFace]

The knockoffs have started. http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/27/k...you-always-wa/

Tired of all those "jumbo iPhone" jibes you keep hearing about the iPad? So are we, but there's simply no other way to describe this priceless Shenzhen knockoff than as a supersized iPod. Featuring the unmistakable click wheel and what looks like some sort of riff on Apple's Mac OS, the "new" iPad will be on sale immediately alongside Apple's offering, this April 3, for 2,000 Yuan ($290). Of course, we doubt Shenzhen Huayi's distribution network will stretch quite all the way to the USA, but given the population of 1.3 billion people in China, someone's bound to be happy to help you out. What say you -- does this 4GB pen-friendly beastie do anything for you?

[silentsim]

Hope Canadian preorders start soon...especially after hearing the huge demand in USA I wonder how long it will be till we get our first shipment?

[FanIn80]

Updated shipping forecasts are in the 8-10 million units range for the calendar year of 2010.

# iPad suppliers now forecast shipments of 8-10 million iPads in calendar 2010, up from their previous estimate of 5+ million.
# Suppliers now expect to ship 2.5 million in the first three months alone (March to May), considerably ahead of Huberty's estimate of 750,000 by the end of June.
# Shipments are not sales, however, and Huberty is sticking with her sales estimate of 6+ million iPads in 2010. The Street's consensus, she says, is closer to 3-4 million.
# Each incremental one million iPads shipped, by her calculation, equates to earnings increases of roughly $0.25 EPS

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune....pments-report/

[Russic]

Originally Posted by silentsim

Hope Canadian preorders start soon...especially after hearing the huge demand in USA I wonder how long it will be till we get our first shipment?

I'm curious of both this and the 3g deal they work out. The iPhone is locked to AT&T in the states, but here it's on 3 carriers ... will they have a 3g deal through all of them or just one? Will the price be comparable? I also wonder how much we'll know before shipping. I recall the 3gs came out and there were many details on pricing left unknown until a day or two before release.

In the end Canadians will have to wait but we could be presented with a more polished product. Hopefully the accessory drought will solve itself, plus the 3 weeks up app store updates won't hurt.

[Devils'Advocate]

Nice that Pages imports/exports to Word.

[FanIn80]

April 24th!

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/31/...on-april-24th/

We were contacted by a source with close ties to the Apple Store that the weekend of April 24th has been marked as a "black out period" for staff. This means no employees are allowed to book this day off. If that's the case, then it would make sense that this indeed would be the launch date for the iPad in Canada. Anytime there's a "black out period" you know it's for something big.

[silentsim]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

April 24th!

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/31/...on-april-24th/

now i just hope they do preorders similar to the USA system....(for in store)

though i might just order it online

[FanIn80]

Yeah, preorders would be nice for sure. I doubt they will though. I get the feeling they'll probably focus on making sure US orders are filled first.

[Russic]

Pre orders would be excellent. In store pickup would also be a massive bonus. Sadly I can see it being a massive sh*t show at the apple store. If that's the case I'll just order it online and wait for shipping.

[photon]

[FanIn80]

Reviews are coming in!

I'll add them as I read them, for now here's the NYT. They did two reviews, one for the haters and one for everyone else. I don't get it though. The "one for everyone else" pretty much shot down everything the "one for the haters" bitched about. Anyway...

New York Times

Speaking of video: Apple asserts that the iPad runs 10 hours on a charge of its nonremovable battery — but we all know you can’t trust the manufacturer. And sure enough, in my own test, the iPad played movies continuously from 7:30 a.m. to 7:53 p.m. — more than 12 hours. That’s four times as long as a typical laptop or portable DVD player.

The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.

And the techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.

The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.

The only question is: Do you like the concept?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/te...h/01pogue.html

USA Today

The iPad is not so much about what you can do — browse, do e-mail, play games, read e-books and more — but how you can do it. That's where Apple is rewriting the rulebook for mainstream computing. There is no mouse or physical keyboard. Everything is based on touch. All programs arrive directly through Apple's App Store. Apple's tablet is fun, simple, stunning to look at and blazingly fast. Inside is a new Apple chip, the A4. The machine is the antithesis of the cheap underpowered netbook computers that Jobs easily dismisses. "Netbooks aren't better at anything," Jobs scoffed during his January presentation introducing the iPad. "They're slow, they have low-quality displays and they run clunky old PC software."

What does a successful iPad launch mean for traditional netbooks? They'll have to adapt or disappear — especially since their price advantage compared with the entry-level iPad isn't as great as some might have thought it would be. "You can use the iPhone as the blueprint for how this will play out," Munster says.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...d-review_N.htm

Chicago Sun-Times

It’s a computer that many people have been wanting for years: a slim, ten-hour computer that can hold every document, book, movie, CD, email, picture, or other scrap of data they’re ever likely to want to have at hand; with a huge library of apps that will ultimately allow it to fulfill nearly any function; and which nonetheless covers the dull compulsories of computing (Mail, the web, and Microsoft Office-style apps) so well that there will be many situations in which this 1.5-pound slate can handily take the place of a laptop bag filled with hardware and accessories.

In fact, after a week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/i...033110.article

All Things Digital

The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it’s far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.

It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.

So I’ve been using my test iPad heavily day and night, instead of my trusty laptops most of the time. As I got deeper into it, I found the iPad a pleasure to use, and had less and less interest in cracking open my heavier ThinkPad or MacBook. I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe’s Flash technology, which the iPad doesn’t support, despite its wide popularity online.

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100331/apple-ipad-review/

[photon]

"Do you have more email addresses than pants? Then you are a techie."

Lol, check.

[Flames0910]

WHY oh WHY do I have to be a broke ass university student?
I wish I had a job so I could drop a fat wad of cash on one of these.

When do we expect to get the 3g iPad's in Canada? Maybe I'll be employed by then...

[Torture]

So my group in SGMA 591 is doing a case study on apple, and we were discussing the iPad, and how Apple really wants to get into the business world.

I suggest something regarding how it would be easier for Apple to make inroads to the business world with the iPad than their computers, and even iPhones cause there's no Blackberry equivalent.

I get greeted with a polite "yeah right, that's dumb"

Little Googling later...
Poll results....#1 reason US consumers would use a device like the iPad? Business use on the go. Huh, interesting.

And I won't even get into the girl who said that they wouldn't work in the business environment cause they according to her research the iPad doesn't use an intel processor.

I'll admit I first thought the iPad idea was poorly implemented, but it's really grown on me and everything I read about it tends to be pretty positive.

[QuadCityImages]

Man those are some annoyingly gushing reviews... I mean, come on!

Chicago Sun-Times

It’s a computer that many people have been wanting for years: a slim, ten-hour computer that can hold every document, book, movie, CD, email, picture, or other scrap of data they’re ever likely to want to have at hand;

The big one is 64 gigs. I know people who have that much music, not to mention movies and pictures. I have 15+ gigs of just "Quad City Image" files.

Whatever the iPad is, or isn't, it DOESN'T have a lot of storage capacity. To claim it can hold everything you ever need seems crazy in the days of 2TB hard drives.

[silentsim]

Originally Posted by QuadCityImages

Man those are some annoyingly gushing reviews... I mean, come on!
The big one is 64 gigs. I know people who have that much music, not to mention movies and pictures. I have 15+ gigs of just "Quad City Image" files.

Whatever the iPad is, or isn't, it DOESN'T have a lot of storage capacity. To claim it can hold everything you ever need seems crazy in the days of 2TB hard drives.

he notes "ever likely to want at hand"

in terms of music, that's the big one. How many songs do you need on a portable device such as this that you can easily switch the songs on?

[QuadCityImages]

People seem to want a lot of their music easily accessible, which is why they keep making larger and larger mp3 players. And how many movies does it take to hit 64 gigs? And that 64 gig number is only for the biggest, most expensive version. It just seems a bit much to claim for something that holds as much as a 2005 laptop.

[FanIn80]

Dude come on. I have a 16GB iPhone and I rip my music at 320kbps so they take up the most space... Right now I have 72 complete albums (5 of them are double length) on my phone, in addition to my 5 pages of apps.

A 64GB iPad will be more space than I need right now.