There are streets in Paris commemorating Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
There are no corresponding streets in Washington D.C., for all that it was designed by a French urbanist, apart from Lafayette Square (it really should be de la Fayette Square). Rochambeau is ignored. Not remembered at all is the man who did the most for the American revolution, and arguably paid for it with his life, Louis XVI.
Since I got my iPad six weeks ago, I have only used my MacBook Air once.
I am not going to repeat the extensive reviews posted elsewhere, but after over a month of extensive use, give some perspective for those who don’t get the point of the iPad, or other similar devices.
First of all, commentators have focused on entirely the wrong thing: feeds and speeds, missing features like multitasking or Flash, Apple’s iron fist over app developers. The iPad begins and ends with the user experience, and that means multi-touch and the incredibly long battery life. That’s why comparisons to stylus-driven devices like the unsuccessful Microsoft Tablet PC miss the point. The amazing battery life, specially on standby (I have never managed to go under 60%, even after three days without charging), means you can use it as a real mobile device and not subconsciously watch the battery meter.
Is it a perfect device? Of course not. Mobile Safari has a hard time with complex and heavy pages like those from my Temboz RSS/Atom feed reader, the screen is too prone to reflections and fingerprints, and Apple’s use of high-quality materials like aluminium and glass instead of plastic and acrylic makes it heavier to hold than necessary.
As to whether it is a replacement for a laptop, the answer is yes and no. The iPad is the first in an entirely new class of devices, and I think it has the potential to replace desktop and laptop computers as the dominant form of consumer computing. The touch user interface makes for a very engaging user experience, far more than using a mouse and keyboard ever did. To be sure, the input limitations do not make it a very efficient content creation device, but that’s where opinions diverge.
I use desktop computers for real work (an eight-core Mac Pro with 12G of RAM and a 30″ display at home, a quad-core iMac with a 27″ display at work). A laptop just feels too constricting for extended use. I have the luxury of using proper desktops because I do not travel much for work, and the extent of my mobile use is reading books or browsing the web while commuting by bus. The improvements that most benefit me are in synchronizing my iPad with multiple computers, and offline capability (I got the WiFi model since there is no way I will pay AT&T for their garbage excuse of a network).
Road warriors need a more featured device, even if cramped, and will not be so impressed. I think genuine mobile users are a minority, however. Surveys in the past showed that most laptops are tethered, i.e. users would unplug them from home, take them to work and plug them there, and back. That is why Windows laptop makers introduced monstrosities like Pentium 4 powered laptops with battery lives that barely exceeded the hour. Laptop sales exceeded those of desktops because many people wanted the option of mobility, even if they seldom, if ever, availed themselves of it, and a less obtrusive presence in their homes than the typical beige box with its rat’s warren of cables. Those people would be better served by a well-designed desktop like the iMac and an iPad for the occasional mobile use.
(updated 2013-04-21)
See also this list of cloth napkin burgers.
As a bonus, the most overrated burgers:
After updating OS X on my work iMac, I noticed XEmacs and DDD take about 30 seconds to launch, behavior I did not see before the upgrade, and do not see at home either. The 30 seconds are suspiciously similar to a name lookup timeout—I am dependent on whatever lame excuse for a DNS caching server is used in my landlord’s 2WIRE router, whereas I run unbound at home.
Sure enough, running a packet trace shows strange DNS lookups:
tellann:src root# tcpdump udp port 53
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on en0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
13:18:51.819226 IP tellann.58811 > home.domain: 5470+ A? tellann.gateway.2wire.net. (43)
13:18:51.840258 IP home.domain > tellann.58811: 5470* 1/1/1 A 192.168.1.81 (150)
13:18:51.841196 IP tellann.58057 > home.domain: 18746+ A? /tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x.gateway.2wire.net. (60)
13:18:51.870233 IP home.domain > tellann.58057: 18746 Refused*- 0/0/0 (512)
13:18:52.842654 IP tellann.58057 > home.domain: 18746+ A? /tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x.gateway.2wire.net. (60)
13:18:52.865696 IP home.domain > tellann.58057: 18746 Refused*- 0/0/0 (512)
The code>DISPLAY environment variable has changed to:
tellann ~>echo $DISPLAY
/tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x:0
Before 10.6.3, it did not have the org.x bit. This whole approach of using a DISPLAY set to point to a UNIX domain socket was set up by Apple to allow launching X11.app on demand when a X client is run, but obviously many clients make the incorrect assumption that the part before the :0 display number is a hostname if it has a dot in it, and this is biting us.
The solution is simple: just set DISPLAY to :0 prior to launching XEmacs or DDD, and presto—no more delays, e.g:
env DISPLAY=:0 xemacs&
Please print a QR code for a page where the manual can be donwloaded, on the manual itself.
Thank you.