Here’s what Apple’s up to with the iPad

Andy Ihnatko:

Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing.

I think the good Mr Ihnatko is bang on the money: the iPad 2 is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, but it’s heading somewhere very, very interesting.

I know that Apple plans to deploy the next great leap at about the same time when everybody else is introducing new tablets that sort of do what the iPad could do in early 2011.

At this rate, Apple has until 2012 — or even early 2013 — to make their big move.

“An opportunity for Gary to take cheap shots at a band he doesn’t like and sneak in a mention for one he does”

Jon Bon Jovi reckons Steve Jobs has killed the music business. Sometimes I love my job.

By a happy coincidence, I reckon Jon Bon Jovi represents everything that’s wrong with the music business. I think there’s a reason why Bon Jovi albums don’t sell like they used to.

It’s because they’re rubbish.

And thanks to technology, they can’t get away with it any more.

Why should you pay more to use your iPhone as a portable hotspot?

The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer.

There are only two possible explanations.

One, iPhone data is a different shape from Android data. It’s triangular, or maybe octagonal, and it gets stuck in the internet tubes.

Or two, the networks are bastards.

iPad 2: it’s about sex appeal, not specs appeal

I’ve decided to compete with Rihanna in the international pop market, so for the last few weeks I’ve been building a rival in my shed. It’s not going too well, to be honest.

I don’t know what the problem is. I mean, I’ve got the specs exactly right: there are bones, and guts, and teeth, and hair, and ears. In fact, my specs are better, because my Rihanna has two heads and four lungs. And yet I can’t persuade anybody in the record business to give me any money. And now it’s starting to whiff a bit.

I think tablet manufacturers know how I feel.

Steve Jobs nailed it yesterday when he said “technology is not enough.”What makes the iPad and the iPad 2 special isn’t an A4 processor or an A5; it’s iOS and the apps it runs. My Rihanna rival is useless, because it doesn’t sing. The iPad… the iPad sings.

I have no idea how much RAM is in the iPad 2. I can’t remember the A5′s clock speed. The two bits of the Apple event that made me go wow didn’t involve benchmarks, or spec sheets: they were the bits where we saw the magnetic covers, which made me laugh out loud, and when we got to see GarageBand, which made me wish I were 16 again while also making me glad I’m old enough that I won’t hear the awful crap it’s going to help people create.

In fact, rather than make me crazy about the iPad 2, yesterday’s event made me even happier about my first generation iPad. There are two things in iOS 4.3 that will make a big difference to my everyday life: the personal hotspot feature coming to the iPhone 4, and home sharing coming to the iPad. Taken together, that means my 16GB Wi-Fi iPad has just become an UnlimitedGB 3G iPad. For free.

Any thoughts I might have had about jumping to a non-iOS device have just gone out of the window.

Apple’s event wasn’t really about technology. Instead of banging on about the A5 processor, Apple showed us how to play the drums and strum guitars, muck about with home movies and morph nine different faces simultaneously. Instead of talking about RAM, Apple showed off Smart Covers – a mere accessory that delivers more joy than most firms’ entire product portfolios, and something I think is going to be responsible for loads of iPad 2 sales.

What Apple gets – and what I think a lot of firms don’t – is that most people, the kind of people who are currently buying iOS devices and apps in extraordinary quantities, don’t care about specifications any more than they want to think about how their lunchtime sausages are made.

They know what iPads are, and they like what they see, and when they see a rival tablet they’ll ask, “hey, why would I buy this instead of an iPad?” And the answer they get is gigahertz, and true multitasking, and other stuff they don’t care about.

I can show you the problem in two videos. First, the iPad. We see books and games, and education, and fun. Not only do I want to buy that, but I want to have the kind of cool, intelligent and exciting lifestyle the ad implies.

Now, the Verizon ad for the Motorola Xoom. It couldn’t be more teenage-boy if it took place in a black-painted room full of suspiciously crispy socks.

Buy it? That ad makes me scared to even touch it.

Two months with an Apple TV

I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since then, so here are a few thoughts.

It’s great if you have kids, and Handbrake
Kids like films; kids also like scratching DVDs. Slowly but surely I’ve been using the combination of Fairmount and Handbrake to copy our various Pixar discs to the Apple TV. It takes forever – DVD ripping, no matter how good the software, is never anything but a pain – but it’s cheaper than having to buy Wall-E all over again.

It’s surprisingly good
720p HD video over Wi-Fi? No problem. If you absolutely, positively have to have 1080p, don’t buy an Apple TV yet. It doesn’t do it. Me, I couldn’t care less. My TV isn’t big enough to tell the difference between HD and True HD.

It’s really good with the iPad
The novelty of watching something on YouTube on the iPad and hitting one button to put it on the TV hasn’t worn off yet. Once iPlayer etc can do it too, things will be fun.

It’s buggy
I’ve never had to reboot an Apple product as often as I have to reboot the Apple TV. If I get two days out of it I’m happy. Luckily the reboot is simple and quick, but we’re not quite in “it just works” territory here.

It can be desperately slow
I’ve had to divide my home movies into individual years, and even then the Apple TV takes between two and five minutes to load details of a 100-clip library – not the video, just the folder listing and thumbnails. To say this pisses me off would be an enormous understatement. I don’t know if it’s the Apple TV or iTunes, and I don’t care.

It needs iTunes
Apple TV is crying out for a media server, I think. Having to leave iTunes running on your Mac is a pain, and I hate to think how much energy the combination of Apple TV and running MacBook Pro is using up. I hope it isn’t too much, but I’m scared to see what my next electricity bill says.

Movies are still ropey
Is there such a thing as a good UK video on demand service? The catalogue on Apple TV (and in iTunes, and on the Xbox, and…) is still very patchy.

It needs iPlayer
If Nintendo can put it on the Wii, Apple can put it on the Apple TV. This one’s right at the top of my wish list.

It doesn’t do many video formats
If you’re the kind of person whose television aerial is bittorrent-shaped, expect to spend a lot of time converting those AVI and MKV files to M4Vs or MP4s.

YouTube is great, but I can’t favourite anything
Anyone else have this problem? I’ve been getting the temporary-error message for two months now.

I can’t see my own Flickr photos
Flickr support is nice. Flickr support without login, not so nice. I keep my personal pics in Friends and Family mode; Apple TV can’t login to display them.

It’s great for music
Or at least, it is if you’re willing to faff a bit. My Apple TV is hooked to an AV receiver, which in turn is hooked to the TV. I’ve got HDMI control on so that when the TV goes off, the DVD player does too; unfortunately that means the process of listening to music without the TV is this:

* Turn everything on
* Turn AV receiver to Apple TV
* Find playlist etc on Apple TV, start playing.
* Turn off the TV
* Turn the AV receiver back on again (it’s gone into standby)
* Take the Apple TV off pause (it goes into that automatically)

It’s not elegant, but it gets there eventually.

It’s worth £101
Provided, that is, you don’t mind swearing at it from time to time and rebooting it every few days. It’s a clever bit of kit but if you want something as simple and as reliable as a basic DVD player, get a basic DVD player.

Thunderbolt and iPads

Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things:

The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the iPad-ification of OS X and the iPad-like design of the MBPs are a sign of where this is all heading?

We’ve seen how quickly mobile processors are progressing, and it won’t be long before it’s possible to put the specs of today’s MacBook Pros into a MacBook Air-thin iPad. Quad or six-core processors, oodles of RAM and a couple of Thunderbolt ports in an iPad could produce something really interesting.

If I were the sort of person who used the phrase “paradigm shift”, I’d use it here

Me: why the HP TouchPad is another nail in Windows’ coffin.

What’s happening is incredible, and it’s happening incredibly quickly. Until very recently, personal computing generally meant Windows running on Intel, with a smattering of AMD, Linux and Mac OS X to keep the internet in arguments. Now, though, personal computing often doesn’t involve traditional computers at all.

Reports of the Kindle app’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated

The hills are alive with the sound of tech writers going “OMG! Apple will kill the Kindle app!” I’m not convinced.

The bit about Apple refusing to “let customers to have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store” isn’t a quote from Sony. It isn’t included in the Sony Reader blog’s explanation either.

Since such a policy would make Apple look quite exceptionally evil, you’d think Sony might have mentioned it.

I think the NYT is right and wrong at the same time. When it says Sony users can’t access content they’ve already bought, it’s perfectly correct: if you can’t have the app, you can’t have any content that’s delivered via that app.

Apple hasn’t banned the content. It’s rejected the app.

Of course, the fact that so many people think it will kill the Kindle app doesn’t say much for Apple’s public image…

The iPad is one year old today

Me, on Techradar:

In December 2009, on this very website, I wrote a very silly thing. “There’s no way any device, not even an Apple one, can live up to the hype the long-awaited Apple Tablet has generated,” I grumbled.

Oops!

Elsewhere on the site I’ve written a wee piece on the NGP, aka the Sony PSP2.

Sony’s codename for the PSP2 is NGP, which stands for Nice Gamey Playtime.

An iPad app to captivate children and make their parents cry

If you’re a parent you’ll know Oliver Jeffers: he’s the writer and artist who created the sublime Lost And Found. And now, one of his books is an iPad app.

Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, the iPad version is a digital delight. And as it’s about death, it *will* make you cry.

The app is currently £2.39. More here (itunes link).