On comments about the iPad

[chipotle]

What was the famous Slashdot quote about the first iPod? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

While I’m not going to predict the iPad will match the success of the previous iP* product lines, there’s a definite party line among the geek crowd that only fashion-conscious fanboys would ever actually buy Apple products and that whenever they introduce a new gadget it’s the Stupidest Thing Ever. If the majority of commenters on Slashdot and TechCrunch did not piss all over a new Apple product, that’s the product I’d expect was in trouble. Given how much pissing is going on around such sites over the iPad, I'm betting the thing is going to sell like crack-infused hotcakes.

Never make the mistake of assuming either of the following:

1. That you really know what a product you've only seen demo videos of is going to be good at. Some things look much better in demos than they really are, and some things have to actually be used to be properly evaluated.
2. That because ultimately a product is not good for you means that it's not good for anyone else. You are not necessarily in the median of the product's target market segment.

(N.B.: I'm not sure I'm in the iPad's target market segment. It's not designed to be a laptop replacement and I'm not sure I need another gadget about. I might rather have it than a dedicated e-book reader, all the arguments for the superiority of e-ink not withstanding, but I haven't been sold on e-book readers yet, either. So.)

Comments

[dollraves.livejournal.com]

*cough* Ignore any blatant grammar errors in there...

I should note that I scaled DOWN from the 15" Macbook Pro to the 13" Macbook Pro when I purchased my laptop last year... that extra two inches increases the portability significantly, so I lost out on some of extra performance even within the laptop line. I don't need a LOT of performance, but WoW runs so poorly on this 13MBP that I've given up playing it entirely. This is, of course, NOT a bad thing. :D

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm likely to replace my 15" MacBook Pro sometime this year and am debating whether to drop down to the 13" one. With the current models that will still be a CPU speed increase, but I'm not sure I'd be happy with the reduced screen space for development work. Then again, if I'm doing really serious coding work I'm very often at either the office or home, connected to an external monitor -- if I'm writing fiction, pixel count isn't nearly as big a deal.

Some of the MBPs have considerably better graphics processors in them and would probably do great for WoW, but I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against them.