How does Apple’s iPad fare against its own first incarnation of the tablet computer- the Apple Newton? Let’s find out.
Screen
The iPad is the clear winner here, with its large 9.7 inch color display. The Newton screen however isn’t all that bad and does support multiple screen orientations and has a low power draw.
Input
The iPad brings us a large version of the iPhone keyboard, along with now popular multitouch. However the iPad completely lacks handwriting recognition. You can’t use a stylus and (most) gloves are out of the question. This is a bit of a draw. Both Newton and iPad support external keyboards.
Connectivity
The iPad offers Wifi and when they eventually get around to shipping them, 3G. That’s great, but what if you want to send a fax? Well the Newton does the job rather well here. The Newton offers a standard 8-pin Mac serial port for connecting to a variety of devices. The Newton also offers an infrared interface to talk to other Newtons. The Newton can even dial a phone by holding its speaker up to a phone.
Expandability
The iPad offers a lot of nothing here- since you can’t even easily swap in a global Sim card. The Newton however rocks it. All models had at least one PC Card expansion slot, allowing anything from CompactFlash memory, to wifi cards, to bluetooth cards.
Battery
The iPad has a nice battery that can last quite some time. The Newton is powered via AAA batteries, which don’t give it a lot of battery life here. However the Newton allows you to swap out batteries, whereas the iPad does not. Even when your iPad battery is dead and unchargable, the best you can do is go to Apple for repair. The Newton? CVS will fix you up.
Price
The iPad might seem like an expensive toy, but the MessagePad and Newton series were expensive too! Varying on model they were between $500 and $1000 1990′s dollars!
Winner
Wait, you’re really wondering who won here? Clearly the Newton… not! The iPad has 20 years of development time on the Newton and is a great piece of hardware. Despite the fact that Jobs has it locked down tighter than a Federal Prison and expansion isn’t exactly its strength, everyone has come to expect that from Apple
I’m on my fourth Apple laptop, but I think that’s where it will stay for a quite some time. Apple doesn’t have anything new that interests me.
I’ve had:
G4 iBook 800
Macbook Pro 15″ 2ghz
Macbook Pro 17″ 2.4ghz (gamerDNA provided, and thus i sold the 15″)
Macbook Pro 15″ 2.5ghz, mid – 2008 model(purchased after gamerDNA)
This isn’t the monobody slick new one. Yet- I think it is far better than what is currently offered. The good news is that you should be able to pick these up for under $1,000 easily if you look in the right places.
Why is it better? So many reasons:
Far better keyboard – The keys have more travel, the keys are curved inward and provide better feedback.
Real mouse button – I often don’t use it, but when I want it it really is nice.
ExpressCard/34 slot – The 17″ is the only model to offer it now, which is $3K
Firewire 400 and 800 ports, two USB ports – The new ones only have a single FW800, which is backward compatible, but annoying since I have a FW400 audio interface and several hard drives that don’t like being chained with an audio interface
Matte Screen – I hate gloss screens. You can pay more for the 17″ model to have a matte these days, but it isn’t worth the cost.
512MB Video Memory – I know the new ones have a slightly faster graphics card, but the memory is only 256MB on the 15″ models.
Same processor – The processor is still an Intel Core 2 Duo. They offer the 2.53ghz standard now. Mine is ‘just’ 2.5ghz. Big deal.
DVI Output – Sorry Apple, but DisplayPort isn’t as common as DVI. I carry around adaptors anyway for VGA, but I don’t see what DisplayPort buys me today. I do rather like that the new 27″ iMac allows you to use the screen as an external monitor for another computer. I hope they do the same on laptops soon.
Easier to play Operation – I really can’t imaging that the Monobody is all that easy to get inside or work on. I haven’t tried, but it is probably either really easy, or really hard. I’m guessing really hard. I’m thinking of hacking mine to put in some SSD drives instead of the optical drive soon. Or maybe I’ll just get the ExpressCard/34 SSD.
Removable Battery – I don’t buy the argument that everyone will carry about extra batteries. They don’t. How many people do you know carry charged extras? Yet, it is nice to be able to replace yours easily. I threw a new one in mine and rather enjoy being able to do so without a reset even.
About the only thing I like about the new ones better is that I can pay out the nose for 8GB of memory in them instead of the 4GB that I have in mine. If you’ve got 2GB in your Macbook Pro you can upgrade for around $100 from Crucial and installation takes about 3 minutes. I recently put a 500GB 7200rpm Western Digital drive in mine, which has made for a nice speed boost in loading applications. They haven’t upgraded the stock hard drive size since mine was purchased either.
My Macbook Pro does everything that the new ones do and more. They’ve done firmware updates lately and added in things like 4-finger mouse controls and such. I’d like an 8-core Mac Pro with 24GB Ram and 4 video cards, but really this machine does 99.9% of what I realistically need on a daily basis. Oh and it plays modern games just fine!
If you do happen to pick up one however, try as hard as possible to find one with Applecare. I had my keyboard/mouse die the other day and because of Applecare I was able to get a repair within 48 hours. 100% worth it.
CUPERTINO- Apple computer announced that it was attempting to make a new affordable laptop to help meet the needs of growing populations of hipsters in areas like Williamsburg, NY and San Francisco. The laptop is set to cost only $1,000USD- a price that many believe simply can’t happen.
“Apple cannot release a laptop for $1,000. This has been tried before. Either this will never see the light of day or the price will actually be twice that.” said Mick Flegropanti, an expert on inexpensive laptops from Cambridge, MA.
Others were shocked at the announcement, citing that Apple wasn’t properly assessing the needs of the poor, undereducated and malnourished hipsters in these harsh urban environments. “What hipsters really need is a constant supply of clean PBR and dropoffs of food supplies from a local, organic CSA. If they really need technology improvements from Apple it would be an iPhone that wouldn’t need to be replaced after falling in the toilet while vomiting cheap whiskey and sushi.” In the announcement however it was noted that the laptop would even survive if partially submersed in PBR and Bloody Mary’s, leading many to speculate that this technology might carry down later into the iPhone.
Earlier designs of the laptop included ones with a hand-crank to power it, but it was soon realized this would require physical exertion on the part of the woefully frail hipsters who are often weak from spending hours in the salvation army looking for trendy and ironic clothing.
Of course many hipsters don’t make money due to the economic fallout in their neighborhoods. They subsist on subsidies provided in the form of trust funds from richer family members like their parents, or maybe even grandparents. Keeping this in mind, Apple is making available a “Buy one, give one” program making it easy for parents to send the laptops to their children.
“No one expects hipsters to make their own living. It simply isn’t practical. The wages at their local coffee shop simply cannot meet the high rents of the area and also pay for their basic transportation needs like fixie bicycles and organic foods. Plus the debt they’ve accumulated through the five years getting those degrees in poetry and philosophy is just crushing to their local economy. With these laptops, it will be much easier for them to get a basic education- like a Master’s degree or PhD that they need to get by in today’s world.”
2009 has proven to be eventful so far, but unfortunately not all in a terribly positive way. Last week at GamerDNA I wrote to our CEO asking for him to catch everyone up on the latest strategies, efforts and gameplan between departments. Shortly after I got an email that we’d have meetings on Thursday to discuss such, which I was happy to hear. Unfortunately the first and only meeting I attended that day was getting laid off along with three others, including a co-founder, in an effort to cut costs and spending. I left Jazkarta hoping for more risk, and I got it. Such things happen in the startup world however and I’m not bitter or upset about the situation. Things are difficult overall in this economy, but I’ll get through that and I feel that there is still plenty of opportunity out there. GamerDNA has been kind enough to let me use the laptop assigned to me through the remainder of this week, and provide references for future opportunities. I think they’ve got some good stuff happening there and hopefully these cutbacks will give them the ability to keep moving forward as things come together more.
I owe Laura Fitton/Pistachio a huge favor, in that in a very short period of time she helped organize a Pink Slip Party at betahouse, with nearly 40 in attendence total. She helped bring all of this together within 24 hours. Thanks also go out to Jon Pierce of betahouse for allowing us to have the event there, and the sponsors of the event. I was by no means the only person who lost their job last week, including many at EMC and OLPC.
Timing would have it that Friday was also the day that I picked up the final check from Sooz for my 15″ Macbook Pro that I had sold her a month earlier and we agreed to split into two payments. While nothing is specifically wrong with that, the timing fits somewhere between ironic and painful, as I now find myself without an Apple laptop for the first time in several years. I have a Pentium 4 server running Ubuntu 8.10 as a SAMBA server, but its really not much good for daily activity. The timing served, in the words of Homer Simpson, as a “Doh!” and made me wish that I had held onto that laptop a bit more. Sooz was kind enough to offer for me to borrow the laptop when I needed it, but I do need to find a long term solution and I would rather not impose.
So now I’m on the search for a new/used Apple laptop. My requirements appear very simple, but come up on a few catches. I have a Firewire audio interface which I use on a nearly daily basis. USB audio (and video) interfaces are generally insufficient. I also have two firewire (400 and 800) hard drives. The new Macbook systems lack Firewire completely, and have no expansion Expresscard/34 slot. The thought has occurred to me to use the optical audio in/out, sell my current audio interface, and purchase AD/DA conversion, preamps and headphone amp and use a Macbook but such solution isn’t elegant and likely not very cheap. It still isn’t out of the picture completely however.
I also do a great deal of photography and Aperture is my digital darkroom of choice. I’ve ran Aperture prior on underpowered systems, including a G4 desktop and 1st gen intel Mac Mini. Mainly due to the graphics cards its a very painful process, involving leaving the computer for 20-30 minutes while previews are rendered before doing anything. I don’t look forward to that experience again, and would like to run it on the fastest reasonable system possible. The new Macbook systems seem as though they would be sufficient, albiet slower than any Macbook Pro offered currently or recently. Yet, these are the ones without Firewire (no audio). The older Macbooks seem insufficient for Aperture with the integrated Intel 3100 video cards, although I’m going to test this theory out when possible on @RichHelle’s computer.
As a minor gripe, I rather dislike the glossy screen on the newer Apple systems. Perhaps I would get used to it, I’m the guy that held out until nearly 2008 to replace his 19″ Sony CRT monitors because LCDs have poor color reproduction generally (at least on cheap ones). The concept of an oversaturated screen to correct photos on seems madness. I hope that the newer ones with the glass screens, instead of the plastic-like ones of the prior generation are better overall and not so distracting, inaccurate and fatiguing.
And of course the real kick in the pants is that I’m now looking for a job. As @repcor reminded me, I really don’t need to spend any money right now. She offered also that I could borrow her (very aged) PC laptop for use in the meantime. This may be what I end up doing in the short-term, but that bad-boy is going to need Linux put on it, as XP/Vista honestly are painful to my soul in many ways. So I’m looking for the cheapest possible way to get the most out of a computer, and yet still have something ultimately useful. I’ve purchased Apple computers and sold them after 2-3 months of use before,and lost relatively little, if any, money on the situation so its likely that I could purchase something that would “get me by” for a bit until I could get the powerhouse that I want.
I asked GamerDNA if I could purchase the 17″ MBP. They said they’d be up for it, but they have it on lease from a computer so they don’t own it and can’t sell it unfortunately. If anyone should happen to have a 15″/17″ Macbook Pro available for sale at a reasonable price, or a job… please feel free to contact me.
I updated my iPhone to firmware 2.0 the day before it came out. I was glad to see that it didn’t complain too much about having a jailbroken phone, and I was pretty happy. I immediately went out to get some apps.
However, I’ve gotten a handful of applications now and realize that most of them honestly suck or are worthless. I guess this is true with every platform, but even many of the “Top 10″ applications really aren’t all that useful and are just a waste of time and money.
Let’s go through what I’ve tried so far:
Bank of America- This is a pretty nice application, but it’s really just a re-wrap of their website as an application. This is a trend that many websites seem to be going for. Wrap up your website, and call it an app. It’s good for checking balances, but little else. C+
Google- Again, just really a re-wrap of the iPhone website. I really wish Google would have done something more but they didn’t. It’s basically just replaced my Safari shortcut to Google apps. C-
Remote- This is likely one of the best applications I have. I have three computers running Leopard, with one of them always hooked up to my media setup. It basically acts as a really sweet iTunes remote control. I wish it looked a bit more like the iTunes on the iPhone. Maybe in revision 2. I’ll give it an “A-“
Monkey Ball- This game is horrible. Likely the worst $10 I’ve ever spent on a game. It was #1 on the top 10 just because it was demo’d as a 3d iPhone app with motion control from Sega. Thankfully I think people have realized that this is the worst game since ET on the Atari 2600. F-
PayPal- This is oddly cool. It actually approximates what PayPal initially was attempting to be as a company. If I don’t mind the PayPal fees, I can actually do things like beam my friends money at the dinner table to pay for dinner or something. I wish it did something super cool like pick up on which iPhone is nearest to transfer the money or something, but as is its pretty good. B+
AquaForest- Also a waste of money. It’s a neat tech demo, but if someone records a video of it online then that’s all you’d ever need to see. Oddly enough more entertaining than Super Monkey Ball. D-.
SmugShot- I have a Smugmug account, but I only like to post professional photos for sale- not junk from my iPhone. I could care less about this app. F. Useless
Twitterrific- It’s a decent Twitter application. Pretty smooth really, but I wish it did a few things better. Searching Twitter would be great. Since it doesn’t “push” in the background you don’t get refreshed while your phone is dormant. Wake me up when it’s updated to be a push-application.
WordPress- I get it, but blogging from that onscreen keyboard? Umm. No. C-
Pandora- This is pretty awesome. Moreso if you have the 3G phone. It stops the music when my phone is locked though, which isn’t cool. A-
Facebook- Just another website re-wrap. B-
eBay- Just another website re-wrap. C-
Bloomberg- Another website re-wrap but it’s fast and useful and shows the graphs well on screen. B+
Tap Tap Revenge- This is the best free game out there I think. Flawless. Amazing. Fun. A+
AOL Instant Messenge- It worked for me, but it still kinda sucks without Push. C-.
Overall the apps aren’t all that great. I think a lot of people honestly did better without the official API and writing jailbroken apps. Julia Roy also seems to have been dissapointed by many of them. Plus the 2.0 update made things so slow that it was almost unusable. Apparently 2.01 is supposed to be better, but it took them a while to address the issues. I’m installing it right now.
