The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

http://layeredbyte.com/2010/01/30/the-ipad-literally-breaks-every-use-case-i-had-for-it/

by Raphael • 16 years ago

18 66 16 years ago

layeredbyte.com

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

Is it really single tab browsing? Ugh.

lmohdlp• 16 years ago

based off of screenshots, seems so.

tdmackey• 16 years ago

It allows for multiple windows, which is somewhat similar.

dschobel2• 16 years ago

I didn't understand his objection here. Is it the inconvenience of hitting the "windows" button?

With the iphone's touch interface this is painless and I can't imagine it'll be any worse for the ipad.

drcode• 16 years ago

hmmm... didn't think of that either- That would be pretty painful if I buy one...

martythemaniak• 16 years ago

You can't convince fanboys that lack of features will eventually lead to pain for the users.

pyre4• 16 years ago

To be fair, Apple might buckle on some of these issues in the future, but you're still making a gamble on that if you get the iPad thinking that those features will come later.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

You also can't convince nerds that excessive degrees of freedom are a serious usability problem.

After all, doing six things at once while remembering the state of a bunch of invisible stateful objects -- tabs, background apps, file hierarchies -- is the nerd core skill.

Meanwhile, I would note that Apple has apparently sold about 35 million iPod Touches:

http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling...

... which exhibit the exact same set of "missing features" as the iPad.

jacquesm6• 16 years ago

But they exhibit at least two features the ipad lacks:

    - sub $300 pricing

    - fit in pockets

Herring• 16 years ago

>The Daily Show, Castle, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother:

Annoying workaround, but Air Video can stream from your desktop.

chrischen10• 16 years ago

I've always envisioned watching TV on a TV while I have the iPad on the couch doing other stuff.

pyre4• 16 years ago

That may be, but in the Keynote they did push the 'you can watch 10 hours of video on a single charge' so they are pushing this as a device to watch video on. If it fails at video, then it's a failure of the device if that is one of its goals.

bombs• 16 years ago

"Even past the fact that the iPad does not have a camera, it cannot run two applications at the same time. Meaning: talking to my girlfriend, I could not look up a train time while we talked. Result: have to use my iPhone while we video chat. All that in a device that commands a price premium."

How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back?

"Again, we run into a software problem. From what I have seen in images surrounding the iPad, you can only have one tab open at a time. Excellent, if this was 1996. Hell, even Internet Explorer 7 had multitab browsing. Oh, and if that Apple sourced processor is so fast, why the hell can I not use it? Single tabbed browsing is just a plain deal killer for content consumption, period."

The button to switch windows or tabs is located between the forward and bookmarks button. It is located in the bottom right on the iPhone.

"Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read. And Gmail is never closed. Blast, there goes that."

If you're using the iPod and Mail applications, this isn't an issue, as both of these applications can run in the background.

"Again, when are we going to see HTML5 casual gaming? I love the game “desktop tower defense,” which is flash based. iPad? No."

There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5.

pyre4• 16 years ago

> How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back?

He's saying that even if it (the iPad) had a camera for video chat, he would have to use his iPhone to look up the train times because there is no multi-tasking on the iPad.

chrischen10• 16 years ago

> There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5.

Why make people pay when there's FREE games out there online if only flash were supported. Flash support means opening up to a whole world of preexisting games, rich internet applications, and porn sites.

But not allowing flash creates an artificial monopoly that is the app store.

jstevens855• 16 years ago

The argument against using Flash is that it's not suitable for a low-powered, long battery-life hand held device. My guess is that Jobs is worried that if Flash were enabled, the average consumer would notice a much shorter battery life. The consumer won't understand that Flash is to blame, and will end up blaming the iPad instead.

>Why make people pay when there's FREE games out there online if only flash were supported.

There are also many free games on the App store. Also, with the new version of Adobe Flash, it's a relatively trivial process to turn a Flash game into a native iPhone app.

alextgordon• 16 years ago

No tabbed browsing in Safari. I'm guessing dozens of tabbed browsers will pop up in the App store almost immediately. Unless Apple rejects them of course.

Zak• 16 years ago

Last I checked, Apple rejects anything that duplicates the core functions included on the device. Those include web browsing, media playing and email.

matasar• 16 years ago

There are many web browsers and email clients available in the app store today, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple blocks them. This doesn't solve the background apps problem, but there are also many apps that play media.

jstevens855• 16 years ago

http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409

Apple doesn't have a problem with third-party web browsers as long as they use the WebKit engine. Otherwise, the app would be implementing its own language interpreter and therefore be against the developer agreement.

akamaka• 16 years ago

This guy is a complete idiot, and has obviously never even used and iPhone or iPod Touch.

Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read.

raptrex• 16 years ago

Unless he's talking about using Pandora while reading, I'm pretty sure you can use the music app in the background

jacquesm6• 16 years ago

> have to use my iPhone while we video chat.

In the article strongly suggests he has an iphone.

jkincaid• 16 years ago

I don't really get why everyone is talking about Flash and its relation to porn. If the the number of non-Flash playing devices grows, couldn't these porn sites just go to HTML5?(this applies to all other video sites, actually)

pyre4• 16 years ago

Well, he could also be talking about no flash memory card slot. If you were to watch non-streaming porn on the device, I doubt that you would want it to be in the same place on the device as your regular movies (lest you hand the iPad to someone else that stumbles across them). You would probably want to have your porn on a memory card that you could remove when you are no longer using it.

Lazlo_Nibble4• 16 years ago

Or in a locked "porn vault" on the device. Which there are already apps for.

catch23• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure porn sites will adapt pretty fast. Nobody wants to be the last porn site not supported on the iPad.

chrischen10• 16 years ago

iPad is really good at doing what it's designed to do, and really bad otherwise. It's not a satisfy all device, as we've seen in the response to it so far.

dbz3• 16 years ago

Really? What the fuck was it supposed to be really good at doing? Running the iphone OS?

chrischen10• 16 years ago

I'm sure Steve wasn't an idiot. He definitely designed this product for a specific type of user and it's probably really good at doing that. I just don't know what that is. But I'm certain he didn't slap on a bunch of random features that didn't go well together.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

At the risk of repeating myself: Apple has apparently sold 35 million iPod Touches in a little over two years:

http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling....

Sales are apparently up 55% year-over-year.

These devices do exactly what the iPad does, only with a much smaller screen, far fewer networking options, and (if rumors are to be believed) slower performance.

These numbers are trying to tell us something. Perhaps we should listen?

jstevens855• 16 years ago

Yep, exactly.

A lot of tech nerds don't understand just how unnecessarily complex computers are today. Watch a 60 year old try and use a PC for the first time and you'll realise how non-intuitive the modern desktop OS is today.

The iPhone OS moves away from antiquated input devices (mice and keyboards with cursor keys and function buttons) and towards a touch interface that is simple and intuitive.

The other benefit is the sandboxed limited nature of the native apps. The average user is tired of having to do a clean wipe of their computer every couple of years because the software they've installed has slowed down the OS. I think that in the future, apps won't be allowed to make changes to the underlying OS. If you want to do something complicated, you'll need offload your app to the cloud.

jwecker• 16 years ago

I was looking forward to a humorous example of even a single use case being literally broken, since I don't know how to literally break a use case. Alas, it's just a list of use cases the iPad doesn't meet.

Lazlo_Nibble4• 16 years ago

...and use cases the iPad DOES meet, but which the poster doesn't realize it meets. Like "tabbed" browsing, listening to music while running another app, and playing free casual games.

dghughes• 16 years ago

The Axitron looks pretty sweet, it's a Macbook modded by Axiotron to become a real Mac tablet computer, the Modbook.

Woz is on the board of advisors.

http://www.axiotron.com

jaxn• 16 years ago

I read the article and it seems like flamebait to me.

The iPhone has what is essentially 8 tabs for browsing. Music is able to be played in the background. Gmail will have push email so how is that different than running in the background from a use-case perspective?

This post does not deserve to make it such a high spot on HN. Not even on the weekend.

archgrove• 16 years ago

Well, the browser has tabs (at least, the iPhone Mobile Safari does, so it's no stretch to think this does as well). The lack of a camera is, I agree, silly.

Rather than rebut the rest of his "points" directly, I'll focus on "multitasking". Frankly, the iPhone and iPad do multitask, in the ways that are important to (most) people. Multitasking in an end user product really means "I can do more than one thing at once", not "The computer runs many processes". The iPhone OS currently accomplishes exactly this, via saved state.

In any well behaved iPhone app, if you quit, the state of the UI and your data is persisted, so that when you return, it's like you never left. The UI for this multitasking is a bit clunky - hit "Home" then pick the app - but for most people, this works fine. There are only two situations when this doesn't - when the app does something interesting in the background, and when the "stack" of application interactions collapses - if I click a mailto: link to open Mail, quitting that doesn't return me to Safari - I have to go there again manually.

The two cases of "Does something interesting in the background" that really people want are audio streaming and notification of some event, and they're real problems. However, Apple's persistently said they're trying to protect the user experience (stability, battery life etc) by denying background apps. I've no reason to believe this isn't the case (I'm mean really, what are they gaining except geek ire by restricting this?). The audio case is annoying and needs a solution - the notification case is slightly better since push was rolled out.

Outside of these cases, the iPhone multitasks well enough for 99% of the world. His reading case, catching up on the news etc all are handled - you just have a slightly painful app switch process (i.e. you press two buttons rather than just one). The only case that isn't is background movies/music from 3rd party apps - and really, the only sensible case out of that is music (Do you really watch a movie and browse at the same time on a 10" screen?). Regardless, I suspect the point will be moot soon enough - OS 4.0 seems very likely to bring some notion of background processes.

The geek anti-iPad ire really confuses me. What did we expect, other than what we got? It was never going to run OS X - the user experience would have been awful without major changes that broke all 3rd party OS X apps (and then, what's the point?). The hardware, modulo camera, seems entirely reasonable at a price that's damn good - who realistically expected anything more from an affordable tablet machine at this point in technology? The "walled garden" is a real issue, but I think we have, as a group, gained far more than we've lost with the App store. All these people saying "I could never have been a tinkerer with an iPad" - poppycock. Download the SDK for free, develop all you want. Pay a nominal fee to deploy to 100 other devices without ever giving Apple a look at your app. Or hell, just jailbreak it if the limits of the SDK are so onerous.

Alternatively, just don't buy it. Having chosen this please, stop filling up HN/Reddit/The Internet with "The iPad doesn't raise the dead, make me a billionaire and cure cancer, so all my dreams are shattered and Apple is awful".

jsz02• 16 years ago

Apple is changing the way massive numbers of people use technology. For any revolution there's going to be some group of people who prefer the old way of doing things because they see the new way as some type of threat to what they're comfortable with. Personally I think these people are upset that the "coolness" factor of technology is no longer limited to technical bullet points and has expanded well past it's geeky roots. They really don't like technology being designed for a big mainstream audience because it weakens whatever part of their identity they have built around being a geek if anyone can walk into a store and buy something that is functional and get, basically, the same results as the geek who spends hours customizing a system to work exactly as they want it to. I think they feel left out when technology skips the geeky early adopter market.

yuvi• 16 years ago

Develop all you want for free: as long as you only want to run your application on a simulated iPhone. You can't load apps onto your own device without paying $100/year or jailbreaking. Heck, you can't even use XCode to compile an app for the iPhone (not simulator) without a license.

Anyway, an additional multitasking use-case is IRC and other apps where you're in constant contact with a server. With Colloquy, for instance, right now you need to setup a server to bounce off of or else you leave all channels every time you switch apps. Of course, this class of uses is one that you don't want running when the device is off or else the battery drains quickly.

I've always felt that Apple was waiting both for their hardware to become powerful enough (the original iPod touch consistently ran out of RAM with 2 open webpages + music for instance, and page rendering wasn't exactly snappy) and also to come up with a good way of limiting the number of background processes without user involvement. You don't want every other app you launch hanging around so that when you run out of resources, the OS kills the music player which you actually wanted open.

jsz02• 16 years ago

I don't understand why this individual is so angry. If it doesn't meet your needs don't buy it. What's the problem? I always feel like people who write this type of stuff just have a really bad attitude because they get so upset over something so unimportant. It's like they're just trying to find things to be upset about.

dschobel2• 16 years ago

It's the flip side of the Apple adoration. If Apple releases something which doesn't suit people it's as upsetting as if their favorite band had released a clunker of an album because you know it'll be a long time until they have a chance to redeem themselves and in the mean time you'll worry that they've lost their touch.

jeffcoat• 16 years ago

No one complains about something that they have no interest at all in -- it's not a rant about how IBM's newest z/OS mainframe has poor support for browsing websites that use Flash.

Much more frustrating is something that looks like it could be just exactly perfect for you, but is for some reason fatally flawed, or just out of reach.

Lazlo_Nibble4• 16 years ago

z/OS doesn't ship with Flash because Adobe's runtime burns MIPs like nobody's business. Data Center Operations does NOT like having to bring additional capacity online because the Southeastern Division discovered Farmville in the middle of year-end batch.

The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

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