IPad, the destroyer

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/02/ipad-the-destroyer-19-things-it-will-kill/

by ZeroGravitas • 16 years ago

23 34 16 years ago

axod• 16 years ago

"Who wants to shell out $30-50 for a dopey game title when you can download cool $1-5 games to your iPod touch on a regular basis or get rich, major games from big publishers for $6-12 on the iPad? They’re beautiful, wildly interactive, and are going to slay Nintendo and Sony in the portable gaming market. Nintendo’s boss says he doesn’t get the iPad. That’s executive speak for “I’m going down with the ship.” The correct answer was: “We’re creating iPad titles based on our beloved franchises as fast as we can.” Ya’ll are dead."

This is hilarious. Pretty good satire piece.

ryanb• 16 years ago

Somehow I don't think it was meant to be satire, but I agree with you.

JarekS• 16 years ago

The fact is that very rarely new technology is killing the old one. Radio never killed newspapers. TV never killed Radio. TV never killed books. We see marketshare shifts, new niches are being created are we simply use more devices (radio while driving, TV on the evenings, books we read before we go to sleep etc.).

iPad is really interesting because touch interface is so much more natural for us then mouse or keyboard. We just have to wait and see how we will apply this new technology in our life...

ugh• 16 years ago

I’m quite tired of those grandiose declarations of what the iPad will achieve myself but I have to correct your history a bit.

We know of examples were new technology of delivering media killed old technology. CDs killed LPs, DVDs killed VHS tapes. (In the same way in which cars killed horse carriages – there are still some out there but they don’t really matter.) Other technologies fundamentally changed just how we use media. DVRs did that to TV.

So just why do we see certain change but not other kinds of change? My personal little theory is that certain modes of consuming media will pretty much always be useful, independent of the available technology.

Delivering just text will in certain situations probably always be cheaper than delivering visuals and audio (no need to produce expensive visuals or hire a speaker), I also think that it just might be more effective to take in certain information by reading rather than any other way. Consequently something like newspapers and books will always exist (with or without the text being printed on dead trees). You can make a very similar argument for Radio.

The big thing about computers has always been that they can potentially deliver everything. Just text. Just audio. Just visuals. Or all that in any combination you wish. So, sure, computers (and that includes the iPad) might just be able to kill newspapers, radio, TV, books. But just as we know them. There will probably always be devices which allow us to read text, listen to something or watch and listen to something.

nickpp• 16 years ago

Very flame-bait but a fun read nevertheless. Let the wars begin!

philwelch• 16 years ago

No, let's please not have that kind of nonsense on Hacker News. We used to be better than this.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

It occurs to me, typing on this iPad in landscape, that this thing would be perfect to implement something like Microsoft's Courier concept or it's MS Research ancestor, Inkskein. Now let me see what Evernote is up to...

Qz• 16 years ago

Those Courier concepts turn me into a drooling fan in an instant.

sandee• 16 years ago

Glanced the article and stopped reading when i read 'brochures'. Obviously this guy has no idea the reasons for which brochures exist.

mojuba• 16 years ago

Every time I see the phrase "stopped reading at X" I downvote. You may be even right about brochures, but the "stopped reading" people in general are bad at understanding someone else's thoughts, are rude towards the author and usually don't get the entire article except the point they stopped at. It just looks bad. I'm sorry.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

I stopped reading your comment at "I downvote". ;)

cheald• 16 years ago

In all fairness, if companies start handing out iPads preloaded with their literature, I'll be happy to take one or two to glance over.

dmd• 16 years ago

People who predict the death of Office/Word have clearly never written anything longer than a newspaper article.

Try writing a 500 page document, complete with TOCs, indices, tables, lists, footnotes, endnotes, references, etc. in something like Google Docs sometime.

vault_• 16 years ago

In my experience, using Word for that hasn't been a whole lot more pleasant.

cubicle672• 16 years ago

It's not exactly a picnic in Word either

Handling very large text files is something the old unix tools did well (I can load a 500Mb log file (don't ask :/) in vi no problems), but most modern applications still struggle

carterschonwald3• 16 years ago

Try writing a 50 page document with those same references, but also countless images or diagrams (and perhaps even some care taken with typesetting!).

It has certainly been the case even in the past year or two that the happless art history major with a senior thesis project due soon, but whose machine doesn't have the resources to handle the document or have to deal with unexpected changes in formatting because they switched which printer they'll be printing to!

obvious they should be using latex over word :p, but the point is that theres a tradeoff on where the abstractions are and who has to deal with them.

Seriously though, anyone on HN who regularly writes large documents and cares about their formatting etc being nice, should have a go at latex! :)

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

Why?

Why, in this day and, would anyone want a 500 page printed document? Something that would need updating as soon as it's printed?

The only reason I use 500+ page things is to read them from my couch, something the iPad (and the Kindle, the Sony and the Nook) can do very, very well. In fact, I carry about 100 books in electronic form with me on my iPod (which could be described as an "iPad Nano")

And any reader can do even better if it's not a monolithic 500+ page monster, but a neatly organized and searchable website.

roel_v• 16 years ago

Research proposals and research project results need to be delivered in paper format. They are also written by multiple contributors (sometimes up to 100) and can use only technology that 1) everybody has and 2) everyone can use without learning something new. Taking personal experience and extrapolate into 'this is all anyone ever needs' hardly ever ends well.

rbrcurtis• 16 years ago

My wife is a grad student. Every time she writes a paper, no matter how long, she prints it out and then marks it up with a red pen to go over changes she thinks it needs. I always think this is extremely backwards and she should just edit it directly in word, but it is what works for her. She will surely do the exact same thing with the book she is working on as well.

cubicle672• 16 years ago

> Idle moments. Remember when you used to sit in the park, lost in your lover’s eyes? Now you’re both busy checking messages on your iPhone.

I know this is toungue in cheek, but it's also kind of true and sad at the same time. I speak as a guilty party :/

chanux2• 16 years ago

DVDs? (& all the similar disks are dying anyway. It doesn't take iPad to kill those).

Text books? I think iPad is the third or so to kill text books or maybe Text books have multiple lives.

Brochures? Is he outta mind or something?.

(stopped reading at Brochures.)

carterschonwald3• 16 years ago

A lot of recent articles such as this one seem to think that dedicated ebook readers are now doomed... I couldn't disagree more. This has been said by other folks, but it bears being repeated: Eink displays function act in the same way optically as to actual books, by reflecting rather than shining light into your eyes (i know which i can sustainably stare at for hours with far greater comfort).

One thing which I don't see discussed as much as I thought it would be in IPad press has been the absence of something like electromagnetic induction stylus capability from the device. I certainly know a number of folks who would be much more interested in the if it had such functionality (and thus actually enabled a digital analogue of the pad on paper note taking abstraction)

Anon84• 16 years ago

Ask and you shall receive: http://tenonedesign.com/stylus.php

carterschonwald3• 16 years ago

unfortunately, theres a big difference between and EM induction stylus and capacitive, namely being able to have your hand on the writing surface even slightly while writing :-), capacitive alone doesn't let you do that, and once we have screens that support both, it'll be really amazing! (think two panes, one for a previous set of notes/ text youre moving through and occasionally annotating, and the other where you're writing up some other document).

I'm actually very much hoping that the microsoft courier product (if it ever materializes), allows that sort of setup !

edit: turns out the most recent lenovo tablets work thusly! http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/lenovo-thinkpad-x201-tabl...

ThomPete• 16 years ago

The iPad is going to kill none of those things. If it will be killed it will be by technology in general not the iPad.

The iPad is expensive not everyone will be able to let alone want to pay that much.

jimfl• 16 years ago

The iPad is going to kill technology news. At least for a couple of months.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

Not kill. Just dumb them down.

balding_n_tired• 16 years ago

The paperless office, my old friend these 35 years. I wondered where he'd been.

Odd that Mr. Dilger forgot "The critical faculties of hordes of bloggers and journalists."

nosse• 16 years ago

This kind of radical apple fanboyism is one of the biggest things keeping me away apple products. The biggest reason is that I'm poor.

But I have to say I like the impact apple makes on the industry. Lots of people are worried about all kinds of pads being uncreative and mind dumbing because apple is showing them to that direction. But there has always been mp3 players that don't require you to use iTunes. And there has always been laptops that let you choose your desktop backround color freely, not just from handful of options.

So people, don't worry. There will be cheap and crappy pads you actually can open. And there will be Apple's iPad. There will be kids who get a cheap and accessible pad when they are young and they became hackers. And there will be rich kids who just play games on their iPads. This whole pad thing might change the way computers are used, but not the way people go on with their lives.

PS. It has always taken a couple of decades for any industry to mature. After that things like usability and reliability and ease or repair starts to matter to the sales.

bmj• 16 years ago

Single-purpose industrial gadgets

Not with the current App Store model. We absolutely drool over the potential of the iPad/iPhone/iTouch for our applications, but there is absolutely no enterprise support. On top of that, you can't take over the device, or at least limit access (necessary in some cases), so that's a problem for some domains, too.

MS and HP could take a big chunk of this market with the Slate, if it is accommodating to single use applications.

Tycho• 16 years ago

Now we're talking. Will this be the point in history when everything shifts towards the Touchable User Inteface? (the... Toohey?) I'm sure in the back of Steve Job's mind this isn't just a cool product, but a way to reclaim the mainstream computer market. Which is still a long-shot, but in Apple's case it seems that criticism is the sincerest form of flattery. Why else would so many bloggers waste so many words on a product they don't want to buy, unless they sense the genuine threat of a new paradigm that could leave them behind.

omellet• 16 years ago

I stopped reading at the eReaders point. Ganz falsch.

chanux2• 16 years ago

So is it going to kill printers along with office?

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=8616

neondiet• 16 years ago

Dam, I can't believe I got suckered into visiting that site again. DED from Roughly Drafted is a rabid, frothing at the mouth fanboy who does Apple no favours. He's demonstrated in the past (in a heated exchange of words with me) that his grasp on real world business computing needs and technology, beyond the confines of his bedroom leave a lot to be desired. I'd advise you not to pay any attention to anything he has to say.

IPad, the destroyer

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