Our office Fanboi just exclaimed "That's almost enought to do video processing!"" and dashed off, I think to go order one...
Apple confirms 128GB iPad. A hundred bucks for an extra 64GB
Apple has slapped an extra 64GB - and a $100 price increase - on its fondleslab range to create the 128GB iPad. An announcement today from Cupertino confirms the device's existence after references to the hardware were found in the newly released iOS 6.1. The new iPad will be available from US Apple stores, the company's …
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 20:30 GMT Zaphod.Beeblebrox
Re: Wait...
No, not joking. He's fun to watch - said something this morning about an iOS 6.1 jailbreak party this weekend. I've seen him at the lunchroom table with an iPhone, iPad, MacBook of some kind and recently what looks like it could bean iPad mini too, all spread out & interacting with them almost all at once.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 12:18 GMT the-it-slayer
Fandroids are off again...
If you don't want it, don't worry about it. For some of the media abusers out there in tablet land, this is a dream product. My 16GB iPad mini does me for reading and generic use (with a tiny bit of video use). For me and many others, it's too much money for what I use it for. To store iTunes, iPlayer, Sky Go stuff, it's the best thing out there for now.
If this was a £700 Samsung/Nexus tablet with 128GB of storage (without SD cards), it would be marked up as the holy grail. Sheeeeesh. The Apple abuse needs to stop and some common sense restored (and black badges dished out to timewasters here).
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 18:35 GMT El Presidente
Re: Shine going off your business?
How many more years until they announce the first USB port?
About 2 years and they'll claim to have invented it, sparking another patent war.
The first iPadu™ with USB will have 1 USB port and it will cost an extra $100.
The iPadu2™ will be released 6 months later and will have 2 USB ports so $200 extra.
Usable with non apple USB devices only with an adapter. Which will cost $50.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 23:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Shine going off your business?
How many more years until they announce the first USB port?
It will be a special Apple USB port, requiring a $50 cable to operate...
Don't joke about it ... USB only really took off because when everyone was wanting to use FireWire Apple tried to hold out for something like $2 royalty per port when everyone else was agreeing on 50c per device .... so a group split off, took the previously discarded as too slow USB spec, announced plans to bring out a much faster 2.0 version.
So in a real sense Apple did invent the USB port as we know it today ... and part of the reason was their prices!
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 23:31 GMT R 11
Re: iPads already have USB
Not quite true. My iPad would happily recognize my Blue Yeti USB microphone, at least until iOS 5 which determined it used too much power so stopped it working. I understand they still work if connected via a powered USB hub.
My iPad also recognizes my Fender electric guitar when connected via the Rocksmith USB cable.
I'm guessing that's no coincidence, both likely presenting themselves as similar USB audio devices. Anyway, with a USB adapter, there are other devices that can work with an iPad.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 12:20 GMT Alan Edwards
Re: "without needing their old PCs"
Probably got more grunt than the crusty 3.2Ghz P4s some of the design people here were using until very recently. I'm sure I've seen some 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duos around still, albeit with Quadro graphics cards.
There are likely still some ThinkPad T43s around with 1.6Ghz Pentium-Ms, slower that the Atom Z2460 in my phone.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 17:56 GMT adnim
"Taking a pot shot at the ailing desktop computer market, Apple marketing veep Phil Schiller suggested iPad owners could use the extra space on their tablets to store all their work and media without needing "their old PCs”.
Yup they sure could store 128Gb data in their 128Gb iPad or a 128Gb USB key.
What's that? I hear yells of... "it's much more than a storage device".
Yes it is, one can watch movies on it, browse the Internet, listen to music and buy software from Apple with it.
The iPad like all tablets is a toy and not a serious computing device. There is a reason I use a laptop and a desktop for work and a tablet as a media player and a browser.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 18:10 GMT ThomH
But naturally you're not willing to tell us what that reason is or make any other arguments beyond a bare statement of your position?
It would seem to me that the use case Apple cite — AutoCAD — is quite real, even if rare; designs often need to be shown at sites and in meetings. Tablets (including but not limited to the iPad) have fully functional office suites for 95% of computer productivity tasks and have or are acquiring a bunch of the more specialist software, like Mathematica, DICOM viewers, first draft video editors, etc.
Tablets are serious computing devices, including the iPad.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 18:31 GMT G R Goslin
Re-ThornH
You can't be serious! As an ex CAD draughtsman, the iPad comes in as the equivalent as the back of a fag packet, against a full size drawing board. Marginally OK for showing pictures, so long as you don't want to see detail. As for meetings, you'd probably get more attention by passing round a picture of a pin-up
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 21:21 GMT Steve Todd
Re: Re-ThornH - @G R Goslin
I come from a family of draughtsmen. My Uncle was one of the first to use CAD in the UK. They ran an 8 user system off of a single Univac mini with 64K words of RAM, and used it to design oil rigs. There's plenty of capacity in an iPad to render CAD files (it's got about the same CPU/GPU oomph as a Windows box from 5-10 years ago, and they were more than powerful enough to run the likes of CATIA)
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 23:02 GMT Mark .
Re: Re-ThornH - @G R Goslin
Great, so you can run software from 5-10 years ago.
Believe it or not, CAD software doesn't just use that extra CPU power and RAM for "bloat" - it hasn't stood still for 10 years. Yes sure, you could use an overpriced underpowered ipad to run CAD software that was cutting edge in 2002, or you could use a real computer and have the latest technology and functionality.
(And if you really want a tablet that's high end and can do what a real PC can do, they're the ones with x86 inside.)
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 08:51 GMT Steve Todd
Re: Re-ThornH - @G R Goslin
The hilarious thing is that while all these armchair experts are prognosticating how an iPad couldn't possibly run a modern CAD package or render AUTOCAD files, Autodesk have gone out and written a version that runs on iPads, iPhones and Android devices that lets you share, view and edit files with desktop systems. No one is suggesting that the iPad will replace full CAD workstations, but its a perfectly viable tool for taking drawings out into the field and making minor changes.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 11:07 GMT David Cantrell
Re: Re-ThornH
An iPad might be the modern equivalent of the back of a fag packet, but back when I worked in metal bashing, just about all my employer's products started off as rough sketches on the back of a fag packet, either in a meeting room with our customers, or on the shop floor to fix a production cock-up. Being able to easily transfer sketches from fag packet to CADDS would have been Quite Handy.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 05:46 GMT ThomH
Re: Tablets are serious computing devices... @AC
It's cheap to criticise; how would you define your anointed 'serious computing'? I can think of no distinction that doesn't either bar all computers more than about five years old (ie, based on processing capacity) or deign that only about 2% of the world takes part.
My feeling is that — even if you exclude leisure browsing — as tablets can do at least 90% of what people use computers for, they are computers. Just like an oven without a hob is still a kind of oven, a two-seater car is still a kind of car, a light aircraft is still a kind of aircraft, Heat is still a kind of magazine and Vin Diesel is still a kind-of actor.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 11:30 GMT Naughtyhorse
Re: Tablets are serious computing devices... @AC Vin Diesel is still a kind-of actor....
By precisely the same standard a iPad is a 'kind' of computer.
best of luck transporting your 450 passengers 5000 miles across the atlantic in cessna 152 with 2 seats and a range of 800 miles.
while you're doing that i'll be doing cad on this here iPad
the point is that we are talking about cad here - not just surfing the web and reading e-mail, which is indeed all that 98% of the worlds computers need to do. But that does not apply to CAD users.
And as for computers more than 5 years old, well i havent seen a serious CAD operator use a machine from 2007 since about 2009, so yes, pretty much any machine more than 5 years old is in the same box as an iPad - thats the one labeled 'crap not suitable for CAD.'
Wait til an array of iPads crops up on a list of the top 100 supers then i'll take it seriously (but i aint holding my breath)
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 11:55 GMT Steve Todd
@Naughtyhorse
While the Casna might not have transatlantic range it will certainly let you ferry passengers who arrived on such a flight to their intended destination.
Similarly you can do all the heavy work on a full desktop workstation, but such a device isn't practical to take on site or down to the factory floor where the people who are actually building your fantastic design want to see what they are supposed to be making and enter minor corrections when things don't quite fit.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 13:19 GMT TeeCee
Re: Tablets are serious computing devices... @AC
....as tablets can do at least 90% of what people use computers for......
Well, as around 50% of what I use computers for involves typing on a keyboard and requires a couple of full screen displays in front of me so I can both see WTF I'm doing and look at more than one thing at a time, in my case I have to call bullshit on that.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 18:58 GMT adnim
I thought you would be
smart enough to work it out. OK I will tell you.
VM web server and database server for web development. Vector and bitmap graphics editing, SD/HD video and music production. Multiple applications running at once without the system choking or having to wait for a context switch.
A tablet is not a serious computing device even if all the productivity software in the world was ported to iOS or Android. I am sure that with a couple of more years development they will be powerful enough to be taken as serious computing devices.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 19:11 GMT Lusty
Re: I thought you would be
@adnim, I take it then that you never go to meetings? I use mine to take notes, give presentations and for data input while interviewing users about how they use their computers. Important though you clearly are, you are a tiny TINY minority in terms of use case for business computing and as such I suggest you add the caveat that it's not a serious computing device for you.
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Tuesday 29th January 2013 21:10 GMT JEDIDIAH
Re: I thought you would be
> I use mine to take notes
Sounds like a palm pilot from the early 90s. It's a media consumption device.
If your use case doesn't sound like "media consumption", then it's going to be a disaster.
Sure, there are business reasons to do "media consumption". That doesn't make your glorified ipod a serious computing device. It makes it a slightly more portable take on a VHS player.
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