iPad Air not very hot: Apple fanbois SHUN London fondleslab launch Apple's new iPad Air has fallen to earth with a thud following a dismal launch day in London. The new fondleslab went on sale today and was met with unimpressive crowds which had entirely dissipated by the early morning. Normally, huge throngs of fanbois descend on Apple stores at the merest hint of a new product launch, but …
It's because if you have a retina screen iPad then there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade for the sake of a little less weight. If they had introduced the fingerprint reader ( next year perhaps ) then maybe but only just.
Most people are waiting for the mini retina screen, that will sell BUT just think that if you hold out till next year you will get one with a fingerprint reader......
It's not great is it, if all I can find to rave about is this? It really is quite a bland offering but hey you can say you have an Air.. Kudos, nope not any more.
And then HACKED in minutes by a 7yr old using Play Dough to spoof people's prints or chewing gum. That's how advanced Apple's lame stupid purchase was in beating Samsung out the door by merely buying the company out from under them, Motorola and HP. Who'd been using Authentec since 2005!
Samsung already had a patent submitted for Authentec Sensor in Galaxy S3's HOME button a year before Apple bought them and then killed support to all their prior customers. That's how Apple like to compete..... copy, steal or thief all their ideas off the competition, that they lost in court on accusing them of copying and stealing from them as they've been doing all along!
"Latest slab selling like cold, unattractive cakes on Day One in Blighty"
<sarcasm>That's right, no one will be buying the iPad Air. It is a total failure in every way. Apple will need to claim a loss of a billion dollars as Microsoft did with the Surface. No one is buying the iPad Air... really!</sarcasm>
(Eyes rolling in reaction to the absurdity ;-))
Odd. When Apple, in the past, have had restricted stock, The Register write how they are deliberately restricting stock to create the impression of popularity (even though anyone who knows anything about retail tech business knows you would never, ever, do that because it results in losing sales to your competitors). Now they have adequate stock and are settling into an incremental update pattern (as they have done for years with MacBooks) and again, The Reg proclaim it a disaster. Hmmm.
Heh. Compare with the gushing going on here:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/01/apple-ipad-air-launch-videos/
The Apple shop employees are paid to clap and cheer like morons at every product launch. They'll even insist on giving you high fives on your way, though they are at least doing it in order to provide themselves with shelter, warmth, food, etc, rather than because they honestly think that shaving 180g off an already successful product is really exciting.
I guess the issue on Apple's side, when launching modest annual evolutions, is whether to risk a damp squib of a launch event like this, or to forego one for the first time since the iPad was announced. Damp squib it is.
"Be fair, he works hard. He must have searched high and low to find those "mixed" reviews. I could only find five star ratings."
Ha, the usual Fandroid contingent down-votes from but where are the links to the bad reviews? Odd that. I guess when the paucity of links that prove my comment wrong is so great, even the Fandroids are too embarrassed to take up the challenge !
Yep exactly - they are tablets not laptops. It took way longer than I was expecting for somebody to actually correct my earlier comment, thanks for paying attention.
So what the hell is this quote from the article supposed to mean?
"The tech seems to be maturing," he added. "I remember old laptops, which used to break every year, so you needed to buy a new one. That's not the case anymore and Apple also face competition from Google or Samsung. Apple are still on top of the game, but you cannot expect them to do something different each time."
"The tech seems to be maturing," he added. "I remember old laptops, which used to break every year, so you needed to buy a new one."
I don't remember that time at all - I've still got a late 90s vintage Macbook G3 and a couple of iBooks, a few ancient Latitudes - all of which got very heavy usage as we couldn't afford to buy many back then...
In fact it's only of late that the annual upgrades have started, because someone seems to have started making machines that cannot be user serviced, or upgraded at all, so they go obselete very quickly, quickly enough in fact that it looks like a marketting strategy, but no-one would do that, would they?
> because someone seems to have started making machines that cannot be user serviced, or upgraded at all, so they go obselete very quickly
Obsolete? Really? Through the nineties and into the early 2000s it was sensible to buy a new desktop for around £1000, because the software and new uses would mean that more CPU, RAM and HDD was always desirable, not to mention having to add stuff like soundcards, CD-ROMs and scanner cards (IRQs, joy). In the mid 2000s, there just wasn't that much that more power would do for the general user, since by then a £500 (or cheaper) machine could happily do all the email, DTP, image editing, web-browsing and DVD playback that a general user would need.
My laptop was bought several years ago, and still performs excellently for CAD and the like. It could always be faster on a render or whatever (and an SSD wouldn't hurt it), but it is very far from being obsolete.
you seem to have misplaced the argument. you've stated exactly the point - the laptop you bought several years ago CAN be upgraded to give it some more relevance years later...SSD, maybe more memory...use a PCCard adapter or such for new connectivity. you cant do that with some recent devices...particularly fruity firm devices - the iPad and Macbook Air spring to mind here.
"the laptop you bought several years ago CAN be upgraded to give it some more relevance years later"
Not so. You'll be lucky if the new devices like SDD are supported by the interfaces available on your old motherboard.
Ask me how I know this, me being in the IT lark and having spec'd several home machines for this fabled ability to upgrade and extend the life thereby.
Well apparently just about any old Apple product with an SATA connection can have an SSD. This is one of the biggest boost to speed along with more memory. I've added both these to an older MBP and it's like a new machine.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDEX3G120/
All Mac Pro models
• All PowerMac G5 models
• All MacBook Pro models
• All Mac mini 2006-Current (All Intel Models)
• iMac 2006-current (All Intel Models)
• iMac G5
• All MacBook models
• Xserve 2009
"you cant do that with some recent devices...particularly fruity firm devices - the iPad and Macbook Air spring to mind here."
And you can't fit that old upgradeable laptop through a gap 8mm wide. Consumers have voted with their feet, and although several people are very bitter that they are not on the winning side, that doesn't change the fact that the rest of us voted for portability.
Yes, your shitty old laptop is more usable now you fitted an SSD, but my iPad Air is more usable because I have it with me. Win for the iPad.
Yes, your shitty old laptop is upgradeable so you can keep on flogging that dead horse, but my MacBook Air doesn't cause permanent damage to my back while carrying it in a bag around London.
Yes, you may be able to replace your old battery, but I don't even need to carry the power supply because my modern devices last 12 hours with constant use while yours, even with your new battery and hours of cocking around with settings and stopping services, probably lasts "up to 4 hours" which we all know means 2 hours of actually using it.
No I can't upgrade my stuff, but it's so much nicer that I'm not bothered by that at all and will continue to buy the new versions while selling the old ones for slightly less than I paid a couple of years later - I lost around £100/year on the old iPad which works out at pennies per hour of usage. You may think I hate the environment, but in that time you've probably binned a lot more kit than I have!
I was just saying that computers don't "go obsolete very quickly" these days. Specialist users (gamers, editors, animators, scientists, traders) will always gain benefit from more power (and thus easy upgrades), but average users can do all they need on modestly specced machines, and on most software they won't even notice much of a difference.
They won't, until Microsoft decide that Word needs the return of Clippy, but this time raytraced in real-time and composited against a 4K video live stream.
@Eddie D - >"I don't remember that time at all - I've still got a late 90s vintage Macbook G3 and a couple of iBooks, a few ancient Latitudes"
Well - I have tons of old equipment laying around. Most of it still works, if I bother with it. But one thing I don't do - I don't memorize the names and the specs as if they were some glorious gifts from the Gods. And believe it or not - some of that old gear I have in storage is even Apple gear. And I couldn't honestly tell you the name or the model number of ANY of it. If I need to find a driver, I can go to the device and read the model number from the sticker or from the etching.
I guess that's a big part of the difference between "Fanbois" and everyone else who uses tech to get work done, not to try to be hip. And a big part of the difference between those who religiously purchase every device from one company, and those who buy the best tool for the job.
@Robert Taylor - "So you have a poor memory. That doesn't seem a good reason to bash someone for being specific in their post."
My memory is fantastic. But I don't stuff it full of useless data - like the name of the laptops I was buying 15 years ago. Or even 4 years ago. Or the model numbers of parts I used to build workstations with. If I need to know the name, I go and look at it. I don't recall the exact name of the phone in my pocket right now - I know it's a Sammy Android with a slider keyboard - because I work better with a keyboard. I don't recall the version of Android it's running - I don't give a crap unless I need to load an app that won't work with that version. And if I do need to know, I look it up on the phone.
What I DO remember is the enormous amount of work I've done with those machines over the years. I've bled most of them dry.
And I don't stick with one company religiously. I'm typing on a new HP laptop right now, and I've got a Sammy Android in my pocket. I built my workstation. My last laptop was a Dell, and my last phone was a Blackberry. And I can almost guarantee you my next ones won't be the same. I buy the best deal that will do the job for me the best at the time. That's the only thing that matters to me - getting the job done at a decent price. I don't care if anyone is impressed with the gear I'm using.
So it's significantly lighter and thinner, 64 bit processor so potentially much faster, same battery life - sounds pretty good to me. I would not call the older model being about a third heavier as minor weight loss.
Basically it's the best tablet available for most people unless you really have some major issue with Apple / iOS or do not want to spend as much.
Repeat after me: "64-bit architectures have NOTHING to do with speed"
If anything, they're slower than their 32-bit counterparts, due to having to process more bits for a given calculation. Unless you're doing lots of double-precision floating point analyses, their use is somewhat limited in a tablet.
Go on then, downvoters, prove me, and my electronics degree modules in computer architecture wrong. Last time I checked this was a tech site.
Why does 64 bit mean faster? It doesn't. It allows you to address more memory (last time I checked no tablets had 4GB RAM.) And unless you're doing CFD, CAD, HPC-grade analyses like weather prediction, stress analysis, or things like desktop-level gaming then you're not going to see the benefits in terms of the added double-precision calculation capacity that 64 bit offers over 32 bit.
http://techland.time.com/2013/09/13/why-in-the-world-would-you-need-a-64-bit-smartphone/
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/166244-iphone-5s-the-64-bit-a7-chip-is-marketing-fluff-and-wont-improve-performance
Yes yes, those articles quoted are about the 5S. The A7 chip in that is the same architecture as the iPad Air.
If it's a full 64-bit architecture instead of a 64-bit processor on a 32-bit bus it does necessarily mean faster because you load 64-bits into the processor with one read cycle instead of 2. That's why 64-bit didn't make a hell of a lot of sense when Intel and MS released them for XP on 32-bit motherboards.
I'll agree it doesn't necessarily affect the perceived user speed because we long ago passed the point where the desktop CPU is idling at 80-90% most of the time for a typical user. But the system itself is still faster. You also get into issues with coders compiling stuff for 32-bit and running the 32-bit on top of the 64-bit with an emulator between the two, which will slow down the perceived speed. Again, that's not the hardware being slower.
29 upvotes for that? Obviously not from the technical readers of the site.
A 64 bit architecture does mean that you can address more memory but it also, just as importantly, means that you can move twice as much data per clock cycle around the system as you did with a 32 bit architecture. That means, with a machine that is very much attuned to photography and video that you can move photos and videos around twice as fast; process them twice as fast and generally speed up many operations where moving large amounts of data around is important.
I hope you don't belong to the more recent university cohorts who had to pay for their degrees. You don't seem to have got your money's worth.
Actually, ARM is quite good at 64-bit transparency: 32-bit code doesn't appear to have a penalty, but it is hard to tell when all you can do is compare first-attempt (okay, second-attempt, but Apple's is the first in a client) implementations of ARMv8 with mature, optimised ARMv7 implementations.
That said, I completely agree with you that 64-bit isn't a big performance deal. I've written a lot of code over the last 25 years, for a lot of very varied application areas, and my gut feeling is that outside of scientific modelling, integer maths accounts for the bulk of most applications' calculations (remember that GPUs handle the floating-point for 3D transformations). Of that, I'd guess that 99% can be be accommodated by 32 bit registers. The big performance benefit of 64-bit, that of being able to access more than 4 Gbyte of address space, isn't a whole lot of use on a device with such constrained resources as a tablet. (To be clear, I still think 64 bit is of incredible benefit on desktops and servers, but they have more memory, more storage, and run applications that work with bigger datasets than a tablet.)
Basically, being 64-bit isn't why ARMv8 chips like the A7 are better than their predecessors, but I suppose it's the easiest "this number is bigger" feature for a marketing department to work with, and in the inevitable absence of market-changing new features to trumpet at every iteration, Apple have now joined the tech industry numbers game instead: lighter - nice, more pixels - okay, but... twice as much "bit" as the competition?? Only the first two provide a customer benefit. As a customer, why should I care how wide the ALUs are? it doesn't add anything that will benefit me now, or in the lifetime of the device. It's a willy-waver feature; a bigger number buyers can use when someone challenges your choice of product.
Nor does it mean the device will be faster or better than the competition. Right now, I think a good ARMv7 implementation can still beat an ARMv8 chip, simply because v8 is new, and the vendors are still getting to grips with it. But as the same optimisation is applied to the newer architecture by vendors, we'll see v8 pull ahead.
But again, that performance gain will still have very little to do with it having 64-bit addressing. Not on a tablet, running tablet applications.
For some reason I've been down-voted on this in the past, but my opinion on 64 bit in phones / tablets is that in the future it will enable some much more efficient usage of storage (aka unified storage). Getting everything prepared for the future is a good thing. Yes, the marketing idiots and trolls here will shout about it being great, but it doesn't make a squat of difference other than the ARM chips in use are rather faster and more efficient than the previous ones... it's just that they happen to be 64bit as well.
When you have 2GB of RAM in a device, 32 bit addressing is fine and efficient. However even these current devices usually have access to 32/64/128GB of additional storage. Storage is changing (see today's El Reg article on memristor future 100TB storage products) and the differentiation between volatile storage such as RAM and non-volatile storage such as Flash storage is lessening to the point that it many cases it will make a lot more sense to consider the non-volatile storage not as a traditional storage medium but part of the addressable space of the processor. Apple, with their closed shop approach, are in a much better position than other vendors to take advantage of this and the efficiency gains it will give. That's for the future though, for now it's the improved chip rather than it being 64bit that's most important.
64-bit processors are slower than 32-bit because they have to process more bits for a given calculation? Wut? By that statement 16-bit processors must fly!
You do realise that mantissas are processed in parallel and therefore for 'up to' single precision numbers processing would take exactly the same time (given otherwise identical architecture).
For numbers of 32^1 +1 or larger (it's really not that big of a number, people always focus on 2^64 as being humungous but that's a smokescreen, 32-bit processors struggle just as much at 4.2... billion remember that's where the 32-bit TCP/IP address system crapped out).
In any case the architecture is much improved so there are advantages across the board, the only disadvantage is the memory required to store data, pointers etc. if coding isn't tight for SP numbers.
Ignorance is not an excuse to spread crap regarding the advantages of 64-bit architecture just because you are not onboard yet. Embrace the future.
> By that statement 16-bit processors must fly!
I can tell that for certain operations the 8088 on the original IBM PC (and others) was slower than the 8085 and Z80s.
In particular, byte write operations required the 16 bit word to be fetched, the byte changed and the 16 bit word rewritten (otherwise the 'other' byte on the 16bit bus would be lost) while the 8bit machines just wrote the single byte.
> "64-bit architectures have NOTHING to do with speed"
Unles you're doing SIMD calculations. The extra word length means more operations per clock. But I'd expect that to be a small minority of most users' work...
> If anything, they're slower than their 32-bit counterparts
Most CPUs suffer from bandwidth restriction to RAM. The more bits you have to load up for a given routine, the longer it takes to get into your CPU. Cache only goes so far befoer it's full...
Vic.
"The 64bit processor will have more relevance in a couple of years time, but it makes sense for Apple to introduce it now so that by then most of their iDevice range will be using it, making software development easier."
Ermmm.... What?
As a developer for some 30 years now, let me assure you the transition from compiling for 32 bit architecture to a 64bit one is literally changing one or two switches on your compiler (or clicking a button if you're using one of those new fangled GUIs). I have done literally dozens of "conversions" from 32 to 64 bit builds and never spent more than a couple minutes on it.
Never in history has any corporation forced its customers to prepay for tech that does nothing for them, just to make clicking said button easier for developers. The situation with the apple products is simply this: the consulting firm Apple pays to develop their CPUs finished a 64 bit version and Apple decided it would make good marketing sense to throw it in now despite it actually being useless. From the silly nonsense I've heard spouting from the iHoles of their devoted, seems they were right.
@Dave 126 - you are such a tosser!
The A7 double the CPU scores of the previous chip (check our GeekBench). Couple that with OpenCL and you have the ability to really do some real if not serious computing.
Consider this also... the A7 clobbers some of the recent Intel chips used by notebooks such as the Intel Core 2 Duo L9600 2130 MHz and the Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2400 MHz. It also equals the Intel Core i7-2677M in its scoring.
Tell me that its a worthless climb for a tablet to now better some recent notebooks.
Apple can't win - they have stock and the device is not selling - they run out of stock and it's a conspiracy to try and drum up demand. People queue and they are muppets - people decide not to queue and of course it's not selling at all. You can't have it both ways... wait for the actual sales figures Apple publish after the first weekend and then the first quarter sales.
Suspect the iPad Air will sell extremely well.
except it's now every 3 to 5/7/9 years depending on tolerance levels.
In fact it's scary to think that I'm still not thinking about replacing my hand-built desktop. I don't remember exactly what the date was on which I built it, but Vista had just been released and I mistakenly bought the 64-bit version (so I could address all the memory I was putting into the system) figuring I'd be building myself a gaming system that would last a few years. Turned out the gamers were still focused on 32-bit XP architecture. Even LOTR wouldn't load on my 64-bit system. Fortunately I dual installed 32-bit XP so it wasn't a total loss. But the Windows 7 partition is still serviceable for my uses. It turns out I'm not a big fan of MMOs after all, and they're pretty much the only call for a gaming rig.
Probably because it's Friday but your article inspired me to rework Desmond Dekker's classic
Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir
So every month can buy ipad
For me iColyte
My wife an' my kids them a pack up an' a leave me
Darlin' she said, "I was yours to be seen"
For me iColyte
Shirt dem a tear-up trousers a go
I don't want to end up with money and Android
For me iColyte
After a storm there must be a queue
You catch me with a 4 but the 5 is new
poor-a- poor, for me iColyte
Ima wondering working for hard
A-poor, a-poor, a-poor, me iColyte
I look a-down and out, sir
poor-a-poor, for me iColyte
yeah, sorry about that
As an owner of some Apple kit (and and iPad 1 and iPad 2), as well as some Android kit (Nexus 4 phone) I sort of want a reason to upgrade .. but can't find one.
I'm sat staring at my iPad 2 and never really worry it's not fast enough for what I want. Yes, the retina display is lovely when I look at my wife's iPad 3, but can I still read the screen? Yes.
It's 33% lighter than then iPad 4, but remember the iPad 4 is heavier than the iPad 2 because of all the Retina stuff. Therefore the iPad Air is smaller than my 2, but not massively lighter.
Grr.
are you on the right website, because here you are either a die hard apple fan that believe Apple can do not wrong and all that buy iGadgets are the chose people, or a die hard anti-apple fan that believe that apple can do no right and all that buy iGadgets are harbingers of the apocalypses.
Hmmm let me think!
Stylus = palm pilot, ipaq, hp jornada and most importantly etch-a-sketch knock offs, stylaphone (see Rolf Harris)
Glasses = Sega Master System, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Kodak slide thingy, X-Ray specs in the Beano
Watches = Calculator watch, radio watch, camera watch, remote controller watch, all worn by t$%^$rs
I want something that works properly all the time and doesn't suck me into a space/time void where 2 minute anticipated task actually takes 2 hours because of updates, crashes and conflicts.
Like it or not iPad was a game changer and as with many "FRUITY" products the benefits are often realised after they first come out. If 64 bit is so awful I might be able to interest you in a Z80 processor or a Viglen 386 with a Cyrix math-coprocessor or a Penny Farthing.
Indeed the iPad was a game changer. But the game has now changed. Now the iPad is similarly specc'd to many cheaper devices, and tablets are a commodity product. Now, the iPad is not really distinguishable from any other tablet.
As for comments on getting work done, my £129 NookHD+ does everything I need, quickly and efficiently. It's never crashed and seems to update itself in the background without me noticing. I'd be hard pressed to say it was any worse or better than an iPad of whatever vintage.
As for 64bit, you may get a slight performance increase in the right circumstances. But do tablets really need it? (Notwithstanding that, end of next year nearly everything will be 64 bit anyway due to marketing pressures, not because of any major advantage in using it)
Re the other devices.
Apple may not 'invent' them but if past evidence is anything to go by, they will make those devices practical to use whereas their forbears may not have been.
Whilst I agree with the fandroids that their kit is in the main overpriced they do have an infuriating knack of taking something and applying a lot of design and thought into making said item work at least halfway decently. Whereas those have came before may well have been slightly clunky and a PITA to use.
I am writing this post on a late 2007 17in MBP (Core 2 Duo CPU, matte screen). It has lasted longer than any other laptop I have ever owned. Yes it cost a lot back then, but the fact that I use ut every day 6 years later say something for the way Apple make stuff. I bought a Dell Inspiron about a year earlier. It died a long time ago. That said, the Thinkpad T43P that I bought second hand still runs RHEL 6.4 very nicely.
The real problem is that there is no new technology applicable in their market area that Apple can pretend to have invented.
What would change the world of course is a viable high definition, daylight readable, colour display technology capable of use in the whole range of display sizes. OLED still seems a bit stuck in a time warp. Something NEW is needed...
The more I think about it, the more I realise I won't be buying any new phone/laptop/tablet until this occurs. All that we now have are annual minor performance increments.
And of course I'll skip the silly watches and glasses entirely.
Apple seem to think the cameras are much better in the new model. The weight saving seems a goal I can understand, if not understand the mania for. Thinness for its own sake would seem to be getting on a hiding to nowhere. Thinner=more fragile, no?
Does buying the old model iPad make sense now? Is the price/quality of build ratio good? I can't tell from the buzz because of all the rabies infecting commentators.
Yesyesyes, please get the shots next time. I agree that using an iPad as one's primary photographic capture device is as of now an amusing sight for onlookers, but then again, I still use a digital SLR and laugh at you dorks with your smartphoncams. I suspect in a few years you'll be less offended by slate wavers.
To return to the question at hand, phrased so as to include your reservations: Would you look like a prat when teleconferencing with an iPad Air?
I think the difference is that BlackBerry were overtaken by technology — everyone else's products were much better while they ran around buying QNX and desperately trying to get BlackBerry 10 ready. The same isn't true of Apple. A majority of people prefer alternatives and there are a bunch of things Apple consciously disallows but you don't get the sense that they're technologically behind. They're just control freaks with very specific ideas of what a device should be.
When the screen on my MacBook Air broke (cracked somehow) I was quoted around £380 by Apple to repair it because you have to replace the whole top unit of the laptop, I figured it made more sense to simply buy a new another laptop. That's the price you pay for making things thin and light.
That said though, the MacBook Air is a great laptop and I think it's very good value for money, my previous Dell was plagued by overheating issues.
I'm looking to get an iPad Air, but only because I currently have the 1st gen iPad and think it's time for an upgrade. The other person I know looking to get one is only buying it as it is her first iPad, she previously had a Galaxy Tab
No trouble at all getting MK iPad Air 128GB this morning in MK. No queue mid-morning and no trouble with stock. 'Queue Here' barriers were in place but looked like some new piece of modern sculpture......standing all alone in the walkway.
Replacing a very slow iPad 1st Gen. The improvement is significant, but at that price it damned well should be!
It's not cynical to make money by updating and selling an existing product. That's called business and businesses that don't do that aren't noble, they're stupid. I would suggest that a better example of cynical is framing every article about Apple in the same negative fashion with little insight into the nature of the business of making and selling hardware and software products. Part of the reason your Apple related articles seem so stale is that you probably wrote several dozen in advance and set up an automatic posting to occur whenever any bit of Apple news hits the inter webs. Here's a bit of insight for you. Magic doesn't happen every day. If it did, it wouldn't be magic.
The last iMac was thinner - then came the iPad mini - now the iPad air. Don't despair folks, Apple is still at the cutting edge of innovation - they've found a way of selling less kit for your buck. The ultimate in marketing hubris would be the 'iZilch™ - it IS thin air' </sarc>
P.S. - I do own & use a small selection of Apple kit on a daily basis, FYI.
"We have all models of iPad Air in Space Gray and Silver" Apple's store manager told a relieved crowd. Apple store staff then handed out tickets to those in the queue for the iPad Air. These tickets ensure that people who queue get the right iPad. The ticketing system, introduced a few years ago during overwhelming queues for the iPhone, also ensures that all people who queue know they are getting a device."
http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipad-iphone/news/?newsid=3476761&pagtype=allchandate
If selling more devices in a weekend than MS has in a year is an artificial shortage then I have to wonder what the opposite might be? Selling one to everyone on the planet?
Apple sell millions of items during the launch weekends. Most other manufacturers would give their eye teeth for sales volumes even 50% of what Apple achieve year on year.
Fandrods really should get a dose of reality. Apple are not perfect by any means but a lot of companies can learn an awfu lot from them about product marketing and launches. (MS Are you listening?)
Whoa! Fanboi much? Frankly, comparing a company to Microsoft's hardware group to show off its success is kind of like comparing a live slug to a dead goat to proudly boast how one is much faster than the other.
What part of "biting the hand that feeds IT" did you miss, fanboi? In my opinion they aren't doing that often enough, or hard enough. To me, today, the adage I first heard about 34 years ago is still true: all hardware sucks, all software sucks, the rest is strictly personal preference. El Reg is fairly good at showing that adage to be true (now and again, wouldn't do for them to get a swelled head).
we live at a time when 2 working adults cant support a family that 2 generations ago would have been supported by one. parents are forced to send their kids to expensive nurseries where their children are abused. the kids grow up never having spent any time talking to their own parents.
but you can buy a new iPad so its ok for us to be treated like this by the powers that be. hand over your cash and forget about little johnny or jane being abused by the staff at the nursery where most of your wages are spent because society wont let you raise your own kid anymore. its the new world order baby.
It's not just Apple, it's most of the tech industry. But a few moments of thought show the venom is misplaced.
The root cause has been identified by many labels and sayings. Here are a few:
- Diminishing returns
- Law of 80/20
- Sturgeon's observation
Thirty years ago when Apple and MS were starting out and Altair was not yet a memory it was virgin territory with lots of opportunities for new concepts, mistakes and quick hacks that worked but weren't optimized. Now the broken concepts have mostly been disposed of, the opportunities most evaluated, and the math geeks have seriously optimized those quick hacks. With each new iteration of technology we've cleared the low hanging 80% that could be fixed. The 0.024759% on which we are working are just exponentially harder than those first iterations back in the good old days. In fact when you really think about it, making any improvement is really pretty amazing.
El Reg and the Fandroids say so.
Actual reviews such as http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tech/news/a528527/apple-ipad-air-review-technology-on-a-diet-but-does-it-deliver.html disagree but I have learned from reading the well informed comments on here that a 64 bit chip is slower than a 32 bit chip and the weight loss is 'minimal' .
If you are a Fandroids, fine, go and buy an Android tablet and phone.
I will stick to Apple products because I, personally, like them and my foray into the world of Android was a horrifying experience (I gather this is not the case for most but it will take a lot for me to try it again)
I, personally, can not justify upgrading from my iPad 3 to the Air but I am fairly certain that the next iPad will be enough of an improvement for me to upgrade.
If Apple made massive improvements each year people would complain about obsolescence, the increment ale approach means my 'old' iPad is OK but after a few iterations I want to upgrade.
Suits me.
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