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Having used the hardware keyboard yesterday, though, it is clearly a secondary form of input. You cannot even vaguely drive the iPad interface by keyboard alone. It is almost entirely only for text input. The arrow keys really only work for text editing. Shift-arrow combos work for selecting ranges of text, and Command-arrow combos work for moving the insertion point to the beginning/end of lines. Option-arrow combos do not work for moving a word at a time, though.
Perhaps it's finally time to give vi a look for word processing?
I have noticed that my Magic Mouse's batteries have not burned out as quickly as most say they do. That could mean the reporters of quick battery death are at their computers 10 hours a day and I'm not. Or it could mean that when I do work, I don't use the mouse. Can you imagine using a mouse for select stuff from menus, moving from one app to the next, entering a URL into your browser, etc? It's madness, I'm telling ya.
This entry written without the mouse. Vive los batteries.
In other news, Grubes says...
Lastly, a thought regarding the iPadโs aggressive pricing. Apple is obviously leaving money on the table here. They could easily charge $999 as the starting price and have hundreds of people lined up outside every Apple Store ready to buy one on day one. Then they could drop the price later in the year, as the holiday season approaches.
You can only, which few exceptions, sell the same tablet once to a potential buyer. Sell it to those willing to pay too much first. If 30% of potential buyers would pay more, why leave the money on the table?
Do I quote myself [from just over a week ago]? Very well, then I quote myself.
Daring Fireball's explanation for the overly low price of the entry-level iPad is that, "Apple is trying to stake out a long-term dominating position" in "the mobile computing landscape". Maybe, but I don't see WiFi sticking around at the high-end too much longer as 3G and 4G grow. If my laptop gets 4G speed built-in, do I need 802.11n? No. One barrier to entry down, and I don't even bother clicking the Airport icon in my menu bar at the coffee shop.
And if WiFi isn't where the landgrab's at -- and it's not. You don't make subscription money on WiFi -- 3G and 4G are. So kill the $499 lowend, and at least make the $629 price your price of entry. (3G and 16 megs) or (32 megs with WiFi) both at $629. Who doesn't buy the 3G at this point, since there's no contract involved?
I don't see how the WiFi-only $499 model is helping my Apple stock, middle (as opposed to short or long) term. Well, beyond the App Store. And iTunes. And maybe even iWork soon. And eBooks. And games. And...
While consumer interest in Apple's forthcoming tablet is high, a price north of $700 could turn off many potential buyers, a new survey has found.
The latest Retrevo Pulse Report found that most who responded -- 70 percent -- said a price point above $700 would prevent them from buying a tablet. The study was based on 500 randomly selected Retrevo users polled from Jan. 16 through Jan. 20, 2010.
You can only, which few exceptions, sell the same tablet once to a potential buyer. Sell it to those willing to pay too much first. If 30% of potential buyers would pay more, why leave the money on the table?
posted by ruffin
at 1/21/2010 09:01:00 PM
According to those familiar with the situation Apple will be targeting the new device at both homes and classrooms. Apple is said to envision that one device might be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email. For classrooms, Apple is looking into electronic textbooks. The device will include a virtual keyboard for input.
I enjoy reading pdfs with applications like Skim (OS X) and Foxit Reader (Windows), which both do a decent job of annotating pdfs, but on a tablet, I don't see how you make marginalia effectively without a stylus. The virtual keyboard of my iPod touch, even if it was in a giant device, isn't going to make the grade.
The iSlate turned iPad is going to need a stylus for marginalia if any serious scholarly work is to be done, and if Apple's targeting educational institutions, I've got to guess a stylus'll be in there. That's about as far as my predictions/wish list go/es.
In other news, $1000 is more expensive than my MacBook that I'm hypocritically using to type this, and more expensive by a pretty serious margin. I can't see spending that type of dough on an eMagazine/newspaper/book reader. Which, of course, means Apple is pricing this one exactly right. I'm an early adopter, but I'm also a cheapskate. As an example, I made the fam give up a Sprint cellphone plan to use Tracfones, and now I'm piddling around with plans from Cricket. It's amazing how much you can save on phones if you don't assume nearly unlimited minutes is a necessity and you use Google Voice for voicemail. Price it so that I'm interested in buying an iPad now, and you're leaving cash on the table from the "BMW drivers" of zeroes and ones.
So the first wave -- rich early adopters -- pad Apple's pockets. Once the hardware costs go down, they start pitching the thing for schmoes like me who, in the meanwhile, have plunked down embarrassing sums for a Magic Mouse, iPod touch, and MacBook. /sigh At least I still own some stock.
This is from an academic article titled The Accuracy of Stated Energy Contents of Reduced-Energy, Commercially Prepared Foods, which I picked up from the US Food Policy blog. The bottom line is that not only are restaurants underestimating calories (no real surprise there; can any franchise really keep squirts of mayo to company specs outside of their in-house labs?), but that frozen food producers are too. One advantage of mass production is supposed to be standardization, right?
The accuracy of stated energy contents of reduced-energy restaurant foods and frozen meals purchased from supermarkets was evaluated. Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods averaged 18% more than stated values, and measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated.
Emph mine. I don't think this is horribly surprising either, honestly. To range pretty far in the metaphorical field, take recent baseball slugger, short-time home run record holder, and steroid abuser Mark McGuire. The guy has caught some grief recently for saying that he wished he hadn't played in the steroid era, and that if he hadn't (and had played when testing happened), he wouldn't have taken the drug.
The argument that these comments are disingenuous and that he still made the decision to take steroids (and Big Mac is thus an evil man) is flakey at best and its logic willfully unrealistic. Where there clean guys pre-testing? Perhaps, but within the rules of Major League Baseball (MLB), steroids weren't illegal. Sure, they were illegal in the "real world" but so is jaywalking, speeding, whaling on Sunday, and Limewire. We've slowly learned that illegal is nine tenths enforcement. If there's no good method of enforcing national laws, then baseball's lack of testing for steroids in baseball or even putting it on their banned substances list tells players that their sport is looking the other way. It's an implicit encouragement to use, and nobody can say that the Sosa-McGuire chase hurt MLB.
Same here with food and calories. Being able to argue that more food has fewer calories, I have to imagine, is a successful selling point for dinner makers. This study tells us that it's pretty obvious that many producers aren't reliably testing the caloric content of frozen food. And if your competitor isn't, what's you motivation not to follow suit? The unwritten rules of the game -- that there's no testing and fudging just enough to maintain some plausable, collective deniability -- say that you, too, cheat. In fact, there becomes a situation of double discourse (or, more accurately, a situation of expertise, of closed, culture-specific mores) that says that cheating is the rule and it is, at least implicitly, encouraged.
Though I try not to live according to these sorts of unwritten rules of expertise and inside deception, as I grow older I find it more difficult not to fault those who act surprised when it's discovered that those rules exist. Nuance your mind, folk.
Why is it that Hotmail continues to include ads for itself in emails sent by its service? We do understand that part of why Gmail's caught on is that it can be used exactly like our old, conventional ISP-based mail service? If I send Gmail, it doesn't have ads in the text of the email, only in the sidebar, menubar, etc if they too use Gmail. Gmail users throw privacy to the wind and accept ads because the Gmail interface is that good, but also because we get everything we used to get from an ISP, plus portability, if we want to use our old mail handlers. (Everything but the ability to email .exe's, that is.)
Why Microsoft/Hotmail continues to append "spam riders" to their users' email, I don't understand. Spam riders will keep many Gmail users from ever considering switching. Perhaps (and I suspect this is part of the case) they've given up on growing and would rather simply "monetize" what little they've already got, like when AOL's prices stayed insanely high for dial-up (and even AOL access once users were using someone else's high speed access) and priced themselves right out of business in the long term.
But rather than milking cash, why not make try to make a better interface than Gmail's? Maybe they could remove the insane MSN tie-ins, maybe even keep the spam riders, and take out the annoying ads inside of Hotmail? Right now there's no war for email, not attempt to out-innovate Google. There's only Hotmail and Yahoo trying their darnest to make more profit as their ships all but sink.
Ads and Related Pages Ads in Gmail are placed in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through the Google AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The goal is to provide you with helpful ads, links and content relevant to your specific interests. Advertising and related information are displayed based on a completely automated process. [emph mine]
If it's automated, it's okay? Though that doesn't even explicitly mean that your privacy is protected -- an automated process could certainly fill a database full of some pretty compromising information from your emails. Heck, has anyone seen the search results AOL let slip in 2006? I'm not sure how I missed it, but I got the feeling that I'd never peered quite so intently through a keyhole into someone's most personal activities until I looked at some of those files. And they were, of course, created by an automated process.
But the implication, I think, is that the automation removes the personal connection. There is the feel of a double blind provided by the code between your personal email and corporations' ad copy.
Gmail is a technology-based program. Advertising and related information are shown using a completely automated process. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers our AdSense program. This technology enables Google to target dynamically changing content such as email or daily news stories.
No humans will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or related information. Because the ads and related pages are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful.
...
Your Privacy
Google does not and will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission. No email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers. [again emph mine]
No humans will read your emails? So now we won't even promise that humans won't be reading the key terms from your emails? Makes sense from a software engineering bias, but not from one of personal privacy.
Neither automation nor collective ("non-personal") data eliminate threats to privacy. This, unfortunately, hasn't yet stopped me from using Gmail.
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