labrats5

Chris Rawson and Tim Wasson are the only one of you who can see past the RDF to what a tablet would have to be to make sense. Web browsing, movie and music playing, e-mailing, and all those other existing "features" everyone else is talking about is not going to sell a tablet to non-fanboys. Yes, any apple tablet will probably need to do all these things, and do them well, but they are not in and of themselves reason enough to pick a tablet over or in addition to a PC/Mac and a smartphone. Smartphone's have the killer feature of fitting into your pocket, while computers have the killer feature of being freaking full fledged computers, and there is no room between the two for a device that does the same old stuff in an in-between form factor.

As Chris said, in order for a tablet to make sense, it has to do something well that neither a laptop or a smartphone can do well. Wasson has the right idea for what this would be: mimicking a piece of paper really really well. Bringing the infinite flexibility of paper and the obvious benifits of digital data together is something that has been tried before and failed, but I still believe that the idea is sound. A correct implementation must enhance the two killer features of paper, namely reading and drawing (which includes writing), while still being light, durable, and reasonably priced. I believe that someday, someone will create a tablet in a way that satisfies this, and it may very well be apple.

I'm sorry to ave to tell this to you guys, but there is basically no chance of what he says being true. I mean, I've been there. I saw those cortex-A8 spec sheets, read those reports saying we'd see them in smartphones by the end of 07. Didn't happen. Fast forward 1.5 years, and there is exactly 1 A8 phone on the market, with the iphone soon to come.

Want some better eidence? Howabout that the A9 is designed for 45nm. The way things work is that the top of the line foundries are initially used for low volume high-margin products, and only produce arm chips once the pc/server indusrty has largely moved to the next proccess. 45nm is state of the art right now. Intel is switing in 2010, and the rest of the industry is typically a year behind intel in terms of manufacturing. Just by that, we are looking at 2011 at the earliest for bulk manufacturing.

take a look at TI, one of the best gauges in the ARM industry. They just announced the OMAP 4, they're A9 platform, a year ago. The OMAP 3 was announced in 2005, and only started shipping in a real product 10 days ago! they had started sampling mid 2008 for the OMAP 3. Well, it's mid-2009 now, and they haven't even announce a timeframe for sampling.

in short, this guy is full of shit. There is no way, this industry simply does not move that fast, eben though I wish it would. I have been stung by hype before, and I hope to prevent the same fate from befalling others.

there are few things in this world I hate more than the VGA port. The fact that we still use it is a disgrace and a stain on the entire computing industry.

Yeah, what he said. Everyone who says that they can spec out a Dell box for significantly less than the Mac Pro are either lying or not doing an apples to Apples comparison. Most of the time the dell is actually more expensive, often significantly so.

The main problems with the mac pro isn't the price. It is quite cheap for what it is. The problem for me is configuration. You can only install 32gb of RAM, which seems like a lot, until you realize most competing dual-socket workstations fit 72-192gb. Also, 8gb on the single-socket model is laughably small.

Then there's the graphics card issue. there are very few options. If Apple were to give a reasonable cross selection of graphics cards, the mac pro would be a serious consideration for any business in the market for a mid-range workstation.

All these comments remind me of how people bitched when TVs started mapping most of the controls solely to the remote. I'm sure everyone who reads this will start rationalizing for why it is different, but if your honest with yourself you will realize it is the same thing. In the early days of TV remotes there was a degree of vendor lock-in, but then the ecosystem kicked in, just as it will here.

Controls on the headphones improve accessibility. There is no use arguing this. In maybe 1 year all ipods and iphones will have real voice control (a.k.a. you speak name of song, artist or playlist and it starts playing), and moreover it will be the MAIN way people control their ipods. The new ipod shuffle is the clearest sign yet that they are moving in this direction, and I'd say the only reason they didn't do full voice control yet is that they either weren't ready with the itunes software, or they couldn't find a powerful enough processor that fit into the shuffle. If you don't believe voice control can be good, please do a little research.

I will admit that the shuffle feels like a premature product, but I am definitely happy with the direction it represents.

I PLAYED THAT GAME!

to this day I still believe it is one of the most graphically beautiful games ever. Hand-painted backgrounds, smooth animation, just a complete work of art. Absolutely timeless. Its been a dozen years since this game came out, and in 12 more years I will almost certainly look back and say it is more beautiful than any of the big name shooters that came out this year.

Bring back point-and-click adventures!

Great news. You should also crack down on those bastards who make unrelated replies to the first comment just so it gets read earlier.

Crap.

This device has all the markings of something that was rushed to market. No manufacturer in their right mind would waste that much front real-estate unless the actual dimensions of the thing weren't finalized until after the screen orders had been placed. They are obviously using new cpus, which haven't been thoroughly tested yet, so they probably wanted to give themselves a wide margin of error and just make the phone bigger rather then trying to shoehorn it into the form-factor they wanted. Way to go Asus! First to market!

Ok, I know this is contreversial, but Firewire needs to die.

Yes, firewire is awesome technology. But it has been so horribly mishandled that it almost doesn't matter anymore. To borrow a phrase from El Jobso, it is a bag of hurt.

Let me paint this scenario: the year is 2007. I have a macbook with a 6-pin connector, an imac with a 6-pin connector, a dell with a 4-pin connector, and a camcorder with a 4-pin connector. To connect my camcorder to my mac, I need one kind of cable, another kind of cable to connect it to my dell, and yet another to connect my two macs together. Not too terrible. Then along comes firewire 800. Now I need 6 types of cables. Or dongles. Cause, y'know, everybody loves dongles.

This is ridiculous. A complete lack of connector standardization. Sure, The IEEE 1394 standard might be great, but with all this incompatibility it almost isn't worth it. USB is so elegant and simple. It just works. And with USB 3.0 coming out soon, the speed and volt gap will be almost completely bridged. The real loss is peer-to-peer of course, but at least I can still use my cables without having to whip out a flow chart.

I cry myself to sleep thinking about how amazing it would have been had Firewire been managed as well as USB. Standard symmetric connectors for truly ubiquitous peer-to-peer networking. Painless migration between Firewire generations.

*sniff*

I'm not even slightly surprised by this. Diablo 3 immediately captured my attention. The combat looks leaps and bounds better/ more visceral than the original. And of they can actually deliver randomized quests in a way that doesn't feel tacked on, I might never stop playing the game.

By Starcraft2? I have seen absolutely nothing there that didn't make me say "oh, so it's exactly like the original Starcraft, except in 3d and with some minor gameplay tweaks". The only thing is maybe that Raynor single player thing, but they didn't explain it well enough for me to care.

They simply can't release Starcraft 2 if that's all it's going to be. They have to find something that will make it stand out as its own game and not a phoned in sequel. Diablo 3 already has that "it" factor for me. I'm still waiting on Starcraft 2.