iPad is Here. Result? Disappointment

January 28, 2010, 8:54 pm

I'm a fan of a lot of Apple's hardware. If I hadn't just gotten a PC, I'd still have my iMac. I kept it for a little over a year which, for a geek like me, is a pretty long lifespan for a computer. Aside from a dead hard drive (Western Digital's fault, not Apple's) I never had any problems with it.

I, like many millions of others out there, were pretty excited to hear about Apple's new tablet device. I'm not sure what I was really hoping for... but my hopes were high. Maybe too high. The device that they unveiled looked pretty much exactly like what I figured it'd look like. I expected the hardware to be not much more than a large iPod Touch, and that's what it is, but I didn't expect the software and features to be so bad.

I'm not going to go in to a huge multi-page rant. If you want to read about everything that's generally accepted as "wrong" with the device, 5 of the top 10 stories on digg.com right now are all about what people hate about the device. I will list a few though.

First is the DRM. I hate DRM, and EVERYTHING on the device is DRMed. Every application, the browser and its lack of plug-ins (Flash, WTF), everything. This means that no one can write apps for the device unless they're accepted in to Apple's App store. I was hoping for a stripped down OSX, not a beefed up phone OS. Sure it can run all of the existing iPhone apps, but those apps are designed for a panel with 1/4 the resolution of the iPad. What's Apple's solution? Upscale them so they look like crap. Yeah, great idea.

Next turn-off for me has to be the price. $500 for the cheapest model - which gets you 16MB of internal storage. In true Apple fashion they haven't included any type of SD card slot, so that can't even be expanded. They want you to load all of your audio, pictures, videos, etc on this device, yet you have to pay almost $900 for the one with 64MB of internal storage. Even then that's still not a lot, and they use flash and not SSD, so it's not like throwing 128MB or 256MB in a $500 device would break Apple's bank.

Third and final deal breaker has to be the inability of the device to multitask. I can multitask on my phone, and IMO that's not even really required. On something that's supposed to replace a netbook for casual browsing, emailing, music listening, photo displays, video viewing (no HDMI out WTF) etc. it's not just a nicety - it's REQUIRED. I think part of this is due to the 1Ghz Apple CPU in the device, which probably isn't any more powerful than a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU that comes in the Google Nexus cell phone.

I feel pretty bad for the device. Apple could have come out with something really great here. They certainly had the hype. Instead, it seems like the general consensus is "Meh... not really worth it." Personally I'll keep my $300 netbook with its 160GB HDD, video out, SD card reader, ExpressCard slot, and ability to do whatever else I want it to do... including type on it without it sliding off my lap.

Brian Mecham

April 22, 2010, 6:06 pm

Jason, I didn't see a contact page or email address on your account. My message is in regards to your article "Installation of Windows XP on an ASUS Eee PC" ( http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php ) which I found very useful. I found an easy way to make this bootable from USB Flash drive. You may want to consider adding to your tutorial to show people how to install Windows from a USB Flash drive. (I found a very simple way) Thank you for this tutorial. Awesome! I just finished doing this on my new Asus 1001p netbook, after removing Windows 7 Starter (which consumed over 500MB of the 1Gig of memory.) I decided to opt for installing Windows XP via a USB Flash drive. After following various complicated tutorials (which never did fully work for me) I found a very simple way to take the resulting Windows install files created by nLite and create a bootable Flash drive: WinToFlash ( http://wintoflash.com ). With WinToFlash all you need to have is a Folder on your PC containing all the Windows install files. This could be the folder/files created by nLite or by simply copying all the files from your Win XP install disc to a folder on your PC. Then you just open WinToFlash, tell it where you Windows install files directory is, then tell it what letter your Flash drive is (i.e. J: ). It does the rest for you. SIMPLE :) Once it's done boot from the flash drive on your netbook (or PC you want to install this copy of Windows on). When I first tried this I was getting bsod (blue screen of death) errors when Windows setup was starting. After doing some research online I decided it might be due to some corrupt files (the XP disc I used was too scratched up)... so I located another disc and went through the nLite process again (was easy because it saved my previous settings)... then did the WinToFlash process again. This time Windows XP installed without a problem from my USB Flash drive! The best thing about this is: - My Windows install was only 270MB (with all Asus 1001p driver integrated and non-essential windows XP stuff removed thanks to your tutorial) - Bootup to XP is fast (less than 30 seconds) - Memory usage is at less than 200 MB! :) even after installing a bunch of programs (disabled non-essential startup processes). Thanks. Brian Mecham. brmecham@gmail.com