iPlod

Back in the 90s, i worked at an experimental theater company in san francisco called 'the george coates performance works.' the company was headed by none other than george coates, a classically trained actor, who had done quite a bit of acid and decided he'd take theater to new heights. along the way, he'd made friends with many notables. ken kesey and various silicon valley geniuses -- most notably, steve jobs. this was back in the day when the majority of people running silicon valley companies had once done drugs and followed 'the airtight garage' and 'heavy metal' and listened to krautrock.

the shows incorporated live acting, dancing, projected sets onto a screen that had a patented ratio of dots per inch. this allowed the audience to see through the screen, so that the actors behind it would appear to be interacting with whatever images were on the screen. george eventually sold this patent. if you ever wondered where all the buses with giant ads, from top to bottom came from, it was this patent.

now, we threw all sorts of projections on that screen, there were film projections, video projections and computer animated projections. fun stuff. also of note, is that all the projections were in 3-d, a full 15 years before the 3-d film trend has hit theaters.

we received most of our hardware as donations from whoever george new. one day; a new silicon graphics monster would arrive, another; a new mac, and another; a sparcstation. i remember the first time i laid eyes on a quadra 840av. wow, what a machine.

anyway, at one point, steve jobs made a most interesting donation. he donated prototypes of a computer that apple fully developed, but would never bring to market. the computer was a powerbook 5300, without a screen, just a pen to write stuff on the screen, like a newton. it had a 3.5" floppy drive, ethernet and other stuff, like any powerbook would. it was the world's first tablet computer. the operating system was a hybrid of os 7.5 and the newton os. it functioned like a mac, but had handwriting recognition, so you could run any mac application.

apple knew they were way ahead of their time and could never market it, so they gave them to george in order for him to make them into something. the only thing he did with them was stick them in actor's hands and tell them to run around with them and touch the screen every once in a while. i remember them often being dropped. i doubt any of them even work now.

this is a true story. don't believe me? ask adam savage, another ex-coates employee and great guy.

now, what is the point of this post?

the ipad is a $500 iphone on steroids. it doesn't run osx, not even a hybrid, but an os made for a cell phone and mp3 player and yet wants to parade itself as the real deal. os x is a mature operating system, with about 40 years(if you count all the unix stuff) of development done on it. it works, well. it is stable and multi-threaded. presently, the iphone os can only run one application at a time. push notifications have been hobbled by apple. one can only load apple sanctioned software onto it, for fear of someone else's building any app that competes with their own. it's a toy operating system. i can't believe they made the decision to run the iphone/itouch os on it. this was obviously a decision made in the marketing department in steve's absence. this decision will forever hinder this product.

apple has hastily announced plans to upgrade the os to 4.0. so what? how long will it take for the iphone os to catch up?

then there's connectivity. what, it has a single wired interface? no usb ports? no firewire? why would i spend money on this? oh yeah, and it costs $700 for the 64gb non-3g model? honey, please! for about $300, i can buy a netbook and install os x on it and have a fully functioning operating system that runs photoshop and has a real fucking keyboard and can connect shit to it.

apple has apparently sold 300,000 of them already and declared it a success. this only points out that there are 300,000 fanboys and girls who have at least $500 in their wallets to hand over to their favorite company, which they would do anyway. i'm not saying it won't take off and won't make apple a bazillion dollars, but i won't shell out money for any product i know in my heart is inferior.

link | rss | share | posted: 2010-04-06 15:13:54