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Comment by thenduks | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone care about any of these points?

Wires? Yea, we still need wires for some things. Apple doesn't do stuff that's not going to be a good experience.

Memory? ...don't know, don't care how much memory is in my original iPad - I only care that it performs well - and it does.

Screen resolution? Don't know what rumors they were following, but it's completely impractical today to put a retina display on an iPad-sized screen. Wait for it.

Megapixels? ...pointless fluff marketing numbers.

Storage space? I bought a 32gb and wish I had saved the 100 bucks. All my content is on my Mac which has many hundreds of GB of storage.

These all seem deep in nitpick territory. This is a consumer device - like your TV or your microwave. Post-PC, remember?

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> Wires? Yea, we still need wires for some things. Apple doesn't do stuff that's not going to be a good experience.

Having to plug crap in and out is not a very good experience though. In fact, Apple seems to agree. See AirDrop in Lion.

> Memory? ...don't know, don't care how much memory is in my original iPad - I only care that it performs well - and it does.

Disagreement, Safari is a pain to use on more than two different page (outside the issue of not having tabs or anything simple) because it keeps reloading the fuck out of them due to lack of RAM (iPhone 4 has far less issues there, with a similar resolution)

> Megapixels? ...pointless fluff marketing numbers.

Yeppers.

> Storage space? I bought a 32gb and wish I had saved the 100 bucks. All my content is on my Mac which has many hundreds of GB of storage.

Well yeah but not everybody's is, and iPad would be even better if there never was a need to tether it to anything (but a wall outlet for charging).

This is not the case currently.

On the other hand, storage space — as screen resolution — is a technical problem: you can't find 128GB NAND chips on the market, not in the amount Apple needs anyway. That's also why the iPod Touch still has only 64GB NAND and the iPhone finds itself lagging at 32.

> Having to plug crap in and out is not a very good experience though.

I was thinking the same way you were until a year ago when I spoke to a colleague who has a Droid that got an OTA upgrade to Froyo (2.2)... what a clusterf*ck... he lost battery during the event, it torched his device, and he couldn't even re-flash the firmware, he had to take it into the Verizon store, where they simply replaced it.

All the settings and hacks he put it? Wiped. (Backup is optional in Android... my colleague hadn't done it).

This made me understand why Apple is so old-school when it comes to iPod/iPad sync and upgrades. It's not just the wireless bandwidth, it's about avoiding disastrous edge-cases that ruin customer experience.

A wired sync or upgrade can guarantee backups, power availability and reasonable bandwidth.

I'm not saying doing everything wireless is ideal, and updating your firmware is one of those things I believe are OK wired, I generally want my machine to be plugged in when I update the OS or firmware.

But syncing your contacts, your browser favorites or some music should not require that the phone be plugged into the computer. That's just annoying.

Wired sync isn't exactly a great experience with iOS, either. iTunes db different from your iPod's? Get ready for some work.

Some additional points:

On storage: But given the standard pace of technological improvement, one would expect a 128-gigabyte hard drive by now.

Has this person not followed Apple before? The same company that has not bumped the entry level iPod touch from 8GB since it was introduced in 2007? No one cares, because the entry iPod touch still sells like hotcakes to kids who use their touch for gaming.

On screen resolution: meaning the iPad 2 is already lagging behind the iPhone 4, with its much-touted retina display.

The next best tablet screen on the market (Xoom's 10.1") is 1280x800. That's only 17 ppi more than the iPad. Why would Apple push its tablet to 300+ ppi and decrease their margins when no one else has gone that far?

Agreed. And on the resolution point, as mentioned several times by daringfireball[1] and others, the only way Apple will up the density is if it's doubled. Why? Because it's the only thing that makes sense. Less than double = terrible scaling or forcing apps to supply apps with yet another resolution in mind.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/cold_water_ipad_retina_dis...

I love my iPad, but I think memory is a pretty big deal, especially if you want to do real multitasking. The numbers might not matter to the average consumer, but the experience will.

Open up several tabs in your browser and look at the memory that's being consumed, then tell me you won't care about 256MB vs 1GB of memory on a tablet that most people are going to use to surf the internet.

Not having to constantly reload pages was probably the most eye-opening thing for me using the XOOM (tabbed) browser versus the Browser in my original iPad.

Memory is conspicuously absent from the specs page (http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/)

Are you saying that connecting a device to a computer to sync is a better experience than automatically syncing OTA? And you like tabs reloading if you leave the page?

Nitpicks are important. Good enough is the enemy of excellence.

I'm saying that when they can make those things a good experience, they do. They add memory when they can get it in sufficient supply and it doesn't increase the price too much. They add OTA such-and-such as they have appropriate methods of doing it that don't negatively affect the customer.

Copy/paste is a great example. They didn't have a decent implementation, so they just sat on it and released it when it was ready. I think, when it comes to consumer electronics, this is exactly the right approach.

Agree with the above points, especially the memory. You might think the memory is adequate until you have more of it, but once you do, you will wonder how you lived with less.

That is what happened when I upgraded from my iPhone 3G to my iPhone 4. Months later, I'm still getting over the difference.

Of course. I definitely agree memory is good. All I'm trying to say is that Apple's typical consumer customer doesn't care about the numbers. They need enough memory to have a good experience, Apple attempts to supply that experience without sacrificing other areas (such as price, battery life, or availability).

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