Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The iPad is a computer that, as far as my mom is concerned, you never have to boot, don't have to think about the operating system on, don't require peripherals for, can stick in your purse, can tap 3-4 times to get install any of 10's of thousands of applications, can tap 3-4 times to install any of thousands of movies and TV shows on, and costs half of what a cheap laptop cost only recently.

Can you inform me of the obvious potential of "Color" that I'm missing? Because I also seriously don't get it. And: I like Instagram. But I don't think it's the future or anything.

(Yes. They would have dodged this Daring Fireball post if Adam Lisagor had done a video for them.)

View on HN

It took me over a year before I "got" twitter. Now it would be hard to see how I could replace it - tracking outages, ongoing event updates, what my friends are up to, revolutions in Egypt - Heck, our company's public feed is actually the best way for me to track what's happening at our company than our internal mailing lists.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether there's any money in it. Everyone I know uses AIM - but I don't know if AOL has ever been able to monetize that.

Regarding Color - I'll give it a bit of time, and see what I think after I go to an event with groups of friends, and see what happens when we (and others) are taking pictures.

"Sounds like the nerd response to Twitter" is a pretty compelling restatement of the parent's point. Thanks.

This is a fair point, and one I hadn't considered. Bravo!

But, getting Twitter doesn't mean Twitter pre-any-users-at-all was worth investing $41m at a possible $80m valuation. It might still not be, as it has no business plan to speak of.

I guess I'm naive, but I usually apply the "can (Facebook|Google|Big Company of the Decade) copy this quickly?" as a measure for the value of a service, but then again, it doesn't seem to apply for Place checkins (neither Facebook nor Google seem to have made too much traction against FourSquare) nor GroupOn. I guess that's why I'm not an investor :)

I think is spot on.

My children inherit my old iphones (no sims) and I'm going to set them up - will be interesting to see the photostreams from round my house and the places we go... (and if you are wondering I'm from the Bill Joy school of privacy - there isn't any and I learn to live with it)

I can see it being quite cool for meeting people too - if you are in a space and someone else is making pictures there.

I can also see the potential for hidden artworks/performance

I hope it does take off - it's a new kind of thing and really does have the power to transform our physical spaces

> The iPad is a computer that, as far as my mom is concerned...

Preaching to the choir, man. iPad is amazing, especially for mom.

But the point stands: nerds, especially as a group, have no idea what people want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com