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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

I mean… they did, and called it an iPad. And they’ve sold 350 million of them so far, so it seems like it was a decent idea.

But that was not "revolutionary new", there were tablets previously.

How popular were tablets before the iPad?

It depends on how long before you look. In 1990s they were fairly popular as the smaller devices were expensive and small screens were hard on the users and custom development was not as easy, so field data entry was often with some b&w tablet, often connected to a portable printer and other accessories.

Technically yes, but in practice no. The previous products were extremely expensive, keyboard-wielding niche products which were extremely hard to come by. The iPad was the first viable commercial product, with multitouch, Wi-Fi, and a friendly OS. I bought one right after release in 2010, at the time Android was in its infancy, most people had a flip phone and I’d never actually seen a tablet in any form before (other than the iPod touch a few months earlier). It was mind blowing.

Also, revolutionary != new. Apple rarely is the first to enter a new market.

While not multitouch, the Nokia N770/N900 was a thing.

I mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900#/media/File:Nokia_N... is absolutely nothing like https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w72kt0kbgmY/maxresdefault.jpg other than the fact that they both have screens.

If you wanted to compare the N900 to an iPhone, that might be a slightly more apt comparison, but at the end of the day, the iPhone and iPad completely changed what "phones" and "tablets" look like. Their predecessors and successors are extremely different devices and perform different functions.

They do have different form factors, but do similar functions.

To qoute Wikipedia: "The N900 functions as a mobile Internet device, and includes email, web browsing and access to online services, a 5-megapixel digital camera for still or video photography, a portable media player for music and video, calculator, games console and word processor, SMS, as well as mobile telephony using either a mobile network or VoIP via Internet (mobile or Wi-Fi)."

I mean, yeah that's what the first iPhone might be described as. Before the release of the App Store. Unfortunately for the N900, it was released by the time the 3GS was out.

It has a resistive touch screen, which massively hampers what you can do on the device. This precludes it from any real gaming, or interactivity. By the time the N900 came out, the Apple App Store had 100k apps and 2 billion downloads. That's two magnitudes larger than the number of apps Maemo had in total.

It's not a matter of "a different form factor" it's more that the N900 is a completely different class of device, it fundamentally can't compete with the iPhone and its massive (even at the time) ecosystem.

If you were to squint with glasses of a completely different prescription to yours, sure, you can say they "do similar functions", but let's be honest with ourselves. The N900 was too little too late. It was released at a point in time when capacitive, glass touchscreens with high interactivity games and apps are what was the new norm.

I was one of the people who made fun of the iPad when it was announced, and I am grown-up enough to admit that I was 100% wrong. I made fun of it for being a "wannabe laptop", and at some level I still kind of think that, but I didn't consider that people might not want/need all the features of a laptop all the time. I didn't see the appeal of "an iPod touch with a bigger screen" because I couldn't see through the eyes of a non-geek.

I don't have an iPad, but I do have a Kindle Fire HD10, and I have to begrudgingly admit that I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

And then they sold the keyboard separately for people who used the ipad as more than a YouTube machine.

Interestingly, they actually are:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-developing-fol...

I know it is the frequency illusion, but 2022 seems to ve the year that satire keeps coming true.

This has already existed for a few years in the PC world. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkpad-x1-fold

It's a weird and interesting thing to see; if others do it, it's a weird nice product for a handful of people, but once Apple does it it becomes mainstream and widely adopted.

Counterpoint though, it didn't work out for Apple's touch bar.

How about Mactini?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q

Realistic except for the manual. You're just supposed to find them on your own nowadays.

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