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[Mike Starr: Apple's DRM philosophy, "training wheels welded on"
philosophy, and
> obscene prices in comparison to other manufacturer's comparable products]
[Gene Kim-Eng: The poison pill for me is an OS manufacturer telling me
what I can and
cannot install and even worse, giving itself the power to uninstall
something I choose to install.
[Robert Lauriston: in many fundamental ways the [iPad] platform is evil.
DRM is iOS's first
principle, you can't mount a drive or save a file attachment, there's no
character-level cursor control, etc. Evil.]
It's not evil, it's just business. Greedy business, but business no less. I
consider myself a technical user, and I enjoy having the freedom to do what
I want with "my" technology. But i chose the simplicity of the iPhone/iPad
purely because it provides a consistent interface that enables me to get
more done in other areas of my life that don't revolve around technology.
Contrast that to the myriad of ways you "can" do things on an Android
device, and possiblly even more, depending on which manufacturer's take of
the Android OS your stuck with, and you find yourself in an endless cycle
of finding new ways to do things, rather than just doing the darn thing in
the first place. Android's text selection UI is just horrible, compared to
iOS' intuitive method.
While DRM and big brother control over your use of a device is the iOS way,
there are benefits to forcing applications into individual sandbox file
systems. So while transferring files between applications or
different devices is not a free-for-all, the iPad suits at least 85%
of what the general user wants: Email, Web browsing, E-book reading, Media,
Note taking, Video Calling, and Games...
I haven't yet found the best apps for writing and deploying code, I
think I paid
too much money for music notation software (that I don't use, for non-intuitive
and non-Apple UI reasons I won't go into), but the iPad has excellent niche
apps for recording and performing music, as Robert mentioned in earlier
posts.
That said, I might have jumped to the Windows Surface tablet to test, had it
been available, before buying an iPad. I don't like how every manufacture
decides that tablets are single-user devices. Surface is a full computer in
a tablet. I use Windows at work, and I've owned two Tablet PCs in the
last 8 years. Having a compatible computer would make my life so much
easier, especially if it also allowed touch screen input. My only complaints
in the past were the tablet's short battery life, and their weight, which
made them impractical for portable use. The Surface users I know are quite
happy with their find.
I think Apple really missed the boat by not making versions of the MacBook
Air to be convertible touch screen computers.
-Tony
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