[geeks] iPad - a 'Miss' for me I'm afraid

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 11:26:49AM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:

>The fact remains they have decided to leave Atom support in OS X so 
>it's gotta be there for a reason.

My guess is that it was removed for two reasons. The first was to fuel the
Atom based tablet rumors and the second was as a trial ballon to see how
many people suddenly went out and bought Macbook Air models after
seeing the handwriting on the wall as it were. 

Netbooks fill an important niche for Apple. They allow Apple to sell their
high priced units at a high price, and still fill the need at zero cost
to Apple. 

Obivously I can't speak for every netbook user running MacOS, but from my
experience, most of the users would buy one, and add non Apple memory and an
upgrade hard drive (or NVRAM card).

I expect that very few people who buy the current units do so on their own,
most either buy them with the configuration they keep or have their Apple 
dealer do the installation.

Apple also does not have to deal with the performance complaints of netbook
users. One of the big differences between your usual single core atom 
netbook and a Macbook Air, etc is the weak CPU and poor graphics performance
of the netbook. 

I'm happy with mine because I understand the limitations of the unit, but
it is impossible to watch a 720p (or higher resolution) video on it, and
the local DTV broadcasts only work (in Windows, not MacOS at all) with VLC
and only because they all are 520p. 

The included Windows DTV software is too slow, and that would also make 
it impossible to display ATSC (US) signals which are much higher resolution
or DVB broadcasts in most of the world because they are also too high
resolution.

I'm sure in the end Steve Jobs would rather sell you a $1000 MacBook Air and
be happy, than sell you a $500 netbook and complain all the time. That's also
why the price point and features of the iPad, it's not a MacBook Air and no
one is going to expect it to be one. 

Since it is an ARM processor, I wonder how long it will be before there is 
an UBUNTU port for it. 

Speaking of ARM processors, what's wrong with it? It's not an Atom, but
that's the whole idea. If you were to take a 1.6gHz Atom, underclock it
to equal the performance of a 1gHz ARM, you probably would be able to run
it for 12 hours on a set of batteries and without a fan. The problem would
be all those "overclock your ATOM" articles on the internet which would 
result in a lot of toasted units. 

This reminds me of a discussion I had with someone who used to work for IBM
and is a PhD level expert in multithreading, processor useage, etc. with
a background as a component level hardware tech.

You really could get a heck of a lot more out of a PS/3 than what Sony
allows, because they force game developers to keep it at 85% or less
CPU useage. The problem is that if you would crank it up to 100% useage 
for long periods of time, it would last a month or two due to the unanticipated
heat, and crash often due to noise caused by unanticipated interactions
between the components.

The same with the iPad, by keeping it slow and low power/function, it
will stay cool and reliable. I'd bet that within a month of a simple to
install Linux distro for it hitting the net, people will start
complaining about the poor battery life, strange errors, and hardware
failures.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.