What's Been and What's Ben

I am sure you all know about the major address going on today. Not the state of the union from POTUS. This is from god or Steve Jobs as some call him. Apple just announced the iPad. It is a giant Ipod touch. Little has been so hyped since the segway came along to replace that messy walking thing. This sums it up: gizmodo’s 8 things that suck about the iPad.

It seems really cool and I will likely buy one or something like it. I am different from many other Apple users: I have no brand loyalty to Apple. I use apple for what I find useful. KAUST gave me an iPod touch as a signing bonus two years ago. I gave that one to my sister when I left for The Kingdom. I got a bigger one in Dubai because it was cheap and I find them to be an awesome tool. They make better hardware for some things than any other company. Nothing special. Steve Jobs is not actually god. He is a harsh task-master that has given Apple engineers a higher suicide rate than MIT.

I like the cheap 3G plan of $15 a month for 250GM a month or $30 a month for unlimited access from the Ipad. It uses an Apple A4 processor (a ARM processor with integrated GPU). The keyboard thing seems cool. $500 dollars as a base price for 16GB of storage. $100 extra for 32GB and $200 extra for 64GB. $130 extra for 3G. No camera.

Apple does some things I don’t like. They are into an ultra-proprietary format that only works with iTunes. I find it troubling that people worship the false god of a computer company that makes a good 30% margin on everything they sell. They also aim for the lowest common denominator with a user interface that I do at least appreciate I will still be able to use after having a few strokes.

The iPod is a nice palm pilot. It is nothing new. I had one in high school that would play music from an SD card and I could play games, read books (I read the 9/11 report on it), organize my life, and use it as a flashlight. My palm pilot even used a processor from the same line, ARM. It had the same general user interface with pages of lists of icons with applications (called apps in street lingo). The iPad beat Google Chrome OS to the punch.

250,000,000 iPods sold to date with 6,799,082,702 people alive.

Of course I will not go into the even worse working conditions experienced in the Chinese Foxconn Corp. factories to keep this product secret for months so that the spectacle would be grander and Steve Jobs would feel like a real man.