My company has all kinds of holes in their backup program and work is lost actually more often than you'd expect. Do your friends who are "smart enough to back up all the important stuff" pay for virus software monthly? Do they watch soccer web streams? Most average people I know have all kinds of holes in their backup programs - including myself - I have to connect to an external drive and I don't do it regularly enough.
my company pays an external backup company to make a backup on tape of the entire system every single night. it's an American company with headquarters in NJ btw. we've never had any serious problems. the only reason we needed access to the backups in my time was when we screwed something up ourselves. you don't need to pay for good virus/firewall software. this one here for example is excellent: http://www.comodo.com/ it includes everything you need to protect your PC properly, for free. the firewall is much better than the pre-installed Windows firewall. when I use Windows, which is very rarely nowadays, that's what I use. and the main reason is when I want to watch football on the net since a lot of that p2p software only works on Windows. and it's the firewall, not the anti-virus, which prevents all the nasty stuff from getting even a foothold on my PC. as for having an external HD, that's a smart thing to do anyway. and it's not as if they cost much, you can get a 1TB HD from £65 over here, which gives you more space than you'll ever likely going to need.
This is all very interesting! On another note, I was on vacation in Costa Rica last week. Rather often I wished I had something like an iPad, I ended up having both my laptop (overkill for websurfing) or having to use my iPhone (which is great on the go but not so great for sitting in a loungechair looking at the ocean and wanting to read about soccer). Can't wait to get one - something in between sounds great.
Just adding to the discussion on the topic that ViscaBarca raised (not that I think it will change any minds but there's also interesting discussions in the comments): Are Macs Really Cheaper to Manage than PCs? And there is unsubstantiated speculation going on that Apple is being inundated with iPad pre-orders and may sell out of the first batch in a week or so.
I pre-ordered mine this morning, my wife is already planning on what she wants to do with it. Not sure how to break it to her that it's mine
lol I preordered mine yesterday. Opted to have it delivered instead of pick up in store, even though the nearest Apple store is a block away from me (lots of good games are on April 3rd, and I live in NY where people love lining up at ridiculous times). Went with the 64GB wifi + case + dock
I'm extremelly jealous. I'm hoping the increased cellular competition over here leads to some good subsidizing deals. An iPhone over here costs a dollar with a two year contract. So I'm hoping for some type of rebate with a data plan on a 3G iPad.
Got a couple of friends who picked up an iPad today, including one who isn't an Apple person at all but was absolutely blown away by the thing. He said it was way faster than expected. Might have to make a trip over to check it out this weekend.
I stopped by the Apple store today to check it out. They had about two dozen units for customers to try. I thought typing on it was quite nice, and got to try an iBook reader for the first time. The only bad thing I could say about it, was once I made a mistake typing an URL and had trouble selecting the spot to delete the extra character. After looking at the iPad I hoped across the street to Borders Books to see the Sony eReader. With it limited functionality that will not be any competition. I'd like to try a Kindle some time, to see how it compares. I don't think the iPad is over hyped at all. It really is a new category of computer that will be very common in a few years.
Got my iPad this morning and have been playing with it on and off all day. There are some really nice apps that have already been created for it, I can only imagine what people will be doing in a few months/years. My wife really likes it as well, we bought a bunch of ebooks today and I've already started reading one. I've also uploaded some comics and they look great on the screen. ABC's video player app is awesome. Watched a couple episodes of Modern Family on it and the picture quality was great. Netflix's app is also nicely done. So far I'm really impressed with it and am glad that I got it.
Many folks decided to buy an iPad - Good for Apple! Analyst Estimates 600,000-700,000 iPads Sold on Launch Day http://www.macrumors.com/ Saturday April 03, 2010 11:06 PM EST Eric Slivka The Loop reports that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has released a report estimating first-day iPad sales in the range of 600,000-700,000, well above his pre-launch estimates of 200,000-300,000.
My iPad was delivered by the time I got back from the Manutd-Chelsea game, and apparently the UPS guy had a huge stack of these to deliver to my building. I have to say I am very impressed with the device so far. The screen is beautiful, the battery life is every bit as great as advertised, and overall it runs very fast, and is very responsive. I'm still in the process of getting apps and uploading my media to it, so there is a lot more to discover today. I've heard of calibre to convert pdfs into epub files that can be loaded onto iBooks, and I found some Handbrake settings to convert video files, now I'm just waiting on a comic book app (haven't read comics in years, but now seems like a good time to get back into it). Panefly looks like the best comic app but its not out yet. Apps I am really impressed with: BBC News Bloomberg ABC Player USA Today NPR Time Magazine Plants vs Zombies HD Weather Channel + Weather Bug It's also much easier to bitch in matchday threads on the couch . Right now I have it on the dock at my desktop (which is multimonitor), and still have a use for it. I'll probably pick up a remote desktop app in the near future, and hopefully the Sling app is of high quality as it would be an ideal app to have while traveling.
What I think is funny is that pundits are saying on the one hand it sucks because it's not as functional as a laptop and on the other hand it's going to cannibalize all the macbook sales.
The key thing to remember is that even if the product itself isn't revolutionary, Apple has a way of taking over the market for something through a combination of quality UI, content deals, and simply marketing the crap out of their product. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player out there, nor was the iPhone the first touchscreen cell phone. But that's totally missing the point of how they got out in front. Similarly, the iPad isn't the first tablet, not by a longshot. But it's certainly going to be the first one that the majority of people out there are going to be exposed to, and the first they'll really want to use on a daily basis.
iPad may not have more functionality than a netbook, but what it does do, it does far better. Most of the detractors I've come across seem to have trouble understanding the concept of user experience. Why do people own game consoles? You can do more on a computer, and game with more options, at higher resolutions and frame rates on a computer, but sitting at your desk with a keyboard and mouse is not the same as relaxing on your couch in front of your big screen TV.
I can't believe the battery life on this thing. It's at 28% and I've used the hell out of the last two days.
That's a pretty good analogy. I would say, though, that gaming consoles have probably passed computers in terms of their quality and appeal-- now that pretty much every gaming console is hooked up to the internet, desktop computer gaming is being left behind (although there are some genres of games that still demand keyboard and mouse). It will be interesting to see how many current desktop computer functions are "replaced" by tablets.
I'm using ComicBookLover's iPhone app to read comic I upload to the iPad for now. They'll be releasing an iPad version of it soon. If you're going to be buying comics through the iPad then Marvel has a nice app that's out already, and IDW also has an iPad app that's been released.
I've noticed that with Apple detractors in general to be honest. I know computers, but I don't want to spend my time trying to figure out what this and this is on Windows. Fair play if one likes a certain OS, but I'd like to be able to use my computer without requiring alcohol to use it.
Yeah, it's the new thing, but if i'm a library, i'm seeing all this talk about the new electronic readers and am semi-scared. A few years from now, we could be looking at books where newspapers are now. The iPad (and similar) seem to be the next step from laptops, especially since they'll have built-in 3G access. If someone has: 1) Slingbox 2) Reader (iPad, Kindle) 3) Smartphone What else do they need? It seems like the downfall of phone internet is the inability for various features, but if the site has an app, problem solved. There'd be no reason to buy newspapers or books, because it's all on the screen. There'd be no reason to watch TV because your Slingbox is hooked up to your reader or smartphone, unless you want super quality (HD, 3D), but who's to say that there won't be a 3D iPad some day? Now, God help us if the screen fails or we lose power.
Big day in tech and tablets: Apple announce the iPhone OS 4.0 sneak peek will be on Thursday Microsoft announce their own special event on the 12th - no confirmation on what they will be showing And we got a cheeky new HP Slate video [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDalRBjyJo&feature=player_embedded"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDalRBjyJo&feature=player_embedded[/ame] It looks like it will be a pretty slick device, but ultimately it will fail as its still a Windows based tablet. The OS and applications on a tablet really need to be built up from scratch specifically for the device. I'm surprised HP didn't go with Android, as an Android tablet would seem like a true competitor.
Yes, they're about due but I'd be very surprised to see them mention it on Thursday considering the event is supposed to talk about software. I'm expecting to see the new iPhone announced ate WWDC in early June, same thing they did with the 3GS announcement.