Different orientations are useful

In the iPad's mail app, for example, both orientations keep the email page a comfortable width, the difference being that in landscape mode you get to see your inbox down the left hand side whereas in portrait there's a button near the top that shows the inbox as a pop up.

Although the iPad would do you fine at the minute, with one of its four hardware switches being dedicated to disabling any device rotation features, I think the next OS update is rumoured to demote that switch to being 'mute' like on the iPhone (a stupid duplication of something you can already achieve with the volume button in my opinion, but what do I know?). Though it'll still be there as a software setting if the iPhone is the model.

Funny kind of proprietary

Ummm, that is if Apple do release the specifications as promised, obviously. I'd be curious to know why they rolled their own.

At a guess

Because the student-targetted model, and the one within the price ranges of the devices in this group test (with student discount, anyway), is the MacBook and that doesn't have the 15-ish" screen that would be required to match the criteria for this group test.

The MacBook Pro has a 15" option, but it's well outside of the price range being considered.

Objective-J may be a sign of things to come?

It's not the language you want, but that's not the point I'm making — Objective-J, part of the Cappuccino framework, is in many ways a different language from Javascript but is compiled to Javascript by a Javascript-based compiler for the purposes of the browser. Have a go with 280 Slides to see it in action.

As an Objective-C offshoot, it's nothing like what you want but I'm sure it's not the only thing taking some language that someone prefers and turning it into pure Javascript just for the purposes of the browser?

By porting Chinatown Wars

You know, the DS game that was originally designed to meet Nintendo's strict limits on sex, drugs and violence. Since it was released on the iPod and iPhone months ago, it's clearly acceptable.

And there remain no limits on the Mac side, obviously.

They'd probably port because...

... Mac users are, on average, more affluent than Windows users and Mac users are much more likely to want entertainment products, owing in part to its near absence from the corporate world.

Valve's recent port of Portal (also quite dusty) received 1.5 million downloads in the first week, though it was free. No doubt whatever back-end tools DMA used, which were multiplatform even at the time, have facilitated an OS X port for a negligible cost and they're hoping to generate a reasonable amount of new revenue without doing any substantial work while also dipping their toe in the Mac gaming waters.

Suggest you read e.g. the page you're currently on

The argument that people don't shout when Apple do things appears not to stand up to scrutiny.

HMRC is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (ie, the tax man)

So the subtext to the article is "aren't the public bodies inefficiently run?" and/or "aren't they wasting our taxpayer pounds by sticking to the technology of 1994?". You know, plus people tend to get angry about issues surrounding the efficiency of the collection of taxes generally...

I think you've missed the point

Apple said they weren't counting upgrade purchases. So the number of deactivations is probably the published number of new activations subtracted from the unpublished number of all activations.

Moving from an iPhone 3 to an iPhone 4 counts as an upgrade.

Maybe you could...

... take advantage of the 28 days of statutory paid holiday a year we get in the UK versus the 0 they get in the US to obtain the extra £20 that seems to be your sticking point?

Giving Apple the absolute strongest benefit of the doubt, for the purposes of discussion, I'll guess that the padding is insurance against exchange rate variations over the coming year given that part of Apple's product launch strategy is not to change prices for the duration of that iteration of the product.

It seems to vary from state to state

Presumably when states set their own sales tax they also set the rules covering the mechanisms by which those taxes are collected. Per Amazon:

"The amount of tax charged depends upon many factors, including the identity of the seller, the type of item purchased, and the destination of the shipment. [...] Items sold by Amazon.com LLC, or its subsidiaries, and shipped to destinations in the states of Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota, or Washington are subject to tax."

So it sounds like Kansas, Kentucky, et seq, all impose the local sales tax irrespective but the other 45 states quite probably don't.

@JaitcH

Your argument is:

• the term Apple have used is in the public domain;

• by using it, Apple are trying to steal someone else's IP.

Do you want to rethink that?

@Cantab

I think the difference is that when you're streaming video latency isn't really a problem and somebody has already done a lot of work in advance to compress the stream. To view your MBP through an AppleTV you'd probably need a real time encoder, likely swallowing a large portion of your processing resources, and still have to watch everything a few seconds behind. Or, I guess, at a very low frame rate if a trivial encoder was used.

The amount of bandwidth required for uncompressed video is one of the reasons that monitors are almost the only thing left using a task-specific connector to the computer, rather than just moving to USB.

@Tathan Jones

I think it's ended up being £99. Which is above the amount that $99 would convert to, but I've made no calculations for tax so probably isn't all that bad.

That said, it sounded like you could stream content only from iTunes, at 99 cents (probably 59p ala the app store?) a pop, so that's me lost as a customer. If it was iTunes + iPlayer, 4OD, etc then I'd probably buy and occasionally rent a film to Apple's benefit.

It seems to take 720p resolution photos

My guess: apps uploaded to the App Store contain a list of flags that dictate which bits of hardware they require to work. One such flag is 'device has a stills camera', another is 'device has a movie camera'. There is no 'device has any camera whatsoever', so if the iPod Touch had become the first iOS device with a movie camera but not a stills camera then Apple would have pushed developers of apps that just need a camera preview (eg, those augmented reality apps that bloggers love) into an extremely tenuous position.

I guess it may also be to do with lower level software implementation issues, especially given that Apple seem to have a lot of difficulty finishing versions of iOS nowadays. There was a prominent section of the keynote dedicated essentially to "we are still going to update the iPad's version of the OS at some point, honest".

LCD tablets don't cut it for eBooks

Subjective, of course, but that LCD screens are unreadable in direct sunlight and really very bright when in low light (like, you know, when in bed) has made the iPad quite useless as an eBook reader for me, even with speedy PDF rendering and a surplus of other book sources (in terms of iBooks plus the Kindle app and all the other usual Android/iOS suspects). The AMOLED on my Nexus One was better in the latter case when I switched from black on white to white on black given that OLED black is really black, but that felt like a really odd way to read. And I'm a person that's grown up with computers.

I've a Kindle scheduled to arrive in the next few days, I'm hoping eInk does the trick.

Maybe they're following (non-Android) Google conventions?

In the sense that calling it a beta seems just to mean that users should expect that features may be added or radically altered without a great deal of notice, rather than that the quality of the code is lacking. The keyboard itself sounds like a good idea, I'm going to give it a try.

That said, given the article's willingness to repeat the 35 second PR froth, it'd be wrong to overlook that the same phrase was typed in less than 22 seconds on a standard multitouch keyboard in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVXyVzLjKag . The specific OS running the generic multitouch keyboard doesn't matter.

When did Steve say that?

Sounds like a straw man argument to me.

The advertising often contrasts the amount of malware on OS X to the amount of malware on Windows to make an argument that a consumer is safer on Mac, but that's objectively true. It doesn't matter why, but there is substantially less.

I upvoted you, but...

... on reflection, where's the evidence that QuickTime suffers security problems any more often than Acrobat, Internet Explorer, etc? That is, assuming you're willing to agree that all security flaws that allow control over a machine are equal — I'm not aware of any other mainstream product shipping with a security hole engineered into it deliberately but left in only accidentally.

Every single youtube video is already encoded in H.264

And, regardless of what their other arms say, Google has already embraced H.264 by pushing an operating system onto millions of phone handsets that can utilise a hardware decoder for H.264 video. Indeed, all the manufacturers are pumping out millions upon millions of devices with H.264 hardware support every year, what with it not just being the only thing supported by all current mobile phones but also being the standard codec for most HDTV, including BluRay.

Current number of hardware solutions for WebM? Zero.

So — does youtube want to play on mobile phones, video game consoles, set top boxes and, potentially, smart DVD and BluRay players or not?

The free licence for H.264 means that Google's WebM play already worked. Google won. We all benefit.

Would be more useful than the OS X Dashboard

That being a feature to file alongside the transparent menu bar under keynote material that added no value to anything. And is it because I have so many Apple devices that I can see what a usability joke CoverFlow is?

Anyway, I'm hoping for something interesting in the realm of the Apple TV as it strikes me that if Apple hadn't done something interesting with the tablet computer and with the mobile phone then probably nobody else was going to.

@dogged: It's the user interface, stupid

(NB: a Clinton reference, rather than a personal attack)

When the iPod came out, most of the other players were aping the CD player interface. You got a line or two of display and digital buttons to move back and forth between tracks and to proceed through playlist selection. In summary: navigation was really hard with, most of the time, you having no overview of what you're scrolling through and taking forever to get from one end to the other.

The original iPod did two things very right: the scroll wheel (which gives you fantastic control over moving through a list) and a big screen that shows quite a lot of the list you're selecting from. The other players took years to catch up, even the original Zune had digital buttons disguised to look a bit like a scroll wheel to unsuspecting customers in a brilliant move of self sabotage. And by the time they'd caught up, Apple had become the first company to put together a compelling music shop front. And by the time everyone had caught up with that, the app revolution had come along and Apple had used the iPhone as a stealthy way to reinvent the iPod interface.

One of the interesting things to come out of one of the Microsoft antitrust cases was a record of internal emails from somewhere around 2003 in which the guys in Redmond seem to be pulling their hair out over the very poor quality of the then latest Creative players, feeling that their efforts in PlaysForSure or whatever it was at the time were being consistently hampered by hardware partners failing abjectly to step up to the plate. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=conewsstory&refer=conews&tkr=MSFT:US&sid=anhaQOstu83g

If Microsoft were willing to say it then, it seems ridiculous to try to rewrite history now.

It's not that bad

Picking your post at random to reply to, the article states that ActionScript is translated into Java bytecode. So, in principle, most of the time, the Flash code is executing as though it were Java. The Java runtime then has a whole bunch of similar stuff for translating Java to native code so the whole thing is better framed as a caching problem rather than an ongoing translation problem.

I'd have been all for this a week or two ago, but since Oracle started throwing their weight around I've gone back to liking Adobe more. And probably the best way forward is still whoever it is that's working on the translation of Flash to Javascript+<canvas> — then you're translating something essentially closed (and hopefully soon legacy) into something completely open that's supported by a variety of vendors, each competing for the best implementation. You can even sell it as 'Flash on iOS devices' if you want to grab some venture capital, it'll still benefit the vast number who don't buy Apple.

Numbers has 'table categories' instead

Albeit that this is just a long winded way of saying "no, it doesn't have pivot tables", per the PC World review:

"Numbers is still lacking in a couple of features that experienced Excel jockeys will miss. First is support for pivot tables. Numbers approximates the effects of pivot tables with a new table categories feature, which is arguably easier to work with. Table categories allow you to group data from one table and categorize it in another. The categories are based on existing columns in the original table and can be easily expanded or hidden with a disclosure triangle.

The effect is similar to a pivot table and requires much less effort for novice users, and it works well for almost anyone wanting to quickly view related data. However, longtime Excel users may feel the feature doesn't match what they're used to."

Also absent: macros.

@spegru

I have quite possibly misunderstood based on the rumoured specs, but I thought the point of Chrome OS (as contrasted with Android) is that the browser is the OS, with a browser-level native code extension for any occasion where Javascript can't quite cut it, though you're still explicitly performing tasks as part of the normal HTML page interaction process. So I guess there's one level on which you can say it's no more open than iPhone OS 1, but in practice you're coding at exactly the same level as the built-in 'applications' so a more realistic answer would be that it's entirely open.

I naturally assume WebGL will be in there, alongside canvas, so I applaud the engineering decision.

There's iWork

It tends to get reviewed in terms of "for small offices and home users", but I couldn't name any missing features compared to Office. That said, I work in a small office, so...

Biggest innovation is the spreadsheet, Numbers, in which the top level object isn't a table but rather a page which may contain one or more tables, with cells addressed using symbolic names and dots like Javascript, C# and everything else since the 80s. Besides that there's Keynote (presentation software) and Pages (the word processor), which are both extremely competent but inevitably just a tiny bit incompatible with Office. iWork also has an iPad port and a web version in beta.

Outlook-compatible email, calendar and address book apps ship with the OS, so they're not present. There's no equivalent to Access, but Microsoft don't ship Access for the Mac either.

I'm not sure if it's about confidence or striving for legitimacy, or if they actually don't see the products as overlapping, but if you go to Apple Store you'll still see Microsoft Office boxes on conspicuous display.

An interesting interpretation

The sum total of Android handsets outsold the iPhone at one data point in one territory, and that means the game is already lost? I'd suggest you have a prejudiced interpretation.

CUDA is proprietary nonsense

Apple have chosen to embed GPGPU stuff directly into the OS as a first class component through OpenCL, a standard supported on ATI, Nvidia and Intel chips, on OS X, Windows and Linux. CUDA is just Nvidia's proprietary equivalent, though it deserves some respect for being on the market a lot earlier. In any case, Apple don't use CUDA but do and will offload plenty of tasks to your GPU anyway. They've also got some really good stuff for taking advantage of multiple cores as of 10.6, so those quad cores may even be worth it.

Not actually what the review says

"The weakness in the iMac range really lies in the models that aren’t available" would seem more to mean that the models that are available are competitive against other machines at the same price points but that not all price points are available, matching the sentiments of the rest of the review. It doesn't anywhere make the point that what you get doesn't seem justified by the price point.

So, my paraphrase of the summary would be: "if you want to spend £1000+ then the iMac is a decent option, if you want to spend less then Apple don't want your business".

Not usable, at least on my 2008 iMac

Although both the Wii and at least one of ye olde PowerPC G3 CRT iMacs could happily accept either 8cm or 12cm discs, my 2008 iMac definitely won't accept 8cm CDs. I'm not sure what the reasoning is or when exactly that feature was removed, though I'd imagine it's part of Apple's conscious attempt to sideline physical media. See also: BluRay.

@Wrenchy

Erroneous Howard made a statement that the iPhone does not do voice recognition. bygjohn replied, pointing out that it does. So I think his point is that Erroneous Howard spoke erroneously, which is relevant and to the point, unlike unrelated ramblings about Samsung phones and whether or not the iPhone was first (you know, given that nobody here claimed or probably even thought that it was).

@JP19

Your argument is that Android will be as ubiquitous on phones as Windows is on desktops, hence Apple will cease to exist?

Apple's desktop/laptop machines are very profitable and as a result Apple was a very profitable company before the iPod. Thanks to the iPod it was a hugely profitable company before the iPhone. Your conclusion doesn't match your analogy.

But, just from the names...

... it sounds like they're claiming IP rights over the algorithms — not the specific implementations — that are used for preparing, loading/binding and possible running programs that run in the same manner as the JVM. Whether Dalvik does or doesn't technically infringe, I have no idea.

And I'll be cheering on Google, for the reasons you state and more. I'll add: Oracle are probably going to grab a load of mindshare from this, but none of it positive.

No, it's not

Since carriers and manufacturers may enable or disable any OS feature they like. See also: Vodafone.

You could make money hacking a Wii, XBox or PS3, couldn't you?

At least the XBox has a marketplace of sorts that the average man off the street can sell in (ummm, I think, and the man probably needs to be US resident) but in any case all three have web browsers, which probably means stored passwords for banking, shopping, etc.

I've never been sure why people are so quick to condemn the walled garden in mobile handsets but accept it almost everywhere else, including on video game consoles. I guess it's because by "people" I actually mean "people who comment on tech publications and blogs".

Sorry, probably being dense

I actually don't understand what point Microsoft are trying to make about the mouse. What's the problem with the mouse? You move it, the mouse moves. You press on the left, you do the primary action. You press on the right, you do the contextual action. If you swipe up or down (or left or right), you scroll. How is that a mouse operating differently?

I'm posting as a reply in case your complaint is about operation. But I suspect it may just be that the current Apple mouse is rather flat and unusually shaped?

Re: AC

The poster above has dealt with hardware H.264 decoding; you're also trying to claim that there's no open graphics library on OS X? You know, like e.g. that industry standard one that originated at SGI? You may not have heard of it, I suggest you install Adobe Shockwave and go to some of the related game sites to experience it. You don't even have to leave the browser.

Re: closed and proprietary

I think the issue is related to standard free market arguments; Adobe have set themselves up as the single vendor of Flash implementations when they seem barely able to support all of the desktop platforms - the OS X plug-in is slow like treacle and crashes a lot, the Linux client is probably both of those things but it's also out of date and poorly supported.

With HTML5/canvas/etc, the standards are open and are being separately implemented by at least four teams at some of the world's leading software companies. The weekly stories about the new fastest JavaScript engine are the result and IE9 is about to up the ante on hardware rendering of interactive content within the browser.

In this area, open standards are very obviously benefitting the consumer compared to the closed alternative. What a lot of us are looking forward to is when the open standard stuff is sufficiently ubiquitous that the rich media doesn't just run, but it runs well, everywhere.

Suggest someone tells Adobe

Performed a moment ago:

1) switch Nexus One on

2) swipe to unlock, tap 'Market'

3) search for 'Flash'

Result: Adobe Flash 10.1 beta 3. Version 10.1.72.7, 3.75mb, 50,000-250,000 downloads, 9951 ratings. I scrolled down to the bottom of the list so as to cause further results to be loaded a total of four times, ending my search at 'Add to 2' by Gary Gause and spotted no further versions of Adobe Flash.

Sorry if that's a bit too much like checking the facts for the up/down voters.

That'd be great, but are Adobe up to it?

Just as it's wrong to say that Apple are free of control issues, I don't think it's accurate to say that Adobe are free of quality issues. And if they put out a plug-in or player that crashes even half as much as their OS X plug-in then they'll actually be adding fuel to Jobs' fire.

@Mick F

You've obviously not been installing the Vodafone upgrades then. My fear is that rather than Android continuing to be the only fully open platform, it's going to become the platform that can be open but only if you're willing to pay for a SIM-free handset. I think this is what Google saw coming; probably the Nexus One was just too early. Give the core audience a couple of years of carriers messing up the firmware and there'll be a healthy market for a straight-from-Google device.