An amusing encore...
On April 19 Lang Lang came out to play an encore at a concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, when he whipped out his iPad to play "Flight of the Bumblebee." The technology, is, you know, meh (I played with one today, and thought it was like a big iPhone that you can't call people with), but the reaction of the orchestra is uniformly, "Hey, the new kid has a cool toy."
If this was an Apple marketing ploy, it's pretty clever.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
3 comments:
Actually, the technology is not as meh as you (and many self-appointed pundits) think. The guts are really well-integrated, it uses a phenomenally low amount of power, the GUI is well-thought-out (which may be part of why they're so adamant about keeping Flash off the thing, by the way) and very responsive (as this video demonstrates -- touchscreen pianos tend to be a little wonky), and although comparing between CPU families is notoriously inaccurate, the CPU delivers as many cycles per second as anything Intel offers.
It will be interesting to see the army of imitators, mostly (doubtlessly) running Android, which will come out soon and be held up as examples of why Apple isn't doing anything special... and then a few months after that, Google will explain that the low battery life, instability, and general unusability is all because users have made the Wrong Choices when setting the phone up, which is what they've done with Android for phones.
Hi, anonymous. I loved your poem Beowulf.
I guess I am not talking about the technology so much as I am about the appearance. I'm an aesthete. What can I say. I like the pretty pictures that the electronic gnomes deliver to me from the magical wild, wild world of web.
It's damned slim and damned light. I'd be surprised if it didn't have more memory than the entire space program when we landed on the moon (USA! USA! USA!). Apple has always had the advantage of being in-house both w/ respect to software and hardware integration. The world that is not MacOS has been forced to go the other way. I guess I could talk about the ineffable benefits of competition and free markets, but I'd only be talking out of my iHole. My parents were in town yesterday and showed me their new one, and now Bing wants. But it is still sort of a toy to me.
HJ
(Same anonymous as above... only a distaff relation to the Beowulf author.)
(First: a correction: that should have read "the CPU delivers as any cycles per second as anything of low power consumption Intel offers." And the reason this is important, in case that isn't clear, is that the chip is a custom all-in-one derived by Apple from the ARM spec, rather than an Intel Atom.)
Any new computing device these days is likely to have more memory than the entire space program when we landed on the moon. I seem to recall that we passed that landmark about a decade ago; I think the original iPod had more RAM (not hard disk space -- RAM) than the Apollo program's computers.
I admit I'm kind of torn on the iPad. The technology is pretty fantastic, and I love reading ebooks via Stanza on my iPod Touch (I have no iPhone) and find the small screen limiting, and much of the stuff I'm seeing about the iPad makes it seem pretty darned amazing.
On the other hand, though, the iPad version of Apple's own productivity suite, iWork, is getting pretty solidly panned on their own app store, and for very good reasons (doesn't support all the features of the Mac version, has trouble with file formats, does weird layout things, etc. etc. etc.). And OmniGraffle (which is a fantastic piece of software on the Mac, albeit a bit expensive if you don't use it constantly) apparently doesn't really take advantage of the iPad very well, and that's the other program I really wanted to see on the thing. It looks like most of the apps which take advantage of the iPad right now are games, and I have enough games to last me for years already.
(Speaking of which, I retried Super Mario Galaxy the other day. I could remember very little about it, other than that I found it disappointing and frustrating the first time I tried it. And I was right. Compared with Super Mario Sunshine, that game is terrible. The controls are awful, the whole "running around a planetoid" thing changes the directional context so that the controls are rendered even worse, the graphics are more realistic than Sunshine but much less interesting, the camera angles are very poor, the new enemy types are graphically unimaginative, and when it isn't using one-shot gimmicks the game relies on a very small set of ideas over and over and over to the point of boredom. Seriously, between this, Super Paper Mario, and Mario Kart Wii, it's pretty clear that Nintendo lost quite a bit of its mojo in the transition from the Gamecube to the Wii. I really think an Internet-enabled Wii version of Mario Kart: Double Dash would have had vastly more entertainment potential than the dreck they actually shipped. They even managed to include the "real is brown" idea. Bleah.)
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