Silicon Shecky

The Touchpad isn’t completely Dead. Mostly dead, yes, but is it just a flesh wound? The Touchpad frenzy has proved a point, and now can HP, or any company, really capitalize on it?

Apple has been the cock of the walk, the king of the tablet, since the iPad came out. They came up with something that is a great idea which has spawned a whole tablet market. No competitor seems to be able to come up with anything to seriously threaten its dominance. Its not that the Android tablets aren’t good, it has to do with features, and more importantly price point. I touched on this when talking about the Nook Color in the past. HP though, unwittingly, came up with the plan. Something I had mentioned in those same posts about the Nook Color. Its the same thing that gave the PC the advantage in the PC wars back in the 90′s. that is price point.

I’ve been wondering when we would see a price point that would spur competition. Most Tablets are in the $400 plus range of price. The Nook Color, although a reader, is $250 and offers a lot of tablet features, but its App store is lacking. The demise of the HP Touchpad and the fire sale though has shown that for a lower price point, a tablet that doesn’t have as much app support can compete. Now imagine if you will what would happen if Android had a tablet in the $200 or less range. More people purchase it, more developers see a reason to write apps for it, and bingo, a true competitor to Apple can emerge. Amazon might do that with its rumored tablet, but no solid information on it is out yet.

The idea being that in a down economy that we are in does put limits on what people are willing to purchase. Done properly though, a low cost tablet can bring in a nice profit to a company. Yes they might loose on the initial hardware, but if partnered up with the developers, it can be possible to turn a profit through the purchasing of apps. It might mean the developer makes a little less, or the apps are a bit more expensive, say $2 for most apps instead of $1, but it is possible.

Barnes and Noble could have done it completely, instead of halfway. Now the question is will others learn from this or not?

Apple, a company you either love or hate. Its about as black and white as one can get. Now they really have a chance to make some good changes to their culture, but they won’t.

When Apple was founded, the computer world was a simpler place. Young people just wanted to be able to play, to work on these new machines. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created a company that fed into those dreams, helping define an era. Having an Apple II machine was hip, it was cool, and it was around $1000-$1500 to get one. Most of its competitors cost around the same, so it wasn’t too big of a deal. You could purchase or write your own programs, and do what you wanted to with the system.

Somewhere along the way, after Woz left, Apple’s vision started changing. They came out with the Macintosh which was an amazing little machine. A machine that started to really open the world of computers to more people. A machine that would redefine Apple. Who can forget the Orwellian Ad that they came up with for the Mac. Funny how prophetic that would be.

Steve Jobs always had a great mind for marketing and a brilliant mind for ideas. Some over the years would stick, some wouldn’t. He got removed for Apple, sold all but one of his shares, and eventually through the means of  mergers and acquisitions wound up back in charge of the company he had founded. He brought them back from the brink with a savvy set of ideas that pushed the envelope not in computing, but in consumer electronics.

Jobs also took the paranoia he got from his original ouster to an extreme. While Mac is a good, and solid system, and pretty easy to use, the helped create fallacies around it, from the level of its security to the ease of its use. He also locked the system down tighter than Fort Knox. Same with the iPhone and iPad. Locking down these systems not only gives Apple more control over the device and the data but creates a problem for consumers from a pricing standpoint. The lack of competition helped Apple become the 2nd largest company in the United States, only behind Exxon Mobile. It also gave Apple another item at its disposal, the lawsuit.

Apple is as much a company now that is anti-competitive as Microsoft was back in the 90′s. Its biggest rival is Google, who is just as closed minded and stupid about things as Apple is. Both companies claim to have the consumers best interests at heart. Apple looks at any competing product and immediately tries to find what it can sue over. This is not in the best interests of the consumer.

With Steve Jobs stepping away from the CEO position to Chairman of the Board, he still has a great influence over Apple, its products, its direction. Tim Cook could try to open things up, but won’t. The consumer friendly company that was the little engine that could is gone. They are a company that wants, like Google, to tell you how to do things. They don’t care about what you think. This is why they have been referred to as a cult over the years. Just like Scientology, Jonestown, the KKK and many others over the years, the ultimate goal is to control you and make you bend to their will.

Steve, thank you for all you have done to forward technology, but your controlling and paranoid thoughts, I won’t miss.

I’ve had an iPad for a few weeks now. Been trying to see how usable it is, and at what level. Here is my opinion on it.

The iPad, a revolution in computing. The true coming of tablet computing. I’m still trying to figure out why we need tablet computing. I have nothing against new ideas, or new technology. I just don’t see why someone would want to carry around a tablet, when they can have a netbook which can honestly do more than a tablet.

All that being said, the iPad is a neat consumer toy. It can do quite a bit, but overall it is meant for consumers, or average users, not for techs. The best app I’ve found for what I do, which is consulting and engineering, has been Penultimate, which allows me to create hand written notebooks, which I used to use pads of paper or notebooks for (I have about 10 of them from the past 3 years, each one 200+ pages).

Outside of that, I don’t have much use for it. The amount of free useful apps is minimal. The App Store is awful. Searching the App Store doesn’t give me what I’m looking for the majority of the time, and browsing by category is painful at best. I have found very few of the network tools that I have on my Droid phone (Ping, WiFi Analyzer, NetTools, etc…) available for the iPad, (and that includes similar type programs).

I also have a netbook, which cost about half of the iPad, has way more available for it (even if you leave it with Windows O/S), has more storage space, and a reliable keyboard. The netbook screen, size and weight do make it equivalent of the iPad’s specs there also.

I see the iPad for what it is, a consumer grade bridge, that is refining touchscreen technology. Eventually all of it will be obsolete as we will get a chip planet in us to really give us Augmented Reality. The are working on it.