The Big Event

[Hell Labs]

Lot of apple hate in here. 'Sfunny seeing that comment about overpricing, considering the price of stuff in the miggy world.
 
But really, it's a big iPhone. That's fucking dumb.

[Hell Labs]

You know, looking on the site it's actually really swayed me towards it, especially with iWork. This is pretty much a full computer, with all of the the BS cut out. Maybe in 20 years when the price has gone down, and power has gone up, we can all carry one instead of paper and a laptop. I don't even care if it has multitasking beyond "play music while I do X". This is what a computer should be: unintrusive as possible.

[Hell Labs]

So far I've only seen emulators blocked from the iPhone. You know, I'm not really bothered by that, I can pick up a C64 for £3 at a car boot sale. And it's much more fun. Spy hunter is hard enough as it is, I don't need the scallys on the bus distracting me.

[Hell Labs]

That doesn't justify paying £100 for a low end computer from 1993, even if it is clean and in a box.

[Hell Labs]

You know I find it interesting that here is a single threaded, 1 gigahertz machine that is designed to fill a niche... NOT really designed to compete with PC's or MACs... Does not have memory protection...  To fill a niche somewhere in between..  Sound familiar?

A machine that requires applications to be written specifically for it.. (Obviously not PC, MAC or Linux compatible), runs on proprietary hardware... (And I believe it is a Power architecture)

Am I the only one that thinks this sounds AMAZINGLY close to the description of what the new Amiga COULD have been?   Does no one see the parallels here?

Here is a prime example of Apple brilliance.. Not the machine itself, but the background infrastructure that has allowed this machine to be feasible in the first place.  (Itunes marketplace and the apps that are being written daily.)

Like the IPAD or not, like Itunes or not, the folks that masterminded the whole thing are friggin brilliant..  Given the same infrastructure and backing, the X1000 could be a huge success... Without it though, it will struggle to even reach hobbyist status...

The iPhone OS is just a stripped down osx and does have memory protection. And as far as I know all you really have to do to port from mac to iPhone is make a new interface in interface builder and recompile.

[Hell Labs]

The iPad will bomb with everyone except colleges receiving kickbacks from Apple. Don't get too worked up about it yet.
Ebooks don't seem that cheap, probably because it only costs the publishers pennies to print something. (Not sure about shipping... probably 25% to the retailer).
It's prime target is Kindle so I guess you can't really complain about the OS and you can't compare it to an Amiga. Amigas still lurk around as kiosk machines or possibly a POS machine.

The ipod was different. The iphone had apps. This one doesn't seem to contribute something new so I think it will bomb.

The iPad won't bomb, atleast no more than the macbook air did (i.e, be a sucsess in it's niche market.) The iPad can do pretty much everything an ipod touch can, in a size that's actually useful, and more. just wait for os 4.0, apparently apple will invent multitasking, this strange method of running multiple apps at once.