Wednesday Bird Droppings

But the orange/white hat is awesome

he’ll get far more in arb versus the open market. maybe money isn’t a concern for him anymore. but if that was the case, he would have signed with the rangers last off season.

iPad was (yet another) truly revolutionary, watershed device from Apple. There’s really no denying that. But now the tablet market has matured a bit, prices for components have come down, and there will finally be a worthy competitor for the iPad at under half the cost.

The first time I truly understood the utility of the iPad was just this past Fell’s Point festival. Just a few months ago. The Kuerig company had a stand there where they were giving out free samples of coffee from their machines, and while waiting in line to get one, some booth worker was going down the line and using an iPad to input people’s email addresses in exchange for a bag of KCups. It took her all of ten seconds to capture a name and email address and it was instantly uploaded to their marketing servers. It just looked so easy, it was easy to hold, it wasn’t unwieldy, there were no mistakes. So commercial applications for the iPad are really eye-opening, considering how the same thing would have been captured just two or three years ago. Probably wouldn’t been a much more complicated process with unwieldy devices, etc.

Then, when the Fire was announced one of the NPR shows (On Point, I think) was talking about tablets and the Fire vs. the iPad, and all that stuff. One person called in and was talking about how his company loves the iPad for the same reason as above: it make things so much easier for certain applications. The host asked this person what he thought of the Fire: would this person stay loyal to the iPad? The response, as you can imagine, came down to price: if the Fire can do the same things as the iPad can (probably specific app support), then the caller would love to go forward with a $200 Fire to do the same thing the $499 iPad could do. I thought that was interesting.

There is nothing on an iPad that makes it worth 500 bucks when you can get a considerable number of features for 200. Actually, I’m not even convinced anyone actually needs the $200 product either, but that’s a different argument.

I will say this….if the tablet didn’t really start with Apple, I think it would have taken muchhhhhhh longer to catch on.

I’m not debating whether or not Apple is smart as shit. I’m just saying that it would have taken FARRRR longer to catch on if it wasn’t an Apple product.

I’m sure Alaska Airlines would love to cut their hardware expenses in half and get something like a Kindle Fire if it gave them a similar level of productivity. The Fire is probably not the product to do that, though, since Amazon isn’t really positioning it as a professional tablet. Windows 8 tablets will be the first real threat to the iPad’s dominance.

but your Cone of Silence is still state-of-the-art.

I don’t think it would be very practical for a student

I’m a computer nerd and own everything except a smart phone and a tablet (as we’ve all heard about a dozen times now), but I hated having to do all my coursework on computers etc. It was crazy how many times the fucking system would “go down” when you had a deadline to submit your work etc.

Did you get the $99 w/ads or $139 w/o ads? Is it worth the extra $40?

but i am absolutely getting an e-ink kindle. w/ all the loce they’re kicking prime members and the increasing adoption of kindle’s format for public libraries, seems like a no-brainer.

so cheap