I got splatted/slashdotted/fireballed yesterday because Mike Cane posted the “Amazing” link into YCombinator News. Thanks Mike.
Now I’m running WP-Super-Cache and have donated to @donncha as well. It’s very unlikely I’ll need it ever again, but it’s ready…
Don Reisinger states that Apple needs to fix 10 things with the iPad before release.
The iPad is now less than a month away from hitting store shelves, but there are still significant issues with it that Apple hasn’t addressed. Here are some of the issues Apple needs to think about before the iPad hits store shelves in April.
- Where’s the 3G iPad?
- The 3G-pricing conundrum
- We need Flash
- Displaying iPhone apps
- Accessory pricing
- iPhone OS 4.0
- The Kindle competition
- Connectivity
- AT&T’s network
- No camera? Really?
Journalists are having a field day. Apple claimed they’d ship the WiFi iPad in 60 days. It’s about a week overdue and everyone is crowing about it being late. Honestly. And this fuss about the 3G? More whining. There’s no news here.
A conundrum is defined as
1. “a riddle, esp one whose answer makes a play on words”
2. “another word for a question used by journalists wanting to sound clever”
There’s no puzzle here. The pricing is one of the cheapest plans on the market in the US. How is this a tricky question?
No, we don’t need Flash. We have done fine over the last three years with the iPhone. Performance is bad on desktop processors, what will it be like on Mobile? (Trick question: it sucks. I have Flash on my N800. Flash sucks).
Was this guy even listening – iPhone apps resize to fill the screen at the touch of a virtual button. So there’s 150 000 apps out there that ‘just work’ and there’s people scrabbling to make custom apps for the iPad.
Again, do some research. It works fine with a Bluetooth keyboard. It doesn’t need much in the way of accessories. To be honest, people have inflated ideas of what they need. My USB port on my Air got used for two things. The very occasional printer and USB memory sticks. What else would you really use? And it uses the iPod dock port so there’s a shitload of stuff that will, you guessed it, just work.
iPhone and iPod touch OS updates will be available for free now that Apple has ditched that stupid accounting method. That’ll also count for the iPad. And this is a journalist not doing any research and commenting on an operating system release that isn’t scheduled or announced.
The Kindle is not competition. If people want to read novels. then yes, an eInk screen will likely be a better option. But this is a fraction of what the iPad does whereas working as a eReader is pretty much 100% of what the Kindle does. So, yes, in some micro-percentage, they’re competing but it’s the Kindle percentage which will take the loss. iPad will do well enough even without the Kindle.
If Don had his way, we’d all be using floppy disks to transfer shit everywhere. You’ll use your iPad cable to transfer files (there’s a shared folder) and if you don’t have it, you’ll use this thing called the ‘network’. Duh.
So, who’s network would you suggest Don? I’d suggest Apple use the company which recently won the performance study reported by PC World at the end of February. Do your research, Don. It was only reported everywhere in the world.
Think about the use case for this. You’re seriously going to use iPad to take snaps. It’s immense. How are you going to hold it with any sensible utility and push the button? I can understand the desire for a front facing camera for videoconferencing and that should have been the point Don was making. But taking pictures of flowers or of funny things at random is just the wrong use case. That’s why we have cameras in our phones.
And there we have it. The big bag of stupid.
From Malcolm Moore in the Telegraph.
At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.
…
Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. “In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment,” Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.
…
In its report, Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. Apple admitted that at least 55 of the 102 factories that produce its goods were ignoring Apple’s rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week.
…
Apple also said that one of its factories had repeatedly falsified its records in order to conceal the fact that it was using child labour and working its staff endlessly.
“When we investigated, we uncovered records and conducted worker interviews that revealed excessive working hours and seven days of continuous work,” Apple said, adding that it had terminated all contracts with the factory.
Apple’s taking a lot of flak in the media for this from journalists, pundits and ‘bloggers’ who obviously are not seeing the bigger picture. Writers who are guffawing and retweeting these misleading headlines to the frenzied joy of their advertising managers who love to get an Apple headline in. Apple voluntarily undertakes these supplier reviews. They dutifully apply Western standards of working practise to their suppliers, regardless of region, with regards to employment laws, minimum wage and local standards of holidays and benefits. Re-read the areas I put in bold from the Telegraph article. Are they the actions of a company which is trying to hide it’s association with offending suppliers?
Which other Western tech companies are using those suppliers and why are they not being named and shamed? Why was it left to Apple to be the whistle-blower for these suppliers when they are used by dozens of tech companies around the world?
From the comments in that article:
According to the Wikipedia article, Foxconn – the people actually using child labour in the story – also make PC motherboards for Dell, HP, AMD, and Intel. They make Wii’s, XBox 360’s, and PS3’s. They make cell phones for Nokia and Motorola. They make the Amazon Kindle.
My guess is that Apple is the only one that draws headlines. My guess is that it’s another example of the poor quality of tech journalism in the world. My guess is that finding out who else uses these suppliers would be ‘work’.
A workaround for some of this?
David sent me this link: How much do top tech companies pay?
This prompted a discussion about the costs of living in Northern Ireland compared to Cupertino and the realisation that there’s a normalisation needing done. But despite it not being linear, I still reckon that Northern Ireland gets a raw deal here.
Average income in Cupertino is $123,320 (US average is $76,893)
Average income in Northern Ireland £17,366
Average house price in Cupertino $880,000 (US Average is $259,566)
Average house price in Northern Ireland £156,857
Average house price divided by average salary in Cupertino: 7.13 (US Ave 3.37)
Average house price divided by average salary in Northern Ireland: 9.03
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Income Tax rate in Cupertino: 9.3% (highest bracket)
Income Tax rate in Northern Ireland: 20%
VAT/Sales tax in Cupertino: 8.25%
VAT/Sales tax in Northern Ireland: 17.5%
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Seems to me that we pay a higher percentage of income on housing as well. Considerably larger – Cupertino just normalises the US average to be almost as bad as Northern Ireland.
Now, adding in utilities (I spent a shitload more on heating and lighting here I bet). Can’t comment on TV/Cable but I spend about $100 a month here on Satellite TV (that I don’t even watch). Everything I buy (and have bought) in and from the USA) seemed cheaper.
Northern Ireland has salaries 20% below the UK average and a standard of living around 20% below the UK average. I reckon that Northern Ireland people live in relative squalor and we just get on with it. And we get on with it because there’s no choice.
Northern Ireland’s culture has been artificially frozen since the 1960s. We haven’t progressed significantly in any way. We have a local government whose level of corruption seems to be the envy of politicians worldwide. We have two microcultures that still, after everything we’ve been through, mistrust and want to hurt the other.