

How the iPad Wants to be Used - telcodud
http://speirs.org/blog/2011/1/21/how-the-ipad-wants-to-be-used.html

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brianwillis
My initial reaction to the iPad when it was first announced was that it needed
user accounts. I mean, your smartphone is yours. No-one else is going to pick
it up and use it for a few hours. But the iPad just intuitively seems like a
device that's destined to live on the coffee table and be a family's shared
machine. The software may "want" to be personal, but the hardware definitely
doesn't.

There's really nothing stopping this happening from a technical standpoint.
Have multiple "swipe to unlock" arrows on the lock screen, one for each user,
labelled of course. Passwords on accounts if users so choose. Everyone gets
their own apps, browser history/cookies/cache, music, movies, etc.

Where this gets tricky is when users of the same device want to share things.
You shouldn't need to have two copies of the same movie on a device. I also
have no idea how iTunes syncing would work.

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nlawalker
The iPad doesn't need user accounts... everyone in your family needs an iPad!
:)

This sounds exactly like the kind of feature that Apple would carefully
consider and ultimately reject because it doesn't match their vision. The
ability to have user accounts is just one more feature that makes everything
more complicated for the user.

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martingordon
I have to agree with you. Apple won't saddle iOS with a stop-gap feature that
won't be necessary in 5-10 years when iPads will be cheap enough that everyone
will have their own.

I would bet that Apple has a lot data from Macs being brought in for repair
and from new setups that would indicate that only a small percentage of users
actually use more than one user account on their Macs.

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trustfundbaby
What you're seeing is the slow merge of PC's with consumer electronics and the
surprising thing is that people actually like it ...

What I think is going to happen eventually is that only 'geeks' will have real
laptops/desktops. Everyone else will have one of these personal devices (in
varying forms of complexity).

We live in interesting times.

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citricsquid
I think if that happens (which seems more likely every day) it'll create a
bigger disconnect between creators and consumers than we have now and it sort
of worries me. I got involved in making things from my desktop PC just
stumbling on "how to make x" guides, if I'd only owned an iPad I don't think
that would have ever happened because I'd have to have had made a concious
choice to purchase a desktop computer for the "advanced" tasks like creating.

I guess it's good for Apple short term, but long term... although I guess the
exposure to the app store and similar systems may cause that concious decision
to purchase a desktop to create.

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trustfundbaby
You're absolutely right, but is that such a bad thing?

I mean right now you could look at it like we're forcing Users to deal on a
level of knowledge/abstraction that they don't want to be on ... that is too
complex for them, as evidenced by things like users not knowing what a browser
is or the inane questions users ask tech support when their computers run into
trouble.

To take an extreme example ... Automobiles ... I drive one everyday, but I
barely know anything about how its built, how it works or how to fix it when
its has problems ... now imagine if to start my car in the morning I had to
have some knowledge of exactly how a car worked? (You can even substitute a
manual transmission for this) ? Wouldn't that be a bad thing?

What is going to happen is the segmentation of enthusiasts and experts from
everyone else, and I actually think that is a good thing.

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ZeroGravitas
The way that he suggests Windows PCs "want" to be used (with antivirus) is
clearly a design flaw, for any usage scenario. Why isn't this a design flaw,
even if only for use in schools where a cheap tablet that automatically resets
itself to a known good state and leaves user date in "the cloud" seems a
better idea. The ChromeOS idea of being able to lose or break your laptop and
carry on regardless (possibly even from a random Windows desktop as long as it
has Chrome) seems a perfect fit for students, even if it doesn't play to
Apple's strengths.

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aheilbut
Schools would do much better to give every student a Kindle.

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proee
Please explain...

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aheilbut
The iPad is too much fun. It's slightly better geared for single-tasking than
a PC, but at any moment you're still three taps from every piece of attention-
sucking media in the world.

Although reading books works fine on an iPad, reading books is the only thing
that works on a Kindle. And reading books is the behavior most critical to
learning and becoming educated.

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ludwigvan
But is Kindle really good for textbooks where there are a lot of diagrams,
pictures etc? It might be good for novels, but I don't agree it would be more
suited to textbooks than iPad.

Maybe if the DX price was lowered to normal Kindle price, it would be more
appropriate; but at the moment if you are going to shell out 350$ for a Kindle
DX, it is wiser to spend 150$ more to get an iPad.

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wtallis
How many textbooks have you seen that actually need more than two or three
colors to effectively communicate the point? Unless you're studying art or
showing a really complicated map or 3d surface plot, the Kindle's 16-level
grayscale should be enough. It would also have the effect of discouraging the
gaudy, overly flashy designs textbook publishers use to distract from the lack
of content.

In my experience, for subjects like math or most basic science courses, the
quality is inversely proportional to the number of colors of ink used.

