Apple Developing New Palmtop Mac?

[chaos86]

Tablet or PDA, one thing Apple could do is dump the CD/DVD drive. It is a hole into the machine thus making it less rugged. It burns more power and is loud. It is highly mechanical and failure prone. All software should be downloadable. Tunes are downloadable. Movies will be downloadable, Real-Soon-Now. CDs and DVDs are just a package for the data and they aren't needed anymore. Apple was couragious enough to dump the floppy drive, now dumpe the CD/DVD drive in lower end machines (iBooks, iTablets, iPalms, etc). You'll notice there is no removeable media drive on the iPod.

not everyone has a t1 connection mate. its gonna be a while before everything is downloadable. how do you install final cut or garage band without an optical drive? download? even on t1 that would take a good hour. for a pda that syncs with a computer (that has an optical drive) no optical drive makes sense. thats why they currently dont have one. but an ibook with no optical drive is stupid. how do you put tiger on it? office? larger games?

 

[chaos86]

I recently gave up waiting for such a device and bought a Palm Tungsten E. It's been fine so far, but I'm still trying to figure out a couple of things, like managing what's on the memory card (can't find a way to delete things?). I also have to get a good movie player for it (any recommendations?) and a utility that allows me to convert movies to a suitable size and format (planning on trying FFMpeg, but haven't got around to it yet -QT Pro is probably nice, but a bit too expensive for what I need).

ffmpeg is very good software. it even has apples new favourite codec h264 (not playable in qt6 yet so i use vlc). but, like all video software, its slow. takes about as long to convert dvd to h264 as it does to watch the dvd, so, pointless (at least to me).

oh yeah, if you want to encode a few movies at once, go to tools>open terminal window, otherwise they queue and take longer. (also, im not sure but i think it might be more efficient with your processor that way too.)

 

[GregA]

not everyone has a t1 connection mate. its gonna be a while before everything is downloadable. how do you install final cut or garage band without an optical drive? download? even on t1 that would take a good hour. for a pda that syncs with a computer (that has an optical drive) no optical drive makes sense. thats why they currently dont have one. but an ibook with no optical drive is stupid. how do you put tiger on it? office? larger games?

As you say, if it syncs with a computer there is definitely no "requirement" for a DVD.

But an ibook is a different issue.

Although many people with an iBook have some sort of access to a DVD drive elsewhere, there are some who wouldn't. Why not an external drive? (perhaps wireless)

 

[Yvan256]

not everyone has a t1 connection mate. its gonna be a while before everything is downloadable. how do you install final cut or garage band without an optical drive? download? even on t1 that would take a good hour. for a pda that syncs with a computer (that has an optical drive) no optical drive makes sense. thats why they currently dont have one. but an ibook with no optical drive is stupid. how do you put tiger on it? office? larger games?

You use an optical drive from another computer via wireless, of course. You could also use an external drive connected via FireWire or USB 2.0 if you had one.

 

[ccool2ax]

Apple: Make the Market!

2002 (3?), webcams were downright absolutely dead. iSight comes. Most successful webcam ever made.
2000 (1?), people with MP3 players were geeks. iPod. Thats all I have to say.
2005. Cheap computers are overcrummy, Apple makes mac mini, sells 100k by end of 1st quarter (not sure)
2005 again. Treos and stuff cost too much for too little. Combined with vidmachine PSP, and people want video, audio, photos, and an OS. iWork AV.

 

[ravenvii]

2002 (3?), webcams were downright absolutely dead. iSight comes. Most successful webcam ever made.

And where did you get that? I've never heard of anything like that - iSight most successful webcam ever? Never heard anything like that.

2005. Cheap computers are overcrummy, Apple makes mac mini, sells 100k by end of 1st quarter (not sure)

Apple hasn't even announced their fiscal results yet. That's going to happen on Wednesday.

 

[bigandy]

i love my SonyEricsson P900, couldn't live without the programs i have to edit PHP, the mini MySQL interface i run, and the FTP program....

but if there was an apple device capable of that i'd jump at it.

meanwhile there's nothing that'll do the stuff my P900 does, just as easily. So for the future i'll be keeping it