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Specs only mean anything to penny pinchers who need to feel like they're getting their money's worth on paper without regard to the user experience. If the mini is too expensive don't buy it. Don't ask apple to appeal to the lowest common denominator they've made billions upon billions doing the exact opposite.

Yeah reloading pages and vanishing apps along with pixelated low res screen are a great user experience especially with the price of the ipad mini.
 
Why Apple's still well ahead

This looks awesome. How exciting.

I've seen this sort of message from Google many times in the past with neat new toys: "Chromecast is not available in your country.".. Of course it isn't! I wonder if I'll still care when it is released here? If history's any indication, I'll have moved on.

I'd like to see a mini stereo out jack on this too. I use AirPlay from Airport Express' so I can concurrently stream my music to many different amps in my house. I'm not about to park a TV everywhere I want to stream my music to. Maybe Chromecast 2 will have that!?
 
I guess where I'm confused is what proof you have that higher specs somehow is necessary. Why does apple need higher specs when they outperform all other phones in every tangible test?

Because they usually only outperform them at the release of a new processor line. Android ARM manufacturers and Apple tend to leapfrog each other every other release. And there's never such a huge gulf in performance that it takes long for the other guys to catch up. It's all pretty marginal.

Yes that's my point. So again why does apple need better specs? Just cuz?

Do you think the iPad is perfect right now? Do you think it'll be just as perfect three years from now? Spec bumps automatically lead to better apps as more developers take advantage of the power they're given. If you want better apps, you want better specs.

Well when you put it that way, android just might be taking advantage of it :p

I'll agree that there is some pointless specage in the Android world, but it is kinda fun to see what people do with it.

I think we agree. You just worded it so it looked like apple is lagging behind and needs to catch up. Again, just cuz?

I wouldn't say they're lagging behind, but Apple always has tended to play a little conservative with their hardware. They rarely ever take huge jumps across the board. Like the iPad 4 has a great processor in it, no doubt, but I was kinda disappointed they didn't throw more ram into the thing. Android phones and tablets have been using 2GB for awhile now. Even if Dalvik does allegedly tend to eat more ram, it does give that platform more breathing room overall. A extra GB of ram would only be a small hit to the battery, and wouldn't cost more than $10 per unit for Apple to add. The benefits would outweigh the costs here.

Hopefully the iPad 5 does have more ram in it. It'll make it that much better of a machine.

And while I'm hoping, they should add a digitizer to it, too. It'd start approaching my idea of the perfect tablet if they did that.
 
Read above. More ram means less page reloads, more tabs in Safari. More robust apps, like longer, higher detailed documents in Pages, larger images with more layers in Photoshop Touch or other painting apps, more complex games, more room for the OS to offer up nicer features. I could go on.

What model iPad do you currently own?
 
Apple REALLY need a Retina Mini now.

Keep dreaming. If Apple came out with a $329 retina mini it would kill 9.7" iPad sales. Technically the iPad mini has already killed iPad sales. It would only get worst if a retina mini was on sale. This new Nexus just made iPad mini look irrelevant.
 
Google just demoted your television set into a second screen, a slave to your phone or tablet or laptop. With the $35 Chromecast you can with one click move anything you find on your internet-connected device — YouTube video, Netflix, a web page as well as music and pictures and soon, I’d imagine, games — onto your big TV screen, bypassing your cable box and all its ridiculous and expensive limitations.

Unlike Apple TV and Airplay, this does not stream from your laptop to the TV; this streams directly to your TV — it’s plugged into an HDMI port — over wi-fi via the cloud … er, via Google, that is. Oh, and it works with Apple iOS devices, too.

snip

You make some good points. But the issue is where the content is. Since now so much is available for streaming over the net by a multitude of devices, this doesn't change much for the content providers. Sorta like having yet another browser. And it's basically just a wifi dongle that allows you to control which stream goes to it.

And the switch to user-dependency has already been happening. Once my sat boxes starting providing Netflix we gradually went from a one account/watch together model to separate accounts; kinda like from sharing a POTS line to separate cell phones. This merely continues that (I wonder if three Chromecasts in three HDMI slots in one TV connected to three smartphones resolves the Remote Conflict. Hmm.)

This will make it marginally easier for cord cutters and some others to do so; it's a nice dongle at a good price for those who haven't already got a similar setup.

But just to belabor the point, it's still the content that matters. Take sports, a big ticket item. You can't download today's game in real time; you still need a satellite or cable or OTA. And no way is it gonna be legally possible to stream the same game at the same quality at the same time as the broadcast game, largely due to licensing. Everything is almost available over the web and hence via this device, but all the other "channels" for this content are still gonna seek exclusive licensing for their own content. So not that much is gonna change.
 

Yes. Google is not like Apple. They don't bad mouth the competition every chance they get and they still make apps for the platform. They actually had iPhones and Mac's at today's event.
If Apple held a press even tomorrow they would throw up a pie chart showing that only 1% of Android devices have 4.3. 4.3 was just released 8 hours ago!!
 
I love how everyone that doesn't think the original N7 or the new one is a piece of crap must be a Google Fanboi.

In my house we have a MacPro, 2 MacBook Air, Mac Mini, olf MacBook Pro, 3 iPads, and numerous iPods.

here's the rub, we also own 3 B&N Nook Tablet devices (for the kids) rooted, of course, a N7 and 3 Android phones.

The Nooks were a no-brainer, "Black Friday" for $100.
I got the Nexus & as a dedicated car computer with GPS. If nothing else the N7 beats the iPad Mini because it has a GPS. Yea, the bezel is big, but so is the iPad bezel.

I happen to really like Apple products and all things equal, I buy Apple first.
The iPad Mini lacked features I needed so I bought an N7.
For phones the number one gripe I have is the iPhone screen, and yes, even the iPhone 5 is too small.

If Apple wants my family to dump the Android devices, it has to do more.
I need a phone with a 4.5" screen as a minimum and I need an iPad Mini with GPS without having to buy one with a cell modem in it.
 
While I think this is really cool (and cheap), I don't see it revolutionzing the living room like some people are claiming it. The main issue is that it doesn't have an interface of it's own. Here me out. A lot of people and especially families want to sit down in front of their TV, grab the remote, and throw on a new movie. Boxes like Roku and AppleTV make that easy because you can download movies right away from iTunes or Amazon Prime. With Chromecast, you would have to first download the movie on your phone, tablet, or PC. It lacks the whole quick and on-the-fly nature of movie watching that some people prefer.
 
Wow. That tablet has to be the ugliest thing since the Kindle Fire. It has disaster written all over it.

You really think so. I think the original Nexus 7 sold 7 million. That's a pretty good number. Why would something that is definitely an upgrade from that spell disaster any more than the next upgrade to the iPad Mini, iPhone or iPad?
 
With Chromecast, you would have to first download the movie on your phone, tablet, or PC.

Not at all. According to the google cast dev suite, the chromecast receiver runs a scaled-down Chrome browser. So basically, the chromecast sender just pushes an URL to the chromecast receiver and it starts streaming the content from the WEB server pointed out by the URL. No download or even decoding/transcoding is required on the chromcast sender.

This is the basic principal behind chromcast as I understand it.
 
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While I think this is really cool (and cheap), I don't see it revolutionzing the living room like some people are claiming it. The main issue is that it doesn't have an interface of it's own. Here me out. A lot of people and especially families want to sit down in front of their TV, grab the remote, and throw on a new movie. Boxes like Roku and AppleTV make that easy because you can download movies right away from iTunes or Amazon Prime. With Chromecast, you would have to first download the movie on your phone, tablet, or PC. It lacks the whole quick and on-the-fly nature of movie watching that some people prefer.

Agree. The whole concept (that you store video on your device and stream it to your TV is backwards, counter intuitive and a niche at best. AirPlay makes it more attractive by offering a wider range of features, but the primary Apple content avenue for TV is their set top box, not the iPhone.

This will be attractive to teens who don't own a TV and want to share the next Ice Age flick over at their friend's house. Will the appeal extend beyond that? Doubtful.
 
Thanks. You answered my question. It's useless TO YOU. It's not a useless device.

You are in the extreme minority of people on this forum without Internet connectivity on some sort of set top box connected to your tv. I stand by my statement but keep getting mad all you want. It's useless.
 
People actually buy this crappy tablets? Why, because of the price? Don't be cheap, guys!

Seriously, I haven't seen an Android tablet on my college and, well, anywhere but the shelves.

People buy them, and these tablets end up collecting dust in some closet, given to nephews and nieces or sold on some online classified at a huge loss.

Same for this Google dongle. Will be as disposable as a trade show 500MB pen drive swag because I can promise it will not work as well as advertised, and sure as hell wont be in the same class as an Apple TV.

It's cheap and this is no accident. Performance and experience will reflect the price, mark my words.
 
You really think so. I think the original Nexus 7 sold 7 million. That's a pretty good number. Why would something that is definitely an upgrade from that spell disaster any more than the next upgrade to the iPad Mini, iPhone or iPad?

As industrial design advances in the tablet market expectations shift. The truth is that people buy as much or more based on superficial things like form factor. Why would I want to buy a google tablet that looks like it came from 2008?

You can try to diminish the impact of crappy design. You'll fail.
 
Agree. The whole concept (that you store video on your device and stream it to your TV is backwards, counter intuitive and a niche at best. AirPlay makes it more attractive by offering a wider range of features, but the primary Apple content avenue for TV is their set top box, not the iPhone.

This will be attractive to teens who don't own a TV and want to share the next Ice Age flick over at their friend's house. Will the appeal extend beyond that? Doubtful.

But you can rent movies on Google play and stream netflix. So you don't have to have the content locally - now do you?
 
Not at all. According to the google cast dev suite, the chromecast receiver runs a Chrome browser. So basically, the chromecast sender just pushes an URL to the chromecast receiver and it starts streaming the content from the WEB server pointed out by the URL. No download or even decoding/transcoding is required on the chromcast sender.

This is the basic principal behind chromcast as I understand it.

Seems like a very round about and limited method to me.
 
But you can rent movies on Google play and stream netflix. So you don't have to have the content locally - now do you?

You guys are all missing the part where the content doesn't at any point stream directly from your tablet or phone to this dongle. It's ALL streaming from the web.
 
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