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McGraw-Hill CEO Confirms Apple Tablet, iPhone OS Based, Going to Be "Terrific"

hopefully this thing can do something spectacular in terms of syncing with an iphone/ipod/itouch because when i buy a CD or something from the store, I have to wait till I get home to rip it and all that kinda stuff.

someone told me just use itunes, but some people still like the "cover art" of the CD...
 
I could see how the tablet will be competitive in books, newspapers, magazines, etc. And I'm really excited about this.

But, I'm wondering how it'll work in the case of textbooks.

In college, I needed to have my notes and, more often than not, two or more textbooks open at once to study.

I'm thinking it'll be pain to solely rely on a single tablet to study in college. Hence, I see the need to either buy an extra tablet or an actual hard copy of the text book. Which then leads to obvious money problems.

Unless, Apple tackles this problem, I'm having a hard time seeing the tablet replace the current textbook. It'll be a nice gadget to have but not a necessity on its own.

Well, this dilemma is of course due to my expectation for the tablet to revolutionize college text books and how universities will find major use of it.
 
Mp3s do not suck compared to CDs really either, I mean they do if the bitrate is crappy but most are high quality.
 
Yeah I want the tablet so badly, but if its the iPhone OS, forget it. and yeah they may have a lot of changes to 4.0, but I want the full os on it. I'll just wait till the day someone hacks it!

Whats the point of having a bigger iPhone. Im not going to sign a contract through att being that i already pay for my iphone and having an iphone thats a bigger is pointless to me. now you make a 10 inch tablet running osx and dear god I want it!!!!!
 
iamPro said:
I could see how the tablet will be competitive in books, newspapers, magazines, etc. And I'm really excited about this.

But, I'm wondering how it'll work in the case of textbooks.

In college, I needed to have my notes and, more often than not, two or more textbooks open at once to study.

I'm thinking it'll be pain to solely rely on a single tablet to study in college. Hence, I see the need to either buy an extra tablet or an actual hard copy of the text book. Which then leads to obvious money problems.

Unless, Apple tackles this problem, I'm having a hard time seeing the tablet replace the current textbook. It'll be a nice gadget to have but not a necessity on its own.

Well, this dilemma is of course due to my expectation for the tablet to revolutionize college text books and how universities will find major use of it.
Click to expand...

i feel you. i rely upon FAFSA and things, and sometimes it just isnt enough. As as far as the two textbook things, maybe since it 10 inches, you can have uhhh one book in 5 inches, and the other book in the other 5 inches?

the tablet could make it nice as terms of finding things quicker.

could the tablet put out the printing presses? haaaa.
 
I see this device as a blank canvas that many things can be create from.
Some of them might be straight forward like e-readers and internet.
Others will be completely create around the gesture technology. This is where the device will shine. Maybe in the beginning not many application and uses will be clear cut, but once developers get a grasp of the possibilities, this is where the device will flourish.
Maybe this is the reason Steve is so pumped about it.
 
troop231 said:
Mp3s do not suck compared to CDs really either, I mean they do if the bitrate is crappy but most are high quality.
Click to expand...

It used to be most were 128kbps (don't know if that's the case anymore) - at that bit rate, there is noticeable degradation, particularly things like cymbals, percussion, etc.
 
dguisinger said:
For those who claim OS X and iPhone OS are greatly different beasts... no, not really. They share much of the same underlying code base, the OS X UI is obviously removed for obvious reasons... but the OS can technically do multithreading, you just aren't given the ability as an App Store developer. Things that wouldn't have use on a phone aren't compiled in, but thats a given, there is a limited amount of RAM, Flash, and CPU cycles.
Click to expand...

To nitpick, you can do multithreading on iPhone OS, NSThread exists, you can use it (I have). That's not the same as backgrounding applications, which you cannot currently do. In fact (as this poster says) these beasts are *very* similar. You have darwin, you have most of CoreFoundation and a load of the other underlying classes, in fact most of NSxxxx exists apart from the user interface classes and instead you have Cocoa Touch UIKit, and you know that actually has a lot of similar design principles as the Cocoa UI, just designed for small devices and with a different event handling protocol, one which makes sense for non-keyboard/mouse applications.

What's missing at this point, let's see, independent application lifecycles (background apps), Grand Central Dispatch (and blocks), Garbage Collection and Bindings. Pretty much the rest of the bits of the OS you use are there on the phone. I'm sort of expecting some of those things to show up in the next major release (i hope 4.0), at least GCD and blocks. I'd expect the tablet/pad/whatever to support a richer set of UIKit-type widgets which add back in some of the functionality you can use on a full-size screen, but still keep the event model of UIKit.

If that happens, someone's done a real crapload of work under the covers and the whole long plan of OS X development is really starting to pay dividends.
 
Excitement is building. This thread is now 27 pages w/ 651 posts.

This is my take on tomorrow.

Apple site is taken down prior to start of SJ's address
Lights dim. Steve takes stage to thunderous ovation
Steve wows everybody with new product(s) / updates, etc.
"One more thing" brings everybody to the brink of orgasm
Steve exits stage, lights come up.
Apple site is back up with a gazillion hits within an hour
Macrumors site rife with praise/bitching/nonchalance.

Can't wait.
 
puppyflightclub said:
that mac mini is amazing, well to me.

i just hear that the mac pro is a BEAST. i mean...it runs STUDIO's
Click to expand...

Yes, it is a beast; A beast that could use some new graphics cards (I don't like flashing cards and the GTX 285 driver's suck too much).

puppyflightclub said:
screenshot20100126at702.png


that would be a reason i would buy this if all it was ebook/itouch. my human biology book was 160 at the school!
Click to expand...

You do realize that it is referring to novels and not textbooks. Textbooks for college will still be insanely expensive, just now they are more portable. Realistically, one would probably still have some of their books as hard copies and some others as ebooks.
 
Berio said:
oh dear god, please no flash! or at least the option to switch it off and leave it off.
ever since getting flash-blockers on all our computers, every visit to the internet seems "snappier" ;-)
Activity Monitor confirms that flash is a waste of time and energy
Click to expand...

Flash is great, it's the millions of companies that use it for advertising that suck. Honestly, if it wasn't flash we'd have embedded quicktime adverts instead or something just as bad which would be even more performance hogging.

Better the devil you know IMO, and a simple add-blocker should stop 98% of the unoptimized and poorly programmed flash on the web.

Flash on an apple tablet would make flash video websites and games usable again, which would be awesome - but I'd not want that if I'm still forced to use safari and can't block ads and the like.
 
rols said:
To nitpick, you can do multithreading on iPhone OS, NSThread exists, you can use it (I have). That's not the same as backgrounding applications, which you cannot currently do. In fact (as this poster says) these beasts are *very* similar. You have darwin, you have most of CoreFoundation and a load of the other underlying classes, in fact most of NSxxxx exists apart from the user interface classes and instead you have Cocoa Touch UIKit, and you know that actually has a lot of similar design principles as the Cocoa UI, just designed for small devices and with a different event handling protocol, one which makes sense for non-keyboard/mouse applications.

What's missing at this point, let's see, independent application lifecycles (background apps), Grand Central Dispatch (and blocks), Garbage Collection and Bindings. Pretty much the rest of the bits of the OS you use are there on the phone. I'm sort of expecting some of those things to show up in the next major release (i hope 4.0), at least GCD and blocks. I'd expect the tablet/pad/whatever to support a richer set of UIKit-type widgets which add back in some of the functionality you can use on a full-size screen, but still keep the event model of UIKit.

If that happens, someone's done a real crapload of work under the covers and the whole long plan of OS X development is really starting to pay dividends.
Click to expand...

I miss NSAttributedString. Some of the core data stuff is missing. A few things here and there.
 
gugy said:
I see this device as a blank canvas that many things can be create from.
Some of them might be straight forward like e-readers and internet.
Others will be completely create around the gesture technology. This is where the device will shine. Maybe in the beginning not many application and uses will be clear cut, but once developers get a grasp of the possibilities, this is where the device will flourish.
Maybe this is the reason Steve is so pumped about it.
Click to expand...

+1
 
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