The Speculative Pre-History of the iPhone 195
harrymcc writes "The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors about 'iSlate,' Apple's supposed upcoming tablet. It's constructive to look back at coverage of the first iPhone in the months before it was announced. A high percentage of what was reported turned out to be hooey — as I remembered as I reviewed stories that said the iPhone would have a click wheel, a slide-out keyboard, and two batteries, and would run on an Apple-branded wireless network. I'm guessing that much of what we 'know' about iSlate is similarly off-base."
Wait for it... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait? (Score:3, Informative)
Why?
Several reasons, but...
Is it because you can't or don't want to afford their products?
I had a Powerbook. It cost somewhere between $2k and $3k, so yes, I can afford it. I actually really like the hardware, and the OS was pretty slick. It did a few things that I really miss -- I could open Terminal (as in, Terminal.app), I could set it to be translucent -- really translucent -- and I could set it to map a single keystroke to navigate around open terminals. That was really nice -- I could cycle through them as easily as if they were tabs, but they'd all be physically there, and command+tab would switch applications.
But, eventually, the backlight died. I had AppleCare, so I sent it in for service. It was really nice -- they overnighted me a box with all the packing, all I had to do was pull out the right little strips of foam and send it back.
They refused to fix it because it had a dent in the case. Apparently any physical damage at all voids the warranty, whether or not it's at all related -- that dent had been there for over a year.
They also wanted $1200, insisting that they had to replace basically the entire machine. It was a backlight.
A few other annoyances about that Powerbook -- it was a high-end, late-model Powerbook, which is to say, I got it only a few months before they announced the switch to Intel -- so I kind of got shafted by Apple's keep-everything-secret policy.
And there was a little annoyance -- a bug in the keyboard settings. I reported it to Apple, and not only was I basically sworn to secrecy by their bug report form, but as far as I know, to this day, they have not fixed the bug. I know I lived with it for over a year. But since the OS is proprietary, I couldn't fix it myself -- and because of the way it was designed, there wasn't really a good way to hack around it, as I might on Linux.
I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard, quite possibly the best keyboard I've used, except for its Apple-ness. I can only update its firmware (yes, it has firmware) on a Mac. The alt and Windows keys are swapped, because they're actually alt and command on OS X. And Apple, in their infinite wisdom, replaced the insert key (or what's supposed to be the insert key) with an fn key. Maybe you don't use insert, maybe it has no use on OS X, but there are a number of places on my current OS where it'd be useful.
So, Linux lets me remap keys easily enough -- so alt/command problem solved. But that fn key is apparently interpreted by the keyboard -- it never makes it down the USB cable, so I can't remap it. I can map one of the random other keys to insert, but my actual insert key will always be fn.
I could go on...
See, the Apple Way of doing things is cool, slick, easy, and powerful, as long as you want to do things Steve Jobs has thought of. The second you want to do something Steve Jobs didn't think of, or doesn't approve of, things get very rough. The keyboard settings was a perfect example of that -- I had custom keymappings, and some of them got screwed up.
So, I used Kubuntu on a company laptop. That died, so I had to use a shiny new iMac for about a week until my new laptop arrived. It had leopard, and it was awesome -- but there were still many things I missed.
I just got a Mac Mini with one TB (two 500G).
Good for you! How much did you pay for it?
I've got a Linux box with a terabyte SATA drive in it. The drive costs less than $100.
It runs unlimited Leopard Server
Again, how much did it cost? The box I have that terabyte drive in runs Ubuntu Server.
and is connected to our 47 inch LCD TV.
My laptop runs Kubuntu, and it can do that just fine -- over HDMI, no less.
AFAIK, nobody else sells anything remotely like this.
Check out the Dell Inspiron Zino HD. With a single terabyte drive
You may be waiting a while (Score:3, Informative)
After all the rumoured name of the product: is-Late