iPad 2 Rumored to be in Production

Stoobalou writes "The normally sober and sometimes accurate Wall Street Journal is claiming that Apple's iPad 2 is currently in production. Foxconn might be producing a limited number of prototype samples of the Second Coming of the iPad but we're pretty sure full production won't start until Steve Jobs (or whoever will be donning the black turtleneck in his sickly stead) strides onto the stage at the official launch keynote."

/. News Network

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

A company well known for releasing new models of its products will release a new model of one of its newest products! Gasp!

Also, will it have video-out capability yet? Or possibly video-in so I can use it to pretend I have a portable DVD player?

Re:Not a 2

[Glock27]

Actually the iPhone models were:

• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4

So, Apple has been all over the place with its naming "conventions".

No DVD

[crow]

It is very unlikely that Apple would do anything to make it easy to put a DVD on the iPad. They want you to obtain content like that through the iTunes store. Anything they can do to help kill physical media is good for Apple.

Re:No DVD

[RazzleFrog]

Well except for those 100+ DVD's sitting under your TV that you now have to repurchase from iTunes?

Re:No DVD

[Arkham]

Actually it's quite easy to get a DVD movie onto an iPad.

1) Most movies come with "Digital Copy" now. Put the code in iTunes, and you are done.
2) For the ones that don't there's always Handbrake [handbrake.fr], which has presets for it and makes it trivial to convert in a few minutes. Once it's done, drag to iTunes and sync.

Re:No DVD

[iluvcapra]

it's not the best "technology" has to offer. It's the business "business" and "the law" want to offer us for now.

What part of my post, after the word "assuming," didn't you understand?

Without legal regimes to create copyrights, there'd be no mass media to buy content from, you'd have a high-speed no-physical-media perfectly-interoperable system to deliver the best content creators would have to offer under such a system, which would be:

• 30 second videos of cats peeing on things
• 1 minute Star Trek parodies (that go on far too long even at that)
• 5 minute screencasts showing you how to python script your word processor
• two-hour university lectures given by pointy-headed media academics who spend their whole lecture pompously asserting how advanced modern society is now that authors are unable to collect royalties, and how he's going to have to stop posting the videos unless more people stop auditing his class and start taking it for credit, because he's gotta eat.

Re:No DVD

[node 3]

Yes, 'quite easy'. Obvious problems though - you shouldn't need iTunes. It's a stupid interface for getting movies onto your device.

How so? iTunes is a large part of the mass appeal of iPods.

Something like AirShare lets you drag and drop a movie on your desktop to the device, but of course the sandboxing means you can't get that movie into your iPad videos folder, you nee to watch it inside AirShare.

Why does that matter? It still plays just fine.

The iPad also has no inbuilt way to watch movies stored on NAS.

Why does that matter? If there are apps easily available, how important is to to be built in?

There's a number of apps which try to offer DLNA support, but all the ones I've tried have been unstable.

I've not used any DLNA apps, but I've used network video sharing apps, and they all worked fantastically, even transcoding on the fly.

It's not that the iPad isn't capable - look at the XBMC install for jailbroken iPads. It's just that Apple won't allow the capabilities to be exploited.

Um, except that they do. You've seen the App Store, right?

They'd rather you just bought the movie again through iTunes and let them get their cut.

Their "cut" isn't the issue. They'd much rather you buy an iPad than buy movies from them. Their selling of movies is entirely about selling hardware. The reason they limit *some* things is in order to make their devices more appealing. Once something becomes too complex, people start to look elsewhere.