But it was no iPod. Now I didn’t own the first iPod – I wasn’t impressed, it wasn’t much smaller, was only 5GB (I had already upgraded my PJB to a larger drive) and the battery life was a wash. But by the time the second generation iPod came out, the writing was on the wall. iTunes was a much better syncing solution, the iPod was smaller, lighter and had better battery life. The scroll wheel was much faster to scroll than the buttons on the PJB.

Now HP did have a great genesis for a groundbreaking new piece of technology in the PJB, and I think HP could have easily beat Creatives offering (ha!) at the time – but I do agree with you that they totally squandered it. Much like Xerox squandered much of what was developed in PARC – instead of developing it, allowing others to pay paltry sums to come in, see the ideas and then build their own solutions. HP didn’t even do that in this case!

“When Mac OS X v10.0 shipped, Mac OS 9 stopped being an operating system and started being a subsystem of Mac OS X.”

Um, no. When OS X 10.0 shipped, it was completely 100% separate from the OS 8/9 OS. Mac OS “Classic” booted as a completely separate OS. It did not use any of the OS X kernel or libraries. It was OS 8 or OS 9 (I believe OS 8 was dominant when X shipped, but I might be wrong there), not OS X with a skin.

If you were using OS 9 instead of OS 10 it was because you chose to do so. Or rather, because you did NOT choose to change the DEFAULT boot OS to OS X. Yes, that is correct: until 10.2, all Macs sold DEFAULTED to booting in OS 9.

This is very separate from the “Classic Environment”, which ran inside/alongside OS 9, and within which the lowest-level OS calls ended up being OS X kernel calls (but at a very low level for that transition), as well as from the “Carbon” API which exposed the API familiar to OS 9 developers but called into the OS X kernel fairly high up in the stack. Those are the two go-forward integration layers, but the story with OS X 10.0 and 10.1 was “install this, play with it, report bugs against it, but don’t rely on it for mission-critical tasks yet”.

If you uninstalled OS X, OS 9 was still 100% available. If you uninstalled OS 9, Carbon was still 100% available. The only real chimera there was the Classic Environment, where OS 9 libraries were loaded but ended up calling into OS X kernel calls deep down.

I was there. I worked for Apple during this time. 10.0 and 10.1 were indeed shipping products (although 10.1 was a free update to 10.0) that people paid money for. However, I definitely recall the “troops” at Apple viewing those as not-ready-for-prime-time releases that were there primarily to iron out the issues so that 10.2 and beyond could be brought out. “Experimental” is probably too strong of a word, but I certainly didn’t get the impression that 10.0 or 10.1 were seen as ready for “the masses” in the way that OS 9 was. Internally, I recall several business support apps which required the “classic” environment (not booting to OS 9, but the Classic environment loaded as a shell) to run, so there wasn’t even 100% buy-in from Apple on OS 10 as THE platform until 10.2 came out.

You seem to be comparing the OS 9 / OS 10 situation to the iOS / WebOS situation. While there are some nice aspects of WebOS, I would not say that is built on a better architecture than iOS, which knocks one leg out from that analogy. More importantly, though, OS 10 was available for users to “play” with on the same hardware as OS 9 was, and they tended to (unless they bought the box in the store) get it for free alongside OS 9 in any case. This, too, is not the case for the iOS/WebOS “transition”; you need to buy completely separate hardware for the latter.

It’s commom how many analysts are seeing the situation using the past mistakes as present problems. Until where I know, what has passed, has passed.

Many of this reviewers that has tried the Touchpad have a history “pro Apple”. For example, is not easy find in any place some columns talking about the IPad’s bugs, and I have an IPad that have bug.

Well, I’ll gonna be very happy when I see the somebody talking about the webOS after use directly…

If the HP is really making a big mistake, is not to sell worldwide…

I for one just can’t understand why HP released the TouchPad with the issues it obviously has – after refusing for so long to actually give a ship date and just sayin ‘Summer’. Three or four extra weeks wouldn’t have hurt or changed anything – unfortunately, releasing the TouchPad as they did, to the reviews it got, hurts tremendously. Crazy..

I’ve been looking forward to purchasing the TouchPad for months (I’m in the UK so still waiting – launching the end of this week) – but after reading the reviews I’m seriously unsure as to whether I should buy, hold on and wait to see how the TP performs after the OTA update (one is in beta, I know that for definite) or just go and get an Android tablet instead (the Toshiba Thrive is particularly interesting to me).

I’m kind of like the previous commenter who said they were sick of the iPad. Definitely world class and exceptional, but boring with it – I’m looking for something different and exciting.

I may be in for a long wait! Cheers…

as for new hires post-acquisition, they got Ari Jaaski and his team at Nokia who designed Maemo and Meego (which as we have now seen are quite nice). There are also some great people in the fields of node.js and js.

True, it was no fun to run the MacOS 9 compatibility layer, which I remember as sluggish and buggy. But it didn’t take long for me to convert almost entirely to the new OS. And yes, as Sam noted, you could boot into MacOS 9 for quite a while after X was introduced.

The problem with WebOS is that you need a really compelling reason to buy it instead of the default iOS choice. The multitasking should be one, but if my memory serves bad battery life is a problem. Apple has learned from its earlier premium priced products that if you keep your price low, you can own the market and make competition almost impossible. That is certainly what happened with iPad.

If your rival can build the Mercedes-Benz of the market for about the same as a Chevy, you’ve killed off Chevy entirely. (This is what happened with the various $499 Android tablets.)

So you can compete by becoming a Yugo (which is what the generic brands, like Coby, are) or you can become BMW or Ferrari. If I wanted to get into the tablet biz, I would see what could be done to produce a BMW or Ferrari. Not sure if it could be done but at least the question’s interesting.

I tried iPad 2 in the Apple store today and performance was pretty Ferrari-like. Maybe competitors could try a distinctive style for those who are allergic to Jonathan Ive’s designs?

D

The US and a limited selection of European Countries does nothing to gain the support of the rest of the world.

@BillSchmidt: “Regarding your comments about “write once, deploy many”; webOS is structurally different from iOS and Android in this aspect, the apps do automatically re-size themselves quite well” … Actually, Apple’s interface builder has really great support for auto-resizing of widgets and views. You can specify where things should stick, resize, etc, as screen sizes and shapes change. That’s not really the point to porting something to iPad. The DESIGN of the app has to change to really address the user’s workflow (playflow?) with a device like the iPad.