Gates Told Jobs About the iPad in 2007

"Good artists copy, great artists steal... thanks Bill."

Steve

Sent from my iPad
 
you can get in trouble for saying that.

what

post pc

why

.......

owned.
 
Ha, that was entertaining. It was sort of annoying when the woman interviewer kept on spouting random crap, though.
 
I imagine Apple had been working on the iPad for more than 2 years. :) Steve is talking about Personal Computers, not Windows machines.

It sounds like Steve was talking about some browser-based device that accesses useful things on the Internet.

Interesting video clip! I can't believe Steve and Bill didn't start fighting. ;)
 
I really doubt Steve and Bill have a bad relationship... they're just two competitors...

The fanboys are the ones that'll stab eachother in the balls.
 
Gates was thinking of something very different. The digital ink stuff on Tablet PCs is second to none, and that's what he was talking about.

On the other hand, Steve 'if you see a stylus they blew it' Jobs is a much bigger believer in the touch interface, which is why the iPad is essentially a giant iPhone.
 
I imagine Apple had been working on the iPad for more than 2 years. :)

Hahaha, no. The iPad runs on common smartphone guts, hence why it runs the iPhone OS. Its just a Cortex A-8 with an extra large battery. HTC could throw something similar together running Android in a month, tops.

Take an iPhone 3GS, clock the CPU at 1ghz, give it a larger screen and a larger battery and you have an iPad. That isn't 2 years of work, nowhere near it.

They probably spent far more time working on all the launch apps than they did the hardware.
 
With all his money you would think Mr. Gates would have a better barber.
 
99% chance they started development of the iPad after the iPhone hit the market, the 1st generation model, and was declared a massive success. Until that release, even Apple could not be certain that a touch-based device would go anywhere; there is no way in hell they'd commit that much in term of resources towards a potentially fatal device.

Remember the Newton? Oh yeah, big seller, big product, big fucking failure.

They weren't going to make that same mistake again twice, not with Jobs at the helm. So the iPhone turned out to be the stepping stone, errr... touchstone (?) that got things really moving. It's patently obvious that an iPad is a big iPhone minus the actual voice call technology, anybody that says otherwise is just stupid - not even ignorant, they're just fucking stupid, period.

As such, and as I've been saying for a very long time, the iPad is not revolutionary; it is simply evolutionary and nothing more.

The iPhone OS isn't anything I'd brag about either except for it being the first competitor to Windows Mobile that's mattered - and that comes from the perspective of Windows Mobile and all it's predecessors being either stylus or resistive-screen controlled.

Note I'm careful not to say "touch" there because Windows Mobile was eventually turning into a touch-based operating system - Apple did not invent multi-touch, nor were they the first device with a "touch screen" meaning actual capacitive touch-screen finger-controlled product on the market. Again, evolutionary - taking what came before and stepping on it to reach higher.

Windows Mobile, for all it's faults from day 1, is still a damned fine OS, it really is. But it's oh so easy to just bash it in favor of "the next big thing."

Apple took a lot from Windows Mobile, but people with blinders on can never see all that went into making the iPhone OS that now powers their evolutionary products.

Damned shame that Windows Mobile never gets the credit it so rightly deserves.
 
99% chance they started development of the iPad after the iPhone hit the market, the 1st generation model, and was declared a massive success. Until that release, even Apple could not be certain that a touch-based device would go anywhere; there is no way in hell they'd commit that much in term of resources towards a potentially fatal device.

Remember the Newton? Oh yeah, big seller, big product, big fucking failure.

They weren't going to make that same mistake again twice, not with Jobs at the helm. So the iPhone turned out to be the stepping stone, errr... touchstone (?) that got things really moving. It's patently obvious that an iPad is a big iPhone minus the actual voice call technology, anybody that says otherwise is just stupid - not even ignorant, they're just fucking stupid, period.

As such, and as I've been saying for a very long time, the iPad is not revolutionary; it is simply evolutionary and nothing more.

The iPhone OS isn't anything I'd brag about either except for it being the first competitor to Windows Mobile that's mattered - and that comes from the perspective of Windows Mobile and all it's predecessors being either stylus or resistive-screen controlled.

Note I'm careful not to say "touch" there because Windows Mobile was eventually turning into a touch-based operating system - Apple did not invent multi-touch, nor were they the first device with a "touch screen" meaning actual capacitive touch-screen finger-controlled product on the market. Again, evolutionary - taking what came before and stepping on it to reach higher.

Windows Mobile, for all it's faults from day 1, is still a damned fine OS, it really is. But it's oh so easy to just bash it in favor of "the next big thing."

Apple took a lot from Windows Mobile, but people with blinders on can never see all that went into making the iPhone OS that now powers their evolutionary products.

Damned shame that Windows Mobile never gets the credit it so rightly deserves.


FRom what I'd been following Apple had a prototype of the MacbookAir as a slate tablet with the only real change being an onscreen keyboard and the explosion over the iPhone caused them to either split development or just dump everything in the jackass iPad. I was really enthusiastic about a MacSlate but the iPad just just idiotic.
 
I think laptops will be the device that disappears, not full on PC's. As tablets get better they can double as a laptop if you use an external keyboard. There is no need to always carry the keyboard everywhere you go. There need to be some advances in technology though. Color e-ink displays and faster x86 low power processors the can run a full OS on a true tablet form factor something like the iPad in size.
 
FRom what I'd been following Apple had a prototype of the MacbookAir as a slate tablet with the only real change being an onscreen keyboard and the explosion over the iPhone caused them to either split development or just dump everything in the jackass iPad. I was really enthusiastic about a MacSlate but the iPad just just idiotic.

Funny you say that:

From the moment the MacBook Air appeared I've been saying "You know, if you took the lid off (disassemble the entire lid assembly, remove the lid itself and use only the LCD and front bezel), and you pull the entire keyboard assembly off (remove the keyboard and palmrests), and then you flipped the LCD/bezel so it's facing up and place it directly where the keyboard/palmrests were, and made that entire LCD a multi-touch surface... my god..."

Now, the iPad isn't quite nearly that concept but, if you can mentally visualize that disassembly and re-configuration of MacBook Air components... it would be pretty damned close to a 13.3" iPad.

So they weren't far off from my imaginings... what a scary thought. :D
 
Windows Mobile, for all it's faults from day 1, is still a damned fine OS, it really is. But it's oh so easy to just bash it in favor of "the next big thing."

Apple took a lot from Windows Mobile, but people with blinders on can never see all that went into making the iPhone OS that now powers their evolutionary products.

Damned shame that Windows Mobile never gets the credit it so rightly deserves.

As likely as we're to be tarred and feathered for it, I agree. By most standards, WinMo *sucked*... but it was also an impressively capable little OS. It was largely a letdown due to its incomplete and inconsistent hardware support and UI issues. It, however, was so far ahead of the curve in many regards. Still is, especially considering how Jobs keeps squeezing tighter and tighter on iPhoneOS.

I've used several iterations of WinMo on Palmtops (remember WinCE2?) and the Compaq Aero 8000 subnotebook... The biggest thing that held it back for me was the many different CPU versions of WinMo/CE that you had to work to find software for. The Aero8000 was a damned nice unit and I still think it made a better netbook than the netbooks we now have... but the lack of driver and program support for the slightly 'off' version of the ARM CPU that was in that thing crippled the potential it had. PocketIE was a damned good browser for the time, too.

Compared to everything we have now, WinMo and WinCE were alpha. Gotta start somewhere.
 
Hahaha, no. The iPad runs on common smartphone guts, hence why it runs the iPhone OS. Its just a Cortex A-8 with an extra large battery. HTC could throw something similar together running Android in a month, tops.

Take an iPhone 3GS, clock the CPU at 1ghz, give it a larger screen and a larger battery and you have an iPad. That isn't 2 years of work, nowhere near it.

They probably spent far more time working on all the launch apps than they did the hardware.

Apple tablet rumours have been floating around for years. It was like a running joke on Mac Rumours, every yearly conference people expected it to be announced.
 
Funny you say that:

From the moment the MacBook Air appeared I've been saying "You know, if you took the lid off (disassemble the entire lid assembly, remove the lid itself and use only the LCD and front bezel), and you pull the entire keyboard assembly off (remove the keyboard and palmrests), and then you flipped the LCD/bezel so it's facing up and place it directly where the keyboard/palmrests were, and made that entire LCD a multi-touch surface... my god..."

Now, the iPad isn't quite nearly that concept but, if you can mentally visualize that disassembly and re-configuration of MacBook Air components... it would be pretty damned close to a 13.3" iPad.

So they weren't far off from my imaginings... what a scary thought. :D

If only superficially.

Take the MacBookAir... disassemble it. Throw out the only USB port it has, the Magsafe connector, the displayport plug on it, the keyboard, the touchpad, the lcd, the CPU, the hard drive, the battery and everything else... turn all of the aluminum back into raw materials...

And create a new shell with a different type and resolution LCD screen, put a different kind of touch surface on top, throw in two batteries of a different size compared with the one used in the MBA, a different kind of CPU (ARM versus x86), a different kind of power connector, different kind of OS, different kind of storage...

I suppose you could say an iPad is a converted MacBook Air. :rolleyes:
 
I think laptops will be the device that disappears, not full on PC's. As tablets get better they can double as a laptop if you use an external keyboard. There is no need to always carry the keyboard everywhere you go. There need to be some advances in technology though. Color e-ink displays and faster x86 low power processors the can run a full OS on a true tablet form factor something like the iPad in size.

There are plenty of people who'll NEVER give up a keyboard on their computers. Rapid text entry will be a very important action on mobile computers for decades to come I believe and many just prefer physical keyboards to virtual ones.
 
Well, look at the guts of the MacBook Air from the actual motherboard perspective:

It's a real Core 2 Duo mobo/chipset, fully capable, not some stripped down ULV version. It's not much larger - even though it's 2 years older - than the mobo that's sitting inside the iPad right now, they are very similar in terms of space required.

Now, if you took the hard drive out of the guts of a MacBook Air and instead of using that space for storage, you dumped a ton of Flash RAM on that mobo and used batteries that were larger because of the now additional internal space inside the housing... well, you should be able to see what that could have been.

With the additional advances in technology over those 2 years of time - new Atom processors came out, newer Core 2 Duo processors using even less voltage came out, etc - you should be able to shrink the original MBA mobo down to the exact size of the iPad, actually. Far more integration than the original MBA, smaller parts, tighter space utilization, etc.

Hell, I've always said if I had been desperate I could take my Axim X51v apart and attach it to the back of an LCD panel and two extra batteries and duct tape it together - it would be 1/2" thick, work at 1280x960 portrait resolution with upscaling just like the iPad does for native iPhone/iPod touch apps (since the X51v had a VGA screen running at 480x640 portrait resolution), and because of it being run by a low-powered ARM-derivative technology processor (Marvel, technically) it would run for a lot more than 10 hours...

I could have done that 5 years ago, probably should have, who knows. Imagine what it could have been had someone actually hacked that kind of slate together from a PocketPC - just like Apple hacked together the iPad from (essentially) iPhone/iPod touch components. Amazing, eh?
 
There are plenty of people who'll NEVER give up a keyboard on their computers. Rapid text entry will be a very important action on mobile computers for decades to come I believe and many just prefer physical keyboards to virtual ones.

The only real acceptable substitute to a physical keyboard IMO would be some awesome handwriting recognition. Win7's is decent...but still iffy.

Maybe with the increases in multicore processing power, we'll see excellent handwriting recognition someday.
 
Someday, like it or not you diehard keyboard fanatics, your beloved invention will bite the dust and I won't have any problem with it (I'll most likely have long since shuffled off this coil by then, of course).

I always fall back to using Star Trek: The Next Generation as "how things should be done" and someday they will be. When was the last time anyone actually watched an episode of that series and saw someone actually typing any text of any kind into a computer?

All the functionality required is provided by the operating system and it's all apparently object oriented on a seemingly colossal scale - voice input works as expected and is the secondary method right after the touch-based surface controls that cover a huge percentage of not only panels everywhere on the space-faring vehicles but on planets, in habitats, residences, etc. Talk about pervasive technology...

You don't type on L.C.A.R.S - the operating system of all Starfleet computers - you simply tell the computer (or at least the terminal you're stationed at or using at any given time) what you want, by voice, with some manual input if necessary (and there's a potential reason for that too, aka security or privacy related) and it happens. You wouldn't tell a computer (theoretically) your password out loud for others to hear but, the L.C.A.R.S. system in that series is always listening, everywhere and has apparently outstanding voice recognition to boot (no pun intended) - it doesn't just understand your words, commands, etc, it also knows it's actually you because of your own unique digital voiceprint that would be quite difficult to reproduce.

Why can't we -- scratch that -- why DON'T we have this right now? I wonder... but I also know exactly why. Wanna know?

People. People can't stand change, of any kind, good, bad, whatever. They simply can't stand altering their habitual patterns of doing things, which is the saddest thing of all.

Someday, keyboards will not exist except in junkyards (or junk planets as in the movie "Soldier") and museums, if at all. Could be simply digital visualizations stored for people to wonder at and make statements like "You have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy..." (yes I use a lot of TV and movie references... that's from "Back To The Future" of course).

I'm the kind of person that wants such technology and questions why we don't have it right fucking now constantly, every day I'm breathing. Keyboards, even mice... they're too damned slow as input devices.

The future is about voice controlled everything with very little manual input required but, even when that is necessary, it's all about touchable surfaces that reconfigure themselves in a second flat for a given task as required.

Yes, I am a dreamer, but I damned sure ain't asleep. ;)
 
It's not that I'm a keyboard fanatic it's simply that it is very good for text entry, which while not something they do in the 23rd and 24th Centuries. HUGE Trek fan BTW.
 
It's not that I'm a keyboard fanatic it's simply that it is very good for text entry, which while not something they do in the 23rd and 24th Centuries. HUGE Trek fan BTW.

Best line in any Star Trek related show, movie, video, etc was in Star Trek: First Contact (which I really was disappointed with):

Cochrane: "I gotta take a leak..."

LaForge: "Leak? I'm not detecting any leak...?"

Cochrane: "Don't you people from the 24th century ever pee?"


Absolutely priceless comedy. ;)
 
Best line in any Star Trek related show, movie, video, etc was in Star Trek: First Contact (which I really was disappointed with):

Cochrane: "I gotta take a leak..."

LaForge: "Leak? I'm not detecting any leak...?"

Cochrane: "Don't you people from the 24th century ever pee?"


Absolutely priceless comedy. ;)

Great lines from the best Next Gen movie!
 
The only real acceptable substitute to a physical keyboard IMO would be some awesome handwriting recognition. Win7's is decent...but still iffy.

Maybe with the increases in multicore processing power, we'll see excellent handwriting recognition someday.

Let me know when you can write 80+wpm.
 
Let me know when you can write 80+wpm.

I knew taking shorthand sucked in high school but someday it would pay off...

168 wpm shorthand, my tested speed. ;)

Oh, and I type about 110-115 wpm most of the time. How about you?
 
The only real acceptable substitute to a physical keyboard IMO would be some awesome handwriting recognition. Win7's is decent...but still iffy.

Maybe with the increases in multicore processing power, we'll see excellent handwriting recognition someday.

Wow, you're the first person I've heard say that Windows 7's text handwriting recognition is "iffy". Is it perfect? No but when combined with the corrector in the TIP it's simply fantastic.

For writing text tome it's FAR better than a virtual keyboard to me. I wouldn't write code with it but for text like email and documents the HR in 7 is wonderful.
 
Everyone and their brother knew the tablet was coming even before 2007. The problem was implimentation, not the idea.
 
Let me know when you can type a differential equation or draw a UML diagram with a keyboard.

Once again the right tool for the right job.

I think there are apps for that, well, at least for a PC.
 
Everyone and their brother knew the tablet was coming even before 2007. The problem was implimentation, not the idea.

Pure Windows slates have existed for years and slates, even ones that run light OSes are not new. Microsoft had a internet device that they sort of bought to market around the time of the Tablet PC in 2002 that ran Windows CE but they pulled it pretty quickly for reasons I don't understand.
 
Everyone and their brother knew the tablet was coming even before 2007. The problem was implimentation, not the idea.

And therein lies the answer of why the iPad is evolutionary and not revolutionary:

Because the technology to miniaturize the components necessary did not exist (to a major degree) over the past 12 years or so that Tablet PCs have been either in product or in development, especially not to the degree of miniaturization that makes the iPad possible in the form factor that it has.

Evolutionary, not revolutionary. The idea was recently shown to have originated in what, 1968 I think, with the Dynabook which you can read much more here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/alan-kay-steve-jobs-ipad-iphone,10209.html

More stepping... more rungs on the ladder, exactly what Apple does. They weren't the first, not even, but they did bring all the pieces together and made it happen in the form-factor that most of us (at least I believe it's most of us) want/think is best for such a device.
 
Why does Steve Jobs always sound like a tool. While Bill, on the other hand seems to be quite on honest and down to earth. Call me a windows fanboyl. Call me a fan of Gates. I clearly am, but its because i have at least 2 mouse buttons.
 
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