I think they could make a good one, give the body mac internals and give the screen iPad internals.
Add one piece of Mac hardware, you have to add others, soon you end up with a Mac again. Apple is running the opposite direction with the iPad. They won't stop until it floats.
Analogies are worthless in arguments, most of the time, because it often derails the discussion and gets people talking about the validity of the analogy.
Analogies are worthless?? That's like saying ... well, you know. Analogies, if used correctly, are an invaluable communication tool. Maybe you're talking about bad analogies. In that case, bad things are always worthless.
Yep... I can see utility for an iPad when you have children.
In my case (no children yet), I can't see enough utility to the additional space it occupies at home. I'm trying avoiding electronic redundancy these days. Too much stuff to do basically the same thing.
That's cool, I respect that. In my opinion, a lot of activities benefit from the combined screen size and portability of tablets, to varying degrees, some niche, some more mainstream, and few activities even require them. One of the more mainstream activities that I believe leans toward requiring tablets, including for me personally, is e-reading. I think laptops and smartphones can
technically function as e-readers in certain scenarios, but they do anywhere from a horrible job to a barely passable job. But I believe if you do something a lot and it's something that matters to you, you should have a device that does it very well. For e-reading, I don't think it's a question that that device is a tablet. E-readers of course are also good and relatively cheaper, but I figure if I'm going to get another device, it might as well do as many things as possible (same reason one might get a smartphone and not a dumb phone). If you can't find that activity that's important to you, that a tablet does much better than anything else you have, then as you suspect, a tablet would probably be a frivolous addition to your life.
Yes, TV's have stereo speakers, but realistically, you cannot hear anything like true stereo from your TV, meaning your left and right ears hear different sounds. I have never ever heard sound from my TV that made me "turn" my head to see what made the sound (but with my surround sound system this happens)
to really get this effect you need separate speakers usually attached to an amp and these speakers need to be far enough apart to create a difference in sound for each of your ears
now, I know that some of these systems use "directed" sound, i.e. create a more direct sound stream horizontally out to try and bounce off the walls, but this is moot on an ipad sized device.
It makes sense, the closer you pull the tablet to your face, the closer each speaker will get to your ear, making it more and more like stereo headphones. Just depends how close you hold it to your face, I guess. But this is all moot for the iPad with its ridiculous stereo speakers both on the bottom(??!)...
Which leads to what I believe is a bigger issue at hand: sound DIRECTION. I want to be the person in the room who hears my tablet the loudest. Right now with almost all tablets having side or back speakers, everyone else in the room BUT me gets that privilege, whether they want it or not. We're like the annoying 80s hip hop guy who held his boombox the wrong way. Apple, give us front-facing speakers! On both tablets and phones. Just slap the speakers on the front, pretty it up if you want, or make the sound come through the screen, I don't care, just get 'er done. No more of this cupping my hand around the speaker to try to direct the sound toward me business.
and I'm pretty sure most people don't use their iPads on those situations either.
