Bob Cringely writes for I, Cringely, “A good friend of mine pointed out the money phrase from Steve Jobs at this week’s iPad 2 introduction: ‘This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.'”
“But then we come to this very rational critique of the iPad 2 from a blogger named Allahpundit who points out that despite the iPad 2 being thinner and faster and just as cheap as the original iPad with two new cameras to boot, it is still a pain in the ass to cut and paste text with one,” Cringely writes. “Why, given Steve Jobs’s boast that these are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, would he build a device that is in this one important area is clearly harder to use than even a Windows PC?”
Cringely writes, “Steve is, well, a little bit of a hypocrite here…. For all Steve’s bold talk, Apple still relies on Mac sales for a quarter of its revenue — about $15 billion per year — which is a lot of revenue, so they have deliberately kept some things like production cutting and pasting text easier to do on a Mac than on an iPad 2.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This article was created on an iPad running iOS 4.2.1. Therefore, Cringely’s excerpts, his article’s URL, Allahpundit’s URL, multiple code snippets, the blurb, and many pre-built items were, of course, copied and pasted using the functions built into iOS 4.2.1. So, obviously, it can be done and we’re pretty good at it, having had a good amount of practice. It takes us about 10% more time to lay out a MacDailyNews post on an iPad as it does a Mac. (We’ve tested and timed ourselves rather extensively using various devices).
Apple’s iOS 4 cut, copy, and paste functions are unmatched by any touch-controlled device. It’s not even close.
That said, the devices we choose to use for production cutting and pasting are, in order of preference:
1. Mac with a Magic Mouse
2. Mac with a trackpad
3. iPad
4. iPhone or iPod touch (limited screen size)
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]