What Has Been Memed Cannot Be Unmemed

The Law Of Horses and Bayonets Sez: The man riding the tank and armed with a machine gun wins.

Fewer anecdotes, not less. Are you just trying to give SFL, Flippin, and me an aneurysm?
BTW, Targa, the local grammar nazis welcome you to Stinque. ;->

@Mistress Cynica: But then you lose the less/more, which is essential to the construction. Rhythm trumps Grammar.

/s/ Grammar Freedom Fighters

Stinque World Domination Headquarters will be closed from 10am PT for approximately ninety minutes as Apple livestreams its iPad mini announcement and the drones huddle around the Apple TV in abject worship. We thank you for your understanding.

@nojo: Stay safe.

@Mistress Cynica: Thanks. And, in my defense, I was working with a construct from radio brags of yore: “Less talk, more rock.”

Add: …and gin.

@Benedick: And, we’re back. $329 for an iPad mini doesn’t sound like an impulse buy. Although mine will be a business deduction.

@nojo: Meh, too little, too late. I’m sure it’ll do well, because it says iPad on it. But this is the worst “me too” game I’ve seen from Apple in quite a while.

@nojo: At $250 I would have done it.

@Targa: Less talk, more rock is correct. If something can be counted in units of some sort, fewer is correct.

Yes, one is insufferable and has few friends, thanks for asking.

@Mistress Cynica: Beat beat-beat-beat, beat beat-beat-beat. That’s all I hear. Especially with my fingers in my ears.

@IanJ: @Mistress Cynica: The angle Apple’s pitching is a substantially larger screen than similar mini-tablets, but I agree with the consumer psychology: $299 or less, preferably $249.

There are production reasons for playing it how they did (the screen is basically a multiple of a 3GS screen, cut from similar LCD sheets), and since it runs existing iPad apps, you can’t shrink them too much from their intended “full” size, but still. It’s not quite playing in the Nexus/Kindle Fire market.

That said, I bought Last Year’s Kindle Fire for development, and the screen size seemed awkward to me. So, who knows.

I’ve got a Galaxy Tab 2.0 7″, and it seems pretty good. The screen is a touch too small, and the body is a touch too big, so I’m calling it overall about right. I also have a (now outdated) New PrevGen iPad through work, which seems ridiculously large to me.

What people still forget is that Apple never really leads in tech innovation, they just watch and see what everyone else is doing before refining their product.

The iPod was far from the first digital music player. It was, however, the first one that didn’t look like a potato, and the first with an efficient system for organizing music.

@matador1015: I was happily making the same argument until January 2007 — that Apple’s genius was refinement and popularization.

The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but the first MP3 player done right. The original Mac developed Xerox PARC’s insights much more than Xerox did. OS X is a Unix shell done right (although it took three rounds to nail it). Even USB — an Intel technology — was lying fallow until the iMac forced the issue.

But the iPhone was all but inconceivable before Apple introduced it. And the iPad created a tablet market where a decade of Microsoft attempts had failed.

Those might be, in the long run, exceptions — Apple’s strength remains waiting for technology to gel before pouncing on it. But even there, Apple is spectacularly innovative: They make shit work.

@nojo: Actually, the iPhone wasn’t Apple’s first attempt. The fact that it was a massive fail didn’t stop Apple from getting it right a couple of years later.

@matador1015: That fail’s on Motorola. But you already knew that.