It just came to me in a flash (but not with Flash, because that would make Steve mad). Apple’s in the hardware business, and the tablet is not a standalone device, so you need something to connect it to. If you have a home machine and a carry-around tablet, then you don’t want a laptop, you want an all-in-one desktop. An iMac. Hence the name for the tablet:

iTosh

“iMac and iTosh”, or perhaps, “I Mac and Tosh”.

Student tool?

The iBookstore format is ePub, which has relatively limited layout support, making it a poor fit for most textbooks. Apple has not announced any support for Adobe Digital Editions, and non-DRM PDF textbooks are a pipe dream (feel free to solve this problem next, though, if you're up for a challenge). Also, the tiny on-screen keyboard with no support for a stylus means no serious note-taking. You can tweet and fingerpaint, but that's about it, so you'd still need to carry actual notebooks. If you were, say, going to the library to work on a paper, do you take the iPad and an external keyboard, or just carry your laptop?

Carry it to meetings?

No remote for using it in presentations, need to carry a dongle to attach it to a projector, no serious note-taking, microphone unlikely to work well for audio notes.

Errand-running?

Pretty big for holding your shopping list, no GPS for finding your way around (although WiFi-based triangulation may work in some areas), no camera for scanning bar-codes.

Commuting?

Only on a train or bus, and definitely only with an optional case to reduce the risk of dropping it (and also hide the big shiny expensive steal-me gadget).

Visiting friends and family?

"Hey, check out the new pictures of the kids! Oh, you want a copy? Hmm, I can't plug it into your computer because it will try to sync, so maybe if I plug in the SD dongle and copy it to a card from your camera, you can transfer it to your machine later. Oh fuck it, I'll just mail you the Flickr link."

Camping?

No GPS, no offline mapping, poor 3G pretty much anywhere interesting, and can't read a book after the "up to 10 hour" battery life is over.

Not an exhaustive list, to be sure, but so far, every reason I can think of to carry this gadget involves either doing without some functionality or carrying it in addition to something else, like pen and paper, a laptop, a phone, a GPS, a camera, or some of the many optional accessories. Taking notes? Add a Bluetooth keyboard or the special dock. Transferring data, including attaching it to a larger display? Carry dongles and cables. Etc, etc.

It’s 7.5x9.5x0.5 inches and weighs a pound and a half. Add a case to protect it from damage, and you’re carrying around a cookbook. In fact, you’re carrying around this cookbook. I could carry this cookbook everywhere I go, but it’s big enough that I wouldn’t do so without a good reason. Take a look at the top 100 applications for the iPhone; are any of them compelling enough to justify carrying a cookbook around? I haven’t found one, and the notoriously capricious approval process makes it unlikely a compelling app will get released quickly, and the notoriously clunky App Store makes it unlikely you’ll find out about it if it does.

Apple promises optimized versions of iWork, but even in landscape mode, the on-screen keyboard is no bigger than the one on the original 7-inch EeePC. And if you put the iPad in a comfortable position for typing, the shiny screen is at an awkward angle for viewing, especially in less-than-perfect lighting.

Am I rationalizing my recent purchase of a Lenovo S12 netbook, and wishing I’d saved my pennies for the iComeToJesusTablet? No. Not only didn’t I expect the iPad to ship before March, I never expect the 1.0 release of any Apple product to be stable, so I wouldn’t have bought one until at least June anyway, and in any case, I can afford to own both. Right now, though, I don’t want one, because I can only envision using it around the house, and all my stuff is already there, so why bother?

I get some use out of the iPod Touch, and I’ve often wished for a scaled-up version, but what I wanted scaled up was the capability as much as the size. The iPad has the size (very close to B5, with a bigger-than-B6 screen), but is basically limited to consuming content created on actual computers. So why not just carry a real computer when you want to work, and an iPod when you only need canned content?

[Update: I’m leaning towards iSpork – only good for consuming canned goods; if you want to cook, it’s the wrong tool]

• iMaxi
• iReadOnly
• iCantTakeNotes
• iCanHazDongles?
• iGotRejectedByTheAppStore
• iPodTouchButBigger
• iPoundAndAHalf
• iTrophyWife
• iOnlyConsumeContentCreatedElsewhere
• iStreamPornOver3G
• iHuntAndPeck
• iBling
• iWTF
• iDrinkKoolaid
• iLikedTheNewtonBetter

Thanks for enabling two-finger trackpad zoom on the desktop in Snow Leopard. One accidental swipe and my carefully-arranged icons are all over the place, with no undo and no way to turn off the feature without disabling it system-wide. Gosh, how clever of you. “It probably won an award.”

As I said earlier, the Faces feature isn’t terribly well-integrated into iPhoto. It’s a standalone piece of metadata that has no collection to the app’s events, places, folders, or keywords. It’s even stored separately, in a pair of SQLite databases that have no real connection to anything else; they can even be deleted without affecting the rest of your database.

At a user level, the key issue is that Faces aren’t people. You can’t use it to tag “Bob’s wipeout on the slopes”, “Mary dressed up as Darth Maul”, “Jean hiding from the camera”, or dozens of other scenarios in which the relevant person isn’t clearly showing their normal face. You could select a random portion of the picture and claim it’s a Face, but it will lower the recognition accuracy, and may not work anyway.

I’m sure a future version of the app will integrate it better, perhaps allowing you to mark out areas of a picture that contain a specific person but shouldn’t be used for face recognition, but for now, you end up with two sets of pictures, faced and faceless, only one of which is easy to browse.

The other set does have its charms, though…

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I don’t really use iPhoto. Its casual-user focus makes it poorly suited to what I want in a photo-management app, and it’s not particularly useful as a general-purpose image catalog tool, either.

There’s some interesting technology in it, however, including Faces, which attempts to detect and recognize human faces in photos, allowing you to (potentially) organize your pictures by who’s in them. It’s not integrated into the app very well yet, and there are some odd bugs, but it turns out to be surprisingly accurate and useful.

Since I was home sick yesterday and not up to much else, I imported a collection of 1,421 scanned photos of attractive young women and told it to look for faces. On the first pass, it found faces in about 80% of the pictures, and only a few of those were false positives (jewelry, plaids, etc). A second recognition pass got it up above 90%, out of a total of 95% that really did have at least one human face. Most of its failures involved faces that were tilted at roughly 45 degree angles, as well as profiles and low-contrast images. It did surprisingly well at finding low-resolution faces, and even did a fair job of auto-naming them correctly, once I had a good sample size.

[Bug note: There are a few images that I simply cannot manually add a face to, and I don’t know why. I draw out the rectangle, add a name, hit Done, and it deletes my work. It thinks there’s something there, because it will offer them as options in the “person X might be in this picture” section, but it never accepts the face.]

It takes a little while to figure out a decent workflow for adding names to pictures, but it does work. If you select a few good matches for each major face, the name-guesser will perform a lot better, and save you a lot of manual selection. I’d like to see it offer the top three choices instead of just the best one, and the UI needs some work (especially in keyboard navigation consistency and false-positive handling), but it works, and in normal usage, most people won’t be tagging a thousand images at once.

As far as integration goes, the names you tag a picture with aren’t keywords, don’t show up in the Get Info page, can’t be searched via Spotlight, can’t be displayed or printed as captions, can’t be used to sort, etc, etc. There’s a Faces-specific browser, and you can click the Names button on a full-sized image to view all the tagged Faces present, but that’s it. It’s not useful as a general “person X is in photo Y” tagging system yet.

[Update: I was just reminded of another missing feature that I really want: a “faceless” rule for Smart Albums, so I can say “all pictures from Album X that have no faces in them”. After 80% of the 1400+ images in my album had names, I only wanted to sort through the ones that didn’t, and the only way I could find to do it was to create a smart album Y as “pictures from Album X that have faces, none of which are unnamed”, manually copy its contents to another non-smart album Z, then define a new smart album as “pictures from X that aren’t in Z”, and remember to keep Z up to date. (the app won’t let me say “pictures from X that aren’t in Y”)]

Now for the amusing picture. This is what happens when all of the faces you’ve identified come from professionally shot photos of young Japanese women in full makeup:

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Can I please have my one-click “show all tracks from this album” back? Clicking on the little arrow next to the album name takes me to the iTunes Store, which was always a pathetic and useless “feature”, but it used to be that alt-clicking on the arrow would take me to the album that I already own, thank you very much. Now it doesn’t.

It appears the only way to select all of the tracks from an album is to select one track, switch to grid view, and then double-click the album cover (which is either a blank square or an automatically-downloaded incorrect picture). And then switch back out of grid view, because it’s pretty-but-useless.

While I’m ranting, wouldn’t it be nice if the new Genius Mixes would show you the tracks it’s going to play, or allow you to rate the current song while it’s playing?

Where did the “clear recent searches” option go in Safari 4.0.3?

Workaround:

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