The New York times ran a technology article by Sarah Perez comparing Apple’s iPad to Google’s Chrome computer operating system.
I’m going to refrain from talking about the subjective arguments and just focus on 2 glaring factual errors. Luckily for me, both are contained within the same sentence!
Perez writes
But no matter what the real truth is, consumers won’t care. Once they find out that video websites like YouTube don’t work on the iPad, news sites like CNN lack video, and the TV portal Hulu is beyond reach, the iPad will, in their eyes, just NOT work.
No Youtube? Well let’s just fire up Apple.com and take a look. Oh, look! A photo of the iPad, right here on the front page! Hmm…what’s this?
I don’t see anything
No no. Look closer. Here, let’s zoom in.
Oh. That’s inconvenient.
Ok, so that’s just one teeny tiny little mistake. How could we expect Perez to be familiar with Apple.com, after all? I’m probably asking too much, aren’t I? And anyway, what about CNN.com? Its website uses Flash to play videos, after all, which we all know the iPad can not display!
Here, I’ll load cnn.com on my iPhone which is also Flash-impaired.
Let me break this down for you…
Oh. Hm. That seems to be CNN video playing on my iPhone. Well, the aspect ratio is a little weird, but I’m not sure I can classify that as “lacking” video.
Finally, we get to the 3rd item: Hulu. Here, Perez has a point; Hulu.com will NOT work on an iPad. Well, good job on that one, but a 33% success rate for that single sentence isn’t really the best track record. School children fail tests with higher scores than that.
~ ~ ~
There are many other things that I consider wrong with this article, but I’ll leave the endless minutiae to more dedicated bloggers. The only thing I want you to remember is that Sarah Perez seems to write about Apple products without testing them, talking to experts about them, or even opening up Apple.com in her web browser.
I think you can take that information and make a good guess about how well the rest of the article goes.
February 2, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Her whole premise is wrong. She thinks Google’s Chrome based slate is “open” and good and Apple’s iPad is “closed” and bad.
Chrome is open in the fact that Google is publishing the code under an OSS licensing agreement. Anyone who wants can take the code, compile it, and put it on their own Chrome slate. In this sense, the iPad is closed because only Apple can build an iPad.
To the consumer point of view, this is completely irrelevant. In fact, in the consumer point of view, the Chrome slate will be even more closed than the iPad.
No data or applications can be stored on the Chrome slate. There is no restrictive SDK for apps because there are no apps. All “apps” will be web based HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. An App is saved on the Chrome slate is simply a bookmark to the webpage. In fact, from what I can see, even bookmarks aren’t stored on the slate. Data access will be using Google JavaScript APIs.
Even better, both the Chrome slate and the Apple iPad use the same Webkit based browser engine. That means any “app” that runs on the Chrome slate will also run on the iPad.
February 2, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Not to mention, Hulu apparently doesn’t have a license to stream to mobile devices, as smartphone users with Flash lite have reported. Also, the simple fact of the matter is that Chrome OS is more locked down. There’s no such thing as third-party software, unless it’s running through the browser (i.e. no binaries). The iPhone at least has the App Store system.
February 2, 2010 at 7:51 pm
I appreciate your arguments. However, YouTube is available as an app, not as a regular web page, this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahintampa/4326012535/) is CNN.com on the iPhone (notice the broken flash window?) and as we both agree, Hulu does not work.
Not sure that’s a 33%…maybe Apple gets partial credit for making a YouTube app?
Also this content came to NYT via a blog. Sometimes blog posts are a bit subjective, so guilty as charged on that one.
February 2, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Hi Sarah, thanks for stopping by!
It looks like the poster ‘Stets’ beat me to this one, but as he mentions below, on an iPhone you have to manually navigate your way to the non-mobile version of CNN to find broken flash links. The default is to present the mobile version of the site that works properly with the iPhone.
You showed us a screenshot of cnn.com on an iPhone when m.cnn.com is what an iPhone user would normally encounter.
Likewise, going to Youtube.com in the normal way will work seamlessly by launching the Youtube app when a video is selected.
So while it’s possible to find screenshots of un-usable CNN or Youtube sites, I still don’t think that really backs up your claim that users will be confused. Anyone who sees those screens must have navigated past usable sites and sought out specific ‘desktop mode’ links. That’s hardly the same as picking up an iPad and finding out that sites don’t work.
I don’t mean to criticize your entire premise of the article, by the way. There are many things that an iPad won’t do and exploring those things is a useful service for your readers.
My point here was that you’re reaching for some pretty un-plausible situations that depend on many qualifiers to even be true. I’m not opposed pointing out the iPad’s limitations. I just think that readers are better served by writing about limitations they’ll actually encounter rather than by explaining weird, out of the way tricks.
February 3, 2010 at 12:11 am
Here are some of Sarah Perez’s other statements that sound a tad strange:
S.P. “Although Google’s mobile offering is far more open, consumers have – so far – voted with their wallets, choosing Apple’s restrictive “we’ll think for you” mobile OS and accompanying ecosystem over Google’s “do what you want” alternative.”
- First off, I don’t think Google’s approach is completely “do what you want”. Even if it were, choosing “we’ll insure security on your device” over “we left the floodgates open. You’re on your own, buddy” is not such an unreasonable decision.
S.P. “Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome OS will. It will provide access to the real web…and all its buggy code. And while that might degrade the battery’s performance on a Chrome PC, consumers won’t care so much …”
- So consumers don’t mind buggy code and poor performance as long as they can get they get to watch their TV? These must be very special kind of consumers who have been well conditioned to put up with buggy code and poor performance! Chrome PC, huh? What are there future tablet customers using now?
S.P. “But Apple has a vision for their devices, and if they don’t like how something is built, it won’t run on their hardware.”
- I suppose that’s how come Apple customers don’t have to put up will malware. Oh, I forgot, you already said “consumers won’t care much.” Where do you find such easy to please consumers?
S.P. “Eventually, these differences will have consumers choosing between two “big brother” type figures: the one that watches your activities everywhere on the web and the one that wants to control what the web even is.”
- Yes one that spies on you and the other who tries to protect you from Nigerian “government officials” and Chinese “nationalist” hackers.
February 3, 2010 at 9:34 am
Pete:
- “We’ll think for you” is a little tongue and cheek. The point was that Apple wants to control things – like app submissions for iPhone, while Google lets all Android apps through.
- Won’t care **so much** – that’s different than saying they won’t care at all. I think consumers will be more concerned with broken web sites that don’t display Flash than with the “buggy” code in Flash itself and the problems it causes.
- How is keeping Google Voice out of the App Store protecting me from malware and hackers?
February 3, 2010 at 9:28 am
But will the iPad take you to the mobile site for a page? I doubt it, not with its larger screen and its niche as a netbook alternative. I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing “regular” web sites on the iPad.
February 3, 2010 at 9:27 pm
As with mobile-optimised sites now, it will be up to the site designers to detect the device and present the appropriate content and css. So yes, it’s fair to say that sites will present, eg, HTML5, or H.264 video instead of Flash, when they detect an iPhone OS device–including the iPad. As we know from years of coding for IE6, you make your site fit the users.
February 2, 2010 at 7:57 pm
YouTube works just fine on the iPhone by going to a YouTube webpage, you get a play icon where the video would be and tapping it plays the video full screen.
February 3, 2010 at 9:37 am
That’s because it auto-detects the iPhone. Will sites have to auto-detect the iPad too? It’s supposed to be a computer, so it will be taking you to the “real” websites you would see on a desktop/laptop (e.g. cnn.com, youtube.com), not some specially crafted iPhone-only sites.
If the iPad becomes supremely popular, it’s possible that site owners will build out special iPad-only sites but that will neither happen immediately nor for all sites on the web whose content displays improperly on the iPad.
February 3, 2010 at 9:44 am
Now see, THIS is an interesting discussion!
I obviously think the opposite way than you do on this (I think iPad will load mobile sites) but even though we disagree I can at least get behind this debate as being worthwhile.
I would have liked your article a lot more if it had been framed as a debate like this instead of saying what the iPad will and won’t do as if they were all known facts.
But then, I understand you weren’t writing in a medium that works well with a back-and-forth debate style. I may be spoiled because I’m writing here and not in a newspaper.
February 3, 2010 at 10:51 am
I love interesting discussions.
Let’s see if I can get to the bottom of this by contacting Apple.
February 3, 2010 at 2:08 pm
I would imagine that Apple will change the identification info for the iPad so that it doesn’t end up loading the super cut-down mobile pages that the iPhone currently redirects to. However, both Youtube and CNN are clearly capable of delivering video without flash, and while nobody knows yet how well the iPad will sell it definitely has gotten a lot of media attention. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal for CNN to detect the iPad (or for that matter any HTML5 compatible browser that doesn’t have flash installed) and provide an alternate page with standard video embedded instead of flash.
February 4, 2010 at 12:16 pm
If the iPad is running the iPhone OS which, by the way, uses Safari Mobile, one can extrapolate from there that Safari on the iPad would most likely be detected as ‘Safari Mobile’.
I would expect that this, combined with the detection of resolution would enable developers to reformat specifically for the higher resolution iPad but maintain the functionality of the mobile version of the site.
February 2, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Also, I just went to cnn.com on my iPhone and did not get the page you show a screenshot of. I got the default page for iPhone users where video works just fine.
February 3, 2010 at 9:38 am
See above comment.
February 14, 2010 at 4:45 pm
[...] concept video rather than to the actual, real, soon-to-ship Chrome OS? And it’s premised on glaring factual mistakes, like that the iPad doesn’t support [...]