John Gruber’s excited about GarageBand for iPad:

GarageBand for iPad—impressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are a bunch of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPad, and they’ve been used to great effect by many musicians. […] GarageBand for iPad is of a different scope. This is Apple taking the idea of the iPad as a musical instrument and tackling that idea with the full strength of its collective creativity. It is the most iPad-ish iPad app I’ve ever seen. Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The  interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control—every button, every switch, every slider—is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display.

I’m also excited about this app. I use GarageBand for Mac very regularly, and I’ve written loads of articles and large chunks of bookazines about the app, shoe-horning in the entire song-writing process into tutorial spaces in reality designed for far less.

However, I think Gruber does a disservice to apps that already exist for iOS. I’ve no doubt GarageBand for iPad will be polished and look great; it will likely be at least reasonably accessible to newcomers, but offer enough power for amateurs and perhaps even semi-pros to get down song sketches (although the eight-track restriction will stop many in their tracks). If compatibility with the Mac version works, that will also be fantastic (although, having worked with iWork apps for Mac and iOS, I’m not holding my breath on that front). But other apps already do the things GarageBand for iPad is being lauded for (bar accelerometer-based intensity when you strike a key at different speeds). Korg has a number of instruments with custom-designed interfaces, such as iMS-20. NanoStudio—probably my favourite iOS app—offers a highly editable synth, pads, MIDI editing and sampling. In some areas, it’s not as glossy as GarageBand, but a four-by-four drumkit grid is more usable than Apple’s picture of a drumkit to smack.

What I hope is that there’s enough room left for the pioneers in this space, and that Apple won’t just steamroller the lot of them—unless GarageBand actually proves to be far better than the competition and the competition then doesn’t make an effort to catch up. NanoStudio in particular looks to have a real fight on its hands. It’s one thing to be Korg, with many years of branding behind you, but when you’re an indie who’s effectively created GarageBand for iOS and priced it at £8.99, it’s not going to be a fun time when Apple steams on in with GarageBand proper for a third of the price.

Steve Jobs, yesterday, during the iPad 2 event:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

In other words, show what your tech can do, rather than fapping over numbers and bullet-points on a spec sheet.

Over at The Guardian, Jemima Kiss thinks Apple at its iPad event yesterday wheeled out Steve Jobs to distract from the fact that the iPad 2 (thinner, lighter, two cameras, twice as fast, nine times better graphics, new creative apps) was a load of rubbish:

It’s not hard to read Steve Jobs’ surprise appearance at Wednesday’s iPad 2 unveiling as a mark of desperation. Is Apple so in need of a boost to its share price that it needed to haul Jobs out of medical leave?

Clearly, she’s right. After all, it’s pretty rare for Jobs to front an Apple event. NO, WAIT! And, yeah, mark of desperation—for anyone not expecting digital unicorns, the iPad 2 ticked all of the boxes. But Kiss wanted her horny horses.

But was his appearance designed to distract us from an underwhelming launch? His introduction seemed to try even harder than usual to build up Apple and to knock its rivals – from ebook and app download numbers to dismissing the competition’s attempts at tablets.

Because, gosh, Apple’s rivals haven’t been doing similar, and it’s not like the tech press would EVER report on bullshit spewed out from Apple’s competition regarding tablets. Quick tip: sometimes you have to fight back. Sometimes you can’t rise above. Apple was merely stating some pretty blunt facts about the current state of the market.

Anyway, UNICORNS!

What were we left with after that? A faster processor, a dual-core A5 chip, that will mean it can operate twice as fast and render graphics up to nine times faster.

Yeah, you tell them. No Retina! No USB! NO DAMN UNICORNS! Unremarkable, really, unless you care about performance and graphics, like anyone using creative apps such as the new iMovie and GarageBand for iPad that Apple revealed, and which Kiss seemed to not see, presumably because she was by that point smashing her keyboard with fury, yelling I WANTED A UNICORN, DAMMIT!

A less logical rear-facing camera – who’s going to use the iPad to shoot anything?

Man, if only Apple had demoed some kind of movie-editing software for iPad, like iMovie, and said it would be released on to the App Store alongside the iPad 2. Then that camera would have somehow made sense! What idiots those Apple guys are!

Those improvements could all have been made to the original iPad, though you can’t count a black and white version as an improvement. Lighter, thinner, maybe. Is there really much incentive to buy an iPad 2?

If you’re one of the people with an iPad, maybe not (although, on a rough count, about half the people I know who have an iPad want to upgrade to the iPad 2); but, Ms. Kiss, it might have escaped your attention that while Apple did quite well in selling iPads over the past nine months, it didn’t quite sell 6.7 billion of them. Therefore, there might just be a market that Apple can target with its new device. And thinner/newer/better is a stronger marketing tactic than ‘a year old’.

Steve Jobs’ appearance undermined Apple’s obligation to cultivate a new public face of Apple, apparently for the short-term benefit of a stock-price boost. Long term, that’s succeeded in keeping the succession the main story.

This is true, because at recent Apple events, Jobs has been furiously protective of his space, never showing that Apple’s a company that has many people working hard to make it a success. Stupidly, he never lets anyone else share the stage. Well, apart from Tim Cook. And Scott Forstall. Oh, and Phil Schiller. And Randy Ubillos. And Xander Soren. And Jon Ive. And Craig Federighi. And Bob Mansfield.

Apart from those guys, it’s always all about Steve ‘quick, distract everyone from the substandard updates’ Jobs, the sneaky territorial bastard.

Oh, David Goldman of CNN Money, haven’t you been listening? The iPad is actually doing quite well, grabbing 93 per cent of the market. While it’d be nice if the iPad 2 was unicorn-powered, all Apple really needs to do today is provide a nice upgrade that shoves in a bit of extra clout and some cameras. That alone will see the iPad 2 fly off the shelves, right?

GOLDMAN SAYS NO. In fact, Goldman says some very odd things:

The good and the bad news for Apple is that the year-old iPad still rates highly among even its newest rivals.

That’s good news, because Apple should again have the best-in-its-class tablet if the iPad 2 is as improved as the rumors say it will be.

But that’s also bad news: How much thinner, lighter, faster, better — and perhaps most importantly, cheaper — can the iPad get? Did Apple shoot itself in the foot by making its first generation tablet too good?

Yes, because the one thing people thought when they got an iPad was “man, if only this product was worse”. And iPad-owners thinking about an iPad 2 today are all complaining: “I would have upgraded, if only Apple had made the original iPad complete shit”.

The only people wishing Apple had made the original iPad worse are important figures working for Apple’s rivals.

But, luckily, there’s one way Apple can win this game, thinks Goldman:

Tim Cook, Phil Schiller or whichever Apple executive introduces the iPad 2 will need to offer some impressive specs, lest Apple fans walk away disappointed.

After all, it’s not like the competition tries to differentiate itself by wanking itself into a frenzy over spec lists, rather than, say, what you can actually do with your device. here’s hoping Goldman realises that, eh?

Rival tablets have front- and rear-facing cameras,

Phew!

[…] dual-core processors, four times as much RAM as the iPad, HDMI output and Adobe Flash support.

Oh.

And:

If that’s all Apple does, its fans will probably be unimpressed. Apple may need to have something “magical” up its sleeve, as Jobs likes to say, to wow its potential customers.

NO UNICORN? I’M LEAVING!

To be fair to Goldman (it’s sunny, so I’m in a good mood), he’s right on that last thing. Apple ‘fans’ typically have insane expectations, driven by the rumour mill. However, Apple doesn’t need a checklist of specs that somehow ‘better’ its rivals on paper—it simply needs to stay ahead where things really matter: usability, apps, quality.

Articulate argument from Tim Anderson on why 24-bit will not fix computer audio and why 16-bit is fine:

[What] are the limitations of 16/44 audio? We can be precise about this. Nyquist’s Theorem says that the 44,100 Hz sampling rate is enough to perfectly recapture a band-limited audio signal where the highest frequency is 22,500 Hz. Human hearing may extends [sic] to 20,000 Hz in ideal conditions, but few can hear much above 18,000 Hz and this diminishes with age.

In fact, despite the claims of audiophiles, most people cannot tell the difference between studio-quality output and an MP3 file, especially given that output is usually sub-optimal (car stereos, crappy headphones, TV speakers, and so on). And given that music is distorted beyond belief in all commercial recordings these days (to make everything sound ‘loud’, audio is compressed and peaks are clipped, wrecking dynamic range), upping the audio from 16- to 24-bits won’t make the slightest bit of difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you have high-end kit.

To my mind, as long as sources are offering ‘high enough’ quality lossy files (256–320 kbps AAC or MP3), that’s enough. Any move to 24-bit will just be corporate PR wankery—a pissing match that aims to snare users who think higher numbers are better. And I bet you’d get charged more for the privilege.