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.

Fraser Speirs on the iPad 2’s benefits for education:

Apple was already ahead of the pack. The [iPad 2] hardware alone keeps it ahead of the pack and, with iMovie and GarageBand on iPad, Apple is starting to stretch out of sight when it comes to delivering a hardware and software toolkit for education. Anyone can do a tablet with a web browser and an email client. Most can get a port of Kindle, Evernote and Gowalla.

Nobody else has anything even close to Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie and GarageBand on their platform far less the great 3rd party iOS apps such as OmniFocus, Instapaper, Toontastic, and the Elements. iOS is and remains the only mobile platform worthy of consideration for education.

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.

Apple wants the old iPads gone. If you don’t care about thinner/faster/cameras in the new iPad 2, Apple’s currently knocked £100 off of the price of every existing tablet on the UK Apple Store. This means prices range from £329 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model through to £579 for the 64GB Wi-Fi + 3G version.

Refurbs are also affected, meaning you can—at the time of writing—grab a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad for £289. Quite a bargain.

Or you could pre-order a Xoom for £599 from Carphone Warehouse, obv.

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.