On the iPad
by Pablo Defendini
I’ve kept my mouth shut about the iPad on here, mostly because I have the good sense to not go off half-cocked and pontificate at length about a product I’ve not been able to play with myself (hurr hurr). The rest of the internet, apparently, has no such misgivings.
No camera! No additional carriers beyond AT&T! Too big! Too small! Too thin! Too pretty! It’s too proprietary! No Flash! Bah, cry me a river. These people all sound like the same fools who predicted that the iPhone would be a flop (John C. Dvorak, I’m looking at you, you bloody idiot. How is this man still making money from tech punditry?!?!).
But at this point in the game, I think it’s clear that the iPad is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, and that’s a good thing; Apple is building on the success of the iPhone OS, and making a product for the masses. To wit, an anecdote:
A few years ago I got my Mom, who is a relatively young baby boomer (you’re welcome, mother) an iBook (yeah, Apple used to have laptops called ‘iBooks’ back in the day). It was her first modern computer. I say modern, because she’d used a command-line terminal to telnet into my dad’s office network in the eighties, but this was her first GUI. She was very excited and eager to learn how to use a computer , and totally bought my sales pitch about how the Mac was the “computer for the rest of us”: easy to use, easy to learn, etc. I took a day out of my life to sit with her and teach her all about how to use a web browser, how to do email, how to do word processing—all the essentials. Now, my mom may be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them; she seemed to understand everything I was showing her, and she seemed to get how to navigate around the internet on a very rudimentary level. Two days later, she was on the phone asking me about at least half the things I thought I’d taught her. She just wasn’t getting it, after all; the ‘desktop’ metaphor didn’t resonate with her, and concepts that I take as givens, like basic mousing, file systems, hierarchies, and system settings might as well have been particle physics to her. It was a very, very frustrating experience for both of us.
That was the state of affairs for years, until about eight months ago. All of a sudden, practically overnight, my mom went from a total n00b to an emailing, web-browsing, Facebook-using (!), txt-messaging machine. After a few days of noticing this new behaviour (and the sudden deluge of lame email forwards—did you know that Bill Gates gives out money every time you forward a chain letter? w00t!), I called her and asked: what gives? Did you get a new, faster computer? Did you have someone else teach you? Was I not good enough a mentor (the shame, the shame)?
The answer was simple: she’d just bought an iPhone, and she just got it—no explanations necessary. So to those people who complain that the iPad is just a bigger iPhone, I say: so what if it is? If that’s all the iPad is, then the iPad is for people like my Mom, which is most people out there. And it will sell like fucking hotcakes.
But the iPad is not just an oversized iPhone, actually. Purely by dint of its larger screen size, it allows app developers to stretch their legs and take advantage of the dead-simple user interaction experiences of the iPhone, and leverage them in the service of much more complex functionality. We saw a bit of that with the demos of iWork and Brushes during the Apple keynote. I’m sure once developers have been allowed to play with the iPad SDK, we’ll see a torrent of additional innovation building on iPhone conventions.
There’s a few other people who understand this, and state their cases much better than I do. D.A. Davies does it here. Rob Foster chimes in over here. Ethan Nicholas goes on here. And John Gruber, of course, gets it.
And, I can assure you, I get it, and I’ll be getting an iPad as soon as they make the 3G+WiFi model available (so that I can then get rid of my mobile phone, and rely entirely on Skype for the little actual telephony I do, if Skype releases a version for 3G, which seems likely at this point). And once I have it in my grubby little hands, I’ll be glad to explore every nook and cranny, and report back in excruciating and possibly mind-numbing detail. In the meantime, I will point and laugh at the fools who don’t get it.
Comments
YES! ::stands and applauds::
My 72-year old mom was eyeballing my mac and my kindle recently and commented how ‘easy’ everything looked. Maybe the moniker was intentional – and not for the ‘har har’ reasons you’re thinking. iPad connotes simplicity – you jot something down on a notepad; utility – you cart your notepad around with you to access information you need for the day.
I’ll be right in back of you for my iPad purchase – we should test case our Moms and report back!
I’m surprised that on a blog about the intersection of books and technology, you’re not addressing the iPad as an ereader.
I’ve anxiously awaited this device, thinking (as so many have) that it would be an ereader to leave Kindle and Sony Reader in the dust. As it turns out, however, as an ereader it leaves much to be desired. It seems that where I was anticipating a fantastic new ereader that might also happen to have additional computing multifunctionality, what Apple has produced is the exact opposite: a multifunctional computing device that also happens to serve as an ereader.
I could just cross the device off my ereader wish list and move on, were it not for the fact that the ‘agency model’ deals it has spawned between publishers and Apple’s upcoming iBook store are now driving prices of new-release and bestseller ebooks up across all platforms. So, even consumers who have no interest in buying an iPad must suffer the fallout of its arrival in the marketplace.
The iPad is a major distruptor, certainly. Just not in the way I’d expected or hoped.
Kate @1
I’ve been looking forward to a tablet from Apple since before the iPhone was even announced. Mama Defendini will have to rip my iPad from my cold, dead hands. Or, you know, get one for herself (but she’s hardly an early adopter, so it will take time, I’m sure).
April @2
As I mention on my post, I’m wary of really delving into substantially reviewing the iPad (or any device, really) until I’ve actually had the chance to use one.
In general, I don’t think it’s fair to pull out seemingly well-formed opinions solely from secondhand reports. Specifically with regards to Apple products, I know from firsthand experience that actually *using* the device sometimes changes my opinion of it, usually for the better (sometimes, the inverse is true).
While I also have some misgivings about the iBooks application in particular, I’m not ready to chime in, nor am I interested in speculating until I’ve had a chance to play (and do some heavy-duty reading) with it firsthand.
I’ll be getting one as soon as it’s available, and you can certainly expect me to write about it here, especially with regards to how it performs as an ereader. But in the meantime, I’m willing to be patient.
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My mum did exactly the same thing. Spot-on article. Totally agree with you on John C. Dvorak too. Can only wonder what the C. stands for.
the ipad is apple’s way of testing the waters in the world of e-readers. it’s sleek and idiot proof, and just like the iPhone, it does more than what it’s intended for. that said, it’s still a very expensive kindle.
consumers who buy mac products are people who either:
a) like shiny things
b) want usability beyond function
and/or c) want the label.
from a capitalist point of view, there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t mistake what this is. it isn’t a tablet. if you want a tablet mac, look up the modbook on google. this is just a bloated e-reader, something apple is good at doing: making something more than what it is.
(sent from my iPhone btw).
“A very expensive Kindle”? Not at all. Not even close to the parking lot of the ballpark, dude.
Can a Kindle author text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations? Can a Kindle play media (not just music, but video, too). Can a Kindle map out your location? More fundamentally: is a Kindle a fully-interactive, touch-capable, full colour device? No.
Kindles are “dumb” devices, with strictly limited and linear functionality. iPhones, and the iPad, are practically a tabula rasa for any functionality that app developers want to impart on the device. Therein lies the genius of Apple’s app store strategy.
Even the things that the Kindle does do apart from reading a book in black and white: browse the web, listen to music—and, err, that’s it really—it does in a very, very mediocre fashion.
Granted, the Kindle SDK will open the device up to developers, but eInk’s atrocious refresh rate and the horrible UX of the current iteration of the Kindle OS will hobble any applications developed for the platform (as a matter of fact, I can’t see the Kindle in its current iteration being attractive to developers in the slightest).
Future iterations of the Kindle may very well be an improvement (I fully expect the next Kindle to be colour and touch-enabled, for example), and I suspect that Amazon is looking towards these future devices when opening up the Kindle platform, but for now, we’re talking apples and oranges (no pun intended).
The iPad is not “Apple’s way of testing the waters in the world of e-readers”. The iPad is a multi-purpose device that happens to include optional functionality (remember, the iBooks app isn’t pre-installed—you have to download it) which helps leverage a subset of media (eBooks) which Apple is making available in order to increase the selection of the iTunes store.
The Kindle is not a bad first iteration of a reading device (it’s not the best, either, and I have serious usability issues with it beyond the fact that it’s a closed system), but it’s hardly in the same category of products as an iPhone, let alone an iPad. Trying to pigeonhole a device like the iPad into the same category as the Kindle denotes a very myopic, publishing-centric attitude, one that seems prevalent within the publishing industry, and will prove to be very, very harmful to publishing.
As a side note, and as someone who’s been buying Macs for years, and whose first Mac was a dull, beige, not-shiny-at-all G3, I find your reduction of the attitudes behind why people buy Mac products woefully simplistic, to say the least. People buy Macs, and Apple products in general (an iPhone is not a ‘Mac product’, btw), for all sorts of reasons, same as they buy Windows boxen for all sorts of reasons. Again, simplistic reductions will get you nowhere around here.