A few thoughts on Apple’s iPad

Be they ranting, raving, salivating, praising, or deifying, Apple’s newly announced iPad has just about everybody buzzing. As a professed technology enthusiast, not to mention a long-time Mac user (among other things), I thought I might weigh in on a few of the more popular comments and bits of punditry floating around the web.

“What’s with the name?”
One of the first reactions to the announcement was: “you’re calling it the what?” Indeed, aside from the acclaimed alphabetic prefix, the name seems rather un-Apple. It’s almost preposterously, purposefully entertaining, and has of course already spawned a number of humorous responses. Personally, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the choice, especially on an aesthetic level. But on a marketing level, I believe the name could be genius. It’s eminently recognizable, memorable, and straightforward, all qualities Apple gravitates toward in more areas than just its naming conventions. And, as with Nintendo’s own funnily named device, I’m betting the iPad name will slowly transform into something household and ordinary, a process made possible in large part because of the satirical attention the device will at first receive. A form of word assimilation, if you will.

“It doesn’t have enough features!”
This is perhaps the biggest area of complaint, and one that goes hand in hand with questions about what the device is actually for (which I’ll address below). Michael Pusateri has a useful perspective on this phenomenon:

Remember way back to January 2007, when the iPhone was announced? Oh Internets, you wailed and gnashed your teeth endlessly. No 3G network? No MMS? No apps on the iPhone? No replaceable battery? Oh, your complaints were endless. You were sure that the iPhone was doomed because it didn’t meet all your requirements.

And what happened? Well, Apple has sold 40 million iPhones. FORTY MILLION. They have become the largest mobile device company in the world.

So today, you moan on and on about all the features you expected and demand in the iPad. What no Verizon? No two-way camera? It’s not weightless? A full half inch thick? Only 10 hours of battery life? You make tons of predictions on the success and failure with scant details and without ever actually trying one.

The same sort of reactionary punditry we’re hearing today is exactly the same kind of talk we heard when the original iPhone is released, and that is now one of Apple’s biggest successes. They have a tried and true philosophy that began with the iPod, was applied to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and now will be used with the iPad: design a product with superb core functionality in place, make it look slick and feel great, release it, and then iterate on that core. Given how well it’s worked in the other product areas Apple has applied it to, I see no reason to doubt its efficacy when applied to the iPad.

Also, regarding the loudest individual feature complaint–no multitasking–I would remind you that Apple holds an annual developer conference, and that iPhone (and, as it were, iPad) OS 4.0 is due out this summer. Nothing is confirmed, but it is widely presumed that Apple will address multitasking in both their Phone and Pad paradigms at that time. To paraphrase a friend from Apple, their biggest competitor is Android, and they’re looking very closely at the competition in designing OS 4.0.

“But, what is it for?”
Far and away the most difficult question to answer, but also the most important to understanding the iPad’s potential. It has already been addressed by a number of respected pundits more eloquently than I could ever hope to, but my favorite take is more of a meta-analysis of the impact the iPad will have on the state of personal computing, penned by Steven Frank of Panic fame. I suggest you read it in full, but the basic premise is encapsulated below:

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Apple, with the iPad, is betting on a future where so-called New World Computing is the norm. Under-the-hood tinkering and hierarchical file systems will give way to an abstracted, blobular form of interaction, one in which we can focus on tasks rather than specific applications or data types. There are obvious caveats, especially for those heavily invested in Old World methods (such as myself!), and I don’t believe the Old World will ever fully disappear–someone will be developing applications and writing OSes, after all–but for a more detailed analysis thereof you should read the essay.

But what about right now, in this moment? I am certainly not the target audience for this device–an uber-nerdy, low-level complexity enjoying, tinkerer of a user–but someone like my mother would love an iPad. It’s straightforward and easy to use; it does everything she needs to do (browse the internet, check email, look at pictures); it’s thin, portable, and can be toted around the house with ease; and it frees her up from having to worry about, for instance, what a ZIP file is, or what exactly a disk image does, or where that pesky Downloads folder is located. All of this is abstracted away in lieu of a New World experience.

“What’s in it for Apple?”
Apple has, as with the iPod and iPhone before it, identified what they consider to be a new and relatively untapped computing niche. Smartphones and portable MP3 players existed before the former two Apple products were released, but because they applied their design sense and the aforementioned iterative product philosophy, they were able to capture those markets and transform the product landscape (especially with the iPhone; see Google’s Android, Palm’s WebOS). I have no doubt they’re attempting to do the same thing here, to release a product that no one else quite has and, ultimately, dominate the forthcoming market on account of their prescience.

The Old World/New World dichotomy is still likely a long ways away from being fully realized in a majority of consumer computing appliances, but in the meantime I’ll bet people are going to fall in love with these things as soon as they get their hands on them. And, despite all the racket over what’s “missing,” Apple’s going to be laughing all the way to the bank as those whose concerns don’t lie explicitly with Gigahertz, Gigabytes, or Graphics Cards buy iPads up like hotcakes.