Am I crazy? I think the iPad is a ballsy, feature-packed game changer in a category of its own
// January 28th, 2010 // platform, Products
I’ve been very busy this week with client work, the last week of the school holidays, and visiting my wife in hospital. Lousy timing, when all I really want to do is soak up all the reportage and commentary about Apple’s iPad. I just haven’t had time. I haven’t been able to swap observations with workmates and friends. I’m half out of the loop when I’m dying to be at the epicentre. Poor me.
Even so, I can tell that much of the reaction has been negative, with many writers and bloggers disappointed about a lack of innovative new technology, about lack of 3G at launch, about delays to international availability, even about the name.
Well hell, it all sounds very familiar to me: it sounds a lot like the pundit reaction to the launch of the first iPhone. Like the iPhone, the iPad is more a case of existing technologies re-imagined than bleeding-edge next-generation. Critics at the time lambasted the iPhone’s camera as too low-res, the storage as too small, the battery life as insufficient, and aside from the multi-touch interface, there was nothing cool and new for a hardware geek to fall for.
Here’s a great reason why there’s no bleeding-edge gizmos in the iPad: like the iPhone, it’s designed for a broader market of regular consumers, not geeks like me who are prepared to download a new patch every week for the first year while that bleeding-edge technology comes of age. Do that to a regular consumer and you’ve lost a customer. Apple incurs a significant cost in maintaining its high level of post-sale support and it has no reason to convert millions of new customers into frustrated, angry queues in an Apple Store the way Google has managed to do with their first consumer hardware product. (OK Google doesn’t have physical stores, but poorly curated support forums are bad for your brand, possibly worse).
While I have yet to use an iPad, I’m expecting the experience will be great. And while I think the experience will be more important than the feature set, there are still a few features of the iPad that stood out for me. Not many pundits have picked it, but the iPad isn’t the Kindle competitor we expected, the e-book and newspaper reader the media publishers were hoping would save their shrinking fiefdoms.
No, it’s all these things but they are in fact only a small part of what the iPad truly is. It’s not an e-book reader and it’s not a large iPhone. It’s not even a tablet PC as we have come to know them. After a bit of a think, I think I understand Steve Jobs: this is a new class of device — the world’s first dedicated social media device (not hella zingy as a category label, but it’s late, it’s been a big week, gimme a break.)
In this still from the iPad launch video, Scott Forstall (Snr VP iPhone Software) shows more clearly than words can say that he’s worked hard to ship the iPad.
What’s a social media device and why is this not an e-book reader or a tablet PC? Because of all the cool technology which was nevertheless not new enough to excite the geekosphere. Me? Frankly I’m amazed the authorities still haven’t discovered the growing pile of dead engineers Steve Jobs must be quickliming away in his basement to keep the others shipping this cool stuff so fast and so elegantly. Here’s what was worth a few hardware and software engineers:
iPad uses Apple’s own A4 chip instead of similar ‘ATOM’ chips from Intel
Apple’s built its own CPU before, but not since the 1980s. It’s been so long since the company shipped a product with a CPU developed in-house that Apple hasn’t just hired a new department full of top silicon designers, it even acquired specialist chip manufacturer PA Semi back in 2008. That’s a costly investment sunk in fabrication plants and people that can only be recouped over a very long-term on sales of a device on tiny margins.
It’s also a big risk for Apple to take if it wants to maintain its close relationship with Intel, which cuts the chips for the Apple desktop and laptop lines. Not only does Apple mention the A4 in their launch, they make a big deal of it and then include it in their online promotions. In contrast, there’s no mention of the chip supplier in the tech specs on the iPhone. Rub, rub, rub, in goes the salt.
Industry insiders will tell you: you don’t fuck with Intel without a very good reason. I think it means Apple isn’t viewing the iPad as “an iPhone without the phone” but as a new class of device that may be bigger than the iPhone and MacBook markets combined. The A4 chip will be the first of many such chips.
The iPhone has two orientations — portrait and landscape
But there’s only one ‘right way up’ in portrait orientation. On the iPad, any way up is the right way up. It might seem no big deal but I believe it’s huge — it was worth the extra complexity and cost required to redesign ports and remove buttons in order to do this. Why? I think because this is the first device that can be passed from person to person without the receiver having to then adjust the orientation.
See, I can hold onto my iPad by the bottom when I pass it to you, and if you grab it by what is currently the top, when you lift it up into the vertical, the screen flips — you don’t have to flip it. Whether we’re in portrait or landscape mode. That’s a costly investment in a small detail for individual use, but it makes a significant difference if your aim is to make the iPad a highly social device.
Another big investment in making iPad highly social: an LED-backlit display with IPS
Together, these create a very bright screen, visible from a very wide viewing angle. Why? Apple wants you to be able to sit on the couch with a loved one and pore through your photos together without one of you having to sit at the far end of the couch. They want you to be able to hand an iPad showing a Keynote slide presentation to a client so they can flip through the presentation themselves, while you can still see clearly enough to talk them through it. They want children in a classroom to hand around an iPad as a collaborative multimedia learning tool (bam!, didn’t see that coming, didja? All previous tablet PCs have been corporate field devices. The iPad is a natural in the classroom or any learning environment. iPad is the device Aussie kids should get under the Federal government’s ‘a laptop for every child’ program.)
The iPad screen is 132dpi
From memory the pixel density is a little bit less than on an iPhone but still nearly twice the density of a laptop screen. Everything will be crystal clear. I think you’ll be happy lying together in bed watching a TV show or playing with an app on the iPad — it’s light enough to hold with one hand for quite a while, and that display means if you rest it on your chest, your partner should be able to see the picture clearly. Which is why I’d hope the iPad 2.0 comes with two headphone jacks. In the meantime, you can get one of these for $30.
It’s cheaper than it could be
The iPad is much cheaper at US$499 than it could be, which is because Apple expects to earn that back many times over in content and app sales. The latter’s not so surprising, but since the market was prepared to consider a US$1000 price point, setting it at US$499 says loudly and clearly, “we want this in the hands of everybody, as soon as possible.”
It could be a real laptop competitor
Early reviews of the iPad agree that this is one fast device. It’s not multi-tasking in the precise sense of the word, but it’ll still tell you when a new email arrives while you’re working on a spreadsheet, and without a much larger screen (with the corresponding balance, integrity and portability penalties) you can’t easily multitask without lots of keyboard combinations (which are hard to do in a Multitouch interface). Trying to multitask and forgetting how much crud you have sucking cycles is a great way to slow down a device and leave a non-technical regular consumer with a problem they’re unable to solve for themselves. Besides, I’ll take 10 hours of battery life over true multitasking any day and in the meantime, Apple’s well thought-out push and badge notification system is all I really need.
iPad-specific versions of the iWork suite (also available for the first time as separate apps) means Apple may finally be serious about pushing this as a hardware/software bundle competitor to the latest ultra-mini PC laptops, Google’s OS aspirations, MS Office and Google Docs.
MobileMe cloud storage/collaboration, Office import and Office/PDF export might make this something you use instead of a laptop as well as an ebook reader.
Another clue: the first wireless keyboard accessory for an Apple Multitouch device — something we iPhone users have craved for years now. An iPad with a wireless keyboard seems functionally equivalent-plus-more than Apple’s MacBook Air. Am I wrong?
All your data, on all your devices, in sync, all the time
What use is yet another device category if it means you have to spend even more time trying to make sure you have the latest version of everything on desktop, laptop, mobile and now tablet device?
Sorted. MobileMe and several iterations of iTunes Store licensing system later, Apple is the only vendor who offers a way to have all your docs, mail, contacts, schedule, photos, music, movies, TV and apps synced across more than one device. Yes, all your iTunes content and apps are DRM-protected, but you can now buy that stuff once and then authorise, say, your iMac, your iPhone, your Macbook Pro and your iPad to all have a copy, and still have one authorisation left-over to share a game app with your kid on their iPod Touch.
While the AppleTV still has a way to go before it’s as good as the other products wearing an Apple logo, it integrates really well with the iPad. You can start a movie, TV episode or podcast on your AppleTV, pause it, and it’ll sync with your iPad, so that on the train the next day, you can hit play on the iPad and it’ll pick up exactly where you left off on the AppleTV the night before. (AppleTV already does this with iPod Touch and iPhone, though it’s not often mentioned. I think it’s a great feature, though I hope one day it’ll sync content wirelessly, not just data.)
Cool features a-plenty but there’s one thing more important than any feature
See? There are some interesting features in the iPad product launch information, but to return to the opening paragraph of this post, it’s not the list of features that make an Apple product a winner, it’s the way they’re integrated. I like to describe the typical Apple product experience as “smooth and creamy” — meaning I rarely find something illogical, interfaces are generally consistent across devices and contexts, and problems only rarely occur. Even better, with an Apple product, you experience many little “oh wow!” moments that are like chocolate sprinkles on that smooth creaminess.
If you’re underwhelmed by what you’ve read about the iPad in the last 24 hours, do yourself a favour: reserve judgment until you’re able to play with a friend’s iPad for ten minutes, or until you can walk into the nearest Apple Store and try one out. Better still, bring someone with you, because this is a social machine. If I’m right (and very occasionally I am) the smooth, creamy experience of using the iPad and sharing it with a friend will close the sale before the Apple Store staff member even has a chance to ask if they can help you with anything.
MG Siegler puts it really well on TechCrunch today, so I’ll close with a quote from his article (emphasis is mine):
When the iPhone first launched in 2007 I was sure I wasn’t going to buy one. Then I played with one. 15 minutes later I was $600 poorer. It was arguably the best tech purchase I’ve ever made.
…go play with one!
