The iPad and the Future
I have a message for all the early-adopters and influencers who are denouncing the Apple iPad. As an early-adopter and technology gadget-hound myself, this has been a hard realization to make, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The message: What we want and ask for in an Apple Tablet simply doesn’t matter.
Apple didn’t design the iPad to be for us. It’s not a “Netbook without a keyboard.” It’s not meant to be a multitasking, primary-use computer. You’re not meant to write novels on it, or use InDesign to design a newspaper, or edit a movie in iMovie. The iPad isn’t for us; it’s for everyone else.
Apple has clearly spent a lot of time on the iPhone OS user interface to allow it to lower the barrier of entry to computing to practically nothing. I can hand my 2-year-old son my iPhone and he figures out how to navigate the controls immediately. My mother, who can barely manage to turn on her iMac to compose an email is able to use my iPhone with little guidance. The iPhone was the first step in moving away from the desktop paradigm of computer use; the iPad is a second step. It’s ironic that Steve Jobs and Apple, who did so much to create and popularize and spread the desktop metaphor of computer use, are the same people working to overturn that metaphor and move the public to a new way of interacting with computers.
In ten years, we won’t even recognize the computers that we’ll be using. My son will be 12 years old, and he won’t be using a laptop or a desktop computer, except in some specialized uses. Mac OS X and Windows as we know them will be distant and obsolete technologies to him. His computing environment, ten years from now, will be some distant generation of the iPad. Speech recognition and multi-touch variants will be the primary ways of interacting with his digital devices. Technology evolves and improves rapidly. What we’re seeing with the iPhone and now the iPad is nothing more than the next generation of computing devices. It’s going to be exciting to see it evolve.
The iPad also lends itself to a global audience. Apple has already figured out a better way for Chinese language characters to be entered, using the multi-touch trackpad on their newest laptops. This kind of data entry, using your fingers to draw characters rather than a keyboard, will of course be ported to the iPad. Just because the most efficient way of data entry for an Arabic character-based language is via a physical keyboard doesn’t mean that that is true for a large chunk of the rest of the world.
So you can titter and joke all you want about the name and how it conjures up images of feminine hygiene products. Apple doesn’t care. People laughed at the iPod name also and look how big of a failure that was. Eventually the iPad will gain some multitasking functionality in a future iPad OS version and it’ll be more palatable to the geeks. But until then, Apple will be selling millions of these things to average users who simply don’t know and don’t care about the “missing” features about which you are whinging.
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January 28th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Bravo, Damien – excellent writeup! Jodi is already drooling over this and is trying to decide if she’s willing to accept a 1.0 version for her birthday in June!
January 28th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
No matter how you feel about Steve Jobs, the man is rarely wrong. Fine, you want to call the Cube a “failure”? I’ll argue it because I know three graphic designers – and the New York City Museum of Modern Art – that still have them: as art
But it’s moot, because it’s impossible to ignore his successes. After practically inventing the personal computer, actually inventing the notebook computer, re-inventing the Mac in 1997, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store with all record labels signing on simultaneously, the iPhone, the App Store, and taking Apple from a $5B annual rev, to a $50B annual rev in 10 years, he says the iPad is the most important thing he has ever done.
Yes, he could be wrong. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. But he could be right. And he usually is.
Good article, Damien.
January 28th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
“But until then, Apple will be selling millions of these things to average users who simply don’t know and don’t care about the “missing” features about which you are whinging.”
Replace “Apple” with “the government”, “users” with “citizens” and “features” with “freedoms” and you sound exactly like a tyrant.
“In ten years, we won’t even recognize the computers that we’ll be using.”
WRONG.
In the future, computing devices will be more general purpose, infinitely customizable, and people will be smarter and know how to use those many “features” you claim to so be in the way of “average” users. Unless, of course, you are comfortable with the idea of splitting society into Eloi and Morlock…
“My mother, who can barely manage to turn on her iMac to compose an email is able to use my iPhone with little guidance.”
That has everything to do with interface, not simply having fewer choices. A child can very easily learn to use a desktop interface. So what if they don’t dive into a terminal and write a script off the bat? The iPhone interface is essentially one flat “desktop” of icons. The idea for that came from users using their desktop as their scratch space AND dock AND menu, full of icons.
I will say that we should continue to make computers more natural to use, but I strongly oppose dumbing down computing for anyone. If it were right to do that, it would be all right to deny people electricity service because they don’t understand it. “Here are some batteries. It’s easier. Oh, you need to run a leaf blower? Sorry, we don’t support batteries of that size.” Or what about math? High level math isn’t intuitive, it takes effort and gradual learning. With your reasoning, we should delegate math to a small few and let everyone enjoy the benefits yet be at our mercy.
I catch your wording “lower barrier to entry”. That I understand. Recently, the FCC eliminated a morse code test for achieving amateur radio licenses. Instead of new licensees “forgetting about obsolete morse code”, it allowed more people in the door, and morse code, a difficult skill to master, is on the rise.
So, this is NOT *THE* future of computing. If all devices became as simple as this, we could never develop anything new. It’s just a small transition. Once younger generations grow up with computers, appliances will hopefully disappear. It’s as computers become more powerful and complex will technology improve and therefore, hopefully, the general public’s knowledge of how to use it.
January 28th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
David, we clearly have different visions of the future of technology and about the level of technical understanding that non-geeks aspire to. The history of technology is rife with things becoming more popular and widespread once it was made easier to use. I don’t see how the iPad and it’s future descendants is any different.
There will always be technology specialists and developers and inventors. Technology’s progress isn’t going to slow down or halt because of the introduction of a new kind of computing paradigm (multitouch, iPad, etc.). This is the argument you making (if I’m comprehending your post correctly) and it’s a shortsighted view of the future.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Damien,
Well said. The fact that Apple went through so many prototypes of this product before it was put on the market is indicative of the thought that went into it. People love complaining about Apple’s newest products right up until the moment they get their hands on it.