January 27, 2010:
…I haven’t been so disappointed in an Apple product – well, ever. The day the iPhone was announced, I was crestfallen at the release date, then resolved to have the money saved up by day one. The day the MacBook was released, I was in my boss’s office begging for the high-end black model. Today, I don’t really understand what this thing is good for….
…here’s the fatal flaw: if you have an iPhone, you have 90% of this already. Do you really want to pay out double the money again, plus an extra $30 bill every month, just to do it on a larger screen?…
…it’s an interesting idea, but right now, at the current price points, the marginal utility for me is nonexistent. I just wonder how many other people will find a reason to give it a whirl anyway…
Well. Erm. This is awkward.
Let’s see what I said after I slept on it.
January 28, 2010:
* The common thread among those who have seen and touched and used the iPad is that “you won’t truly understand until you handle it; words and specs and YouTube video doesn’t do justice to the experience of using it.” My regard for Stephen Fry is such that I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this front.
Lesson learned: trust Stephen Fry. In fairness, going from 1024×768 to 2048×1536 on the same display will probably make things even more visually impressive.
* Everyone seems to think that $499 is not a bad price to pay at the entry level for this thing. That’s as may be – no one has ever accused me of having a good sense of the value of money one way or the other, and I will agonize for literally months over a $20 Nerf gun but think nothing of donking off $20 worth of coffee and soda in a day – but my comparisons are to things like a $299 netbook, or $199 iPod Touch, or $200-something Kindle 2 that comes with free lifetime wireless access. Against that, $500 is kind of steep no matter how you slice it.
This has actually stood up. Nobody, but nobody, has brought in an iPad competitor at an appreciably lower figure – there’s always some sort of compromise on size, or weight, or performance or battery life. The only folks who have undercut this in any meaningful way are the Kindle Fire team, who did it by going to a 7″ tablet with a forked version of 2010’s Android rev and explicitly abjuring anything but media consumption (of which more later). I’m a little surprised (but pleasantly so) to say that the price point hasn’t budged across the board three generations later. Meanwhile, the netbook has been exposed…
* I played around with a Dell Mini 10 running Windows XP this afternoon. I think the search indexing was running some of the time, which didn’t help, but the general feel was: OH. DEAR. GOD. SO. SLOW. I wonder if it would be any better with Xubuntu on it instead. The keyboard on the Mini 10 is the best I’ve seen yet on a netbook, and even pwns the keyboard on some of Dell’s full-sized small-business offerings (Vostro 1520, I’m looking at you…and contemplating using the bathroom) but if that’s as fast as it gets…maybe the fundamental problem is that things like the iDevices or the Kindle have a purpose-built Device OS rather than a full-size Computing OS (such as Windows, etc), and as such can run their own apps and things faster on less powerful hardware than trying to coax Windows performance out of an Atom N270. (God help you if you try to watch QuickTime movies on that thing…)
This is how Apple made the tablet work in a way no one ever had: instead of trying to scale Windows down, scale a phone OS up. I don’t need to re-link all my posts about my six-month experiment with the netbook; suffice to say that it was a compromised and compromising experience and I was never able to use it. Even the original iPad clubbed it for screen resolution and use of said screen alike. The hottest device of 2009 has ceased to be a thing in any meaningful way, because everyone’s rolled over to tablets, because you can’t seem to make using Windows on an Atom processor and a 1024×600 screen a remotely tolerable experience.
* The thing I always come back to is…blogging. You wouldn’t ever want to blog on an iPhone. Twitter, Tumblr, sure – but nothing over 100 words. Looking at the Kindle, I’m not sure you’d want to blog on it even if you could – the keyboard is made for a long session with a surgeon about the damage you’ve done to the ligaments and tendons in your thumbs. And looking at the iPad, I still don’t see how typing on a flat glass screen is going to work.
Well. Erm. I did it. Repeatedly. And banged out longer posts on the Bluetooth keyboard as required. And that was all without the useful aid of the tilted SmartCover for setting it on a flat surface and typing at an angle instead of looking flat down.
* Devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch/Kindle/smartphones generally – they are meant for consumption, not creation. You read on them, you surf on them, you do a little communicating on them, but you don’t use them to hammer out the Great American Novel*** or design your website or handle your taxes. For all their weakness and lack of power, netbooks actually give you some small opportunity to produce; if the iPad turns out to be unsuitable for same (iWork or no iWork), it really will be consigned to the Kindle/overgrown iPod Touch category.
Well, um…iWork (all three programs). Garage Band. iMovie and now iPhoto. Put another way: I could take the new iPad to Punxsutawney and shoot the threequel to 02:02:02 next February on the iPad, cut up the video in its entirety on the iPad, and publish it to the Internet through Vimeo on the iPad. Sure, it’s probably no good for Framemaker or Oracle developers, but the idea that the iPad is only suitable for consumption is deader than Rick Perry’s campaign.
Flash forward to when I finally got to handle the thing:
April 5, 2010:
I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them…
April 6, 2010:
…It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design….I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android….
April 8, 2010:
…It’s quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It’s incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you’d never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I’d had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it’s incredibly fast to get going – button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load…it’s like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great – work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out….Long story short – does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it’s too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing…
Which is why, after three and a half hours of struggling with iPhone and laptop to try to hit the most slammed site on the planet (while simultaneously struggling with the worst sort of corporate brainstorming-team nonsense), I closed the deal on a black 32 GB Verizon 4G new iPad, engraved “My Dynabook.”
It’s replaced the laptop. I don’t have personal material on my work MacBook Air anymore, aside from the contents of MarsEdit and Evernote for convenience’s sake. No iTunes content, no other personal files aside from things I occasionally scrape into a folder and upload to Box. Hell, even Safari doesn’t have my bookmarks in it, and there’s damn sure none of my non-work email there. This device is, for the most part, secure.
But how much easier to get all my personal stuff moved to a 1.4-pound slab the size of a magazine, which I can pull out of a bag and instant-on most anywhere? Which will let me buy a wedge of 4G data in the US faster than my DSL was until Christmas 2010, or buy a SIM off Orange or O2 next time I’m in the UK and go just as wireless when the Wi-Fi runs out? Which will last all day without having to remotely think about charge?
In the end, it came down to what is my next laptop, and between an 11″ MacBook Air and an iPad – when I already have the work laptop to handle work stuff, the move has to be the iPad. Pocket the hundreds of dollars saved, and enjoy the ride into the future of computing.