Three days in and it’s already becoming apparent: this is, once and for all, my laptop replacement. The battery life is ridiculously long. The display is amazing (desktop pictures 2048 pixels on a side are suddenly not only plausible but necessary). The performance is certainly superior to earlier models, although that may be as much a function of having a full gigabyte of RAM as the updated processor and graphics hardware. Even the Smart Cover is worthwhile and minima. As with almost anything I spend more than a year agonizing over, when I finally get it, I tend to be glad I did.
One of the things in the iBooks collection of PDFs is a copy of the 1972 essay by Alan Kay that described the DynaBook. Amazingly, he pitched a viable price point of $500 and the general dimensions of the device, not to mention the prospects possible if the keyboard itself could be displaced and the screen act as keyboard. It’s eerie. About the only thing Kay pitched that is not present here is the ability to program the device yourself and write your own code for it – and that may fairly be abstracted away as a legacy of a time when doing anything on a computer meant, of necessity, writing the code for it. Programming was all you did, if you wanted programs.
And here we come to an interesting crossroads. Some folks have complained of the iPad and iOS in general (and to a similar extent about the Mac from its earliest days) that you can’t actually do the hard stuff with it. You couldn’t write an iOS app on an iOS, not in any meaningful fashion. Maybe you could on an Android tablet, with a little work…but I’m not likely to. Nor are almost all the folks buying these devices.
Ultimately, that’s why there’s no point in me having a Linux netbook, or a generic Android tablet running a bare install of Ice Cream Sandwich. I don’t have the necessary skill set to make it worthwhile. I’m not going to modify the OS, I’m not going to write my own software, I’m not going to be riding the bare metal with no saddle. I’m going to type blog posts and read magazines and get through my RSS feeds and answer email. And for that, something that just works beats the living shit out of something I can hack myself.
The phrase that springs to mind is “casual computing.” Games like Mass Effect or Call of Duty or World of Warcraft have motion-picture budgets and require players to sink hours and days and weeks into their completion…but Angry Birds has sold seven hundred million copies. I do need an actual laptop for work, because of things like Apple Remote Desktop and file systems and Unix command lines, but for casual computing, I need…well…an iPad. With basketball season over and no need for ESPN3 streaming until Labor Day and the return of college football, the iPad can handle everything I need from a computer from the time I get home until the time I get back to the office. Unless I need to work from home, there’s no reason to take the work laptop out of its bag. I’m banging this very post out on glass, with the iPad propped up in my lap as I recline in bed.
And let’s face it, for most people, casual computing is what they do at home. Do the taxes, maybe balance the checkbook, sure, but other that that? It’s Facebook and funny YouTube clips and email blast forwards and Skyping with the grandkids. I dare say the 75% of the home computing in this country could be taken care of with an iPad – maybe not always well, but it could be done. And as for travel – I had in the back of my head that the netbook would be handy for blogging and video chat home from, say, Paris. I didn’t actually take said netbook to Europe when I had the chance. But I can blog and video chat from this thing VERY easily, and on a Euro cellular network to boot (try making that work on your Linux netbook), and there is no chance I go abroad again without this thing in my carry-on bag.
Twenty years ago, Apple had those ads with “What’s on your PowerBook? What’s on your PowerBook is you” as the tag line. Today, that’s the iPad. What’s on it? PDFs of role playing game manuals from my adolescence. The complete Bigend Trilogy by William Gibson. The last five weeks of the Economist. Four email and six Twitter accounts. All the pictures from my three trips to England. Both Iron Man movies and all six episodes of the new Sherlock series. The tools to update this blog, the list of everything (well almost) that I’ve eaten in the last almost two years, a link to Bruce Springsteen’s SXSW keynote speech, three different maps of the world, a dozen channels of streaming video of one sort or another…
At long last, we have the personal computer. When the Weekly Reader told us our future, it didn’t involve sitting down to program this bloody computer, it talked about instantly retrieving information and video calls to Mars and doing things. And that’s what you use an iPad for. You don’t program it, you do stuff with it.
This is my DynaBook. Next stop: everything.