I'm not quite sure why all these iPad articles are framed with the assumption you're going to use the iPad instead of something else. I've been working on a project in Logic most of the night on my Mac with the iPad sitting on my desk for browsing, music, and video. It's a fantastic setup. Nice break from keyboard & mousing. The display is stunning and multi-touch web browsing on this size screen is such a natural experience. Something about the portrait view is very compelling to me. I popped it over to landscape for a bit and some of the magic disappeared. I wonder if part of the appeal of the iPad is simply that it's the first mainstream computing device to use portrait orientation so effectively.
They're framed with that assumption because of the other articles that call it "the future of computing". If something's the future of computing, it's supposed to supplant the present of computing, right?
Sailboats are luxury items, dude. People aren't forced to use sailboats. In fact, instead of 100% of ships being sailboats, I'd gander only 5% or less are sailboats.
5% of the sailboat market is pretty significant - as is 5% of the computer market. In fact, iirc, Apple has been making solid profits from round about 5% of the laptop market.
Anyway, I was merely illustrating that "the future of" does not mean "the sole replacement of".
It certainly simplifies things to say x will replace y. I suspect that with the ipad, its more of the beginnings of a new facet of computing.
For me, as a developer, the ipad certainly won't be much more than a diversion or a target for development. For people like my wife, though, I think it will definitely have an impact. Many people simply want a content consumption device (web, media, etc), and I think the ipad is a very good device for consuming most content.
Don't forget the cost. If its the future, its a must have thing. But its also expensive, meaning a lot of people can have only one and its a choice between the future of computing and everything else.
I remember in one post PG mentioned that his solution to procrastinating on the internet was to get a separate computer to do all of his non-work-related internet browsing on. If I'm remembering correctly, that's the only thing he would use this computer for. It was at a different desk and so whenever he would use it too much he would feel something wrong.
I think I will try implementing something similar with my iPad, and see how it works.
"I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. "
That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions to really make this kind of product shine.
I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how could they install them?
I really wish Apple didn't require a 500-employee headcount and a D&B number to be an enterprise customer. They should relax the constraints so that small businesses can start making internal apps.
That would become a backdoor app economy. If any little company could install apps on their employee's phones, I'd start making apps to sell them without the 30% cut to Apple.
Andy Ihnatko mentioned something about this the other day. Since the device is orientation-less (for the most part), Apple could make an iSight that plugged into the dock connector and you just held it upside-down. They probably won't, but it is possible.
Apple’s photo software already has face recognition and its video software already has good image stabilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were spin-offs of work towards precisely this.
Bad angle, really? This is freaking Apple we're talking about if Jobs can't resolve something as simple as a camera angle (hello dozen phones that came out last year with a swivel mounted camera to directly resolve this problem) then he should resign as an incompetent fool. He managed to bring Apple back from the brink and revolutionize the industry, if he can't resolve a camera angle issue he's a complete fraud with more luck than Jesus crossed with that air stewardess who fell from flight altitude crossed with the bastard child of Anakin Skywalker and Yoda.
I'm sorry, bad camera angle is the biggest piece of piss poor excuse I've ever heard. I'd honestly be more appeased if Apple simply said "sorry, things got missed out that we wanted to implement, shit happens - that's life".
Having played with my friend's iPad a bunch today I am extremely impressed. I can't wait for my 3g one to arrive.
He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural."
My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.
That echoes my experience. No single WOW thing (well, maybe looking at my photos, but that may be because my photos are awesome). Everything is very fast and crisp and right.
The browser on the iPhone always felt like a last-browser-of-desperation except for sites specifically tuned to it. On iPad, it's actually usable. The sites that I work on all look great (with the exception of embedded flash video, naturally)
"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls."
It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.
Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.
If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print ad rates.
It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."
I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the New York Times.
Indeed. If they had put the effort into getting premium rates from advertisers starting the day they went online, they'd be there now. Instead recent experimentation with new insterstitial formats suggests its just beginning.
I feel that it's important, from time to time, to remember that plenty of things that aren't the next big thing are also variously laughed at, ignored, dismissed, and so on.
I'm not making any predictions about how the iPad will do (sitting and waiting will get me better information than pulling a guess out of the air), to make sure that's clear. Just reminding myself that it possible that perhaps Apple will produce a product that won't change the world.
I think most criticism has been constructive and well placed. It's a large iPod touch with potential at this point. After playing with it for a good 10 minutes it still feels wanting. Consumption means different things to different people. In my case I wouldn't dream of using the Internet without a keyboard, except on the iPhone where the absolute convenience of size overrides the restriction of input. As a solution for my mother...maybe. I'm willing to wait another revision before I get her to switch.
"I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe."
I was an early adopter and got burned. It never worked for me. After fighting for hours with configuration and bad Apple support (which is uncharacteristic), I realized that the time it would potentially save me was being burned up in setting it up, so I abandoned it. In the end I ended up losing $99 and gaining nothing. I'm guessing from what you said that they've worked the kinks out now, though.
Yea the launch was a disaster. They were definitely stretched too thin at the time. I've heard some people have had issues still but it has been perfect for me since I got it around the launch of the 3GS.
"The usual fanboy rebuttal is that [the iPad] is not designed for what I do."
How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. So what?
Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.
He doesn't say his mother's going to love it. He says: ...although her Mac is terribly inadequate and confusing, with so many layers of contradictions.... Too bad this product is so far from being able to replace it for her.
He mentions that as the only thing his mother would like about the device. The paragraph above the one you quote says this:
I also work with people who are not very deeply skilled in computer technology, exactly the kind of people this product is supposedly for. It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. We learned a long time ago that inexpert users don't use less resources, they just use them differently. The argument that the Mac wasn't a serious computer was nonsense. I was there when all these arguments were fresh. This is not a replay. Keep dreaming if you want, but if you give the iPad to your mother expect the light to go on for you. At that exact moment you will realize how poorly prepared it is for that.
You make a good point, which proves that neither of us actually knows which phrasing Dave Winer meant. Don't be a jerk. We live in the same city and might actually meet at some point. I don't like being on bad terms with people I've never met.
If you read his comment carefully you will see that he simply stated a fact. Stating a fact is not being a jerk. However, by saying "don't be a jerk" you've added a personal insult to the conversation.
Tone is really hard to convey on the Internet and I also hope you don't misread the tone of this comment. I'm writing this in the spirit of a friendly reminder that I myself need sometimes, too.
I'm sorry if I came off as attacking you: there wasn't any intent to do that. I just was trying to point out where I think you misread Winer's article, which is in the grand scheme of things a pretty minor mistake, probably not even worth the downvotes. I certainly wasn't trying to make it personal.
I think one issue may have been that what I wrote in my post was just the first two sentences; the whole second paragraph is cut-and-pasted from Winer. In that paragraph Winer himself comes off as pretty aggressive, and by quoting all of that it may have made my comment read as more caustic than it was designed to be. (though I guess we should heed techiferous' point about tone on the internet and give Winer a little benefit of the doubt here too!)
This community (and discussion forums in general) is only useful if we sometimes can correct each other's mistakes and use evidence to argue against each others' positions. However, we should always do so in ways that never make it feel like anyone is being attacked, and it's my bad if I fell short of that.
I sent Aaron a direct message on Facebook already saying all this, but I wanted to clarify for everyone else here, especially anyone who flagged my comment: I was somehow locked out of HN starting sometime shortly after I made my original reply to Aaron and ending just a minute ago. My best guess is that this must have been caused by some mechanism triggered when several people flag your post but a mod hasn't decided whether to ban you yet. Just speculation, though: it's also possible my co-founder logged into my account and turned on noprocrast as a subtle message to get off HN and get back to work! :) That's actually pretty good advice that I'll be following now. Have a good few weeks, HN.
Thanks Mark, I appreciate the message on Facebook. I haven't had an opportunity to get back to you yet (my day has been hectic), but I'll send you a response later when I have a chance to do it justice.
A jerk is someone disagreeing with you apparently. It is completely obvious that Dave Winer did not invoke "the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line". In fact he rejected exactly that line. Mentioning an individual feature his mother might actually like doesn't suddenly reverse the gist of his argument.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but he didn't say that stating that the iPad is not designed for what he does means that you are fanboy. He merely said that fanboys would say that, which is likely true since I think almost everyone would say that (including fanboys, but also many non-fanboys).
Yes. iPad is for consumption not for production. Don't know when some of these guys will realize it and stop making a big fuzz. I don't see the point of it.
To me, the biggest surprise of iPad launch day was just how well the keyboard works. According to various (dubiously reliable) online typing tests, I range from 40-70 WPM on the iPad. Accuracy is acceptable; much better than the iPhone keyboard but of course not as good as full keyboard.
It's perfectly fine for email, posting on message boards, etc. I also will probably use it to write documents when I'm out and about, and using it today I felt like I would like to be able to code on it (though ssh or jailbreaking are probably the only ways that will happen).
24 hours ago, I would have agreed 100% with you that "iPad is for consumption not for production". After a day of using one I have changed my mind entirely. The iPad can be an adequate device for production, and it has the potential to be a great one.
Specifically, having a software keyboard has large and untapped potential advantages over a physical keyboard, once basic typing is acceptable. The buttons on a software keyboard can change to adapt to the situation. We already see see small examples of this with the built-in keyboard: when the address bar in safari is open, the space bar disappears and the forward slash and .com buttons take its place. Imagine alternate keyboards for things like LaTeX markup. Furthermore, your pointing device (finger) is much closer to the keyboard, so no moving your hand from your keyboard to your mouse. I think apps that really take advantage of the possibilities of the interface are yet to come. Once they arrive the "tablets will disrupt the laptop" argument sounds sounding really plausible.
They are barriers because if Apple added an "advanced" button somewhere that gives you root, then tons of ordinary users would press it (perhaps after being instructed to by an online tutorial, or by a scam), break things, and find that their iPod does not "just work" and be unhappy. Apple would be adding a button that you can press to enable your device to get malware, and that will confuse and harm lots of people.
It's not obvious how to add an advanced button that the right people will press, and others won't. You can hide it, but it will get reported on websites that newbies see, with simple instructions. But that said, I'm sure there's a solution, and I hope Apple finds it.
I think the development effort from Apple to enable stuff which would only be used by a fraction of the audience -- even done to Apple's high standards of polish -- is a secondary and more minor issue. Apple can afford it, and Apple knows that developers are worth the expense. However, in terms of development time rather than money (which aren't equivalent because finding, hiring, and training good programmers is hard), this has to be lower priority than enabling multiple programs to run at once and some other stuff, so maybe it'll be a while.
It would be rather simple to have a soft-root that allows root-like implementation without affecting the actual core files of the system. The iPod deploys with a ROM section for the core files to restore the system, truly this is all the iPhone or iPad need (and AFAIK both have). You would only require a more foolproof implementation to ensure even the gravest idiot would be able to save their device by plugging it into their PC.
However, I believe your latter point is right. I won't dump any amount of money on an iPhone/iPad until it's able to run multiple programs, and until it is route access is likely pointless.
Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if the iPad was just as good for production as consumption.
My girlfriend (a university professor) is in the process of finishing her first book, and would love to do the rest of her writing and revising on the iPad in Pages, but she doesn't see it as being realistic. She's still really excited about being able to watch Battlestar Galactica on the iPad. (regarding BSG: yes, I am lucky.)
I spend all of my time writing code in Ruby and Objective C. I'd love to be able to get access to MRI, the Rails gems, MySQL and TextMate on the iPad in order to do my work there, but it's just not realistic. And that's ok: because I am unbelievably excited about the web browsing experience and the games on the iPad.
Everyone realizes it. I think the contention is (right or wrong) that a pure-consumption device isn't what people want or need (given the other things that they have in their lives). It's redundant. It doesn't replace anything.
I think if they had multi-tasking it'd go a long way to shutting up this criticism.
Hey Tony - Pity that seemingly everyone in Seattle is staying in tonight. Crappy weather... Two things:
1. You've probably forgotten more about this sort of data than I'll ever know, but I look around at folks on laptops in cafes and see nothing but Facebook or Gmail on Netbooks. I think we, as a class of users, are the exception: most people on computers spend the bulk of their time consuming information instead of producing it.
2. Rumor has it that iPhone OS 4 will be announced at WWDC 2010 (big shock) and will feature multi-tasking.
Facebook and Gmail both have production and consumption. A device that excels at consumption and is inadequate for production will not serve as a replacement for many people. It sounds like the iPad is adequate for at least some limited typing, but it remains to be seen whether it's adequate for what most users do.
The bigger critique, though, is multi-tasking. I like to be able to consume music and webpages at the same time. A consumption device that won't let me multi-task is inherently unsuited for my normal day-to-day use.
To be clear, both the iPad and iPhone do allow you to listen to music and surf the net or use other apps at the same time, but only if you use the iPod application.
The problem has never been that the iPhone and iPad can't support multi-tasking, it's that Apple has only permitted some of its own apps to multi-task.
Heh-- yaw, I'm not certainly I AGREE with the contention. No one ever went broke overestimating the vapidity of consumers. Still, I wonder. IM Facebook, and email are content creation. Will the swoosh-factor of the iPad make up for inconvenience of an onscreen keyboard, no multi-tasking, etc?
True, but "people" you talk about are like you and I who wish we could poke around with this device a lot more. Most people just consume and hardly produce anything-- other than, perhaps, emails, todo lists, & recipe notes.
I think the relevant verdict would be delivered not by the Pogues or Mossbergs but by mom, dads, and the 4-5 year-olds who see this device for what it is. Because, for the first time we (as in majority of the general public) can look at a computer as a consumer device as oppose to a general purpose device that needs training or learning. I think most reviews I read missed this aspect.
It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too.
Hmm, I think he is possibly incorrect here. A lot of people do multi task; but my parents close every application when they start a new one. If they are sending emails they close Word - and vice versa.
My gran did this, my brother used to do this till a few years ago, most of the people on my uni course (electrical engineering) who were not computery people tended to do this, all my friends generally do this as well.
Indeed the only thing I have seen people traditionally leave on is music (which can be done on the iPad) and chat (which currently cannot).
Would it be rude to say that I don't care what anyone has to say about the iPad after only a single day of use? It's not a new laptop, it's a new mobile device entirely. It'll take more than one day to really get the iPad, for better or for worse.
Yes, and no. Let me explain: if it would be a new laptop, the differences from existing laptops would be mostly subtle. A day may be too short to see them. With a device of a new class, you'll feel the differences right away. Being able to analyze and articulate them takes some time though, even if you do that for a living. This is why I dislike all this rash of articles about the iPad. They're all speculation, as the facts have not sunk in yet.
The Quicktime-based GUI has become a lot more responsive, even as they've added more features. That was my main complaint -- the idea that a 2D UI should bring a 3 GHz processor to its knees.
