waffle

Two years ago, there was this new computer that came out. It was thin, which was what people expected, and it was wireless, which was what people expected, although it was weirdly shaped. (The bezel around the screen was too thick, for example.) People said that it wasn’t powerful enough and that it was too slow to get any real work done on. To add insult to injury, the best performing model was a bit too expensive for people to stomach, at least those people who were interested in how many features you could squeeze into that price tag. But most of all, they were incredibly underwhelmed. They expected nothing less than the negation of the known laws of thermodynamics.

What’s weird is that although the company that makes them has a record of simply killing off poor performers, they haven’t yet done so. I wonder what’s taking them so long.

I don’t need the iPad. I don’t want to pay what they tell me for the iPad version that’s got 3G. I remain unsure that there’s a niche unfilled between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone that requires a third device. The iPad is as ridiculously reclusive freedom-wise as the iPhone ever was (although thanks to the ragtag team of interhighway freedom fighters, that’ll change before April’s over, and Apple won’t even be able to say the carrier wizards did it because they’re just a data option now). I even think that the value proposition for what the iPad can do out of the box is far below what Apple should be able to muster.

You might handily conclude that I loathe the iPad, or at least think it’s unnecessary. I don’t. I think it’s the most necessary product to have hit the computer industry since the original Mac OS X, or perhaps the scroll wheel mouse before that.

What’s great about the iPad is that it’s the first affordable suitably large portable multi-touch display with a lineup of applications that squeeze every little drop out of those basic conditions. Windows 7 may have multi-touch support and adapted the system for touch, but it’s not built for multi-touch, it’s an amended dialect of keyboard-and-mouse, menus-and-windows that in places doesn’t assume that you’re using a precise cursor and in even fewer places takes advantage of multi-touch. When someone like Paul Thurrott compares an iPad with a Tablet PC, everyone’s laughing at him.

Screw “full screen Mobile Safari”, iBooks or the iTunes^WiPod app. What I’m most excited about is actually iPad Keynote and iPad Pages. Throughout iPad, Apple proves that multi-touch scales when it graduates from iPhone tables to full-screen apps with sidebars and popovers. I highly suspect that iPad Keynote does not do 100% of what Mac Keynote does. But it does a damn sight better than the 25% I would have gunned for had you asked me on Tuesday. More than the essentials of the apps are there without looking like a ton of clutter, without soiling the interface and without being cryptic.

The iPad is next-generation user interface pornography. Not in the way of flashy web site demos, particle emitters, refractive gradients or crisper buttons; in the way of evolved, rethought interfaces that don’t stick around for nostalgia, provide remarkable presentation and work better. For that, I will forgive Apple almost everything that’s wrong with the iPad.

If you understand nothing else about the iPad’s ability to use a hardware keyboard, understand these two facts:

• The iPhone’s software keyboard is about as good as a smartphone hardware keyboard for typing speed. It may not feel as good, and reports differ on whether it’s slower or faster, but it’s about as good. The iPad’s software keyboard’s respective competitor is a normal-size hardware keyboard, which is faster by a wide margin.

• The iPad was made for lugging around in the same way a laptop is lugged around; the heft of a Bluetooth keyboard or the keyboard dock is comparable to the iPad itself. Maybe iPhone support for Bluetooth keyboards will sneak its way in with the next iPhone OS update to hit iPhone (4.0?), but I’m guessing that it never would have gotten added had there not been an iPad.