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.
The port of iWork is the most interesting part of the iPad. It suggests that really this is a rethink of our concept of what desktop software is. I’m wondering if a little later down the line there might be versions of the iWork suite reworked for the iPad. Gosh it is all very exciting! Wish I could justify getting one.
By Adam Wilcox · 2010.01.29 01:48