- Nick Gold

If you followed the rumors that circulated around Apple’s mythical post-Newton tablet computing device for almost a decade, there was something surreal and sublime about the moment when Steve Jobs finally unveiled it on stage. But now that everything’s out in the open, what is most interesting is how few people understand just how profound, indeed radical, the iPad is.

I’d like to talk a bit about why the tablet—err, iPad—impresses me so much, and why you need to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one. This is something much bigger than it might seem on the surface, and is in fact a hint at the future of computing in general. To see where we may be headed, however, it would serve us well to take a look at where we’ve been.

[As an aside, I strongly encourage you to watch Steve Jobs and company’s full iPad unveiling keynote video, and pay special attention to the section of the demonstrations that show off the new iPad versions of the iWork suite. If you haven’t already focused on this section, you may be missing a real sense of what this device can do.

Here is the link to the keynote: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialevent0110/

I'd like to add that the following opinions are my own, and not those of Chesapeake Systems at large, and certainly not those of Apple. They are my impressions and interpretations of the iPad and Apple’s design and marketing message, and some of what you are about to read is perhaps a bit controversial. I am very open to other views and opinions, which you are more than welcome to send to me at nick at chesa.com.]

Phase 1 - iPod

The iPod was not the first MP3 player to come out, nor was it the first hard-drive-based MP3 player to hit the market. Most of the early MP3 players could only hold several albums worth of songs, making them barely useful at all. However, by the time the iPod went on sale, there were several models on the market that incorporated hard drives, and thus were capable of storing a significant amount of music. So on the surface, there was nothing new about the iPod…

…Except there was, and this difference was two-fold: its very small physical size, relative to its competitors, and its easy-to-use interface. It was so tiny it begged to come along with you all of the time; and it was so easy to use, it appealed to the mass market. Loading music onto it was easy, and this became even easier and for a much larger audience as iTunes hopped platforms and became available to Windows users. Some of us were sad to see Firewire get dropped in favor of USB, but this advance did serve to hasten adoption of the iPod by more and more people.

The iPod continued to evolve over time. As it shrank in physical size, it could do more and more. The ability to sync your address-book contacts along with your music (as well as audio books, games and videos) greatly expanded the versatility of this small device and gave more people more reasons to own one, and more legitimate reasons to incorporate it into their day-to-day activities. In summary, the very first iPod was nifty, but it offered only a glimmer of what the platform would eventually become—the ubiquitous mobile media device that essentially reinvented and then took over the market. Which in turn spawned iTunes, the number-one music retailer in the world. This all led to…

Phase 2 - iPhone

For a number of years it was obvious that Apple saw the writing on the wall concerning the future of mobile electronics, and the predominant theme was convergence. When you’re carrying around two electronic gadgets all of the time, and each is capable of doing about half of what you’d ever want to do with a mobile electronic gadget, consolidation into a single device was a logical next step. And this is what the iPhone has become.

But remember that when it was first unveiled the iPhone was marketed as…a cellular phone, the best iPod yet made, and a “mobile internet communicator” (meaning that it also enabled web browsing and email). There was no App Store, and in fact Apple gave the impression that the platform would never be opened up to developers (a likely red herring to throw off the competition, I would submit). It didn’t even shoot video like many other “smart-phones,” nor did it do MMS (multimedia) messaging. It couldn’t use fast 3G cellular networking technology and couldn’t even copy and paste text!

But in just two and a half short years, look at what the iPhone has become. It is the standard by which all other cell-phone manufacturers measure their own products. Billions of application downloads—via an App Store that features 140,000+ applications—were created by an army of developers who have recognized the iPhone as the next great computing platform of our time. It has put a powerful mobile computer and communications tool into the pockets of all types of people. Most important, the iPhone reached out to many people the handset manufacturers had been neglecting with their then state-of-the-art “smart-phone” offerings, a la Blackberry.

The iPhone was so ahead of the curve, in fact, that it forced every other handset manufacturer to re-think their mobile computing plans. Microsoft more or less gave up on their handset version of Windows (or, rather, handset manufacturers gave up on using a Microsoft OS for their products). Palm ditched their entire “legacy” lineup of hardware and OS offerings and, after hiring one of Apple’s former key executives, launched a whole new platform aimed squarely at the iPhone. Google invented a handset OS from scratch, just so something would be available to manufacturers that even slightly began to resemble the iPhone’s OS and overall user experience. Even executives at Nokia, by far the biggest mobile handset manufacturer on the planet, had to compliment Apple on the amazing accomplishment that was the iPhone.

While Apple’s coup was amazing because of everything just mentioned, what makes this achievement even more noteworthy is that a company that had almost no experience at all making cellular phones made it happen. While Apple had worked with Cingular (now AT&T) on a frankly crummy iTunes-capable music/phone product, they had never attempted to design and market such a product on their own. It came out of left field; and while it wasn’t fully baked when it first appeared, it is now obvious to everyone that Apple is the de facto leader of the cell-phone industry—in terms of defining a concrete vision of how mobile computing + telephony ought to work. It’s also worth mentioning that by some accounts Apple is now the world’s most profitable handset maker.

Phase 3 - iPad

This recap of Apple’s past 10 years of mobile gadget-making now brings us to last week’s long-awaited and much-hyped announcement of their tablet platform, the iPad—the true significance of which many observers have completely missed.

When you consider the new iPad, the first thing to remember is that this device ought to be compared, in a sense, to the very first 5-gigabyte, black-and-white iPod (which was really nothing more than a slick, portable MP3 player) as well as to the first version of the iPhone (which was a phone, great multimedia iPod and “internet communicator,” but did not have an App Store, development kit, copy and paste capability, etc.). The iPad we see today is a Rev 1 product, the launch of a new platform; inevitably it will be followed by future iPad generations that are more capable in every conceivable way.

Many people are surprised that the iPad lacks a forward-facing video camera for video chats. It’s a safe bet that such a camera will be built into future versions, or perhaps even become available as a separate peripheral that works with the Rev 1 generation. But why would Apple postpone the inclusion of this popular feature?

The camera, and the requirement for the iPad to do real-time encoding and streaming of high-quality H.264 video, would have placed two burdens on the device. First is battery life. Apple is clearly proud of the ten hours of video playback the iPad offers, and video chats would have put a serious dent in this capacity. Second is the available bandwidth on current 3G cellular networks, which is limited to a few megabits of downstream and, typically, significantly less than half a megabit of upstream speed. On top of that, the cellular networks are just now starting to ramp up their backbone speeds; throw several million (or more) video-chatting, peer-to-peer users on the current 3G networks, and the system would choke. The experience would be unpleasant, and Apple obviously likes to avoid exposing its users to sub-par experiences. The combination of spotty performance and seriously diminished battery life is just not the sort of experience Apple wants users to associate with their brilliant new platform. Therefore, they’ll probably wait until power and cellular-data technologies mature a bit before video functionality appears in the product.

The next major feature the new iPad lacks is the ability to run third-party applications simultaneously with first-party, bundled applications that Apple provides “out of the box.” This is actually not technically accurate, since most of Apple’s applications can run in the background, while a user-installed third-party application is in the foreground. The “OS X Mobile 3.2” operating system the iPad runs on has the capability to do limited multitasking, but it is not 100% at the user’s discretion.

Here we return to the fact that for the iPad this is a first-generation release, running an OS that is a minor-point update of the current iPhone operating system. It stands to reason that Apple is aggressively working on a significant upgrade to their mobile OS, and there is always the chance that Apple will provide users more flexibility in how they multitask applications on the iPad.

Almost every “underwhelmed” reaction to the iPad focuses on nice-to-have features or specifications that hold appeal for hardcore gadget enthusiasts, but frankly are lower down on the list of average users’ priorities. Most of these features, both hardware and software, will likely be addressed by peripherals that come to market, future hardware iterations of the iPad, software updates to the iPad’s operating system and bundled applications, and of course third-party software releases. We need only look at the history and ongoing development of the iPod and iPhone to know that this is true.

The Real Scoop on the iPad: A Radical Reinvention of Personal Computing

We can now concentrate on the iPad’s hidden story and agenda, which is nothing less than Apple’s goal of dramatically shifting how we think of and relate to “computers,” especially in the hand-held/mobile space.

There was another famous “pad computer” in popular culture not too long ago. It was literally called the PADD and appeared regularly on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation and other extensions of the Star Trek franchise. You remember the PADD (Personal Access Display Device)—it was the ubiquitous hand-held screen/input device that everyone on the Enterprise used to interact with the ship’s computer. Like the iPad, it was compact, had a multi-touch user interface, and a GUI that constantly morphed to present a logical form of interaction for whatever task a user happened to be engaged in at a given moment.

The PADD was an interesting and prophetic take on handheld computing, in that the device was not the be-all, end-all of computer technology in the world of Star Trek, but a means to an end. It was the front end of a technology available at the crew’s fingertips, but it was not representative of that technology in and of itself. If the Enterprise’s shipboard supercomputer was “the cloud,” the PADD was a window onto the resources in the cloud. As a discrete device, the PADD was insignificant; nobody on Star Trek reflected on the power or features of the device itself. Instead, it served as a useful interface to a much wider technological platform that resided in the background. (Is it a coincidence that Apple is currently building a very significant data center in the USA whose exact purpose is currently unknown?)

Star Trek notwithstanding, it’s hardly far-fetched to imagine that a powerful and diverse software-as-service platform will be a growing part of what we think of when we think of Apple—as iTunes, the App Store, Mobile Me, and now the iBooks store already suggest.

The new iPad is Apple’s current manifestation of this type of computing experience: remove the emphasis from the device itself and make it, quite literally, a blank slate. This “window” becomes, from one moment to the next, what you as the user need it to be. The dynamic experience is a function of software and internet-based software services.

It’s curious that so many people shrug off the wide appeal of the iPad but collectively envision so many different uses for it:

“It will be great for home users, but I can’t see it catching on with professionals. It’s a media-consumption device, and not much more.”

“Visual artists are going to love it as a portable, high-tech portfolio, maybe even input device for visual-media creation/video DJ-ing.”

“Audio producers and DJs are going to go nuts with this, it enables custom user interfaces for their music applications, at a price point much cheaper than existing alternatives.”

“Salespeople will love it as a mobile sales tool, for creating and delivering presentations, marketing materials, spreadsheet work, and Internet access, including VPN-ing into the office network.”

“Kids will love this, it’s going to take over mobile gaming.”

“It’s a decent e-reader, especially for people who consume a lot of content on the web, or have given up on ordering a physical copy of the daily paper.”

I could go on and on, but the underlying constant is that people have very different notions of what the device will be good at, and who will likely want one. And this is key to why the iPad will succeed: it will be many things to many people, across many different industries and walks of life. Because of the eventually large pool of software and services that will be available for it, it will do many things quite well. It will be a mass-market device, both consumer and professional, because at the end of the day the mass market is really just a large collection of different niches. And the iPad will evolve to support them.

Finally, many “computer people” dismiss the iPad because it “hides” the underbelly of the operating system from its users. It’s too simplistic, not nearly “hackable” enough, not configurable enough at the OS level. It doesn’t include every last bullet point on many geeks’ “desired specification sheets.” It seems to me this misses the point, because the iPad is almost infinitely configurable; it is a blank slate for which thousands and thousands of developers will invent new purposes.

Vehement critics of the iPad are also missing the point for another important reason. For the past several decades of the “personal computer,” we have grown all too familiar with computers and technology that keep promising to expand our horizons and our capabilities but which grow ever more complex and troublesome for average people to use. We geeks often forget that we are in the minority, and that the majority of computer users actually know very little about how computers work. I would dare say that most computer users wrestle with their computers much of the time. Computers are foreign, a black box—something that in many ways is beyond their capacity to ever really “get.” Many technology enthusiasts and computer experts mistakenly feel that this is because those other users are not smart, or at least not sufficiently dedicated to learning about computers. We disparage users who ask “stupid” questions or have been told how to do something umpteen times and still don’t know how to find the setting they need in System Preferences. We are, to be frank, a techno-elite. We generally enjoy this status, even though it pains us every time we hear someone incorrectly use the term “memory” to refer to “storage space.”

With this new platform Apple is saying one thing above all else, and I for one like what I’m hearing. They’re saying that while there is a role for relatively complex computing systems like the desktop version of OS X, that is not the correct modality for how “the rest of us” should be forced to interact with computers in the future. It’s time to minimize the “having-to-learn-how-to-do-it” portion of the experience and just give people a tool that does what they most often need it to do—in an intuitive way…something you can play with a bit to get the feel for, and then go right ahead and use for fun and exciting things. This is what the Macintosh platform was originally all about, re-conceived with the most cutting-edge technologies available today, and presented in a way that even your grandparents or grade-schoolers can have a good time with, without the constant need for tech support. (No offense to the highly computer-literate grandparents and grade-schoolers who are reading this, but I think you get my point).

There will of course continue to be a role for the totally versatile, “power-user” type of computer that we have learned to take for granted over the past few decades. But in the future Apple is also going to offer new ways of using their technology, and ease of use will be at the forefront of this offer. While on some levels Apple may limit your options, the platform will indeed mature and grow more sophisticated. At the end of the day, for many users, limiting options is actually a good thing.

Steve Jobs, when unveiling the iPad in his keynote, made a big point of how Apple likes to inhabit the world where high technology and liberal arts converge; the iPad is the most profound manifestation of this core design philosophy to date. And as Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, makes clear in the iPad marketing video, this new platform is just a first step: “In many ways this defines our vision, our sense, of what’s next.”