The iPad
One word: potential. Remember how I mentioned people hyping it up too much? This is what I was talking about. Clearly Apple wanted to start from bare basics and then upgrade. Essentially, this is exactly what people heard since a while ago: a giant iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple clearly wants to ride the familiarity people have with the iPhone, which may or may not be a mistake. People were expecting something revolutionary, and instead they got the familiar, just bigger.
In one respect, the iPad is disappointing in that it really doesn’t do anything new. No 3-D interface, no use of advanced multi-touch, and no steep learning curve. It doesn’t even have multitasking, which people expected the iPad would bring to the iPhone. Instead, we’re all trapped under a single app at a time, which is virtually inexplicable for a device with a 1 GHz CPU that reportedly performs very quickly. I can only guess that Apple wanted to prevent the device from slowing down after opening up too many apps at the same time.
What Apple did right: the price. The base unit, 16GB WiFi and no carrier contract, starts at $499, which, if you recall, is exactly what the original 4GB iPhone cost with a contract. The 16GB price is obviously meant to sell, as I seriously doubt that doubling the memory really costs an extra $100. Apple wanted the low-end model to be at a price people wouldn’t gag at, and they did it: $500 for a tablet computer is actually pretty damn good. Add the pre-existing app base and how comfortably anyone will be able to slide into using this, and you begin to understand Apple’s strategy.
And that, I suppose, was a key point: make it available for most people, get the basics down right, and then follow up with more features every model. You can fully expect a new iPad in 8-12 months with a front-facing camera, Bluetooth and a compass, then another one after that with new screen sizes and multitasking, and so on. This is what Apple does. I called that one spot-on in my prediction 10 days ago:
Like the iPhone, one should expect a relative paucity of such features upon the initial release, allowing not only for everyone to focus on the core innovations of the product, but also to allow for Apple to make the subsequent generations of tablets more attractive.
See?
Apple is indeed going with the closed ecosystem; again, they are going with their strengths. Hopefully, you will be able to “authorize” the iPad so it can use all of your purchased apps right off the bat, without having to buy them all over again. Apple is adding iWork to the mix, so we get a long-overdue office suite. The apps are priced at $10 a pop, I presume no discount to buy all 3. But $30 for an office suite seems quite acceptable to me.
Missing from the presentation: any indication of how the file system will work. Now that we have an Office-style set of apps, surely we’ll need a place to save them. How will that work? If they introduced that, I haven’t seen it yet.
And textbooks! What’s up with that? No mention of textbooks in the keynote? Surely there will be something coming, but Apple better not make it so you have to buy a separate textbook app for each publisher. Even free apps from each publisher would be a pain in the ass, as you’d have to remember which textbook you’d gotten from what publisher, and you’d have to switch back and forth.
My predictions for the tablet were not bad–I got a lot right, probably more wrong, though I probably fared better than most analysts. The iPad is slightly larger than I thought, in order to accommodate the border/bezel, which I believe I accurately predicted–I think that’s about a half-inch, maybe a bit wider. I nearly nailed the pixels-per-inch prediction, guessing 130 (it’s 132), and was right that there’d be at least a 720p resolution–I guessed 1080 x 720, it’s really 1024 x 768, not spot-on but fairly close. I predicted that viewing angles would be an issue, and was right–Apple went with a special type of LCD called “IPS” which was a wide viewing angle. I don’t recall many other prognosticators addressing that issue. I was right about the camera not being there, and why not; I was right about the price but for the wrong reasons; and I was right about the importance about there being a Wi-Fi-only option.
I was wrong in my expectations for the interface to use advanced multitouch, though I fully expect Apple to start from the familiar base OS and upgrade gradually instead of shocking people with a new, hard-to-learn UI. I was wrong about the home button location, but right on all the other buttons. I was wrong about the mini-USB and the mic, and missed it on the CPU.
Overall impression: Jobs did not hit one out of the park like he did with the iPhone, in that this is not a huge, awe-inspiring device. Instead, it is far more subtle and subversive: it will slide people into a new way of computing, slowly acclimating them instead of diving right in.
In the end, the question is, will people buy it? It’s a very nice, familiar tablet/ebook device for an affordable entry-level price. I think people will indeed go for it, though not in the excited droves they went for the iPhone. Jobs is playing this one safe rather than taking risks. It’ll be a sleeper, slow in the short-term, but a long-term hit.
It’s going to be the killer back-to-school & Christmas gift.
My app ideas weren’t working so well in HVGA, XGA is a lot better.
This is a very good video player and also good for the kind of games I want to write.
This is basically a Macbook Air w/o the keyboard.
This is a home run AFAICT. It would have been a grand-slam if it had 180+ dpi instead of 130dpi at the equivalent performance.
oh yeah, this is basically a ‘let’s live out in Musashi Itsukaichi’ device.
Find some 終点 like Kichijoji or Tsukuba, where you can wait for the next train in the morning for a guaranteed seat. Heck, in my case I may only commute into Tokyo once a week, so I could take the Shinkansen from Atami.
For us here in the states, this is a must-buy for the treadmill exercise time. I’ve tried using my MBP, but it’s too big. And the iPod Touch is too small. This is purrrfect.
heh, we had this pegged back in August . . .
http://blogd.com/wp/index.php/archives/6313#comments
A greener approach with the same results would have been to shrink us all to half as tall as we were and give us iPhones/iPod Touches.
And each of us would use only 1/8 the energy resources!
It will be interesting to see how this works out and who ends up using it and why.
As for myself, I just picked up an excellent (so far) netbook for $205 and it has a version of windows 7, 250gig hard drive, silent as a mouse, and I can carry it everywhere without too much worry about breaking it and it runs all my existing software and allows me to get on the internet at any wifi spot and has a normal keyboard. I was thinking about getting an ipod touch in a few months timebecause I am planning to take some classes in the fall that are taught on that platform through down loaded lectures. But now I have to wait to see if this new platform will shift the lectures to that new platform. I hoping it doesn’t because the form factor is so big.
I’m just wondering who this form factor will work for and why and if the class of users are the same that Apple anticipated.
@Tim Kane
Does your netbook have any 3D performance to speak of? Like able to play WoW?
Funny thing you mention the size of the HD. That’s the kind of specmanship that Apple is getting away from. This is a primarily PMP (portable media player) not a PMC (portable media creator), though Apple in its wisdom has pre-exercised the APIs by creating a stable of productivity apps.
Why do you need 250GB of fixed storage? Wouldn’t 25GB be enough if you had another machine to manage your content? Why would you want to have so much on your device, when chances are you’re going to lose that data eventually.
The analogy I thought of last night is that playing media on a laptop is like eating from the frying pan — there are compromises involved. The iPad is more like a serving dish.
As for breaking your $200 netbook, have you tried dropping it? I dropped my iTouch last week while walking in a parking lot. Not a scratch on it (must have landed right).
How much does your $200 netbook weigh? The iPad weighs 1.5lbs, HALF the weight of the Macbook Air. That 250GB HD probably isn’t looking like such a good deal when the weight it brings to the table.
The form factor is smaller than a netbook. I’ve printed out a paper model of it, and the iPad is damn near the same size as a Campus B5-size notebook. Small enough to fit in the small top pocket of a backpack.
The touch form factor is utter compelling. I am disappointed about the lower DPI than expected but hopefully it won’t be too bad.
The real estate afforded by 1024×768 instead of 480×320 is great, it’s like moving from CGA of 1982 to XGA standard of 1992. No handheld app can overfill that space really — hold a B5 piece of paper a foot from your face and you’ll see it’s the same size as a 24″ monitor three feet away.
I’ve got 11 killer apps for this I need to get out ASAP. Stuff I wanted to do for the Mac but there was no indie market for. Stuff that might work on xbox 360 indie dev but for the controller issue. Stuff that was too big for the iPhone display.
Stuff that is awesome for the iPad.
And there are tens of thousands of experienced developers like me. The iPad is the new baseline of mobile development.
Apple is touting multi-mode apps that downscale their content for the iPhone. The future of Apple just may be this device.