Let me first preface this by saying this opinion piece comes from the perspective of not just a user but a developer and user. The last few months there has been a lot of chatter about the iSlate or iTablet (now known as the iPad for better or for worse). This all culminated in the release of the iPad last week in typical Apple fashion. Much like most of Apple’s largish announcements there is always a pretty big divide as to if the new device has any credibility or purpose. A quick look back to the iPhone and iPod announcements shows pretty much the same theme:
- A couple months of hoopla and rumors flood the web from Apple fanboys/girls and Apple haters
- The ball gets dropped at Moscone Center in San Francisco
- The new device doesn’t live up to the months of hype (imagine that)
- Like Moses and the Red Sea, critics either hate or love the device. There can be no middle ground.
- If the product is successful (iPod, OS X, iPhone) a mad rush to copy it ensues and it gets named ‘The Jesus INSERT PRODUCT NAME HERE’
At the time of this writing we are at the Red Sea portion of Apple’s new product lifecycle. There is usually a good bunch of emotions at this time usually pretty extreme and quite often extremely negative from the majority of bloggers and ‘evangelists’ on the internet. The iPad has another great advantage in that they have a whole new group of critics available to them: Flash developers. The amount of whining going on in the Flash development community right now is bordering on insane. People feel threatened that they will become obsolete for some reason because of the iPad. Flash will one day become obsolete unless their are some major changes in the near future from Adobe. The iPad won’t be the one that kills it though. Not by a long shot. Microsoft will be the Flash murderer. When (if) Microsoft upgrades Internet Explorer to support HTML5 and gets a majority of it’s users upgraded things will change and it won’t be good for Adobe. But that’s a story for another day.
The Bad
The Name: iPad. It’s sounds a bit too much like iPod in my opinion. Typos will be many. It also sounds like a high-tech sanitary napkin.
iPad App Store: This one will have the biggest impact on the iPad’s success. The iPad has a chance to change things for computing in the years to come. A fresh start. An opportunity to revise what is required for *most* computer users and mold the UI and hardware to fit that group. The iPhone is such a runaway success because it redefined what we expect from a phone. To this day every phone manufacturer is still playing catch up. They have literally had years to mimic what the iPhone does and none have been successful yet. As soon as it was opened up to developers and the App Store went online it changed the game almost overnight. The huge onslaught of developers to the platform caused a massive jump in the number of apps available and a startling shift towards $0.99 apps. From a devs point of view it is not at all easy to make a living on $0.99 apps. You need to sell a LOT of $0.99 apps to cover the time and expense to create them. One issue this brings up is that developers are hesitant to spend the time to make a really nice, useful, feature rich application if they can’t sell it for more than a dollar. And why should they? Then after the app gets released for a dollar users expect lifetime updates. How can developers support themselves with that model? They can’t which is why there are so many apps in the App Store that are literally just piles of crap wasting space and making it hard to find the good ones.
The iPad App Store is a chance to right the wrongs and create a whole new class of applications. If there ends up being another “race for the $0.99 app” like on the iPhone the iPad’s full potential will never be seen. I sincerely hope developers out there don’t just take their existing iPhone apps and leave them as is when they port them to the iPad. I also hope users do not buy an iPad expecting to get really innovative and great apps for $0.99. It’s just not going to happen. iPad applications need to raise the bar substantially. They need to be faster, have more features, be prettier to look at and more fun to interact with than their iPhone brethren. Adding in all this extra functionality takes more time. It takes a lot more planning. More time designing graphics that look great on a much larger screen. More creativity is required as well to literally invent new ways to use and interact with a computer. This all means that the price of a quality application needs to go up if we want to continue to drive developers to provide never before seen content.
The Good
It’s a Tablet that Doesn’t Suck: I don’t know why but for some reason all the other computer manufacturers out there besides Apple like to go the safe route and never release any products that push boundaries. Maybe they can’t get the idea of a big risk past their shareholders. Maybe they don’t have the right research and development focus. Whatever the reason, it is clear that there has been ample time to make a decent tablet. Tablet’s have been around for well over a decade. Why is every tablet previously made something chances are you have never heard of or seen or care about? The main reason is because they took an already past it’s prime model (the standard computer interface whether it be Windows, Linux or OS X) and just threw it into a laptop case with a touch screen. Of course they didn’t take off. Why would anyone want to take a computer that is 100% designed to be controlled by a keyboard and mouse and try to use a stylus to control it? No brainer.
Redefinition of what a Computer is: The iPad could potentially change the future of computing. If the iPad catches on and developers come up with some really great human-to-computer interaction patterns this could push computers as a whole towards a similar model. This is a scary idea but what if your computer no longer had a file system? No more Finder or Explorer? No more save buttons? What if your computer no longer had piles of menus leading to even more menus? How could you possibly survive in such a world? This is where Apple is going with the iPad. They are making it so that you no longer have to fumble around with a file system anymore. Apps will have new methods of interaction making the standard File/Edit/View/Etc. menus no longer necessary. Every action you need will be right at your fingertips. Literally.
Notice Apple didn’t tell you anything about the video card the iPad uses? How about the RAM? Processor specs? These things are irrelevant for a huge majority of computers users so why are they so prevalent in computers today? Most users don’t ever come close to pushing their computers. A majority of time is spent in web browsers, listening to music or watching videos. Most users just don’t care about the tech side of things. Exactly how many of the items in the standard Windows “Start” menu do you think most users use? 80%? 50%? 10% Less? Why don’t you take a moment and count the number of clickable items in your start menu (Application folder for Mac users). Now count how many of them you clicked all of last month.
iPad App Store: This is the make it or break it decider for the iPad. Will we end up in the situation described above or will this be the second coming of the computer? The iPad App Store could potentially fill up with piles of applications that you could have never dreamed of before. You can throw away everything you expect an application to do and how you interact with it if things go this way. Gone are hierarchical file systems and the confusion they bring. Gone are virus scanners. Gone are the days of normal computers users not being able to figure an application out. Interacting with a computer can be a whole new experience no longer connected by an obsolete mouse pointer.
The Ugly
It is all summed up here far better than I ever could.