All the discussion around the iPad seems to be based around whether it’s a good product or not. This I expected. But whether the iPad is successful or not, a good product or not, does not interest me as much how they presented it.
Apple has had more than their fair share of game changing opportunities - Macintosh, Newton and iPhone spring to mind - but they’re still incredibly rare. But so, so valuable. These are moments when you can throw out all current user expectations and legacies and focus on what you want to make this product. You can change the fundamental understandings of the project at a whim. If design is art working within constraints, then this is as close to art as design gets.
The tech media’s backlash against the backlash, claiming it’s a revolution and requires a rethink of personal computing, not a new idea, is correct, it’s just I just don’t think the iPad cuts the mustard. This doesn’t feel like the rethink of personal computing it could have been. So while, no, I disagree that this is just a big iPod Touch, it’s certainly closer to it in thinking than it needs to be. More offensively to me, it’s a bit close to personal computers of today. Let’s make a subtitle:
Spreadsheets. That’s what really got me. Fucking spreadsheets. I mean seriously. Apple puts people up on stage, in front of millions of indirect eyes, to say “You can organise your kid’s football games on Numbers”. Come on. Sure, you can, you have been able to for years. It’s these generic, catch-all nerdy tools that I thought we were abandoning along with file structures and window focus, and Apple were meant to be leading that charge.
Hang on, I think I have another subtitle coming.
OK, that’s a bit of a lie, what I’m trying to say is that I think the “personal” but of personal computing is a bit out of date. Both the KVM and phone models are inherently lonely, but the iPad seems a perfect vehicle for an escape of this. Perhaps if they sold it as a household device, rather than as this “intimate” experience, they could make some serious headway in their apparently increasingly abandoned digital hub strategy.
In fact, the iPad could have replaced the PC as the digital hub.
Cheesy family unit imaginary scenario: I come home, throw on some music from the iPad to airtunes, find a note from school saying my daughter needs to bring in some pasta for cookery on Friday, I throw that onto the shopping list, which automatically gets added to our family budget expenses. I debate our next move me and my son will make in our chess game against his uncle and cousin in Edinburgh, replaying the game so far in front of the two of us, looking at it from all angles. We get a video call from the grandparents to catch up. After which, the son borrows it to catch up on facebooking, before bringing it down, and the two kids play virtual air hockey on it. We plug it into the TV and watch iPlayer. Oh, and after I organise a bloody game of bloody football on an app specifically designed for organising bloody games of bloody football.
Sure, this may all be possible with the iPad with the app platform, but that’s not the point. It’s all kinda possible Windows XP, but even Microsoft are beginning to figure out that’s not the point.
I dunno, I’m going to throw it out there, and I can eat my words later, Apple still make great and successful products, and I’m sure the iPad is going to be one of them, but they had an opportunity to do so much more, and they seem to already be making mistakes, which reminds me, they seemed awfully surprised when the iPhone app store was massively successful. Maybe making great products isn’t enough.
