The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos
by Bruce Webb
Geekery below the fold.
Steve Jobs was a little hyperbolic in his language yesterday which led some people to laugh. Well there are reasons he is a self-made billionaire and you are not.
The key to understanding why the iPad and similar devices can change the world it to understand that it is not a computer without a physical keyboard, or a multi-media player, or a portable display, sure all of those are built in but they don’t add up to what the iPad really is, which is a magic briefcase full of Gizmos. If you need a computer, you should try this gaming pc under $300.
What’s a Gizmo. Well the online dictionaries have boring definitions but for my purpose a Gizmo is something that does something for you. A Gizmo generally isn’t big and it mostly isn’t multifunctional, it just does what it does in a fun and efficient way. The iPad, such as that drawing tablet without computer, is designed to be a repository for Gizmos along with Games and Books and Music and allows you to use all of them anywhere you go. Now it sounds silly to put it this way but it doesn’t have to be, if you were a Building Inspector it might be nice to have one Gizmo to record your findings and another that allowed you to look up the International Building and Fire Codes on the fly, and maybe another to allow you to record your time on the job. And on a dirty, dusty or muddy job site it might be nice to have one in the same form factor as the clipboard you had been carrying rather than some clamshell lap top vulnerable to the environment.
A salesman needs a different set of Gizmos. Maybe a Travel Schedule and Ticket Booking Gizmo, maybe one that displays the companies entire product line with accompanying video and specs. And maybe some things to kill time while traveling, say maybe a Travel Chess Set or a book of Crosswords. But whatever you are and whatever you do it would be neat and at times necessary to always have with you your own collection of Gizmos. Me, I am a simple guy on a typical day all I would need is my Bus Schedule Gizmo, and a Gizmo that would display a full web page while allowing me to touch type posts and comments. But in an immediate past job as a Real Estate/Land Development Researcher it would have been nice to have a Road Map Gizmo for my area, another that had copies of County and City Land Development Codes and another with access to Interactive Permit and Zoning Maps for the various jurisdictions we dealt with. Oh and an aerial photo viewer. Now I had all that capability in my office and sort of via my laptop in my car, but there was very little magical about it.
We could go on. A tourist in a foreign country has a whole new set of needed Gizmos. Currency calculators, Maps, Guidebooks, Brochures, Travel Clock, and a Translation Gizmo and probably no desire to whip out a laptop at the souvenir stand in some street in Montmartre. A college student in turn has all kinds of different Gizmo desires, say movie and club schedules, maybe a University Library Catalog Gizmo, or for an athlete the playbook and training and practice schedule.
And that is the beauty of the iPad, it is not based on a model of the tablet computer, instead it is modeled on the iTouch a handheld Gizmo that delivers dozens of other Gizmo products that the user selects from literally tens of thousands of offerings. If you like, and a lot of people do, you could simply have your iTouch loaded to capacity with games, or songs, or videos, plus maybe a Facebook Gizmo. Or you could load it up with every Reference and Trivia resource in the land and bore all your friends for ever. Or just load it up with books and use it as a pretty-good e-readers, or use it as a repository of maps or photos or any combination of that. Of course along with that you can use it as an acceptable web browser and in a pinch as an input device to any cloud computing applications you have going, but in the end what keeps the iTouch a Gizmo Toy and not a Gizmo Tool is the screen size. I mean you could easily load the entire Snohomish County Development Code on an iTouch but absent a very specialized Gizmo indeed looking something up for a client and then sharing it would be a nightmare.
An iPad is built from the ground up to be a full screen screaming Gizmo Machine. Instead of storing a sub-set of your professional books and tools in your briefcase you simply load them on top of a machine. It is said that the magic of the dancing bear is not how well it dances but that it dances at all. And you can say the same about the traditional lap top computer, they have taught it to dance quite a few steps. The iPad instead IS a dance machine.
Okay I have an iPad in my hand. What do I want it to do for me?
1. I want it to be a full page web browser.
2. I want it to be an acceptable blog posting tool.
3. I want a full page version of the Transit Schedule for my area
4. I want it to play my music.
5. I want it to play my movies.
6. I want to be able to update and share my Facebook Wall with someone in the room.
7. I want a functional replacement for my Thomas Guide Map Book
8. I want a useable Guide Book to Western Birds
9. I want a useable Tide Table and opening and closing date/time for fishing runs and shellfish seasons.
10. I want a photo album of all my nieces and nephews
11. I want one click access to my Investment Portfolio’s current prices
12. I want one click access to Professional Books and Codes relevant to my job
13. I want a repair manual for my car.
14. I want a traveling chess board with interactive capability
15. I want the Oxford English Dictionary
16. I want the complete run of Astounding Magazine from 1935-1942
Actually I would be happy with items 1-3, I am kind of a simple guy, but this is a reasonable set of Gizmos for a simple guy, other people would layer on any number of items. But note one thing. With the exception of the web browser none of this is built around the standard Office Suite. And none of it around Graphic Design. Or Application Development. Or building websites. If I was looking to add some functionality to the above it would probably start with the iLife Suite (which would give me some web tools) and then some sort of Writing Program. And probably add some interactive Language modules to allow me to brush up on my neglected French, Latin and Welsh and maybe add back in Italian. But in any event the iPad is already optimized to deliver all of these Gizmos and more, you just need to possibly pay for some of the actual content
When you buy a laptop there is kind of a sense of ‘Well there it is’, it has whatever software package you ordered, and maybe you go online and order and install some more or try to find the disks so as to reload things. The iPad is not like that. Instead it asks you what you want to do with it and you start by visiting the App Store and browsing among the free and trial Apps. And there are literally tens of thousands of them. Then you simply start adding and rearranging Gizmos that do the kinds of things you want them to do.
At $499 and no need for a contract the price point is excellent or anyone who has reliable access to WiFI, which these days often means the Library or Starbucks and there are certainly enough free Apps and free document sources out there to justify getting one. Plus there are a good number of Gizmos built in to the unit. But I think the question will come to this. Pick up a piece of 8 x 11 paper, fold it down an inch at top and side and ask yourself this: “What are the top 25 things I would like a magic piece of paper to deliver to me anywhere any time?” and then follow up with: “How much of that potential functionality do I lose by trying to access that through the 3″ screen on my phone?” and “How much functionality do I really lose if I left my laptop at home and relied on this on a typical day?”
Finally a little note about sociality. Laptops aren’t social. You are not going to whip one out at a party or at the bar or while hiking with friends, nor are they something you would generally just hand to a friend. They aren’t particularly cool even when you are out on your own, sitting on a bench in front of an exhibit at the art museum with an open lap top just screams dork. On the other hand the iPad with out without its case more or less looks like a small portfolio. If you turned it on and did a quick web search on the artist, it would look as natural as could be. As it would be navigating some narrow aisles looking for treasure in an old book store or antique store, who looks at a guy with something the size of a clipboard in his hand? When people I know are talking around me I like to do a quick look up on my iPhone pull up a picture and then show it, but it is a little awkward sometimes I am walking up to them and giving them a phone which since we are all over 50 means them dragging out a pair of glasses. With the iPad instead I can do the equivalent of laying out an 8 x 10 glossy photo by their elbow. “Look know that’s a (whatever they are trying to describe)”. I think this ability to share, to be able to on the spot pull something up and then physically hand the display to another person or to hold it up for sharing is going to open new horizons in personal computing.
This BTW may make this product the must-have for teenagers. It is right at the same price level of buying them a smartphone and a dedicated MP-3 player and I can see the girls passing their Facebook Walls back and forth as they walk down the hall or sit in the lunch room, its a natural. I don’t know how many High Schools provide Wi-Fi but it has to be a lot, this thing just flat out works in the teen, twenty-something social environment.
So the iPad is big. Not because it is in a category of its own, it was proceeded there by both the iTouch and the iPhone, but because it takes that category to a level of real world functionality that transforms a pretty cool toy into what can be developed by each individual into a lifestyle tool. It simply makes the handbook, the guidebook, the catalog, the manual, the route schedule potentially obsolete, People who bitch about its maybe lack of markup tools ignore the fact that we interact with text and information in all kinds of ways in daily life plus we use all kinds of information Gizmos in the process. I guess we will see how his one goes.
One of the important things to keep in mind, is if the device works well/smoothly. Example, the Archos 9 has much better “specs” than the iPad, but read the reviews of poor touch and gesture reponse from its screen – which is the main way you interface with the thing. I am sure the iPad will not have these issues, based on my iPhone use.
As a multi computer user Mac/Windows/Linux/iPhone, Apple designs many little details well, that do not show in the spec sheet. Their hardware and software are well integrated, avoiding many of the windows hardware software integration issues you run across.
I travel with a 12″ Dell Mini Netbook with Ubuntu Linux. I like it overall, light, cheapp, but the overall design is just not that polished. The keyboard is flimsy, and press a key too hard, and will cause another unintended key to be triggered – that is the type of thing that Apple really thinks of, creating a solid experience.
I did want to see a camera (front and back facing), as well as a usb and video out port. But I think Apple has designed an overall package that will function much better than the competition, despite some spec deficiencies. I bet it would serve most people’s computing needs. It will be really good for games.
Either Apple SuperSized the iPhone, or it shrank Steve Jobs.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60Q0BY20100127?type=globalMarketsNews
I have the same travel rig as Krugman (iPhone, X61 and Kindle 2), and, like him, I don’t feel any need for an iPad. That doesn’t mean I won’t eventually get one, however.
McWop. I was hoping for a video camera for video-conferencing from the field but the iPad would be a little wieldy as a camera in itself. As it is it comes with two camera adapters, once that takes the USB cable directly from the camera and the other which takes SD input. It makes sense for me to allow the user to choose the quality of camera rather than sticking with the one size fits all of the typical cell phone. Same thing applies to Video out, you just don’t get a lot of point and shoot functionality with a flat device.
As to USB the standard docking port is USB, on my iPhone I have the same connecter at the phone end put the other end of the cord is a standard USB connection, it is just that file transfer and sync is handled at the other end.
As to computing needs, that I think is where Apple hit the sweet spot. The typical laptop is conceived as being a portable office or studio where a variety of accessories, utilities and games are more or less attached to the core function which has the user doing something productive whether that be reporting or designing. The iPad doesn’t assume you even want to be productive, instead the machine transforms into whatever you want it to be. It can become an Arts Machine, a Food Machine, a Family Entertainment Machine, a Travel Machine, or whatever you like. Just have the right assemblage of Apps on the front screen and you have one touch access to a hundred different resources.
A big key for me is whether you will be able to use a current iPhone and iPhone data plan as a tether. If so then getting an iPad at $495 seems to be a no brainer. I don’t have a Kindle but my brother does and while he likes it a lot it doesn’t work that well for his favorite genre which is military campaign books. The battle maps simply don’t display well enough on the Kindle, perhaps simply because of the color factor. An iPad which is of course color native but also has the ability to expand those illustrations at the touch of a couple fingers which would solve that problem.
I am thinking the Kindle took too narrow a tech focus in elevating readibility as such over scalability and color, too many of the arts and sciences are too crucially based on color to really work in a B&W Reader world. I suspect the competition is gobsmacked at the $500 w/no phone option, and the no contract component of the ones with the phone. If they were planning on competing against a base price of $800-1000 with a two year contract on top of that and so being able to slip a dedicated reader product under that this new price has to be ugly. I read a review that the new Kindle DX only comes in $10 below the 16 GB iPad. Heck for $10 I am going to go ahead and grab the GPS and iPod capabilities. Kindle’s ‘Ink’ is not that damn good.
This will fit the iPhone user profile quite welll.. They don’t want or need a universal computer — ie that can be made to do practically anything. It is a consumer device platform, so I agree that it is a new category and that Apple will make a bunch of money (not on teh hardware so much as the applictaions that can be delivered to the platform).
The significance of this announcement is more that Apple has taken another step away from the computer business. Another device that no longer automatically includes the ability to make a universal computer into anything they want or need. It fits with the times in so many ways.
True believers believe.
And false prophets blow smoke.
IBM let it’s software control fall into the hands of MFST and then let the hardware control be licensed away to Asia and ended up with not even a fragment of the desktop office and consumer market.
Meanwhile Apple with a hickup here and there has kept it’s largely proprietory hardware model and tight control of software in house and is still taking the same profitable slice of a much huger economic pie 25 years later. All that advice to open up the hardware and software turned out to be dead wrong.
Ask Coomodore, Atari and the guy behind the IBM Junior how that worked out.
Understand you can add a camera, but that is not convenient for certain purposes. The front facing camera for me is not to snap photos as I would with a phone or regular camera. It would be to support certain apps like Evernote (snap a picture of a whiteboard session), and apps with bar code scanning. Much easier with it built in, versus a peripheral.
I’m not an Apple fan which doesn’t mean that Apple products are no good. However, not everyone is wild about this thing. See this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4 which is cruel, almost certainly unfair, but funny.
I have been reading a lot of reviews and am convinced that people just don’t get it. Which of course is the point of this post.
I am composing a story in my head that I may put up at my blog tentatively called “Johnny the Supervisor and the Magical Black Clipboard”. Most people are familiar with the image of a supervisor carrying a clipboard to which would be attached perhaps the employee memo of the day, some checklists and include a notepad. My story begins with Jimmy being given a new clipboard and being asked what he would like it to be able to do. Say first being able to tell him the time, then show him the employee schedule. Anyway to spoil the ending he ends up with an iPad that does 25 or 50 specific tasks for him, some of which would overlap with most other users, while others would be company specific or Johnny specific.
In the end the iPad is a tool you design for your own needs and not around a pre-selected suite of software, which is with its form factor why it is potentially transformatory.
Long post up at BruceWeb.blogspot.com
I would note that a lot of hardware limitations are more apparent than real. Apple already has a combination dock/keyboard that converts the iPad into a passable home system. They have also released adapters to allow direct transfers from digital cameras and SD cards into the iPad, I see no reason why that same adapter couldn’t be used to accept input from an external web-cam. It may equally be possible to use that same USB connector to accept Video out.
Most of the criticism has been pretty nit-picky indeed particularly since the base product came out hundreds cheaper than most people expected at a price level equal to that of the first generation iPhone, and that subsidized by a contract.
Bollocks. I decide what goes into my briefcase. Jobs decides what goes on the whyPad. I have a tablet that I use as a slate, more or less – I can draw with it because it has a pen, not a touchscreen. As a reader, it has all the disadvantages of the Kindle, without the e-paper screen. It cannot multitask, hence modern web/app bloat is going to lock interaction sooner than later. It does not have USB, so I cannot choose the peripherals. It’s a portable TV, with the app store deciding which channels you get.
I can understand the gizmo briefcase idea, and don’t necessarily disagree. But, even if I want gizmos, I want more than one thing to be happening – my music to play while I websurf, a simple notepad to be available for jotting while reading, etc. No multi-tasking rules those out. Don’t think it’s a problem of the CPU – Steve just seems ideologically opposed. Look how long it took to get multi-tasking on the Mac. Perhaps he sees it as encouraging a “laser-like focus”?
I am sorry, but I must respectfully disagree. When I saw the iPad, I couldn’t really figure the market for this. You might want one to fill your laundry list, but for most people a netbook does these things much better.
1. I want it to be a full page web browser.
But it doesn’t play flash. So a lot of websites don’t work well, including the NYTimes photo gallery. Not to mention no streaming movies, many youtube videos, etc. This war on flash is one Apple will not win.
2. I want it to be an acceptable blog posting tool.
Typing on the iphone is reasonable, given that it is a pocket sized device. I can hold it in my hands and type. It is a bit clumsy, but it fits in my pocket. The ipad? You either hold it in one hand and type very clumsily with the other, or put it on your lap and hunch over. At least with a netbook you have a real keyboard and it folds up.
3. I want a full page version of the Transit Schedule for my area
But you are stuck with ATT 3g coverage. What if you are is lowsy for ATT? At least a netbook could run Verizon’s network.
4. I want it to play my music.
5. I want it to play my movies.
But no DVD drive so you can’t watch DVDs or even stream them from Netflix.
6. I want to be able to update and share my Facebook Wall with someone in the room.
These days most basic phones will do that and play music. I still fail to see where the netbook fits into the market with this.
7. I want a functional replacement for my Thomas Guide Map Book
8. I want a useable Guide Book to Western Birds
9. I want a useable Tide Table and opening and closing date/time for fishing runs and shellfish seasons.
10. I want a photo album of all my nieces and nephews
Can you download pictures from your camera to the ipad and then upload them?
11. I want one click access to my Investment Portfolio’s current prices
12. I want one click access to Professional Books and Codes relevant to my job
13. I want a repair manual for my car.
14. I want a traveling chess board with interactive capability
15. I want the Oxford English Dictionary
16. I want the complete run of Astounding Magazine from 1935-1942
Look, I am not anti-Apple. I knew the iphone was a revolutionary product the minute I saw it. The iphone was an ipod and a cellphone. But it was more than that. It was the internet in your pocket. Check emails, browse websites…and it was a portable GPS navigator. All this before adding the app store. It maybe wasn’t the best GPS or web browser on a portable device, but good enough. The ipad, well I just don’t see how it does anything better than a netbook or is really worth adding to a consumer market already saturating with smartphones and laptops. It doesn’t really replace devices like the iphone did. It simple adds one that seems rather superflous.
So I fail to see the product niche for the ipad. There are a lot of things it could do, but seeing as it is marketed like the iphone – as a consumer device – I don’t see this selling as well as people are thinking.
it’s not an iPad
it’s an IP ad.
oh, and i can’t imagine high schools allowing this in their doors. they are easy targets for theft and vandalism. do high schools have enough police to enforce property rights?
It seems that the technology becomes an important part of our life.The ipad seems an interesting gadget, especially for kids but not only.I think it`s a good replacement for pc.The company I work for is searching for private cloud system and if it is implemented maybe an ipad could help me do my job from everywhere if I have an internet conection.