I passively monitored Apple’s much anticipated announcement yesterday via a TechCrunch live feed. Apple makes a lot of brilliant products, and their announcements have a big impact, so it's beneficial for anyone in this industry to keep interested.
The TechCrunch show consisted of a couple of people monitoring the twitter feed of someone actually invited to the event while incompetently dealing with technical challenges like “show a graphic” or “don’t abruptly inject a floor audio feed without warning”.
One of the hosts demonstrated why so many of us have an automatic skepticism about the critical reception of new Apple products: As the picture of the product came onto their feed – carried down from the mountain by Jobs – her reaction was “Uhhhhh....it’s gorrrrrrrrgeous!”
Her observation is only shared by the truly faithful, though surely the rest of the Apple herd will inevitably come around. You can be sure that going forward this nondescript rectangle will become the new benchmark of product beauty.
Everything that follows will either be ugly in comparison, or declared a rip off. I just discovered a digital photo frame beside me which I sadly must report is a rip-off of the pure, blessed genius of Apple.
We now know that the iPad is essentially an iPhone with a larger (low resolution, 4:3 ratio) screen, minus voice. Clearly it runs an ARM-derived processor, with performance likely very similar to a Snapdragon 1Ghz. Apple is talking a big game about the A4 system on a chip (saying things like “Intel is looking to do this with their Atom”, ignoring all that came before to pretend that they lead the pack. It's like coming in last in the marathon yet talking about how you finished before next year’s winner), so it would be interesting to see it put to the test against, for instance, the Tegra 2.
One other feature of the iPad is that you can change the background. Apparently that’s a pretty big deal.
The iPad seems to be the continuation of Apple’s platform royalty play, and may be subsidized in the same way that Microsoft or Sony sell their consoles. With this device Apple is going upscale, moving beyond the repackaged web pages and novelty water cooler apps that overwhelmingly dominate the app store. Getting a cut of magazines and books and even more media will surely pad their pockets.
To repeat what I said before, Apple and Sony would be a perfect union. Their modus operandi is virtually identical. Aside from the common quest to act as the troll under the bridge collecting a toll, they share a profound propensity for endlessly reinventing things that came before, cluttering their devices with proprietary plugs and connectors and cards and slots.
The iPad puts into focus why Apple has been so vigilant about maintaining their strict ecosystem command and control of the iPlatform. While some points were debatable with the iPhone (and were cause for much stupidity when otherwise intelligent technical commentators made ridiculous excuses for the restrictions and limitations of the platform, trying to sell some piss water as lemonade), with the iPad it’s clear that it’s for the same reason that the console makers lock down their platform, though the lame excuses are already being doled out.
It certainly isn’t to benefit the consumer. We had shades of this years back as Microsoft built out the trusted-computing platform, and one feared possibility at the time was that we'd end up with a dominant platform where software had to pay a fee and pass a gatekeep ("DENIED! Competes with Excel!"). Thankfully the massive chill was unfounded, or the objection was so loud that it discouraged that initiative.
Alas, the iPad is real. The faithful are pouring forth to tell us that it’s the end of netbooks. It’s the end of eReaders. It’s the future of computing! While usually it’s the Mac faithful that preach the message, in this case it’s the tech media that is pouring on the unabashed praise with no critical perspective. They’re all afraid of posting something negative, only to be mocked when Apple inevitably succeeds. They point nervously at the Slashdot summary of lore.
As Jobs creepily says during his demonstration, “It’s that easy.” Then again Jobs also told us that it will be the “best browsing experience you’ve ever had”, while showing us the device rendering websites like the NY Times, sans Flash or other accoutrements, much slower and less usably than it takes for virtually any PC, including higher resolution, vastly more capable $400 netbooks, to do the same.
“Flash is so yesterday! HTML 5 is the future!” you say. I agree with you, at least if you’re talking through a wormhole from about two or three years in the future, and with a vastly more powerful device. JavaScript and the canvas element can almost yield usable Flash similes on a PC many magnitudes more powerful than this device. Even just for video it’s grossly premature, though Apple will be overjoyed if you’re restricted to their little ghetto, paying your toll while thanking them for it.
Alas, such is the pure innovation of the sort that only Apple can bring us.
As a reader-of-my-blog exclusive, I want to let you all into some secret iPad specifications I stumbled across.
http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm
I knew I couldn’t fool you. That’s actually a tablet PC from 6 years ago. It’s a follow-up of tablet and hybrid PCs that existed since the turn of the century (and of course supermarkets and science centers have had touch screens, including the revered multi-touch, for much longer. Am I the only one who finds that people endless pinching and unpinching on the screen look positively ridiculous?)
Of course it was far more expensive than the coming iPad. It weighed more too, and had a much shorter battery life.
Then again, it was probably faster than the iPad. It was completely open and could run hundreds of thousands of very rich applications (applications not gimped to a smartphone). It also had lots of standard expansion ports and capabilities.
The market generally didn’t care for it or its ilk because the only people who really wanted a screen like that are inventory takers at Home Depot. Most of the demonstrations of it were laughable.
Despite all of Bill Gates’ prayers before he went to bed, the format floundered. They're trying once more to make it stick.
Of course that device used a screen technology that required a stylus. Apple is into the capacitive touch screen technology, so maybe that is super new and innovative for a device like this?
No, it isn’t unique. That touchscreen device came out before Apple’s very first iPod (you know the one. It was the “me too” music player that saved Apple from dying at the hands of a failed computer business — though some gimmickry with the iMac kept it on life-support for a while longer — which they’ve since rebirthed by rebadging PC components, amazingly fooling the faithful into believing that these somehow came from the premium bin).
The iPad isn't innovative. Everything it does has been done many times before. Claiming that its restrictions are a benefit are like saying North Korea has a more refined sense of freedom.
Executing well is not innovation. Apple executes very well indeed, and they put incredible care and attention into their products. That is hugely laudable and worthwhile, but it isn’t innovative.
As to predictions that the iPad will take over the eReader market, while it may come to pass it ignores precedent.
People don’t read books on LCD screens for the simple reason that people couldn’t accept that as a substitute for print when they wanted print. That led to the creation and adoption of e-Ink, mirroring how actual reflective print works. I have no doubt that a lot of teary-eyed iPad adopters will tell us that it’s the cat’s meow, but we’ve been down this path many times before. Yes, even with IPS screens.
That’s Apple innovation for you. If standards change for your product, how can you fail?
Of course, all of this is for naught. Apple has a precedent of going into markets with products that cost more while doing less, and achieving remarkable success. So this is my final cry before I smile and nod politely as told about how Apple invented IPS display technology, the ARM reference processor, flash memory, and so on. The leader is truly wise and great.
