"People always clap for the wrong things."  -  Holden Caulfield

The Catcher in the Rye

I don't know if you've heard, but Apple announced a new product yesterday, called the iPad.  The hype surrounding it was almost obscene in its ability to pierce across broad spectrums of society.  Everyone was talking about it.  So naturally it was a little disappointing when we all found out that it wasn't going to give us the promotion we wanted or reduce our income taxes.  

  Several of those people I know who I would consider technology aficionados, or at least hobbyists, have asked me for my opinion of Job's latest Second Coming, and while I don't want to wax philosophic on it, I do have an opinion or two.  

  The preface to this is that I already own Apple products.  In fact, I love the Apple products I own.  My MacBook Pro is my only computer.  I use it at work all day.  I have an iPhone which has without a doubt made my life easier and changed the way I think about data storage and how we interact with it.  I own an Apple Airport Extreme (the most functional and stable wireless router in the commercial market) and an Airport Express.  In short, I am an unabashed fan of Apple software and hardware engineering.  But I don't own any Apple stock, sadly, and have nothing to gain or lose from the success or failure of this new iPad.

  This is not a product I feel I need.  When I first saw an iPhone, I knew I wanted one.  When I finally got one in my hand and played with one, I knew I needed one.  I do not feel that way at all about the new iPad.  Like many I was disappointed at first by the relatively modest nature of the iPad.  There was nothing revolutionary about it's interface.  Nothing revolutionary about its methods for retrieving and playing back content.  There was no revolutionary technology implemented. Even the name is obvious and fairly bland.  The more I think about it, however, the more I realize that this is because I am not the target demographic and this is not the iPhone, this is the iPod.  When the iPhone was introduced it was revolutionary.  Even without looking at its staggering sales numbers, the proof of this is apparent in how every one of its competitors attempts to follow the iPhone's form and function.  How many large touchscreen mono-piece phones were in existence before the iphone, and how many have there been since?  The iPhone was an immediate hit with consumers and even most of the punditry, though there are some excellent quotes from those who blew that call entirely at the time.  By contrast, the iPod was neither revolutionary nor an overnight sensation with consumers.  A friend linked me to this excellent forum thread from an Apple news site from the day of the first iPod's announcement back in 2001, and it brilliantly illustrates how even Apple's biggest fans were underwhelmed by the iPod's debut.  I found this posting particularly poignant:

I have no use for an Mp3 player.

My house has a CD player.
My car has a CD player.
My Mac has a CD player

I don't use headphones.

The iPod requires me to change my lifestyle to meet it's needs...

I need round holes, not square holes.

For $99 I might buy the toy, for $399? Why?

Doesn't a Mac with a CDR undermine the need for most of this? All that's left is the number of songs you can play and the ability to listen to all of them with headphones anywhere. Do I really need ALL my songs ALL the time?

uhm, no.

Won't last.

The iPod was one of many mp3 players coming out that year and was by no means the cheapest.  It was also a Mac only device.  The above commenter's statement, while certainly amusing in hindsight, is not completely out of line for the time.  More important than the way that the iPod changed the way we consume music by making it easier and faster than anything else had, was the way in which the iPod filled a technological gap that most of the world did not recognize as being there at all--until it was.  

This new iPad has the same potential.  It is not the first tablet style computer, by any means.  Nor is it the most feature filled.  There are many pieces of technology that Apple could have added, but didn't.  At the risk of attracting the cliche police, this is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the computer geeks--people like me--are losing the forest for the trees.  The list of things it is missing if it were a computer is long, but the iPad is not a computer, it's a media appliance.  It's technological marvels are not that it pushes the envelope of what a computer can do, but that it pushes the envelope of what a piece of consumer technology can do--specifically the longest battery life for a full color, capacitive tablet media device of that size at a price that is more than competitive.  Steve Jobs was very specific in his address.  Apple is now the largest mobile devices company in the world.  And as a mobile device for browsing the web and communicating--99% of what 99% of computer users do with their computers--the iPad is going to be tough to beat.  

  There's always the chance that this device could flop.  It wouldn't be the first Apple device to hit a wall of consumer indifference.  But if I had any money to bet, it'd be on the iPad being the sleeper hit of the early half of this decade.  I suspect there will be a lot of iPad 2.0s and 3.0s under Christmas trees in 2011 and 2012.  

Update on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 5:40PM by Ryan Hindinger

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle has an excellent column this week on the American malaise in general, but this was particularly well put:

I calculate it took about seven minutes, give or take, after Steve Jobs finished introducing the shinypretty iPad before the whiny attacks on the wondergizmo began flooding in, how it didn't have this or that expected feature, how it can't do live video chat, doesn't have Flash, the bezel is too big and it won't double as a meat thermometer, how it doesn't really revolutionize much of anything despite how it's, you know, this gorgeous 1.5-inch slab of aluminum and glass that works flawlessly and can perform roughly one thousand tasks in a more fluid and astonishing way than any device of its kind in history.

Big f--ing deal. We just do not care. It's all a big disappointment. Hey, I was expecting to be blown away. I was expecting miracles and transformations and multiple twitching orgasms on sight. Do not come at me with tantalizing promises only to reveal that you can fulfill most of them to a fairly good degree, and not far exceed all of them in every imaginable way. We're Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.

You really ought to read the rest of the column, here, you whiny bastards.