It’s been just over a week now since Apple announced the iPad and I’ve had some time to collect my thoughts.
My initial reaction? Disappointed. The science fiction nerd in me wanted the tablet to be full of the new technologies Apple has patented — haptic feedback, solar-powered battery, individual finger detection, etc. — and I felt disenchanted, disillusioned, all of that dis- stuff. (Ironic, since I said in my initial tablet post that “I do expect some cool, glamorous new technology in the tablet, but the more exciting thing (for me, anyway) will be the re-envisioning of how we use computers.” Sometimes I think I need to read what I write.)
The iPad was more evolutionary than revolutionary, I thought. Wrong. The revolution is more subtle, but it’s definitely there, and it’s exactly what I talked about at the end of that post (duh, Ben). But we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s look at those speculations.
Speculations
- Canvas. iPad. The name is awful and I’m sure most of you have heard all of the female hygiene jokes already. It’s also a bit too close to “iPod.” But that’s what it’s called, so whatever.
- 10″ screen. 9.7″. Close enough.
- New multitouch gestures. Some. At first I didn’t think there was anything new on this front, but watch the Gizmodo video on the new gestures. They’re mostly natural enough that I didn’t even realize they were new.
- A brilliant new input method. We got a big virtual keyboard instead. I originally thought this was lame, because who wants to type like that standing up? Then I realized that it’s mostly not meant to be typed on while standing. And that’s okay.
- Amazing battery life. Not solar-powered and not infinite, but ten hours isn’t bad. We’re getting there.
- New OS. Apparently it is iPhone OS, from what I’ve heard.
- Both 3G and wifi. I was wrong about no plan being necessary, but there are no contracts, which is cool. As for the 250mb/month thing, I checked my iPhone and found that I’ve been using around 170mb/month on it. Streaming video, though, would need unlimited (or wifi).
- $1000 price tag. $499–829. I’m happy to have been wrong here, and yes, I’m planning to get one (the $499 model).
- Books. Yes, indeed. More on this shortly.
- New section of App Store. Not quite. Letting the iPad run iPhone apps is smart, I’ve realized, for two reasons: new iPad owners can use all of their iPhone apps from the get-go, but it’s also a spur to developers to make their apps iPad-ready. (iPhone apps look kind of lame swallowed up in that vast sea of black. And no, pixel-doubling is not a real answer.)
iBooks
When Steve mentioned that there’d be an iBook Store and that the books would be using the ePub format, I got a little giddy. This could potentially be really, really big for ebooks. (It could also fall flat. We’ll have to wait and see.)
First, the iBooks app. The page-turning animation is nice eye candy, sure, but the typography on the book in the demo was pathetic. Rivers of whitespace running all over the place. Seriously, Apple needs to learn about hyphenation. (And this from the company who first brought beautiful typography to computers. Sigh.)
Brief semi-related tangent: As a ebook designer, I’d prefer users to be able to read books the way I typeset them, but if they really want to change the typeface or the font size or whatever, then I say let them do it. If they make it worse, it’s their own fault. My job is to set sane defaults (since most people don’t change the defaults anyway). Similarly, as a reader, I’m willing to stick with the default settings if they’re beautiful, but if they’re hideous, I want to be able to change things till I get something I can stand. Apple, if you can’t get the justification to look good, at least let us turn it off. Please.
Also, the font choices (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, and Verdana) wouldn’t have been at the top of my list, but I’ll reserve judgment there till I see them in use on an actual iPad.
I hope the iBooks app doesn’t mean Apple will be restricting other ebook apps (like Eucalyptus, Stanza, and Classics) on the iPad. Probably not. Will I be able to load my own ePubs into iBooks? Hard to say, but iTunes does let you add your own music and videos to it, so there’s precedent for that. I’m crossing my fingers that the iBooks infrastructure will be available on the iPhone and Mac as well. The iPad might be the ideal way to read iBooks, as far as form factor goes, but it’d be nice to switch devices when I’m away from my iPad (the way you can read Kindle books on your iPhone).
Speaking of the Kindle: Its display is ugly and the slow refresh rates turned me off from the beginning. Yes, I know that e-ink is supposedly easier on the eyes and all that, but I’d rather have a crisp, colorful, fast display, and most people are used to reading off screens anyway. (And if you’re planning on reading for long periods of time, go get a real book. The iPad/iBook isn’t meant to replace paper books — at least not yet.)
iBook Store
This is the more exciting part for me, being a publisher. In the keynote, Steve Jobs said that they’d be opening the floodgates to every publisher in the world, which is great. I’m wondering what their requirements are for who they consider to be a publisher, though. Will it be a yearly fee (like the App Store, where you have to pay at least $99/year) or something else? No clue. I don’t really know what the process is for getting music or videos into the iTunes Store. (Podcasts are relatively easy, though.) Unless Apple’s requirements are unnaturally stiff, I plan to sign up and try it out.
This is great for ePub, I should add. Apple’s backing could help it become the MP3 of books. And ePub is itself a decent ebook standard (it’s HTML/CSS zipped up, basically, with some XML metadata attached — nothing too proprietary).
Will there be DRM? I hope not. Apple is already moving away from DRM for the music on iTunes, but I don’t know if the book publishers would sign on if there weren’t DRM. My guess is that there’ll be Apple-specific DRM, like there was in iTunes, and in a few years when the publishers see how they’re selling way more ebooks through the iBooks Store, Apple will press them to drop the DRM and they’ll comply. ~fingers crossed~
What the naysayers are saying
Two of the biggest complaints I’ve heard so far are about the iPad’s lack of multitasking and Flash — both of which are complete non-issues to me.
Multitasking: First, it’s detrimental to productivity. Seriously. Not only that, but you can switch between apps on the iPad (and iPhone) fast enough that it doesn’t really matter, and the apps remember what state they were in before so it’s almost like you never even quit the app. Not allowing multitasking also really does result in more stability and better battery life. People who keep begging for multitasking are missing the boat. For more on multitasking and the iPad, read Milind Alvares’s article.
Flash: Honestly, who cares? I’ve never, ever missed having Flash on my iPhone. Ever. And believe me, it won’t be long before content creators whose stuff only works on Flash (Hulu, I’m looking at you) make iPhone/iPad apps using H.264 instead. Flash is dying. Let it die.
For more on Flash and the iPad, read John Gruber’s post. Also read Zeldman’s piece on how “lack of Flash in the iPad is a win for accessible, standards-based design.” (And HTML5 video is coming along nicely: check out the new SublimeVideo player. Only works in Chrome and Safari right now, but Firefox support is coming soon.)
My brother-in-law brought up a point that I hadn’t really considered so far: if someone emails me a document, I can’t easily save it to my iPad, edit it, and then email it back. A central Document Library (ala the Photos Library, which apps like CameraBag and Brushes can access and save to) would be nice.
The revolution
It began with the iPhone. Millions of iPhones sold, millions of customers saying that yes, they really do want a more human computing experience. They don’t want to tweak. They don’t want to fiddle. They don’t care about open v. closed. They just want something that works.
And you know what? They’re right. This is what most people need: a computer that’s easy to work with, that abstracts away all the details that don’t matter, that’s as stable as, say, a car. And on that note, check out Gruber’s comparison:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
Why the iPad matters: people who aren’t “good with computers” will be able to use the iPad without having to call their tech-savvy nephew or granddaughter for help. It’s computing for the masses.
Don’t believe me? Read On iPads, Grandmas, and Game-changing, Old World and New World Computing, The iPad is the iPrius, and Future Shock.
Sure, techies who like tinkering will still be able to get old world computers. You can still buy cars with manual transmissions. But within, I don’t know, five to ten years, most computers will become like the iPad. And yes, there will be more open solutions as well (running Linux or what have you). Give it time.
This is huge. It’s perhaps one of the biggest steps we’ve ever taken towards making computers more human-friendly (and not just geek-friendly). Until the iPhone, computers were the province of magic and wizardry, or so it seemed to everyone else. No longer. And again, the iPhone has shown that this is what people want, and the iPad is going to give it to them.