Peter asked me to blog about the iPad. And to give him a shoutout. So here it is Peter, I will pad this blog post with references to you.
Anyway, the iPad. Everyone has been talking (at least those who are geeky or Mac-loving enough to care). Some say it was the biggest disappointment of human history while others are holding out for its impending success in some unexpected way.
Well Peter, here are the main complaints:
- not enough hard disk space
- no multi-tasking
- no Flash support
- no USB
- only App Store
- no camera
Before the last few years, before netbooks and MacBooks existed, built-in cameras never even featured in computers. Now every mobile device has one. But the general population doesn’t actually use a webcam to do much more than take funny Photo Booth pictures or the occasional Skype conversation (fine, they also take vain photos and put them as their profile pics). But the average user isn’t actually thinking about how to communicate to other people virtually. Most of them pick up the phone. Or meet in person.
How many people actually examine the hard disk/flash disk capacity? Only the most geeky. More often than not I’m finding that the people I know are choosing the products by colour first, and then possible specs. That’s why Apple is offering size selection, if you want to be picky, then you get to pay for it.
No multi-tasking. A lame complaint. Do you actually do more than 1 thing at a time on your computer? Like, how often do you actually read two webpages simultaneously, or compose two messages at the same time? There is the odd occasion that I will watch a video while doing something else, or be working on Illustrator or Photoshop at the same time. But that is what my powerful computer is for, not my mobile device. I won’t be creating vector graphics on my mobile device usually. Rather, I will choose to brainstorm stuff on the fly, and then go home and make it awesome when I’m sitting in my ergonomic task chair.
No Flash? No problem! The web world is starting to move away from Flash. Apart from Flash video (like what you are familiar with on YouTube), most legitimate websites are built on CSS, XHTML and other clean searchable code. In fact, YouTube and Vimeo are moving away from using Flash for displaying the videos, instead choosing to move towards HTML5 using h.264 video embedded in their pages. This is not as resource intensive (does your computer fan start going crazy when you view a Flash video online???). The only sites that are going to suffer are ones like media-intensive youth-oriented Flash sites. I do believe those coders are intellectually flexible enough to create sites that are media-intensive yet still CSS/XHTML clean compliant. They just choose not to, and it’s holding back the whole interwebs. Now Adobe (owner of Flash) is not going to leave this without a fight, but I think the world of Flash has just been given its eviction notice subtly by Apple. And the intriguing thing is, Apple is still the company that pushes change in the whole computer industry (nixing floppy disks, bringing Firewire to the forefront, MagSafe power plugs, built-in webcams, multi-touch) — I am not saying they invent these things, but they make them mainstream and expected. And all the other manufacturers still play catch-up.
App Store. Annoying for developers. But simple and unbreakable for users. The standards are high (and picky) so you don’t have unusable crap getting onto iPhones and iPads. Average user, they bend to such demands. And it’s user-friendly, unintimidating, and rock solid. All the apps that are approved are ensured to be clean, secure, and useful. The ones that are turned away, well, maybe Apple is just picky or protective. But at least you actually need to know how to buy an SDK to develop for Apple’s mobile devices.
Everyone is critiquing the iPad as if they know anything about human-computer interaction, product design, usability, interface design, and software development. All this, because they have seen the iPhone or iPod Touch and they think they know what they are talking about. But in reality many complainers (general nerdy public) are just USERS. They are consumers. They don’t invest the money in product development and usability. They don’t look 5 years down the road at what will be viable.
Here’s another way to look at it — if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, your piece of mobile device was the Beta. You were the early adopters, so you tested out the product for Apple, giving them feedback, complaints, and suggestions. The iPad is not just simply a large iPhone. Instead, the iPhone or iPod Touch was simply a smaller version of the iPad. The smaller devices were released for people who were willing to line up for hours for a product that doesn’t offer HD-resolution video, to see how they would respond to the multi-touch and App Store. Now the iPad (which they have likely been working on for longer than the iPhone) has come out and it’s going to be inevitably more stable, more secure, and more usable than the mobile devices that were mere glimpses.
The iPhone was revolutionary for early adopters. The iPod Touch was revolutionary for the more cautious consumers (they still own a cell phone that they don’t want to let go of). The iPad will be revolutionary for normal people.
Take that, Peter.