My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything. The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t. Instead, here is Daniel Beunza, of the fantastic Socializing Finance, with my favorite bit of mulling over the iPad:
Before going into details, let me clarify why I laugh at the tablet skeptics. Essentially: because we cannot judge a new technology by how it fulfills our present needs. “No-one we know takes photos with the cellphone… who needs one?” Such was the reasoning by Nokia back in 2003. And thus Nokia got stuck with camera-less phones for too long, giving away part of its market to the Asian manufacturers. What Nokia missed was that people would take tons of photos with the phone if they had the ability to do so. New affordances create new needs. The challenge is to imagine those needs before they arise.
Interestingly, Steve Jobs does not get this simple point. Or at least that’s what I got from watching his presentation of the iPad. For the tablet to be justified, Jobs said, it should let you browse the web better than a computer and a phone. Actually, it’s the opposite. The tablet should focus on new things that only a widescreen mobile wireless device can do. Social web browsing, for instance. Or situated problem-solving. Marrying mobility and Excel, flicker and pubs. (It is also puzzling, by the way, that Jobs presented a social, mobile device sitting by himself on a comfy chair).
This is followed by an example of the sort of revolution he has in mind, regarding the potential effect of the iPad on financial exchanges. Beunza’s argument that the point of a new technology being the new features it has, not the existing ones which are missing, is well stated, but it doesn’t allay my fear that Apple is moving toward closed computing systems. Do I wish the iPad could support multitasking? Sure. But far more troubling is the fact that it can’t run Flash on its native browser (because Apple decided they don’t want you to), and you have no ability to install a different one with the functionality you like. Computers ought to be able to do whatever you can figure out how to instruct them to do, and seeing that potential artificially limited is frustrating.
Thanks to Kazys Varnelis for introducing me to Socializing Finance in a recent post; for further iPad contrarianism, read Alan Jacobs’s post at Text Patterns.
it strikes me there that while Alan Jacobs was not a fan and Beunza is, and both make good points, neither is willing to cut Steve Jobs slack. Interesting.
i don’t have a take- i think apple’s stuff is cool, but i own none of it solely because i can’t be bothered and am not media-savvy enough for it to make a difference.
nonetheless, i thought Jobs had earned the benefit of the doubt from those who do care about media and technology. it’s like a small-time nyc landscape blogger hating on james corner. uhh…
admitting that, i have a hard time caring about the i-blank
Requisite posts require requisite replies… I’m curiously bemused that the iPad is getting bad press. The same thing happened with the iPod just before its launch – people saying things like :
WeezerX80: “Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where’s the Newton?! ….I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!”
(true quote from Macrumors.com in 2001)
Clearly, WeezerX80 was someone without much vision, given that Apple have now sold several million iPods and have taken over 80% of the market share. Ditto with the iPhone – which has transformed the phone world. Much the same is happening here – people poo-pooing the iPad, lacking in the vision to see the effect that it will have on computing.
Let me put it like this:
The mainframe got superceded by the desktop.
The desktop got superceded by the laptop.
The laptop will be superceded by the iPad..
Check back here in 2-3 years and we’ll see what happened…
“Let me put it like this:
The mainframe got superceded by the desktop.
The desktop got superceded by the laptop.
The laptop will be superceded by the iPad..”
I agree, largely, with this – which is at the root of my concern.
I should clarify – I am not worried that the iPad will be a flop commercially, and I am not poo-pooing it’s inevitable impact. Much to the contrary, I fully expect Apple will succeed resoundingly with this new product, and I hope to see the sort of revolution in portable, networked computing ability described by Beunza in the above-linked post. I’m just not very excited about a computing world in which every capability I want to establish on my machine – a machine that I purchased – must be 1) pre-cleared by Apple, or AT&T, or Amazon, or Google, or anyone and 2) has to be purchased through a single, centralized store (run by the same organization which controls the capability of my machine).
So when I said “But far more troubling is the fact that it can’t run Flash on its native browser (because Apple decided they don’t want you to), and you have no ability to install a different one with the functionality you like;” my point was not that Apple screwed up the iPad by not including some feature, my point was that Apple has artificially limited my ability to remedy that (who cares about Flash anyway, html5 is The Future).
I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro, and I love it. I love that I could install google chrome for mac onto that machine (which I did, and which I am now using instead of safari). That decision has been made for you on the iPad, and the answer was ‘no.’ I don’t like that Apple’s vision of the future of personal computing is more iPhone OS, and less OS X, and I’m troubled precisely because I expect them to successfully shift market expectation in that direction.