What Is An iPad?

Jean-Louis Gassée’s latest meditation on the evolution of the iPad sent me scurrying for the below. It was composed in Pages and lived for a while on Apple’s iWeb service — long since gone. Its creation stamp says: January 30, 2010, 12:33 am. This was just a little over two days after Steve Jobs had announced this new thing. If you were to skip this rumination, the summary is: “I knew I was getting an iPad. I knew I’d been waiting for it. And I knew it’s future.”
I am of course waiting breathlessly for the imminent transition to iOS 11, which is bringing more desktop functionality and multitasking capacities to iPad, but I already do 98% of my work on my iPad Pro, with zero compromises. And, yes, this includes writing (such as this very piece — and no, I don’t use an external keyboard, which I think defeats the reason for having an iPad.) The remnant sliver of work for which I still need my laptop is to (a) create actions in Keynote presentations (other than this, every other Keynote feature has been elegantly implemented in the mobile version); and (b) spreadsheets (they just don’t work well with a touch interface.)
So I’ve been thinking a lot about (and testing) the nature of the iPad since prior to its introduction. Even though some of the following essay is dated, I think it stands up pretty well and is still relevant to the question of iPad’s evolution (and bear in mind as you read: this was written when there were no iPads! Much of this was speculative.) I was tempted to tinker with it and edit for readability, but I decided to be faithful to it as an artifact of its time and so here it is, intact.
Of Course I’m Getting an iPad
Geeks “in the know” are taking pleasure this week in deriding and dismissing the January 27 announcement of Apple’s newest “thing,” often in a withering fashion that brings to mind Henry Ford’s musing: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” (a quotation of which Steve Jobs is justifiably fond.) The smug commonplace verdict goes something like this: “The iPad™ is nothing but a big iPod Touch™!”
Well, the reason I’m getting an iPad for sure is that it isn’t a big iPod Touch. In reality, the iPod Touch was a dinky iPad. And now Apple has fixed that.
The contemptuous nerds who have been quick to show that they know better than Apple (during the same week when those bumbling incompetents in Cupertino announced the company’s highest quarterly results ever) are hazarding the same supercilious oversight as those who initially looked down their noses at the GUI (“it is good for artists, but not for serious office work!”) And the iPod™ (“it is only a very expensive music player, and it has no radio!”) And the iTunes™ store (“it is a limiting, closed ecosystem!”) And the mistake is not understanding what the new “thing” is. As Apple clearly articulated at launch time, the iPad is by design not a pocket device nor a laptop computer. This is not only a different thing, I see it as a different way of doing. Most of the critiques I’ve seen of the iPad fall into the category of faulting it as a flawed pocket device, or an imperfect laptop, or an ill-conceived substitute for both a pocket device and a laptop. Mind you, I’m not writing as an Apple fanboy, and I’ll say a bit about my own perceived shortcomings of the new “thing.” Instead I write from having a priori worked through what it is that I need that is positioned between a laptop and a smartphone, and then recognizing that thing in the iPad.
Before getting into that, it is worth remembering that Ford did not invent the automobile, but instead popularized it by standardizing its production and making it accessible. Before Ford, automobiles were divertimentos that were the exclusive purview of the mega rich. It made no sense for the common person to aspire ownership of a horseless carriage when those contraptions were both impractical and economically out of reach, and the whole country’s infrastructure was geared to support a system of transportation based on the horse (stables, hitching posts, saddlers, farriers, crossing sweepers, pastures and countrysides planted to oats.) After Ford, automobiles suddenly made so much sense that the nation’s urban and rural infrastructure was rapidly and unprecedentedly revamped to support a populace equipped, to a person, with the new thing.

I see the iPad as the first of a class of gadgets that every one of us will soon own to replace backpacks or briefcases, together with their contents. And to enable that there will be a massive repurposing of the infrastructure that generates and distributes “content.” If this pans out, then the iPad will prove to have been not so much a “thing,” as much as a new and improved way of doing the things we want to do. Before you snigger at the idea out of hand, step back and consider that this is exactly what the Macintosh™, iPod, iTunes and iPhone™ have each done in turn. And yes, I agree that Apple’s smug and self-congratulatory product launch shtick is getting worn and is by now so scriptable and irksome that it is fully deserving of the most acid treatment that Saturday Night Live or The Onion might dish (“It is so cool!” “Magical!” “Revolutionary!” “The internet in your hand!” “This will change everything!” Uhmm, that is for buyers — not vendors — to decide, in the fullness of time.) But let’s overlook Apple’s ritualized hype and focus on the actual import of the gizmo that the company is foisting.
Tautology ahead: As I interpret, the dashed expectations of most techno pundits have to do with the fact that Apple has not realized the goals that these same mavens projected onto a “tablet computer” (e.g.: “Where is the keyboard?” “Where is the camera?” “Why doesn’t it multitask?” “Why doesn’t it have a real operating system?” “Why doesn’t it have every slot and port I might ever need?”) Reverse engineering the critiques, I gather that this “convergent device” was to have the form factor of a notepad, and be both an inexpensive and omnicapable computer and communicator, a holy grail that finally reduced all our gadgets to the one thing that we could conveniently carry around to handle all of our tech needs. Instead, the cognoscenti have concluded, all we have is a “giant iPod Touch” because, well, because Apple just either overlooked important details, failed to consult the savants, or just didn’t think carefully enough about this product! Here is where I must explain how I worked from a similar view to the point where I understand Apple’s premises for the iPad: it is about doing well what you want to do when you don’t need either your phone or your computer.
Each of us have unique tech needs and expectations, so it is clear that the success of the iPad is contingent on satisfying a good cross-section of what we all need for it do (and I’m about to argue most of us aren’t fully aware of what that is quite yet — Apple is betting that they are many steps ahead of us.) So here is my random-walk to that place.
If you’ve read this far, then we are quite alike. I’m the quintessential knowledge worker immersed in the virtual world. I want to do everything there (don’t worry for me, I get out and walk, run and bike over the actual surface of the planet — a lot; and I spend time with the people I love and share plenty of actual conversation and hugs.) But my puters enable just about everything I want to do in the informationscape, and I don’t regard them as mere conveyances for things that only become real when they are actually made “physical” by printing to paper or copying to CD or DVD. To me the fungible bits that flow between my screen, my local drive and the various repositories I patronize in the cloud are the real things. I can do amazing things thanks to my puters but the corollary is that I am helpless without them (really, it has been decades since I could write anything lengthier than my signature by hand, and even that is no longer legible even to me.) I’m always thinking of how crude and inefficient everything is outside the virtual world. (Printed reports? Frozen in time and with ephemeral value once committed to modern parchment? Really? Where to put them? How to find them? Or find anything in them?)
Furthermore, if my puters aren’t connected to the net they’re increasingly no more useful than a typewriter. Needless to say, I feel naked if I have to travel without a connectable computing device. My “compute universe” consists of several devices. There is Bambi, a large-screen iMac™ that sits in our kitchen and serves as the family information appliance, movie viewer/jukebox (iTunes) and television (eyeTV™ and a subscription to AT&T’s uVerse™.) Then there is Sapphire, my everyday personal workhorse, a 17” MacBook Pro with 0.5 Tb hard drive (important because my media, the soundtrack of my life, currently require 0.12 Tb), and this is where the bulk of my knowledge work and creativity happen. I pride myself in being a harmless, mellow mensch, but just try to take Sapphire from me. And of course I walk around with an iPhone 3GS equipped with the usual apps you’d expect for the ordinary business traveler. Not to mention Chanteuse Noir, the 0.16 Tb iPod Classic™ that still manages to contain all my musical stratigraphy and favorite movies, or Chiquita, the gossamer 0.02 Tb iPod Nano™ that is handy for treadmill time. And I’m embarrassed to admit to it, but at work I’m saddled with a Dell/Windows laptop that I regard as barely a notch above an Etch-a-Sketch (not worthy of christening nor of forming a relationship beyond the merely transactional.) Needless to say, I can appreciate as well as anyone the chimerical ideal of a single widget that could supplant such an of array of contraptions, each of which addresses a particular intersection of functionality and portability.

And this is where the iPad comes in. Think of the problems that must be solved in order to wedge the functionality of a laptop into the form factor of a notepad. By nature they are intractable. We don’t want to squint, we don’t want to scrunch as we type, we don’t want to give up performance or connectivity, and we don’t want to pay more for something we perceive as lesser (in spite of the apparent non-sequitur, miniaturized computers are by definition, well, less!) We want displays that are bright and crisp (power consumption issue), can represent the customary scale of a book, magazine or letter-size paper (thereby setting the minimum size limit), we want full-size keyboards with full-strike depth and tactile feedback (which has led to endless experimentation with how you can slide, flip or pivot keyboards to overcome the additional area they create), we want net connectivity and the horsepower to run multiple desktop applications. Tablets and netbooks, slight updates of the thin client idea that refuses to die, are patterned on the premise that if you shrink a laptop — lock, stock and barrel — and build it with the cheapest commodity components available so as to obtain an irresistible price point, you have a convenient and inexpensive laptop. Instead, after years of futile attempts, they have invariably turned out to be compromised machines that satisfy no one (at least for very long.) I also sought Shangri La this way, until the MacBook Air™ taught me that the conundrum didn’t have to do with form alone, that what we really need to think about more carefully is function: What do we actually use in various settings? As opposed to what we think we may need everywhere, all the time.

And this was the MacBook Air lesson. Surely if anyone has come close to the ideal of minimal size and acceptable performance, it has been Apple with that sliver of subnotebook technology (I also recognize the breakthroughs achieved by Sony with the Vaio™; if it weren’t for Windows.) But in spite of the almost irresistible aesthetic allure of the McBook Air, it came down to this for me: $1800 for the most capable MacBook Air (which is what I thought I needed), which currently means a 2.13 GHz CPU and 128 Gb solid state drive. For $300 less, Apple will sell you more: essentially the same screen, a 19% faster processor, and 95% more storage space in the form of a MacBook Pro. What do you give up? Sexiness. The MacBook Pro weighs 1.5 additional pounds and its angular lines won’t provoke lustful double-takes from your airplane seatmates. This equation never made sense to me. But it did make me think about why I thought I needed the MacBook Air. It was about having it all but feeling unfettered on the road or on the couch.
The iPhone has taught us that the limitation on miniaturization and performance is not technological, but rather it is the constraint of a minimum, human-appropriate scale. However — short of carrying a little cube on your keyring that you could squeeze to cause it to pop up into a fully functional keyboard and legible display — there will always be tradeoffs involved in form and function (actually, I can see a different, quite effective path to get there, but we will need to become much more comfortable with the notion of taking active control of our evolution into cyborgs, and I’ll leave that for another riff.)
Another iPhone lesson is that we have ample room left to improve human/machine interaction. Has it happened to you, or is it just me, that after intensive use of your iPhone to look up words, places, itineraries, set your music and check your mail, you sit with your laptop or desktop and unwittingly start wiping your index finger across the screen to do things? My days of sitting with my laptop on my, er, lap, are increasingly fewer and far between. At first this class of machines was tremendously liberating (and my experience with them goes back to 1983 and the TRS-80 Model 100.) But now that we have laptops that are unimaginably more powerful and versatile than mainframes of just a few decades ago, I find I really need a surface to be most productive with mine. It heats up. It is clumsy to balance (the keyboard with ergonomic palm rests is the key issue.) I can go at most a couple of hours before having to tether up to an outlet.
And what am I doing if I’m trying to use it on my lap, say on the couch? Typically, I am in lounge mode, doing three primary things: listening to music in the background, while browsing the web and checking e-mail. For the most part, I’ve stopped traveling with my beloved laptop. I noticed that I was just lugging it around, going through the aggravation of dragging it out at airport security checkpoints, using it minimally at airports or at my destination, and then overwhelmingly for two key functions: checking mail and browsing the net. Because I strive to minimize time on the road (as counterpoint to the unavoidable frequency of my travel), my presentations and documents perforce are created prior to travel. At most, I refine at my destination. Yes I always intend to read stuff on my screen en route, but given the dimensions of coach class on today’s planes, Sapphire is just too bulky to use comfortably and without causing a nuisance for fellow passengers. So I pull out my iPhone and isolate by listening to music while reading an actual book, magazine or printed report.
Putting this together what I get is that I need something that is not bulky, that has the form factor of a piece of paper, that can go for hours on end with onboard power, is connected, and is specialized primarily for playback of media, for e-mail and for net surfing. Further, I get that the human factor is the common denominator: the thing must be comfortable in all ways, not just carting it, but including the way that I interact with it. In fact what I’ve realized is that when I’m in serious creative mode, I’m on a surface at an office, whether at work or at home, and using a screen that will allow viewing of at least two documents simultaneously. But when I’m on the road or in lounge mode, what I really need is a bigger iPod Touch.
So, I’ve come to terms with the fact that at present I’ll always need two gizmos, the iPhone in my pocket and then whatever machine is appropriate for my current place and function: my desktop or laptop for serious multitasking content creation, or something like the iPad when I’m on the road, or in the den, or a coffee shop, and mostly consuming rather than creating. And this is evidently what Apple has noticed as well.
In short, I don’t think we’re looking at another Lisa, NeXT Cube, Mac Cube, ROKR or AppleTV here. I can see almost all of us, whether doctors on rounds, technicians troubleshooting, inspectors in the field, grandmas checking out pictures of the grandkids, business people en route to the next deal, and even compulsive creatives in serious consuming mode, using one of these. We’ll interact with it without thinking about it, touching, swiping, pinching, spreading and tapping, and we’ll pass it among one another with the same lack of concern as when we currently pass around papers. And I also realize that what Jobs and Co. announced last week will look neolithic within a few years (have you looked recently at one of the original iPods, with the actual mechanical scroll wheel, and noticed how bulky it is and how dorky the B&W pixelated screen is, and wondered whatever was so attractive about it at the time?) We can all see a built-in camera in the iPad's future, and an onslaught of software creativity that will fulfill the potential of this new kind of thing. I’ve always thought that as outstanding as Apple’s software applications have been (e.g., MacPaint and MacWrite, Safari, iLife and iWork), they have been necessities, and their ultimate purpose has actually been to teach the developer community how new devices or systems might be used, and to stoke creative ideas.) And so it is with the iPad. I was greatly relieved to see the same $30 iWork suite that I’ve come to depend upon tailored for this device. At the very least this confirms the real capacity to travel light, with an iPhone in my pocket and an iPad in my hand, the latter loaded with e-books, e-zines and pertinent documents, with full confidence that if necessary it will be possible to use desktop counterpart applications without compromises.
Apple has a history of nearly missing some major information revolutions, but then catching itself and vaulting far ahead, dragging all of us along. They were going under with the initially underpowered and unsoftwared Mac, until they finally realized that desktop publishing and the GUI were meant for each other. In the modern era they nearly missed the music revolution (the original iMac pointedly was not equipped with a CD/DVD drive), but once they got that, they revolutionized the field from end to end. Apple didn’t invent podcasts, but once they understood them as further fueling demand for iPods, they embraced them and incorporated them into the iTunes store with the fervor of the Borg. The same is true of video on iPods. And true for smart phones. Apple bumbled around for years, including an ill-conceived, half-hearted partnership with Motorola, before deciding to take on the daunting task of designing a single pocket device with telephony. And they benefited from applying the experience they acquired with iTunes and the iPod for integrating online commerce, content streaming, and disparate vendors to create whole new systems.
And the company continues to learn. Watch the introduction of the iPhone and notice how the current gravy train of the device, independently developed applications, was not in Apple’s original roadmap (they called them “widgets” then, after the desktop paradigm, and Apple thought that they would control their development in-house.) But they soon realized, to their great astonishment, that this propellant was powerful beyond imagination. And now they have noticed that when they created the iPod Touch, essentially stripping the iPhone of its telephony but conferring the multitouch user interface upon the iPod, they inadvertently created the thing of the future. Specifically, the dimensions of the Touch were an artifact of the fact that its ancestor was designed as a pocket device. But with the added capacity to program the device for an infinite number of tasks, the thing exploded as a gaming platform and as the iPod of choice. Another lesson is that we, the general public, will pay for things that are useful (they enable us to do better the routine things we want to do daily), that are reliable and, yes, elegant.
Just watch.


[Note: This was the coda; actual tools I used to get to the above conclusions.]
You may want to tinker with your own version of the following tables. I used them to check my reasoning about the niche that lay vacant before the iPad. On the criteria of “Place” and “Function,” I compared the array of compute devices in my universe, with the general idea being to weight each item from 1 to 3 in accordance with its effectiveness and appropriateness for the particular niche. For example, on a plane the iPhone and iPod Touch essentially reduce to the same device, since you can’t use the transmission mode, and for me they have essentially the same utility as a laptop in that setting, though with different strengths — I can compute on both classes of machines, but the laptop is bulky on a plane service tray, whereas the iPhone/iPod Touch force me to squint. In that setting, for reading and media consumption, the iPad will clearly be superior.


