One day after the iPad was introduced, reactions in the tech world have been mixed, so I watched Apple’s announcement to see for myself.
There are quite a few features the iPad lacks: multitasking, a camera, Adobe Flash support, HDMI video output, USB ports, an SD slot, and so on. But remember that at first, the iPhone didn’t 3G or native apps for a whole year. And who would have thought you could successfully sell a smartphone without copy and paste for two years? I bet the iPad is starting out the same way — start off with just enough features to get people hooked, figure out what’s really necessary, and then add on.
If you paid attention to Steve Jobs’ pitch, he may have talked about features and specs, but he really emphasized the experience of using the iPad. “The Internet in your hands,” he said over and over again. Hey, it may look like just a giant iPhone, but once you actually try it out, you’ll be hooked. He’s trying to appeal to your emotional, sensual side — which helps explain why a lot of left-brained geeks weren’t buying his spiel.
A few other random thoughts:
- I found it quite interesting to see what were essentially full-screen iPhone menus being used as pop-up menus or sidebars in iPad applications. If Apple designs its SDK well, it may not be too difficult to create one application that works on both the iPhone and the iPad.
- The home screens look anemic on such a large screen. The icons look too small, and the spacing too large. I’m surprised Apple didn’t put more design work into this.
- For input, I didn’t believe the rumor that the iPad would require you to learn a complex set of gestures, but I was hoping for something more interesting than a virtual keyboard (hello, ShapeWriter). I’m curious to try it out and see how well it works. While the iPhone keyboard isn’t perfect, it works better than I expected on such a small screen. And at least you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it.
- The biggest surprise for me was how aggressive the pricing is, $500 to $830.
I’d love to get my hands on an iPad, try it out, and see whether it’s as “magical” as Jobs claims. But even if it is, I won’t buy one yet. I never buy the first generation of a gadget, and in the case of the iPhone, it was a good idea. Let’s see what the iPad 2 is like.
Ditto on your thoughts. It’s always amusing to see the media and blogger reaction to Apple’s new product launches. Both the haters and the fanboys come out in force with the same spiels we heard the last time. But we’ve seen enough launches now to know what Apple is up to. They release the product with a media frenzy and enough done right (and differently) to establish their brand. Then they watch the market reaction and feedback and build on it, so by the third generation or so, they have a solid product. By that time there are clones in the wild, but Apple’s brand recognition has become unstoppable. It’s a simple pattern that Apple has gotten very good at executing. The iPad is very much a revolutionary product– not in its first generation incarnation alone, but in its long-term development and branding. It’s not going to remake the consumer electronics landscape in the next 60 days, or even the next 6 months. But a year and a half from now, we’ll look back with surprise and see that everything has changed, and we hadn’t even realized it.
As a corollary, I too won’t be getting the first generation iPad. It’s a product for the early adopters with the disposable income, or the developers looking to be first into a new market. I might look at the third generation product when it comes out in mid 2011 or so. My macbook pro remains my workhorse machine for now.