The tablet is finally here and it was quickly followed by the normal reaction to new Apple product releases: disappointment and disapproval by the public – despite the fact that they haven’t seen the product in person or tried it for themselves.
Think back to the days before the iPhone. People carried around Motorola Razr’s or Nokia 3390′s and never gave a second thought to the technological possibilities. Then the iPhone was announced for the low price of $600 for 4GB and the public laughed their collective heads off. “No buttons? Touch screen? Take it home to activate? $30 a month just for the data plan? No picture messaging? No user-replaceable battery?” The complaints rolled on and on, and the product was seen as a failure before it was even seen in public. Fast forward only a couple years, and we see the best phone company in the world as Apple, and all other companies are struggling to catch up to the level Apple was three years ago!
Go back a half-dozen years now. Music was primarily consumed via CD players. While the MP3 format was just beginning to take off, the primary way of getting those file to-go was burning it to a CD which could only fit 80 minutes or 20 tracks worth of music. There were MP3 players, but they were expensive, clumsy and difficult to manage music with. Then a little thing called the iPod came out. Again, the complaints rolled out: “No CD support? Only works with iTunes? Doesn’t use AA batteries? I have to plug into my computer every time I want to change my music?” Of course, we all know the ending on this one. Apple owns over 95% of the MP3 player market and has made larger, richer companies like Sony, Microsoft and Samsung look like a bunch of fools who don’t know anything about technology and the needs of the consumer.
The iPad is the third product that Apple has released since its resurgence that we can safely define as revolutionary. And the haters can hate by saying things like “It’s just a big iPod touch, what’s special? No USB ports? No webcam? No multitasking?” But the truth is the iPad can’t fail, it’s too good of a product to not succeed.
This is the first computer every produced that’s over 9 inches that doesn’t have a keyboard. That’s huge! Everything the MacBook Air wanted to be, the iPad is. It’s less that 2 pounds and is thinner than a spiral notebook, it’s the first computer we can truly define as portable. It runs the same software as the iPhone, but is much better for media consumption. The screen is finally big enough for users to read articles and material without having to constantly zoom in and out or horizontally scroll. You can finally watch movies on a screen which doesn’t need you to squint to see – and it’s also the first movie watching platform without an annoying hardware attachment like a keyboard or playback controls, everything is virtual which saves enormous space and prevents hardware failure.
We’ve all watched Minority Report or Avatar and have seen the tablet computer featured prominently in Hollywood. This is a step towards that direction. The keyboard and mice are going the way of the VCR and CD. The more hardware we eliminate, the more space we have for precious screen real estate and the lower we can drive costs – since there’s less to manufacture.
The very people complaining about the iPad probably own an iPod, iPhone and MacBook of some sort. They will also be the ones heading to a local Apple Store to pick an iPad up a couple years down the road from now. Tablet computing is the future, computers are no longer about programs, running applications and hoarding massive hard drive space. It’s now about online programming, running things through your web browser and consuming media/content through the new medium – the internet; after all, people these days have more tabs open at one time than they have programs open, a trend which came about only a couple years ago.
Yes, there’s nothing the iPad can do that your laptop can’t. But there are key features that the iPad can do better than any laptop on the market today can. Surfing the web, replying to emails, watching movies, reading books and other activities will be executed in a fashion and level never before accomplished on the iPad.
The iPad and the copycat tablets which will undoubtedly follow it are the future of computing. It’s a matter of when, not if, the general public embraces this trend as they have with the iPhone and iPod.
And please, before complaining about the product, please at least try it. Because if history is any indication, Apple is pretty darn good at getting things right and making the critics look foolish.
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