| Tuesday, February 2, 2010 |
11:49 - It's a thing! I'm so happy!
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I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude toward this whole iPad business. Not because I don't think it's cool, or because I do think it's cool, for that matter. More like because other people are keeping themselves so busy explaining to each other what it all means that I can hardly add anything to the discussion that isn't already being said.
Most people who attended the iPad unveiling and are now writing about the iPad are misunderstanding its intended audience because they're not in it. Some smart folks — who happen to also be power users — see the iPad's potential and are trying to convince everyone else. This will certainly take some time, just like there are still iPhone doubters even after Apple sold 40 million of them.
That is the gist of most of the articles that seem to be defining the consensus that most closely matches the tone of the Stevenote. A commenter here says:
a few other articles on this same tone. i think we’ll look back and see this as a major turning point:
The iPad is the Prius
Future Shock
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
Old World vs. New World Computing
And at the same time there's a minority report:
...Which, despite coming from the same kind of voices as the ones I've been watching with much amusement for the last few days, gathering in coven and throng and parliament to bemoan Apple's short-sightedness and lack of willingness to capitalize on a clear market opportunity, is either willfully ignorant of the aforementioned consensus or considers it the work of glad-handing fanboys of the worst kind.
Most disillusioned appear to be the almost-power-users, the creative and artsy types, the ones who have up till now considered themselves Apple's bread and butter. For the past decade they've found a welcome home on the Mac, but they probably came there from the Windows world only a machine or two ago. And now they find themselves confronted with a company who has in the interim changed its name, its flagship product line, and—apparently—its core market demographic. And I'm sure it does hurt. Apple was supposed to be different! I thought they understood!
Well, business is a fickle thing, and while a lot of companies have torpedoed themselves by forgetting their roots, by the same token a company that takes its founding axioms for granted is at an equally dire risk of stagnation. Apple, up till now, has been wedded to the notion that computers are what we've understood them to be for the past twenty years—maybe with better style and smoother edges than the contemporaneous alternatives, but fundamentally the same thing. Keyboard, mouse, desktop, folders, apps in windows that you shuffle around, disk clutter, crashes, telling yourself you should someday do a backup.
And the artsy types who feel so let down by the iPad are the ones who wanted some kind of "artist's tablet", something that would make their creative output so damn much more fun, if nothing else—and probably more prolific and profitable at that.
Well, that's not what the iPad is. Nor is it a tool for picture-from-the-internet-hoarders or video editing fiends or IM addicts. No, the iPad doesn't have a two-way chat camera system. No, it doesn't even appear to have a microphone. No, it doesn't have USB either. (Probably because it doesn't have a facility for installing new device drivers.)
But just as Amazon's weekend fumble against MacMillan-published authors succeeded only in galvanizing people against Amazon who write angrily about dumb corporations for a living, these users who feel so let down by the iPad are the ones who live perpetually in a hive-mind—a loud, angrily buzzing one. Their numbers seem unassailable from within. Their disdain for the product seems monolithic. For all the world, it looks like the honeymoon is over. The bloom is off the apple. It's all downhill from here. Heigh-ho, time to go check out Windows 7. It has touchscreen features and stuff, right?
If the "style" pundits are on the money, though—by which I mean the guys who form the consensus I mentioned earlier, the ones who are hard-core programmers in one window and font nerds in another, who are as jazzed about the possibility of HTML5 and the CSS3 border-radius property as they are about a proper metadata-rich snapshot-capable filesystem—Apple puts no stock in those who put no stock in Apple. By now they've established themselves as a company that can bring compelling products to the wider world, not just to technologists who "get it" enough to overlook the pervasive, inescapable flaws in traditional computing—in other words, not just to people who can put into words, using concrete examples, why they might choose a Mac over a Windows box. Because frankly speaking, there aren't that many of those.
Not compared to the people who would jump at spending $500-900 on a computer if it behaved like an iPhone.
Me? I like to think of myself as in the "style pundit" camp, but I don't know if I personally have a use case for buying an iPad. I imagine I'll probably end up with one anyway, if for no other reason than to keep myself in tune with the way the computer world is likely to move in the next few years, and/or to develop apps to run in that world. But I'm not about to jump into it for the express purpose of using one. I know I'm not the target audience. Which is why I don't think they've just shanked their target audience.
I'll be waiting and seeing. And when anyone wails and moans about how Apple should have brought out a powerful netbook with a full and open OS and a laundry list of hardware features for $300, to pander to DeviantArtists and video-chatters and device driver writers and Grandma, because to do otherwise is to drop the ball, all I can do is think back on all the times in the past decade that well-meaning commentators have admonished Apple to heed their words or face certain doom. And how only the fact that Apple has roundly ignored everything they've said can explain why the company is where it is today.
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Brian Tiemann
