The last apple bashing article ever…

The last apple bashing article ever…

That’s right boys and girls, it’s over. I’m done. With the release of their latest product I can no longer champion my hatred of apple. The iPad, is the greatest invention in the world and we all know it. Look most people have stated the obvious; that the iPad is just a big iphone. The thing is almost every argument made can be said about the iphone itself. It took putting the whole device under a real world microscope for the mystique to be broken. The spell was broken with the saying of the magic word iPad. Apple is David Blaine of the tech world accomplishing feats every other company has already accomplished and call it magical or to use their words “revolutionary.” This is not to say that the iPad is done. Hardly, the real magic of apple is what happens afterwards. If we flash back to 2007 when the iphone was released you will see that while that was clearly a game changer, it still met with harsh criticisms of their most obvious omissions; lack of 3g, sub-par mail, no clear application development, plus a host of other "less critical" complaints e.g. copy and paste. As time went on they addressed what they felt were the most important complaints and left "less critical" features to when they damn well pleased –see mms. As a result most of the complaints have been fixed and they have won the mind share as the best mobile platform despite some remaining deficiencies –see multi-tasking.

Why every tablet has failed, and why apple should also fail…

To my recollection this will be the third wave of tablets. The first wave was in the late 90's early 00's. Laptops were finally in the sub $2000 price point with realistic battery lives and they were becoming indispensable to road warrior business men, and dorm room college students. It would seem to make sense that slapping pen input would revolutionize computing. Amorphous scribbles and notes could easily make its way into the computer we we're finally going to go paperless... except it didn't happen. The 500 dollar premium proved to be too much for a novelty considering that could go to so many more practical items like a larger battery, storage, or more ram. The second true wave was the UMPC debacle. With much hype the tech industry decided that we were all going to carry around almost pocketable full fledged computers without keyboards. The “why in God’s name” we would do this was the new touch screen keyboards. We didn’t need a physical keyboard because there was a translucent keypad on the screen convienetly not “totally obscuring" our workspace. The devices were computers hit with shrink rays with a touch screen slapped on. Again besides the keyboard software no other alterations were made to the device. The industry smarties knew the last time price was a big problem so they promised a price range of 500 bucks at a time where most laptops were still in the 800 to 1500 range. Great except to meet that price point the devices were extremely underpowered. So much was compromised and still they failed to hit that 500 dollar price point, ship dates slipped and everyone pretty much wants to forget the whole incident happened. Up until now every tablet has failed because people have all thought about them as standard computers with touch screens slapped on them. In order for a tablet to succeed there has to be a fundamental change in the way the user is going to interact with it.

To be honest I think the iPad is a diamond in the rough. It will change the game. And it will spark a mini revolution. It will fail because it won’t be another iPod or iPhone. No The iPad will be as popular apple tv. Like apple tv, the iPad could be so much better, but apple won’t let it. On the hardware side we all know dongles suck in general, on portable devices they are seventh circle of hell evil. In addition at a time when all media being generated now is moving closer to a 16:9 profile, apple decides to buck the trend and release something in 4:3. The real problem though is apple has only one content creation platform, the mac computer (be it laptop or desktop). Everything else is a content management/delivery device. Why? Because apple says so. Serious content creation cannot take place with one application at a time. Now I have little doubt that they will change this soon but to begin without it seems asinine. Touch screens are of little value for any content creation requiring large amounts of text input. These shortfalls begin to beg the question of who is going to use this device ? Well this is where developers come in and will ultimately prove whether this device remains a novelty or enters the space of a genuine platform. I cannot stress this enough this device must aide in the creative process in ways here to for unrealized. For example creating a virtual mixing board, or easily transmitting pertinent meeting notes and slides to all attendees integrating with an app like bump it. The problem is programs like these demands a fair deal of market saturation. Otherwise they will be as useful as the wireless sharing feature on my zune which I’ve used twice in two years.

Really is this the last time...

Of course not. The problems I have with apple are the same ones I have with sony. They create products that you want to love and then chain them to money making apparatus with their proprietary BS. The iPad is a very expensive disposable razor where the real money is made through the applications. It is a sound business model, but it is one I abhor. It is the same reason I refuse to recommend any ink based printer. My hope is that the iPad does create a market for itself, because in order to contend the competition has to provide the same or better in a more open platform, and those are the devices I will be interested in.