This is in the top five of “stuff smart people said thoughtfully about the iPad”
A day after iPad launch, I climbed on my self-publishing platform and declared that those of us excited about the New Thing were correct and exalted in being so, and that those who weren’t were wrong and big meanies. A friend, Nick Douglas got on his self-publishing platform, declared he disagreed and wanted to know why I was so sure that I was right. It’s taken me some time to collect my thoughts, but especially because Nick is a smart and thoughtful guy and his thoughts represent a good cross-section of the public objections, it’s important to me to respond. So I’ll do that here in the style of civil conversation between friends at salon over a tray of hot wings. I’ll preface by saying that this is the stuff; this debate and discussion and handwringing and it’s why any of us who work in or with technology have ever woken up in the middle of the night, excited to keep doing what we do.
Nick: While some critics are kneejerking, my (and many people’s) motivations for doubt are as valid as yours for hope! I think comparing them to objections to the iPod and iPhone is cheating. I think different people are objecting to the iPad: people who really like Apple’s other products.
Then you remember differently than I do. The only difference between the iPad skeptics of today and the iPhone skeptics of yesterday is that there are now millions of people with iPhones, and a few hundred with iPads. This, of course, will change soon. But in the first six months of 2007, when we were all just a bunch of Mac users with iPods with a wheel you had to spin like a baby’s toy, there were those of us who watched the keynote and the demo videos through misty eyes, fashioned fake iPhones from printed-out .pdfs (yeah I did) and dreamed, literally dreamed of the possibilites of interacting with that tiny computer screen using only our fingers. And there were those (many of my Mac-using friends among them) who thought the idea of touch-typing on a keyboard that small was just dumb and prematurely decided to wait for the model with the hardware keyboard to come out. It may be tough to look back at that period and remember, but the evidence is there.
Nick: Basically, we wanted a touchscreen MacBook, not a big iPhone. And the iPad is, for now, quite literally a big iPhone without a camera or phone. Its only distinctive feature is its size and an add-on keyboard.
I’m not so sure that a touchscreen MacBook is really what you want. It may be what you think you want. But now’s the time in this piece where I dig out the ol’ Henry Ford quote about what people think they want. “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” To your first assertion, what you want is to interact with your data without the abstraction of a mouse and keyboard. Have you considered the difficulty in that proposition? If you’re curious, take a second and touch the screen of your laptop like you’re doing some work with it. Open and close some windows, move them around, open some applications, tweak some preferences, pay some bills. I think you’re going to find that the interaction model of the Mac OS exists specifically because you have a keyboard and a trackpad below your screen, and those two instruments allow for refined movements within a dense display of information. What the iPhone OS has done is to allow for the removal of that layer of abstraction, and let us touch our information with our actual fingers. And though our fingers are massive and clumsy, every removal of a layer of abstraction between us and our information represents an ephocal shift in technology. Like every such shift, sacrifices must be made, and remedial solutions proposed.
Here is where I make a Big Point. What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re getting closer and closer to that happening. But there are still many layers between our intentions and our environment. As time progresses, we will strip away those layers one by one. And it’s always disruptive to do so. The reason that any manufacturer of technology exists is to ease each step of the process of tearing away the layers of abstraction between our thoughts and our realities. The manufacturer with the greatest ability to ease the process is the winner. Thus far, Apple has been the winner. That could change, but the rest of the industry is pretty far behind.
To your second point, that the iPad is a big iPhone stripped of its camera and phone, I will respond the way many others have already: when you resist the chronology and allow the story to be told nonlinearly, the iPhone is a small iPad with the already familiar form factor of a mobile phone. As a society, it’s crucial that we must be prepared at every step of the way for the introduction of the New Thing by all the New Things of the past. It’s obvious to state that television could not have happened without radio, but it’s always the perfect model for our capacity for adapting to technological change. The iPad could not have existed without the iPhone having been in our hands for three years. Packaging and delivering a computer in the form of a mobile phone was the perfect method for introducing a new model for interaction, represented by the iPhone OS, just as packaging and delivering a computer in the form of a typewriter with a screen was the perfect method for introducing a new model for interaction represented by the original Mac OS and its contemporaries. There was a time when the mouse was considered newfangled. There was a time when people assumed they’d never need a laptop when a big box sat at their desk. And there are reasons that the iPod existed for six years before the iPhone. They mostly have to do with introducing us to the concept of control over massive amounts of data in our pocket, with limited friction. Whether all these evolutionary steps are intentional at any point is anybody’s guess. Steve Jobs said at the D5 conference in 2007 that Apple has 20 years mapped out ahead. But it’s almost inconsequential, like asking whether biological evolution is intentional. It happens whether we want it to or not.
And here is where I make another Big Point. People adapt slowly to change. Society is made of a whole bunch of people. Society must adapt slowly to change.
Back to iPad launch day. With the introduction of the product’s name, I resisted and I resisted hard. I climbed on my self-publishing platform and I railed against the name. “Apple, you fucked up,” I declared, brandishing a little bullshit linguistics. And it’s not til now, 10 days later, that I realize that I’d readily fallen into the trap I’m usually conscientious in avoiding. In hindsight, my response was reactionary and mean-spirited. Now, 10 days out, when I see or hear or think the word “iPad”, I see the Apple tablet computer, and not a notepad or any other dirty, infantile thing the name might have fleetingly suggested. The “iPad” is now it’s own object, but it couldn’t have existed as such without a little time for me to adapt.
We all have a different threshold for shock, and we all react differently to change. There is just as much concern in adapting too quickly as in adapting too slowly. We all must adapt at our own pace, preferably without fear and without anger.
Nick: So yes, the iPad could evolve. But it should have done more of that evolution before it was released in the first place. That’s a valid point to make, and it’s one born out of trust in Apple’s innovative abilities, not out of cynicism.
Not to belabor the point, but this fits in with the “adapting slowly” tenet. When the first iPhone was released, it wasn’t nearly as fast or as slick as the iPhone 3GS of today. When I first used my iPhone 3GS, my very first thought was “this is finally the iPhone as the iPhone was intended to be”. On iPhone v1, I couldn’t copy and paste, I couldn’t shoot video of my dog, I couldn’t play cool games or know what song was playing in a store. I couldn’t ask it where I was on a map. But that did not detract from its magic. From v1, I could have an email come in with a phone number in its body, I could tap that number and add it to a contact and that number would be in my computer after my next sync. I had never had a phone that could just simply do that before. The point being that yes, hardware will always improve. You will always be tempted to wait for the next iteration of hardware. If you’d rather wait until further iterations to experience the bulk of the magic that already exists in the current iteration, it’s your choice. It’s a lot of money to be putting down for something you’ll resent for its eventual obsolescence. But if Apple were to develop a product “to completion” before releasing it, holding off until it had all of the features that it thought that people wanted rather than just the ones that make it amazing, Apple would not be Apple, or Apple would never release products. That’s the point of evolution. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it necessitates, by design, deliberate response to the demands of the environment.
The other point being that software will always improve. And software can often be acquired without new hardware. If you still use a first-gen iPhone, you can copy and paste on it, and that’s pretty damn exciting.
And here’s the next Big Point. To a certain extent, the promise of the iPad is the precedence of software over hardware. By all accounts, the iPad’s hardware has already reached that transcendent level of speed, the one I mentioned having experienced in the iPhone’s 3rd generation. According to my two favorite Apple writers who’ve spent time with the thing (Gruber and Andy Ihnatko), touching and manipulating the UI feels like touching and manipulating objects in real time. This level of maturity of the hardware allows for unfathomable freedom in software. And from a development standpoint, consider that in contrast to the iPhone, developers already have access to the tools to extend the device in software, right from the beginning. No full year of using only Apple-made apps, the developers are already poised to take the iPad further than Apple, exerting way more influence over the transition from this iteration to the next.
And think of the device itself. It’s a piece of glass. The software is the thing. Yes, it’s in a pretty case. Like all Apple products, the case is the Trojan horse. I’m pretty sure that even with modest enthusiasm for the device, you can reasonably expect giant leaps in what’s possible from the UI, right from the first generation. Of course, I don’t know that and you can’t know that until we pick it up and play with it, but consider this: What if the iPad is a big iPhone? Nick, if you’re not still impressed, every single time you take your iPhone from your pocket, by what the iPhone is able to achieve, then, well I guess you’re just difficult to impress, and quit bogarting the celery sticks.
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