I love how suprised people are when you say something obvious. I drove past a very long 8ft high wall the other day and remarked “there are so many bricks in that wall, and a person laid each one of them by hand”. This generated a mini shockwave of suprise in the car.
I suppose it is a testament to our society that we are SO advanced that we don’t even find really long brick walls an amazing feat of engineering any more, but I still try and appreciate the amount of personal effort people have put into things. In the context of Manhattan, a fifty storey building perhaps isn’t remarkable, but take it out of it’s environment and it is much easier to appreciate it as an incredible piece of engineering.
One of the reasons I have been interested in the reaction to the Apple iPad is that there a lot of people who seem to worship Apple and raise them to a status far beyond what they deserve. Most people who know me will have heard me rant about Apple fan boys on many occasions, and I should really apologise for that, because I actually do appreciate Apple products for what they are: well engineered pieces of technology, designed with a specific set of users in mind. I think MacBooks feel great, iMacs look lovely, and iPod Nano’s do exactly what an MP3 player does, stylishly. I have never bought an Apple product because they have never completely fulfilled my needs for one reason or another, but that is no disrespect to them or any of their products. So I have nothing against Apple, it’s just the amount of hype and enthusiasm that some of their users come up with is ridiculous, they seem to forget who is paying who.
Now the iPad seems to me to be a perfectly sensible bit of kit. It looks like it is a nice size for reading documents and newspapers, or watching films. It can browse the web via WiFi or BlueTooth (although lack of flash support would be very annoying) which is what I spend most of my personal computing time doing. Having a great looking, light tablet for these things would be great, especially if the battery life is 10 hours as advertised. People are describing it as a big iPhone, but in reality I think it is better.
Typing is probably a little tricky on a touch screen, and I know a lot of people have been disappointed at the lack of a stylus option for writing notes. I think that this is an interesting one, since third party stylus’ will be no doubt available. I can see both arguments really, and having used handwriting recognition software on a number of occasions I have to say I would not want to use it for text input. The only other thing a stylus would be useful for is for making quick notes and drawing. I will reserve judgement on how easy or hard this is with a finger, but for me it isn’t a show stopper.
My vision of using it is mainly in schlomping around the house, where it beats a laptop, and it is also great for trains, coffee shops and meetings. In other words, all of the places where you would traditionally have a laptop, but it is smaller and lighter, and the other main difference being that it cannot replace a desktop. This is not a bad thing, I like a nice big screen and having plenty of horsepower on my desktop pc for development and music production which is why a desktop makes sense. Having an iPad as well would compliment it perfectly, as opposed to a laptop which create a lot of redundancy.
Anyway, apart from the fact that I am quite tempted by the device, my point is that there is certainly a place for the iPad in the Apple line up, and I think that people have no right to claim that Apple have “lost it” or have wasted their time. This product may not be as revolutionary as the iPhone was, but that is no reason to dislike it, and I think it’s important that everyone just steps back from all the hype and considers the iPad on its own, on its merits. If it does what you need or desire, great, if not, maybe revision 2, but stop whining…