Socratic Monologue
cc licensed flickr photo by Tom Raftery: http://flickr.com/photos/traftery/4311797662/
It’s been over two week since the grand unveiling, although it won’t be released and available for sale until late March. Since that announcement, I have been reading the many critiques and accolades of the device. And yes, just like Stephen, I want one. I am an unrepentant gadget lover and the iPad is the ultimate electronic gadget.
I’ve been trying to justify why I would need an iPad and thinking about that has led me to some insight about what the iPad is. I already my usage of the iPod touch as a portable browser/communication device/game machine. For creative projects, I have my MacBook (although the reworked iWork apps make a good case that the iPad is also a good productivity device). Steve Jobs positioned the iPad as being a category in between the iPhone/iPod touch and the full MacBook. I think that being ‘in between’ doesn’t mean it is a sort of average of the other two products or that it is a mix of the characteristics of them. More than anything else, I think the iPad is an exquisitely well designed interface in its most pure, idealized form with the technology being almost completely abstracted out of the experience.
My iPod Touch, my previous iPod Touch and the Nano before that are some of the most reliable devices I’ve owned. The inner workings of the system were completely sealed off to me and served only as an interface to my media and some other apps loaded onto the iPod Touches. Some of the apps are remote controls for programs on my MacBook which turns the iPod Touch into an interface to those computer applications. A couple of the apps are for remote viewing/controlling of a Mac or PC that has some version of VNC running on it. When working with all the various interfaces that the Touch gives me, I’ve never had a single instance where I’ve needed to understand anything about the inner workings of it. Being a geeky sort of person, I’ve enjoyed poking my fingers around the physical and software workings of several computers. A great deal of my understanding about computers has come from playing with, sometimes with painful consequences, different versions of Linux. That sort of play with my iPod Touch has been denied to me, unless I jailbreak it. I’m not upset about that, though, because I just want the thing to be work reliably for me.
The iPad with its larger screen gives more room for an interface to be presented to the user. I have to say that if I’m using VNC to remote control a computer, the larger real estate will make the choice of an iPad a no-brainer. VNC on the iPod Touch is possible, but not my preferred method for doing that. Imagine what will happen when the iPad is used as an interface for multimedia content as imagined by Sports Illustrated.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk]
Imagine what happens when students have access to that kind of material instead of printed textbooks? Netbooks are being considered as an option in more and more schools with the main goal being to give students access to the web and a word processor. If Google Docs (or Pages which will be available for the iPad) is available to them, the iPad becomes a much better solution because, unlike netbooks which are prone to tech difficulties, the iPad will have the same virtue as my iPods – It Just Works (IJW).
Beyond education, what will medicine be like when doctors and other medical professionals have access to patient records and up to date medical reference materials on a device that has that IJW quality. Or automotive mechanics. Or stockbrokers. Or farmers. Or construction workers. Or my parents? How enabling will it be if everyone had a device that serves as an interface to almost anything and IJW?
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