The iPad: what’s the point?

The iPad was perhaps compromised in its development by the too costly pricing right now of one major component that would have made a big difference in how it was presented to us, and so we didn’t get an OLED screen that would have provided for less eye-strain when reading e-books. It was also compromised by the fact that Steve Jobs caved in to relentless pressure going back at least two years to produce a tablet computer, when his every instinct and conviction told him ‘not yet’. He should have listened to his own self.

Apple has reacted rather than innovated where the iPad is concerned, taking what it’s previously presented to us in handy and incredibly useful portable form—the iPhone—and making it, well, far less portable and a lot less handy.

We’ve got an expensive giant iPhone that doesn’t make or receive calls offered up to us as “awesome”–one of Jobs’ most overused words—when, in fact, anybody with half an ounce of sense knows it isn’t at all awesome, fantastic or inspiring when we’ve already seen everything it can do, and like carrying all those functions around in our pockets.

The iPad is a solution looking for a problem, and a horse with wheels. With an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I cannot see any reason why I would want to add an iPad to my collection of devices. I’ve also got an iMac and an Apple TV and all these devices together make for effortless networking, easy media playback on small or large screens, and all the usability anyone expects to get from desktop or mobile computers. If you don’t have these devices, or just one or two of them, then I’m sure it would make more sense to look at these as first choice additions than the iPad. They do more, and even the Apple TV does better.

My view might change with future versions of the iPad—it would be foolish of anyone to write it off forever—but I, along with many others, found myself disappointingly underwhelmed by yesterday’s launch. No iPhone 4.0 software with multitasking and app folders, no new rebuilt iTunes 10 putting an end to the software’s ridiculous resource-hogging on both PCs and Macs. Just a rehashed iPhone too big for my pocket and likely to drive me insane if I try to use the virtual keyboard for more than a paragraph or two at a time, owing to the fact that there is no tactile feedback whatsoever.

As a writer I need my clicking keys. I need them. I’m no gamer but I imagine they, too, need some kind of response from the hardware to their fingers. For some reason this lack of physicality doesn’t frustrate with a small unit like an iPhone or an iPod Touch. It would do so enormously with a larger device. I know it would.

I also think the product focus is fatally flawed. If e-books had been at the front of all considerations, and not watching movies and listening to music, we might have seen a genuine rival to the Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers. But even with the introduction of another proprietary format—Apple iBooks (regurgitating the classic laptop range name)–the iPad fails to convince readers that Apple has produced a device for electronic books. It has instead made a device for people who, if they dare to use it for reading e-books, care not about straining their eyes or ruining their posture. An opportunity to truly take on the Kindle has been squandered. But it isn’t too late—we’ll see what future versions bring.

Some Apple devotees are already saying “enjoy the technology” and praising the iPad but I’m not one of them. I like my technology to look great and work well, yes. That’s why I like Apple over boring, dull, hopeless Microsoft. The iPad, some say, does look great. I don’t agree. The design and functionality has been seen before, and is loved on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It simply hasn’t translated to a larger device very well. The iPad isn’t innovative. It’s a rehash, a bad cover version, the great Apple snake eating its own tail. It isn’t elegant. It’s clumsy. It isn’t cool. It is, instead a device destined to be popular with uber-geeks and those men who suffer from BCSD syndrome (Big Car, Small Dick). It also has the words MUG ME on the back, that only appear whenever the iPad is whipped out of a bag on a train or in any other public space. And wait for reports of snapping, smashing or overheating iPads to start appearing on the Web…

By the end of the year, unless a new improved version is released, the iPad will be seen as a failure ranking alongside the Cube and the Newton, on the basis of comparatively poor sales next to the rest of Apple’s hardware with, perhaps, the exception of the much-maligned (not without some justification) and slow-selling Apple TV. The public needed to be convinced by the iPad. It costs more and does less than some of Apple’s laptops, it costs about the same in its lowest-spec form as a PAYG iPhone and provides all the same functions except for the core essentials—calls and texts—but without the effortless portability. How can anyone other than the most feverish technology fan be convinced of a need for the iPad? It’s just not going to happen.

Yesterday’s product launch was boring. Apple had nothing genuinely new to offer us. It just went bigger with what it already does well, and bigger does not mean better if a lasting purpose has not been identified for the upscale job. The company went into overdrive trying to convince everyone the iPad was new, exciting and—let’s not forget–”awesome”–but it wasn’t. This was the (now) old dressed up as the new. That’s not to say Apple’s work on touchscreen technology and the iPhone OS hasn’t been amazing. It has, and continues to impress.

We needed something new and different and genuinely useful from the iPad and we didn’t get it. Apple does produce turkeys every once in a while, whatever the evangelists argue. The iPad is one such turkey. Unlike the unfortunate birds, the iPad won’t be immensely popular at Christmas. If anything its arrival makes the iPhone and iPod Touch even more appealing than before.

I love my iPhone. I could never love the first-generation iPad. I don’t have a use for it.

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