The longterm goal of the iPad
Apple doesn’t intend to replace the laptop. It’s meant to be a new hybrid computer product that appeals to someone who doesn’t need a traditional operating system, with menus to search through to find commands, just to get done 90% of what we all do with a computer. Windows XP/Vista/7 tablets have all been the computer equivalent of a Gamecube game with Wii waggle tacked on, and not developed for motion controls. Most early Wii games were gimmicky, not fully-realized motion/pointer controlled.
Apple is applying a few new approaches to computing with this to be the first true touchscreen computer.
A specialized operating system for touchscreen interface.
People think of the form of a computer device as the method of functionality: keyboard, screen, abstract pointer device (mouse, touchpad). Think of the iPad as a more universal form of content consumption without those limitations. The form is meant for light use because it’s physically light and convenient, but the interaction is also more efficient for those 90% of tasks. This is how I think the Apple crew sold it to Steve Jobs, who kept sending the concept back to the drawing board, because he wouldn’t sell a smaller, underpowered laptop or something that just surfs the web while you’re on the can.
By scaling up the iPhone operating system to the iPad, Apple is choosing to embrace a new method of how we use and what we can expect from computers based on these new hardware interface capabilities that make the mouse and hardware keyboard unnecessary for primary computer tasks, while maintaining the Bluetooth hardware keyboard sync so it CAN be the thing you write longer emails or Word documents on. They could have taken the Mac’s full OSX system, popped it into a traditional tablet computer and tacked on touch controls to replace mouse functions (like Windows 7 tablets do), but the approach would lack an intention of design, marrying form factor to the system and content delivery, which is Apple’s greatest strength.
File management.
Think of how often you create and manage file folders to organize your digital stuff. Why do we do this? To catalog and make it easier to find later. And yet, we still lose shit in a complex file structure. These days we have a stronger system search (compare Google’s Desktop search results to Windows XP file searching and you’ll see the difference). We have meta tags (descriptions of files beyond the very limiting file name). As we move forward in the digital era, we’ll rely further on computers to be our bookshelf, movie and music collections. Sifting through entire collections is going to be even more complex and overwhelming for casual computer users. File names won’t cut it and casual users hate trying to find shit.
Compare a photo library in file folders you make in Windows to how Apple’s iPhoto works. You open a program you want to use and have a series of thumbnail images of what files that the program can manipulate, regardless of where they are on the computer. They’re organized by events you choose, not folders with limited character names. It makes it less abstract and more intuitive. It also uses meta tags to organize content.
For instance, it pulls digital photos off your camera and groups them into an “Event” based on the camera’s meta data (date/time when photo was taken) with a thumbnail image from the group to represent it (like a photo of me blowing out candles to represent all the photos from my 30th birthday). But if I want to find all the photos of Jaclyn across all events, iPhoto uses software to identify her face in all the files in the system. Try doing that with files named 100_104.jpg from your digital camera in folders strewn through your My Photos folder. Do I take time to name each individual photo with a file name “Jaclyn doing something.jpg” to describe it and find it later? It feels archaic in comparison. Now make the form of that computer just a touchscreen, make it thin, light, and coffee-table presentable. A netbook doesn’t serve that purpose of presentation or organization.
Take this approach to photos and scale it up to the entire system’s file management. Most casual users save every download to the Documents folder or the desktop. How many times have you seen a casual user’s (or even experienced user’s) desktop loaded with files because they don’t want to take the time to archive them into a folder structure. It’s a drag.
iPhone OS hides the file system from the user, which is what polarizes people. Some get it because they can appreciate the simplicity of a front end for efficient, causal use, while others denigrate Apple for dumbing down the computer system and not fully exposing the system to the user (for user tinkering and customization). Most people don’t need that kind of access to their computer because they wouldn’t know what to do with it and have no interest in learning.
Customized touch UI is better than tacking on touch features to an existing one.
Creating an OS for touch interface instead of tacking touch onto an existing OS is the unique aspect of this. Once you’ve used a touch-screen device like iPhone, iPod Touch, Droid or Palm Pre, you see the difference. When you directly interact with digital content with your fingers instead of something else, the UI presents functions at the point of contact with pop-over lists, something the iPad UI is expanding on. It’s a smoother, faster experience.
All traditional computer programs have menus across the top with the features and functions buried in drop down menus, which aren’t in close proximity to the point of interaction (except the limited functions list presented by a right-button mouse click). We’ve gotten used to that time-wasting learning curve for software, learning what functions are available and finding where they are in menus. Perfect example: When you highlight text on a touchscreen device, immediately a little pop-up appears to tell you what you can do with it. No further interaction is needed from the user to find out what you can do with the selection. Physically stretching a photo with your fingers is better than Menu > Photo > Expand > 30%.
The lacking feature of Flash plug-ins, the peripheral add ones to connect to a camera or SD card, the jokes about the name and other complaints are myopic when you consider the next several years worth of iPad clones that will come along. We still don’t know how reliant this version of iPad is to connect to a desktop PC. Is there wireless sync of Word files from my desktop to my iPad? Do I have to sync via USB cable? Is it strongly tied to a cloud computer system? Can you store files on Apple’s MobileMe server so you always have access to them everywhere instead?
A laptop is a desktop system with a screen attached, and a tablet is a laptop system with a tacked on touchscreen. The interaction is a crunched version of the desktop. This is a true touchscreen computer right off the U.S.S. Enterprise. Did Geordi LaForge ever sift through a file menu with a stylus on his PADD? Did Data have trouble finding the Tachyon Pulse command somewhere in the deflector dish settings? I know that was fiction, but this is a step to actually getting us there. That’s really cool to me because I’m a nerd for this stuff. It should have been what the tech media focused on and not the spec sheets.
