That is my prediction.
And I gotta tell you, I’m getting a bit tired of all the gushing and bashing. Never before have so many written so much about so little for so long. And now I’m doing it too.
But what I have to say is not really about the iPad per se. I have no plans to buy one, although I might if I was single, or if I didn’t already convince my wife that I needed an iMac, an iPhone, and a MacBook Pro in the stretch of 2 years. OK I definitely would if I could get away with it. And I’d be thrilled if someone sent one to me. It does pain me to see people bash them on YouTube with golf clubs and baseball bats. I don’t get those people. But I digress.
I’m one of those for whom the allure of Facebook has already worn completely off. I thought Twitter was dumb when I first heard of it, then I thought I saw prospects, then I thought it was dumb again. I still hardly use it – but twitter, and tweeters, frankly don’t give a rat’s ass whether I think it is dumb or not. People just go on and use it, because for many it is a great way to connect and share. What I loved about twitter in the middle of the affair was the ability to connect with people who shared my interest in say, Sam Beam, without having to join an Iron & Wine online community and wax endlessly about when his next album might come out.
Yet I love to surf. I love to use the internet experience to kill time, to discover new music, to satisfy my curiosity about something on Wikipedia or IMDB. I love to find out there are lots of other people who think the name Lady Gaga is dumb enough to be the sole reason I refuse to listen to even one of her songs, and their words give me comfort that I have not missed much.
I spend a lot of time at my iMac. Taking it out of the box and setting it up was the first Christmas-like magic I had in years – it’s beautiful, it works, it doesn’t come with 34 ‘free’ trial versions of software, it doesn’t endlessly tell me there is a Java update available. It just submits to use.
My iMac sits in my office, where I do this stuff, and surf, and I keep in touch with family and friends on Skype. But one tires of sitting in the office all the time. That’s what I loved about the iPhone. I had a HTC smartphone prior to that, and it was cool, but Windows Mobile really sucked and it just didn’t ‘work’ the way it should. It wasn’t a great experience, kind of like an XP laptop. Dull. The iPhone worked, and if you could think of something you’d like to do with it, there was probably already an app or 9 for the task. It enabled me to indulge my new passion for Google Reader anywhere. I liked that. Like my Vic20 so many years ago, it did a bunch of things I didn’t need to do, or which I could already do with a pen, paper, and a cheap Nokia mobile phone.
So recently I got a MacBook Pro using some dubious logic about why I needed one…and I love it, but I haven’t used it much yet. It’s a perfect device in its class – but the ergonomics of carrying a 15″ laptop around the house or keeping it nearby to satisfy the whims of my knowledge gaps simply aren’t right. That’s where I think the iPad would work. Perhaps I need to get out more.
With the iPad though, most of all, I know it will work. I know there will be great apps for it. I know there will be great content for it, for example, it will excel as a way to consume magazine content. I love magazines. New applications (as opposed to apps) will find the iPad. And everyone else will just try to keep up, instead of innovating. It’s kind of funny, since tablet PCs have been around and failed for so long, that Apple was able to sell 700,000 of these things in a week. Tablet PCs were a choice between a laptop and a tablet – with more moving parts, unproven clunky technology that might or might not work, features you didn’t need. The iPad is not trying to be that. It’s the Jesper Parnevik of tablets – argyle capri pants and all. It’s the device you buy in addition to your other stuff. It’s a break from the same old. You still don’t need one. Need is hardly the point.
That’s where it is kind of like Starbucks – the iPad not just a device, it’s a lifestyle, an identity, an experience. A loser with an iPad becomes a smug loser, and probably takes their new iPad to Starbucks every chance they get. You could argue Starbucks is just a coffee shop, but the masses still go there. You can argue the technological superiority of some other device over the iPad, or the value argument, or the fact that Apple isn’t the underdog anymore. But nobody will care.
The iPad certainly won’t.
