Computers are wonderful machines. They can be programmed to do almost anything. But the very fact that they can do a lot, implies that they involve a lot of details that are not inherent to a specific activity.
For years we have exploited their flexibility and found more and more things that we can do with a computer. Activities we could not do before and activities we already did with other means. Today we can do a lot of things with computers. But are computers the best way to do them?
While a lot of people is today somewhat accustomed with computers and with the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) paradigm, there are even more persons that really are not, nor they want to be, at ease with them. To those that have been using a mouse and a keyboard for decades, computers feel natural. But there’s a step learning curve in both typing and mousing. Neither feel natural to a profane. And once your arm and hand muscles are accustomed to manipulating the mouse and you have learned where the letters are on the qwerty keyboard, you still have to learn a lot of details about your operating system.
Even those who are devotes, will eventually hit the knowledge barrier if they try something slightly different. Switch to a Dvorak keyboard and you’ll hate it for a while. Remove your mouse and start using a trackpad, and it will feel weird for a while. Switch to a graphic tablet and a stylus, and you’ll be hit by the difference between the “relative” positioning of a mouse/trackpad and the “absolute” paradigm of the tablet. Change your operating system for a different one, and you’ll immediately realize that, even if both are using the WIMP paradigm, there are minute and subtle differences in the way the two OSs work and respond.
There are even more subtle things looming. How many people have been hit, when switching from windows to Os X, by the way the OS handles a directory copy operation? Sure you wanted a merge not a copy. But in fact, why are you manipulating files at all? Is it really needed? For years people had directories full of audio files (and sometimes video files). They would browse them to select the song they wanted to listen to, then started whatever media player they had. Some players would even let you create a playlist in the form of an ordered collection of file names. But is listening to music something that inherently requires knowledge of a file system? Does it require you to know a keyboard layout? Does it intrinsically involve having your arm and hand muscles trained to mouse or trackpad manipulation? Of course not. We listened to music even before the computers were invented.
However we did not send emails nor browse the internet, before we had computers, did we? Of course not. But this does not imply that we need computers to do it. We can listen to music without a computer and also with a computer. We very well could be able to use emails, browse the internet or perform any other task that is traditionally associated with computers, both with and without it. All we need is to figure out what is intrinsically needed and abstract it out of the overall computing experience. Take a computer, remove anything that is not inherently part of the task, figure out the best way to interact with the abstractions that are part of the task, add whatever is needed to manipulate those abstractions, and you come out with a completely new concept. An appliance for that specific task.
The problem is that, to make it into a product (especially a successful product) you need to convince people and overcome a lot of resistance and friction. This means that you probably have to add extra features that are not really needed, but are perceived as needed. At the same time you need to remove as many features as you can to make the device simple and intuitive. Not intuitive for those who are accustomed to those tasks on a different device (especially a computer), but intuitive to those that aren’t. You need to strike a balance. You must remember that “better” does not imply success. The Dvorak keyboard layout is much better than qwerty, but friction and resistance from those used to the lesser alternative have decreed its fate.
Apple iPad may well be the next step (yes, pun intended) in this direction. The bigger challenge for Apple is to convince people that the iPad is not a laptop, nor a smartphone. It’s something completely new. And, as an appliance, has very specific uses/tasks that it can performs wonderfully, but is not intended, and should not be forced, into being what it isn’t. The iPad is a side-step. It’s an appliance. Steven Frank calls it New World Computing. He describes it like this:
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
And that is in contrast to the Old World view of computing:
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
He of course recognizes that the shift in paradigm is not totally obvious to everybody. He asks Is the New World better than the Old World?, and of course the answer is that there’s no definitive answer because Nothing’s ever simply black or white.
Steven also recognizes that marketing something completely new requires striking a balance and presenting the device as a somewhat modified version of something already existing. He writes:
Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.
He’s right. And it may even be that Apple underestimated the capability of the market to “feel” the new. This is actually totally excusable. Jobs have been hit repeatedly in the past and is now very cautious. And the number of people that are somewhat resisting to the new concept is still very high. People complain, for example, because the iPad does not have a camera. While a camera could be very useful and, in fact, will probably appear in an upcoming revision of the iPad, it’s not absolutely necessary. Ron Cassel photoshopped iPad is a good take on this, and won first place in a Gizmodo competition to find the 77 iPad Updates That May or May Not Please the Critics.
Walt Mossberg official position is that he will only post a review when he’ll have played with the device for long enough to actually review it. But he did post a First Impressions of the New Apple iPad article. He does recognize that the key to success for the iPad is in whether consumers perceive it as a suitable replacement for a laptop in key scenarios and that the iPad is more than just a giant iPod Touch or iPhone, even though it looks like one. However he does list several potential “minuses”. He says the camera is missing despite being a common and popular laptop feature. He notes the AT&T offer is great, but AT&TY is not popular. And he expresses doubts about the keyboard, too large for thumb typing as you would on an iPhone, too awkward for touch typing.
The camera could be a nice feature. But I doubt it’s essential. Especially if you have a phone with a camera and video-conferencing capabilities. AT&T offer was simply the best offer available at the time of the announcement. But the iPad is not locked. Anyone can offer a plan in competition to AT&T. If Verizon wants to compete, all they need is to offer a plan. The iPad will not be sold as an exclusive device by AT&T. Nor it will come with the AT&T microsim. You will buy the iPad from Apple and than you’ll separately go and buy 3G connectivity from a carrier in a way similar to 3G connectivity with a 3G USB key for a laptop. Except there’s no USB key as the microsim will fit in the iPad. Also AT&T and Verizon are USA only. The iPad market is much wider than that. As for the keyboard, it surely is not intended for touch typing. If you are a roaming journalist or writer you will most probably be better served by a MacBook Air. But what if you are a photographer that carries around samples of his work? What if you are a real estate agent? Most importantly, what if you are John Smith and you can barely single-finger type anyway? The number of Jane and John Smiths that feel uncomfortable with technology and do not understand what “file system” is supposed to mean is much much larger then the number of touch typists.
The Huffington Post lists the 9 worst things about the iPad. They are: the name, no multitasking, no camera, no usb, AT&T, no flash, the screen, the price, the closed app store. I’m not sure about the name. It may well be that, in fact, it was a conscious choice. Surely if it was meant to create buzz it has been very successful. According to College Humor the iPad is a comedy gold mine. The exposure it’s getting because of the name is millions of dollars worth of advertising. I’m not really sure people will not buy it because of the name. But surely they will talk about it because of the name. Multitasking is a non issue. All the things that people say require multitasking could be done with background system services instead. Sure those services are not there yet. But this does not mean that multitasking is needed. The camera will probably come, but it’s not essential. USB is not needed. You have an USB adapter for cameras and memory cards. But that is because of limitations in the cameras. I’d rather have cameras and tablets use technologies coming from BlueTooth for NFC automatic pairing and then either transfer the images through BT or automatically negotiate a Wi-Fi Direct connection for that. AT&T is a false problem: the iPad is not locked. Go ask Verizon for a plan. If they do not provide it, it’s not an iPad fault (and they will provide it, just wait and see). No Flash is a feature, not a problem. See my previous post on this blog. The screen does consume more than a LCD one. But does cost less. And do not compare it to eink, please. The iPad does support ebooks, but it’s not an ebook appliance. Who wants to watch movies or browse the net on an eink display? And when I read I’m in the dark of my bedroom, kthanksbye. The price is too hight? I guess that’s why everybody was guessing $1000+ before Jobs announced it to be $499. As for the closed store, I reserve to blog about it tomorrow.
Ars Technica reacts to the Apple iPad and lists the opinion of many of the people there.
Jon Stokes, Deputy Editor, lists features he cares about in a mobile devices and concludes it’s hard to see how the iPad is really the no-brainer upgrade over everything else. Feature list comparison is a nonsense. You could deduce anything and justify it with a feature list. Timon Singh feature list comparison would, for example, would picture an Etch a Sketch as better than an iPad. But the main problem with Jon’s feature list is that it’s his personal list. While the conclusion he tries to draw is global. What he misses is that for a lot of people, the question is not wether the iPad does something new. It’s whether it bears the ballast of being able to do more than the bare minimum. And wether it requires you to learn things that you do not want (nor really need) to learn. Like using a mouse or a trackpad, knowing how to navigate a file system and other similar non-features. He says:
For my purposes as a power-user and professional gadget freak, you could take either Google’s Android or Palm’s webOS, put them on a similarly-sized tablet that’s designed by, say, HTC, and you’d have a credible iPad competitor that is inferior in a many areas but possibly superior in a few critical respects.
Allright. Go ahead. Nobody has ever implied that the iPad is for you. Go back and re-read Steven Frank. As you say you are a power user. You are a geek from the old world. Fine. But the iPad will be successful exactly because it is a no-brainer upgrade. What you are looking for is not a no-brainer. It’s a geek-brainer.
Nate Anderson, Senior Editor, touches a couple of very good points. The iPad screen size and support for a conventional keyboard dock, makes it a potential replacement for a notebook in some scenarios. But only if it handles the mouse well. The touch interaction is not good for traditional laptops (or desktops). And the mouse may be not too good for a touch interface. The speculation here is Apple presumably has something in mind here, though it’s hard to imagine quite how mouse use would work in practice. Would Apple really slap a mouse pointer on its touch-oriented UI? Probably not.
This is pure speculation, of course. But I really think (and even hope) that Apple will come out with some sort of touch tablet like the ones FingerWorks used to sell before being bought by Apple. Such a device will be the most natural “pointing device” for an iPad. It will also appeal to many desktop and laptop users. And it would be another step in the direction of completely redefining the human-machine interaction.
There are also more opinions in the three page post on Ars Technica. Just go and read them. Or you may want to see why Samuel Axon on Mashable thinks the iPad disappoints. He thinks web browsing is better on laptops and desktops (and even cites Flash). Except they are not if what you want is browsing and not having to do with all the intricacies of a computer. He also touches on the closeness of the iTunes Store and the competition with the kindle. I’ll blog my opinion about this some other time. He says it’s not worth if you have a smartphone and a laptop. Maybe. But what if you do not have a smartphone and have been waiting for years for a way to get rid of your laptop and still be able to email, browse the web, watch movies and manage your collection of photos, which are the only things you do on your laptop anyway? The number of people in this situation is much larger than you probably realize.
But not everybody misses the mark. Besides the already cited post by Steven Frank, there’s a great three page essay by Stephen Fry. He very well explains how the secret of many Apple devices (and the iPad) is not in the features, but in the user experience. It’s not what you can do, but how it feels to do it. And that’s exactly the ground upon which appliances compete. Yesterday a post on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball took me to Mike Monteiro’s The Failure of Empathy which is spot on. The golden quote is:
The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.
And that’s exactly why a lot of people do not get it.
