Newsweek's cover story on the iPad (which pairs nicely with its back cover advertisement for the same product) declares that the iPad will "revolutionize reading, watching, computing, gaming and silicon valley." I admit that I have not yet handled the messiah-gadget (although as an inveterate gadgeteer I've read many reviews of it), but I think that, as usual for Apple products, the praise is way overblown. Let's take a look at what the iPad will allegedly revolutionize:
Reading: The Kindle (to which, full disclosure, I'm partial) has already led the way on digital distribution of books. The iPad only promises to do more of the same, but with pictures! and video clips! I think most people are using e-readers for books - I'm reading Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton," on my Kindle, and have not felt a need for a video re-ceation of the Weehawken duel.
Websites, like ESPN.com, do a pretty good job of combining text, graphics and video, and these will be viewable on the iPad, as well as specially-created text/video/graphic publication that will probably be a lot like ESPN.com except not you pay for them.
I do see the iPad potentially being ground-breaking in replacing textbooks - where graphics, interactive material, etc. could be really helpful, as would the ability to highlight, cut and paste clips, etc. However, this is clearly at the moment a niche market, and not really "revolutionizing reading."
Watching: Ok, you can watch movies on it. Like you can on an iphone or a good PMP, or a laptop, except a bit larger and with a better picture. However, given that home video and TV consumption has been trending toward ever-larger HD screens, and TV-makers are investing heavily in 3D TVs, I have a hard time imagining that the average person is going to skip his 50 inch LCD with 7.1 dolby to watch a movie or the Superbowl in the iPad.
Computing: Without a keyboard, and only able to run one application at a time, I have a hard time seeing how anything you do on an iPad really even counts as computing, much less as "revolutionary computing." Computer use in the past decade has trended more and more toward users creating content - posting pics and status updates on facebook, creating, editing and posting videos on youtube, blogging, commenting on other blogs or sites. The iPad isn't really set up to do any of this. I'll bet that most people who engage with their computers or the internet and own an iPad will use it to consume media, and then go to a regular computer to create.
Gaming: So far the iPad has sold 300,000 units. Great start, definitely, but it has a long way to go before it catches up with the 140 million Playstation 2 units sold over that platform's lifespan. At the moment, the best games for the iPad look like Quake 2 era games from about 10 years ago on the PC or PS2. Nice to be able to play when you're away from your main system, but I have a hard time imagining people becoming iPad gaming loyalists.
Gaming right now is heading in two very different directions. You have gorgeously produced, immersive games like Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare, etc. that have Hollywood budgets and huge sales, and you have very cheap-to-produce, easy to play casual games like the reigning champ, Facebook's farmville, scrabble clones, desktop tower defense games, etc. As with movies, the iPad is not going to match the experience of playing a high-end game on a high-end computer or console with a big monitor or TV and serious speakers. It will probably canibalize sales from portable systems like the Nintendo DS and the PSP, and will get its share of casual game users who want to manage their digital farms while on the road, but again, hardly revolutionary.
In the end, the iPad is a great piece of industrial design, with a very slick looking operating system, that's user-friendly and appears to be pretty fun to use. It's absolutely a desirable object, even for apple-phobes like me. However, as nicely as it does what it does, none of the things it does are revolutionary - it shows movies less appealingly than a big TV, it games worse than a PS3, Wii or X-Box (or a good real computer), its battery life for reading is 10 hours instead of the Kindle's 2 weeks, etc. At the end of the day, it's just a really nicely designed gadget. No problem with that, but it doesn't merit a Newsweek cover.
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