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The iPad Will Not Cure the World’s Ills. At Least, Not Until v2.0.
By Nick | January 31, 2010
People keep asking what I think about the iPad, Apple’s latest wonder-gizmo unveiled last week in San Francisco. In turn, I find myself asking other people, as a sort of conversational icebreaker, what they think of the device. I suspect that, whatever the tablet computer’s eventual real-world merits, its first and most vital use will be as conversational fodder for Manhattan’s chattering masses.
I’d written, very speculatively, about the iPad in the months leading up to its release. But on the day that Apple CEO Steve Jobs actually unveiled the device, I was on a nearly deserted island in the Caicos Passage, on the beach, adding seashells and assorted flotsam to a giant driftwood statue at the high-tide line (there is no better way to unwind, de-stress and reorient your soul than creating massive art installations; this is one of the reasons, I’m convinced, that visual artists who don’t die by misadventure early-on have a tendency to live until their 80’s and 90’s). Consequently, I didn’t see whether my theories as to the device’s ultimate form were correct until a day later.
I was wrong in my previous assumptions. I thought the iPad’s screen would be smaller, the price-point higher, the GUI more adventurous. I don’t think I’ll buy one, personally, when they roll out two months: the two features I wanted were the ability to sync the tablet with my MacBook, to create a second screen, and some sort of handwriting app that would translate my chicken-scratch into editable text (which would save me hours’ worth of transcribing my notebooks into a Word document). Maybe someone will design a third-party program to address that second point, but even so—I already have three laptops, along with a galaxy of smaller communication/media devices, all of which basically means I’m tech-saturated.
But it’s interesting to wonder whether we’re collectively on the hinge of a paradigm shift at the moment, with regard to personal computing. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I saw a variety of manufacturers pushing any number of e-readers and tablet PCs—all of them either running a proprietary OS or else Windows 7—that they hoped represented the future of everyone’s silicon lives. Despite this push, though, I have a hard time finding civilians who express a fervent desire for a tablet computer, which makes me wonder—where is this push coming from? Did those manufacturers see the sales numbers for smartphones like the iPhone and the Droid, and figure that everyone who gravitated towards those devices would be equally enamored of something larger?
I don’t know yet, although I’ve been talking to some of those manufacturers (along with a handful of software makers) lately in an attempt to assemble some sort of Grand Unified Tablet Theory.
Four weeks into the New Year, and it’s Clips Time:
My most recent iPad pieces can be found here and here.
New Thrillist piece, on Casualty Clothing, can be found here.
The final cover of the Playboy Book of Cigars will be much better than the version currently posted on Amazon.com. (Okay, okay, I’ll stop posting about it. I swear. No, really.)
(It’s not a new piece by any stretch, but ReadOz has posted the Private Air issue with my Craig Ferguson interview from Dec ‘08/Jan ‘09, found here. Notable if only for describing the physiological effects of being trapped in a small Cessna, 15,000 feet over Los Angeles, with a late-night talk show host joking about stalling.)
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