iPad: It’s Not For You, That’s Why You Hate It
My head hurt after the debut of the iPad. Aside from being thoroughly underwhelmed, something inside was complaining loudly, complaining that Apple was slowly moving away from where they should be. It gnawed at me for days until I could finally put it into words: the iPad is for dumb people.
OK, maybe “dumb” is too strong a word. Let’s use “passive” instead: it is designed for the passive consumption of media and the passive use of software by passive people. It is the replacement for the television that Steve Jobs has vocally decried in the past. If you are an intelligent, creative, mentally active person then you should find yourself slightly annoyed by its arrival.
“You go to your TV set when you want to turn your brain off. You go to your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” — Steve Jobs
Substitute “iPad” for “TV set” and you have the state of affairs today.
I have been a long Apple booster; going as far back to the dark days when the company faced oblivion. I have always believed that Apple put thinkers before drones; that the appeal of their products came from an intrinsic ability to “get out of the way” until needed (in Heideggerian philosophy, “ready-to-hand”). This appeal was often regarded as elitism by those outside the ecosystem. Maybe it was.
This history gives perspective to the event. The iPad is a step backward: back to the System 7 days when it cost significant money and effort just to write a toy program on the Mac, because the Mac wasn’t for development. This strategy worked for a while: Apple sold a lot of copies of MPW when people still considered the Mac worthy for development; but they kept charging outrageously even as the OS slipped further into obscurity. MacOS X was a major departure from this model: the entire development suite — compilers, IDE, et al. — was shipped with the OS, gratis. It explains the initial appeal of the system to the technology-minded.
The iPad has 80% of the functionality of a regular laptop. The problem is I use that missing 20% a lot more than the rest. If it is missing from the system, I can use Automator or AppleScript or even Perl to complete my workflow with minimal fuss. That missing ability is why the iPad does not appeal to me at all, not even as a dumb terminal. I am lazy and demanding; I will gravitate away from platforms that require too much manual work to get the output just as I want it, not how it wants it.
But the key word in the above paragraph is “I”. I am not a normal user. I work very hard to be lazy. Most people won’t bother setting up complex workflows once: they will blithely view repetitive tasks as bothersome but necessary. Most people will be quite happy with the output of iWork as-is, and be ecstatic that they are no longer held hostage by an overly complex graphical interface. Most people can sit down, do their work, and spit it out — unperturbed that it looks exactly like everyone else’s. The iPad will sell well because there are a lot more garbagemen than college professors.
Maybe “dumb” is the right word after all: the voiceless masses that use the Internet not to share their insight but to consume a surfeit of mindless entertainment. If you really want to have a voice, the iPad is not for you. I’m pretty sure Apple realizes that; the problem is that they just don’t care. Professors don’t make profit.
As I said, I’m annoyed; but not worried. The annoyance comes from Apple-the-supportive-creative-company moving slowly but inexorably towards Apple-the-restrictive-publishing-house and taking important resources with it. The annoyance comes from the blogging drones claiming that the iPad is the best thing Apple has ever produced and that if you don’t like it you’re shortsighted. The annoyance comes from the idiot analysts claiming that the iPad will finally kill off the Mac. The day for worry is when Apple announces that they’ve ported XCode to Windows.
(Edit: Changed post title to better reflect point of this article)