ipad, for everything else
Marco Arment of Tumblr and Instapaper fame recently posted an article entitled Moving on from iPad “office productivity” apps. Trying to boil down the article doesn’t really do it justice, but he basically states that Apple, having touted the first iPad as a viable “office productivity” device, has now taken a 180 degree turn to focus on “casual media creation.”
Apple’s introduction of the iWork suite of apps with the original iPad wasn’t a declaration of the purpose of the device. It met a need to bring editing functionality to some key document types, but they never supposed that people would be writing their TPS reports on an iPad while they suffer from a case of the Mondays. What Steve Jobs sold us with the first iPad, was the idea that this new tablet had to do certain things better than a computer. You might recall that he left word processing and spreadsheets off that list. iWork was simply the software best suited to debut the platform as more than a plaything, and it sent a clear message.
But even as Apple moves into releasing more of the iLife, casual media creation apps that hallmarked the Mac, they aren’t doing it to fall in step with how people actually want to use the iPad. They’re simply creating what they love. They didn’t create GarageBand and iMovie to convince the world of the value of an iPad. They created software that they want to use, and that’s what makes it so good (and why Instapaper is so good). Was there ever any doubt that both iWork and iLife would eventually find their way onto whatever tablet Apple dreamed up? The effort they put into making the best platforms and hardware only exists as it enables them to make better software.
Apple isn’t looking to find the “sweet spot for the iPad’s usage.” With the Mac, most of the software an average consumer wants to use comes standard. But the iPad is about more than meeting the needs of the status quo. Don’t believe me? Watch Apple’s iPad: Year One video. This is where Apple sees the iPad, filling every little niche where a traditional PC is clumsy or unworkable. Apple made a computer that you can fit into any arena or scenario. Not only is there no right or wrong way to hold the device, but there’s no right or wrong task to give it. Yes, the device has technical limitations, but over time it will be computationally just as capable of any task desktop computers do today.
Graphical user interfaces brought computers a big step forward, masking the underlying technology, and bringing the software closer to the user. But it wasn’t emphatically better suited to every computing operation. There are still many tasks that are keyboard-centric, which get only marginal improvement from a GUI environment. Even today, many power users feel slowed down by mice, windows, and file explorers, and lean heavily on keyboard driven commands and shortcuts. Apple doesn’t think the keyboard is irrelevant. The iPad simply proposes that it’s less relevant.
So we have tasks well suited to command-line terminals, tasks well suited to our present desktop and laptop machines, and we will see that many, if not most, tasks benefit from this new leap onto the multi-touch interface. The question isn’t, what tasks does Apple think the iPad is suited for, it’s, what do you want your iPad to do?