ipad round four, printing
My friend Chris and I were having a discussion about the iPad this morning. We hadn’t talked about it yet as he’s been out of the country for a few weeks. He brought up a question about printing. I just so happened to come across this article from the Macalope today for the first time.
The iPad is something different. The iPad is small and cheap but not weak. It’s focused. And yet it fills a hundred niches a crappy plastic laptop never could. One of the complaints in Wilcox’s piece is how do you print from iWork? Who needs to print? Good lord, if Apple could kill printing they’d be doing us the single biggest favor in the history of all mankind. But here you have a device that a salesman and a customer, a doctor and a patient, a lawyer and a client, an Indian chief and a Pilgrim can sit down at together. They can pass it back and forth. This device is intimate; it brings people together. And if someone needs a copy, you e-mail it to them. Printing? 1997 called and it wants its ink cartridges back.
It’s funny, it seems that the issues that we all (myself included) keep bringing up about the iPad eventually fade into the idea that maybe we ought to be shaking off how we used to do things. We’ve spent decades building all these assumptions about computing that we forget to step back and look at the problems they’re solving. This happens to me in programming. I get so focused on my current issue, that I forget to widen my view and see the beautiful solution that’s way further up the pipeline.
Maybe I don’t need to print. I have a printer at home, but really all I use it for is printing pictures size 8″x10” or smaller. I could actually send those to Costco, and have them done cheaper (ink and paper are expensive) at significantly higher quality. Where can I take a paper “hard” copy that I can’t take my iPad? Maybe we have been cutting down too many trees. I don’t know. These are just a few of many new ideas to think about. And to me that’s one of the intriguing things about the iPad. It shatters preconception; it holds no de facto rule about computing as sacred. I think it’s high time we rethought some of these things.