The rumor sites could finally give it a rest last Wednesday, the iPad was announced, shown, demonstrated and I think it will be an awesome product. Admittedly, I work for Apple so there is an automatic bias but I was skeptical of the iPod’s eventual ubiquitous success when Jobs showed it off nine years ago. The world already had MP3 players, including me with a Diamond Rio 150, why would anyone drop $400 ($487 in 2008) on a what was a portable hard drive. Apple did listen to this criticism amongst numerous others, refined the iPod, got the price down and forged it into the true successor of the Sony Walkman; the portable CD player never cut it.
Now there are doubters who love to point out how that Apple is late to the party on making a tablet/slate-based computer or, my favorite, a competitive netbook. For the latter, netbooks are crap in general. They are the Trabants of portables. For a little bit more money, people can have a real computer over a unitasker crafted from spare parts Dell, HP and the rest can’t unload. In the tablet realm, the iPad’s predecessors have failed to set the world on fire too. Pop quiz! When you go to Starbucks, how often is anyone using a tablet PC or better yet, a PDA? No sign of them at the hospital when Somara went in for surgery in 2008 and these things had been around for almost a decade. If she can refute my claim, I will gladly correct this.
To me, the iPad is the logical successor to the Newton, a product Apple launched too early because the rest of the world hadn’t caught up. Imagine how things would be different if the Internet and Wi-Fi were as omnipresent in 1993? The iPad is a second chance to solve the problem of providing a tool bigger than a cell phone while not being as unwieldy as a portable. Best of all, it reminds me of those cool clipboard-like devices shown on Star Trek. “Captain, I’m detecting iPad Detractors 20 meters from here. I suggest we set our phasers on Stunning, like our sweet Apple gear.”
Will I get one? Most likely. The new car is a more pressing concern this year but I think releasing the iPad to the public and developers will result in it only improving; see what people do that engineers didn’t predict which will lead to further refinements. It has a big head start courtesy of the Apps Store for the iPhone and more importantly, Apple controls the software and hardware, therefore it will function reliably unlike Windows with a Palm Pre.