Is the iPad for dumb people?
calebelston.com
calebelston.com
In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one has any empathy for a company releasing a new product without all the bells and whistles. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy here from a group that espouses "Release early, release often."
Supporting quick application shutdown and startup is a better way to make apps in any case.
For example, very often I will want to quickly check my email or chat session while a page is loading, but if it stops loading that page when I switch applications I don't gain that benefit. I also like to have chat sessions open and get small notifications (usually a sound or on-screen indicator) when I have new messages even if I'm in the middle of reading a large article in my browser.
Without background applications, neither of these usage scenarios is viable. It is this sort of usage that sets it apart from a general-purpose computing device and makes it into an appliance for me.
Though one nice side effect of those hoops is that your app appears to survive a reboot.
It's about guarantees. We want to guarantee that one application bug doesn't bring the whole system to its knees. If that app you downloaded gets into some crazy polling loop and starts hogging all the CPU, making your iPhone run hot and run out of battery in 1 hour, you won't be happy and you won't have a good way to figure out what's going on and fix it.
Part of the problem may be that Apple does not present it's products as half-done. They may improve certain features that you're looking for; they may not. You don't know. There's no roadmap for future development, and the only feedback that users get about what features that Apple is focusing on comes at these SteveNotes.
Even when they release a product that is half-done (e.g. the original iPhone; no MMS, no SDK, etc) they try to present it to the world as a complete and final product (i.e. "We don't need a SDK! You can make everything a webapp!"). It's little wonder that people get upset (i.e. With the original iPhone people were upset at the lack of a SDK and Apple/Steve trying to push the "all iPhone apps are webapps" angle didn't give people a solid clue that they would eventually release a SDK).
We know by now that multitasking is a myth. Yes, your computer can do it very well, but you are not a computer. You are a human being, and you can't really multitask (even if you tell me that you can, I won't believe you).
Now, iPhone OS is actually perfectly capable of multitasking, and it does run many processes in the background, but the one-application-at-a-time choice is a UI experiment. It is the idea that people can only do one thing at a time applied. There are certainly cases for leaving running applications in the background, but those are mostly limited to power-users.
As a developer I need to be running a shell and a text editor and a database server all at the same time, but anybody can stop watching a YouTube video to write an email.
Makes one wonder whether the Cocoa Touch frameworks could help with that some...
I do realize that there's always BeeJive for the IM portion of my requirements, but I always thought that keeping your connection alive through a proxy server was an ugly hack that was only necessary due to the limitations in iPhone OS. That and I dislike sharing my login credentials with a third party server.
I also have to say (as an iPhone owner) that I really kind of hate the app switching experience as it stands now. I want an instantaneous switch -- more or less like alt-tab on Linux or Windows -- and waiting for the springboard to reappear and then for whatever new app to load kind of gets on my nerves, especially if I'm trying to bounce between reading an e-book in Stanza or reading a web page and a slow-moving IM conversation. This is one reason why I'm ditching my iPhone 3G for a Nexus One as soon as they're available on Verizon. It's also why I find the Android tablets that are in development, like the MSI Harmony, much more appealing than the iPad: Android multitasks.
But I do also recognize I'm not the iPad's target market.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I suspect a lot of the iPad hate, particularly regarding no multitasking, isn't so much the idea of making a device that normal people can use so much as it is the idea that this is the sum total of the future of computing: specialized devices that uni-task, attempt to lock us into specific content providers, lock up our data in apps rather than letting us have free access to the file system, and so on. In other words -- it's not so much about what it currently is, but rather the potential future it represents. I think those fears are a bit overblown, but I definitely empathize with them. I'd hate having a computer that (for example) forced me to use iPhoto or Aperture or Lightroom or Picasa to manage my photos rather than just keeping them in a nicely organized file structure that I created.
But at any rate, I think there's room enough in computing for both approaches and I don't understand why various groups on both sides seem so anxious to strip those choices away from everyone else. Which is to say: I don't think anyone who is confused by a file system or windowed multitasking is a drooling idiot who shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet, but I also don't appreciate the simplicity advocates telling me that I should get over it because I don't need the ability to multi-task or be able to see multiple programs at once anyway. There's room for both approaches and I suspect there'll always be a need for both.
A developer is already working on something like this: http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/
Apart from preserving state, being able to do things like track where I'm going via GPS AND check my Tweets are things people benefit from.
downloading something(s) in the background, checking on my alarms, grabbing new emails|tweets|im's|sms's|RSS, 5min back in time continuous video/audio record, looking up what I type and search ala Rememberance agent, streaming my GPS location (and one day heartrate, bloodpressure other vital stats) to my server, and many, many more things.
Quit being limited by your simple single task mind.
The iPad may not suffer the same fate, if only because Apple seems more concerned about its success at the moment. I'll need to wait for iPhone OS 4.0 before making a call. Honestly, there's rarely been a modern Apple product that demanded waiting for the second generation more than the iPad.
I think the same gap in expectations applies to the iPad - we were expecting a conventional tablet and Apple delivered something that was tailored to a smaller, more specific set of tasks. Although as geeks we naturally prefer devices with lots of functionality, Apple prefer to deliver something that does one thing well. My mind is naturally drawn back to the Slashdot thread on the iPod - people criticised the lack of features, but the iPod came to dominate the market because it did one thing better than anything else could.
In contrast, the iPod had the scroll wheel - an interface so superior to the alternatives at browsing large collections of music that every iPod since has stuck with it. Similarly, the iPhone had a killer feature - a mobile web browser that actually worked. Also, both products were polished versions of devices whose commercial viability had been established for decades.
The iPad lacks a selling point. It plays music, but it's too large to replace a portable music player. It doesn't support the codecs that 99% of the video files people view today are encoded with, and has a poor aspect ratio for watching 16:9 TV or movies. It has a fancy ebook reader application, but I'm betting that glossy LCD screen will be unreadable in direct sunlight. And it has a web browser that works well on a phone, but will probably feel very constraining on a full-size device.
It seems as if Apple believes the touch interface itself is the compelling feature that justifies the iPad, rather than anything you might do with it. I'm skeptical - touch-based computers have been disappointing marketeers for the last twenty years. They have a certain cachet, but other interfaces are less frustrating in practice. The iPhone is probably the best-case scenario for touch, and yet there's still a huge market for phones with a physical keyboard.
In short, I'm still waiting to see a reason why someone would buy an iPad over a task-specific device or a laptop. (Particularly for $500+ a pop) Nothing in iPhone OS 3.2 is compelling enough to sell to a mainstream audience, IMO. Of course, the iPod and iPhone had significant issues in their first iteration as well, but Apple addressed them in subsequent generations and they'll hopefully apply the same treatment to the iPad. The difference is that the iPad starts at a disadvantage so long as it launches without a killer application.
For instance, you say it doesn't replace a portable music player, but that is only going to dissuade people who are specifically looking to buy a portable music player that fits in their pocket, in which case Apple will gladly sell them one. To everyone else it is still a potentially positive feature.
Likewise for everything else. Each supposed failing only matters to a fraction of the potential audience, and then to a variable degree. The degree to which readability in direct sunlight matters to a person is a function of how much they intend to read in direct sunlight. I don't know about you, but most of my reading happens indoors, at night, by lamplight.
an interface so superior...every iPod since has stuck with it
Not true. The Shuffle and Touch models, along with the iPhone, have never had scroll wheel interfaces. The scroll wheel was an exclusive feature of the iPod, but it was not the singular force behind its success.
the iPhone had a killer feature - a mobile web browser that actually worked
The iPad has this same browser on a larger screen and with better performance. That alone is a fairly compelling feature for people who might otherwise buy a netbook primarily for web-browsing.
It doesn't support the codecs that 99% of the video files people view today are encoded with
Is there data to back up that claim? It seems a bit...exaggerated.
The iPad's limitations will only be known once people get their hands on them, but I think you can extrapolate from experience with the iPod Touch and Apple TV. All of Apple's devices are limited to MPEG4 in the mp4 container or h264 in mov, with strict limitations on resolution and bit rate. They don't support divx/xvid, avi, or mkv. Very, very few files are encoded under those restrictions unless they were created specifically for an Apple TV or iPod.
The iPad's limitations will only be known once people get their hands on them
The video codec support is listed on the tech specs page on Apple's site. A more exhaustive resource is Apple's developer site. This is not mysterious unknown information.
Maybe the camera, but the multi-tasking might not happen. The reason they don't allow multi-tasking on the iPhone is due to battery life issues (or so they claim). I would assume that they might leave multi-tasking out in order to deliver longer battery life to their customers (or else allow it only on apps that have been vetted for their power usage during the AppStore approval process).
[edit] I should add that another complaint was that the iPhone kills off processes that are using too much RAM (so if a game starts up and fills too much of the available RAM, it dies with no feedback to the user as to why this happened)
Not saying that multitasking wouldn't make things worse, but don't give any props to iPhone OS for avoiding delays. OS 3.0 is embarrassingly laggy on the 3G.
I think that's a little unfair. I would characterize most of the negative responses I've seen on HN as more like "I won't use one... if it had a camera at least I could get one for my Mom to use Skype on... maybe rev 2 will be better".
I do see your point, and you are right, I think it will get better in V 2.0, but it's expensive and it is hardware so I think the example only goes so far.
It doesn't multitask. It doesn't let you install whatever you want. It doesn't do 1080p. It will potentially deliver a browsing, music and video experience that is good enough at 1.6lbs.
Of course this isn't everything, there is the crucial fact that it doesn't matter if you hate or love it, or if you are some world class tech blogger. People buy stuff they want.
Suffice to say, I haven't spent a second so far trying to figure something out in OSX that wasn't immediately obvious. Part of this is because I already have a background in other OSes, part of it is because it really is cleanly designed.
Bottom line, if you're a hacker and have been avoiding Macs because of the effort of learning another OS, I can tell you it'll be a piece of cake for you- Take the leap.
I doubt that the hackers who avoid OSX do so because they have to make an effort to learn a new OS!
Admittedly, I still spend most of my time in Terminal and a lot of what I knew transferred immediately (minus the quirks of going from GNU tools to BSD), but even in the GUI parts of the OS there wasn't anything that really surprised me. And once I'd learned the standard keyboard shortcuts I was rather pleased with how completely consistent even third-party applications are about implementing them (a situation which didn't, at the time, exist with most of the GNOME apps I'd been using).
Of course the terminal just feels like home, OSX is a proper *nix and everything works as you'd expect it to. The big difference is that everything else works as you'd expect it too as well. It seems like some sort of dream that I used to spend a whole week setting up a new computer, fiddling with drivers and dependency problems and xorg.conf nonsense.
If you mounted an NFS or Samba share the filesystem driver would 'beachball' the entire operating system if the server ever became unresponsive. There were numerous times where the smbfs driver caused kernel panics too. The only improvement to this offered in 10.3 was a dialog that would popup asking if you wanted to disconnect the share whenever it deemed that the server was unresponsive. Though the 'timeout' that it was using to display this dialog was too conservative. Sometimes it would popup just to disappear right away when it finally get a server response. [Note: these shares were mounted over a LAN, not spanning across the internet or something] The issue hurt me the most when I left a share mounted at home when I closed my PowerBook, only to wakeup the PowerBook at school/work and have OSX require a forced restart because the server was no longer there.
{edit} I know that all platforms have issues, I just get annoyed when people act like they don't.
This is really the division. Not between smart people and dumb people, but between people for whom what they can (or want to) accomplish with a computer boils down to a list like that and the people whose computer-aided ambitions are larger. This is what Tim Bray and others mean when they say "For creative people, this device is nothing".
Most 'smartphone' prior to the iPhone did much the same thing, they just failed at it. Please don't act like Apple is the lone-wolf when it comes to 'trying new things.' They are just good at creating successful new things.
> Apple didn't set out to create a tablet as other companies had in the past
This part irks me most. Apple just created a larger iPhone. That's it. Sure they added features like iWork, but things like iWork just didn't make sense on the smaller form-factor of the iPhone. That's it. Sure they had a different approach to the problem (making a larger iPhone rather than making a smaller touchscreen desktop/laptop), but it's not like they created a new experience with the iPad. The iPad is just the iPhone experience with a larger screen and some extra apps.
I think you're getting it, but then skipping right over it. The change in form factor is the point. You can do things with the UI using the additional screen size on the iPad that wouldn't make any sense in the iPhone. They want to iPad to be the right form to browse the web, watch videos, consume content, etc.
A netbook is the same as a laptop, just scaled down. But that change in form factor is enough to make them frustrating to use, leading to initiatives like Ubuntu netbook remix, in an attempt to make sense of the change.
Whether scaling the iPhone up makes more sense from the human perspective than scaling the laptop down remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful and interested.
Actually, this meme is irking me. Look at the interface on the iPad, it is not just a big iPhone interface. It has its own unique elements that allow it to work. There is real thought going into this.
I think this will be important. It's an enrichment of the iPhone experience instead of a denigration of the laptop experience. A user comes to it familiar with an iPhone and finds it faster, more useful, etc. A user comes to a netbook and feels cramped because it's worse than what it's imitating.
It's a small point among many, but from the human perspective I think it will significantly impact their reception to the iPad.
That 'just' bit is where Apple got it right and everybody else got it wrong. Everybody else started with a successful desktop computer and tried to shrink it to a tablet. Apple started with a successful smartphone and tried to grow it to a tablet. It may seen simple in hindsight, but it is a fundamentally different approach, and the approach which may just make the iPad a success.
iPhone has been incredibly successful and its users are by and large delighted. People who can't stand computers love their iPhones. Why again is it a bad thing to reuse iPhone OS (and extend it in ways that make sense for a larger form-factor device)?
If Apple had created the iPad as something completely orthogonal to both the MacOS and the iPhoneOS yet still managed to make a compelling product, I could see them worthy of heavy praise. Other than that the iPad is maybe a good idea, an innovative idea even, but not some ground-breaking landmark thing. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's the way that I feel (i.e. people are giving Apple the same amount of praise for the iPad now as they would have, had Apple done something even more praise-worthy).
Curious to see what kind of apps and interfaces are built for the platform in the years to come. That could make me change my mind for future versions.
Most people have a resistance to having to own too many devices though. If the iPad doesn't get at least one killer app that really doesn't work as well on an iPhone or a laptop, then it won't go anywhere.
There's a reason why the best programmers are switching en masse from Linux to Mac on their desktops[0]. Mac OS X is a no-compromises Unix: the power and flexibility of Unix when you need it, but when you don't it imposes virtually zero cognitive load. Turn it on, it just works. Even the geekiest hacker ever is going to run into times when they just want to read or surf, and not even have to deal with the interference of a keyboard. For those times, the iPad is perfect.
[0]Actually two reasons, the other being that they stand to make money developing Mac desktop software. Linux? Not a chance...
These devices will eventually just become extensions of our ourselves as with other tools.
The Samurai didn't need to think about the inter-workings of his sword to make mincemeat of his enemies in battle.
Through training, the sword becomes a natural extension of one's self.
Why should our hand held computers be any different?
Most Apple products aren't like this. I ran nothing but Linux for nearly 10 years, but when I bought my first Powerbook, nearly everything was actually significantly better.
Your metaphor breaks down because there is no other tablet (worth talking about).
The question I have with tablet computing is this: my computer usage is extremely multi-tasking - I have actually tried to pay some attention to this recently. I'll put the pasta to boil or something, and then I will hit the computer for 8 minutes. During those 8 minutes I might contribute to a few IM sessions, set off 4 or 5 tabs loading with the top HN stories and scan them, check my RSS feeds, check personal and work email and reply to anything that can be dealt quickly, check the state of my gentoo compile, tag some photos in digikam and set an upload to smugmug, and look up a recipe for tomorrow's dinner. The only reason I can do all that in 8 minutes is by aggressive keyboard shortcuts and desktop-switching.
I do have an iPhone and I do really like it, but it's not a multi-tasking device - not due to the OS, but due to the UI.
So the real question is - how rare am I in my computer usage? Am I analogous to the rare driver that tackles unpaved mountain roads, and so need my niche manual transmission while the rest of the world is happy with their automatics? Is the multi-tasking a geek thing, or do "regular" people do this?