Themes of the iPad Announcement

Many smart, wonderful people have written volumes about the iPad since the announcement. I keep replaying Apple’s January 27th iPad presentation in my head. Not because I’m interested in what multi-touch gestures were used or what this means to the future of Apple, human-computer interaction (HCI), software distribution or any number of things about the device itself. While interesting, we’ll have answers for that as the iPad SDK matures and when the iPad actually ships.

No, what I keep going back to are the broad themes of the iPad demo which are arguably the device’s killer features: Consumption, Presentation and the Future.

The Demo
Six minutes into the presentation, Steve Jobs stated that in order to create a new device between the iPhone and a laptop, it had to excel at certain operations. Specifically browsing, e-mail, photos, video, music, games and eBooks.

During the first demo, Jobs didn’t give the technical specs of the device other than its width and weight. He jumped right into the pleasant experience of consuming media and accessing information on the iPad while seated on a couch.

The second portion of the announcement focused on presentation or sharing. The iPad’s screen has a wide viewing angle making it easy to share content with another person or even an intimate group. Hook the iPad up to a projector and one can share with a larger group like a classroom or an auditorium. Finally, the iPad is a wireless device which allows a person to present or share publicly on the intranet or release an idea to the wilds of the Internet. The 3G version will allow you to do this from just about anywhere*.

So What
Big deal, right? So watching a video on iPad is easier on the eyes than on an iPod Touch. The form factor makes it easier to read an eBook than on a 15” MacBook Pro. So it’s Internet enabled. Whoa. Gee, I can hook it up to a projector. So what. There are other devices that allow you to do that already. Let’s look at couple of seemingly unrelated things; iLife and iWork and a research paper.

Apple’s iLife and iWork suites use the word “share” in several places within the UI. People understand sharing while computer scientists have had to train average computer users what “export” means over the past three decades of the personal computer. Sure it’s common now but sharing is something that humans do while exporting is done by machines. The sexiness of importing, exporting,rendering and the like is so very 1997. Or as Adam Lisagor (better) puts it:

What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re getting closer and closer to that happening. But there are still many layers between our intentions and our environment. As time progresses, we will strip away those layers one by one. And it’s always disruptive to do so.

Exporting is just one way to share.

The other day I linked to a research paper titled Research Instruction at the Point of Need. I’d encourage you to read the entire paper but in a nutshell:

“point of need,” [is] that moment in a student’s research process when she actually needs access to a certain kind of information.

Point of Need Instruction accelerates a student’s learning and retention because it keeps them engaged at the moment of their interest. In other words, the lab, library and tutors are at their fingertips or, at worst, in their hip pocket or backpack.

Since the iPhone, how many times have you said “If only there were some sort of hand held, Internet enabled device…” while out with friends, trying to remember the name of a character from a childhood TV show? Plenty. This is Point of Need. The iPhone commercials are demonstrations of the Point of Need.

Future?
But what about content creation? Too many people jumped on the lack of content creation with the iPad even though iWork looks pretty complete and Steve Sprang demoed Brushes, a painting application for iPhone and soon, iPad. They cite a lack of camera and the software keyboard as limiting factors. Frankly, they’re just small minded. As Neven Mrgan put it:

… think of the person for whom the iPad will be the first computer they use. They will come to it with no expectation of cameras, multitasking, Flash, or storage size. Now wait a few years (months?) and give them a desktop computer. They have to interact with it using these weird things on the desk which aren’t even where the content is. Like, you look here but you click here - crazy! You have to move “windows” around. And check out all those buttons. What, nothing happens when I tap and hold on this?

Now you tell me if that person, the person the future is made of, will leave their iPad because the PC has more gigahertz.

We don’t know what the person the future is made of™ will do with the iPad. Neither does Apple for that matter. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, did they see Podcasting as a thing or iTunes U or a place to store your medical records No, their focus was on the music industry and the personal music experience.

Apple didn’t spend much time on showing what could be created because they simply don’t know. Because they’ve been there before, they don’t want to narrow the focus of possibilities by showing what’s there today.

Intersection

This is why the iPad will be successful. It marries a concept from instruction and learning and that human need to share with haptic glass and an amazing assembly of technology.

Apple gets this like no other company.

Gadget fetishists, Windows/Linux fanboys and Wall Street analysts grammarians do not. Instead they’ve spent their energy collectively missing the point.

*Within AT&T’s coverage map. But I’ve discussed that before.