It’s just another Steve Jobs attempt to convince us we “need” something because it’s cool, but doesn’t REALLY do anything special.
An iPhone is a cool way to BARELY do what good handheld can do.  Yet while it’s thin, it’s too wide and too tall.  You can’t change the battery if it runs out and its life is nothing special.  Plus, Apple explicitly excludes the battery from its iPhone warranty.  If it dies on Day2, you are stuck and have to have it repaired at your own expense—and THAT costs $200 for an authorized replacement! Consequently AT&T sells battery insurance that’s much cheaper—but only if you need it.

I remember reading how one shopper had a problem with how the iPhone would fit his business.  In deadly seriousness the clerk told than he therefore needed to change his business model!

Apple products don’t adapt to you. You must adapt to them.

BTW, iPhone belonged to Cisco Systems.  Jobs hounded every possible way until they agreed to let him have the name in return for joint marketing—an agreement Jobs promptly broke.

“iPad” actually BELONGS to Fujitsu in the USA and to another company in Europe.  Let’s see what kind of dirty attack tactic Jobs takes on THEM—the initial plan is to attack Fujitsu’s ownership on the ground that it’s “underutilized”.

I can’t figure out a single thing the iPad does that my tiny old Vaio doesn’t do better—at 2.8 lbs including DVD burner and 4 hour battery life, WiFi, BlueTooth, Cellular modem (or I just toggle to a 3G phone).

I actually DO own an iPod, but solely because that’s what my car supports for music.  It’s OK, but I usually just leave it in the car, because it’s too big and heavy to carry around, and the screen is too small to watch movies on.

Land Shark, you’re a true believer. What can I say?

Yes indeed, there are “gazillions of iPods in the world.” iPod does indeed have 70% of the MP3 player market, but that isn’t because its a particularly elegant product - even you might admit that other MP3 players available now are just about as good the nanos. That was a marketing (iPod + iTunes) triumph, not a technological one. iPods are the Kleenix of the MP3 world. The iPod Touch is a different story, but it represents a relatively small share of the market (which is itself shrinking).

You might think that iPhones will take over the cell market in the same way iPods took over the nascent MP3 world, but you’ll be wrong. And again, it’s that personality with a boutique price tag that will keep it to no more that 20 to 30% of the market. People who don’t HAVE to have the latest and greatest work of engineering art but want the Web connectivity will settle for Android versions, and the vast majority of people will stick with relatively vanilla cell phones.

iPads will make an even smaller impact on the market between web phone and laptop.  They might have a bigger impact on the eReader world, but even there they will probably never gain more than 50%. I use my netbook to do real work (spreadsheets, word documents, email), not to look at photos and listen to music. And for all of Window’s flaws, the netbook is better – and a lot cheaper – for what I need it for than the the iPad. iPad will be the new Mac, an elegantly engineered niche player that some (like you) will swear is the only think worth having, but most plodding along with what does the job for them.

You are so in love you don’t know there’s another in the world worth looking at.

@tdbach: what I’d add to this is that it is not about me or what I want: it’s about
how the zeitgeist around human : machine interaction evolves. And the facts
simply show this: there are gazillions of iPods in the world (which you seem not
to recognize), not cheaper knockoffs, and soon iPhones will be almost as
ubiquitous.

Whether the iPad will do likewise remains to be seen, but if history is any guide
the pattern will repeat, including the flood of lesser derivative designs, and it
will likely be the Apple product that connects with human desire.

Part of what creates this is in fact the distillation of simplicity into the user
experience (sometimes to a fault), discarding unessential features (the
embroidery of which you speak). Thus, the whine of techoids that the iPad
doesn’t have a plethora of connectors or spurious features goes right to this
essential principle: all that bling just puts people off and distracts from the
experience.

Land Snark, “we” we do not all crave this visual elegance “as we are driven inexorably closer
into the heart of the machine.” You and many like you crave it. I and many like me are content to have much cheaper products from imitators a year or two from now, products that preserve the features that make sense and abandon the ones that are so much embroidery.  It IS about owning the art instead of the print, as your own comment captures: “Would your kids be seen in public with a Microsoft Zune?” Kids are fashion posers in its most raw form.

Look, you love this sh*t. And that’s great – it’s made for you. But where you seem to get confused is in thinking that innovations that thrill you will inevitably thrill everyone. Macheads in the 90s were just as convinced that Macs would make PCs obsolete.  The thing is, Apple never really created anything that didn’t exist before, functionally speaking. They just took things (personal computers, graphics-based systems, touch screens, cell phones, MP3 players, tablets) and imbued them with a lot more personality and pizzazz. It’s really more an intersection of technology and fashion marketing. It’s a lot more STYLE than progress.

This Luddite has worked in technology for virtually my entire professional life. I don’t just accept technological change; I look forward to it. I’m as admiring by Apple’s innovations as anyone. I’m just not charmed enough to go to the alter – especially with the dowry these girls demand!

Mr. Scheer:

Your anti-Apple bias in this article is overwhelmingly transparent. Perhaps taking
a more objective and neutral position would be of greater value to your readers?
Anyway your statements really have very little to do with what this site “Truthdig”
is intended to represent. I mean, really. Why are we even discussing technology?

In any case, now that Pandora’s box has been opened, you could have also
compared the iPad to an Amazon Kindle or other eReaders, which go for sub-
$500US. And look at how much more you get for it! Not to mention an incredibly
beautiful user-experience. Beautiful user experience? What’s that you ask?

As you later pointed out, you can get it for between $499 and $829, depending
on configuration and features. And $499 is not prohibitive to most technophiles
for what you get. An iPhone goes for approx. $800/year with plan, or approx.
$800 w/o plan if you can get an unlocked version, and they’re still going like
hotcakes.

Why did you lead off with the untruthful “It’s basically a giant iPhone that goes
for $729?” The whole idea behind the iPad is as a 3rd device to fill the void
between light highly mobile iPhone-like devices and full-feldged desktop-
replacement laptops. Netbooks are trying, and falling short. People are using
them like they use a stripped-down laptop. Quite simply, they are too much like
desktop-laptops in terms of general user-experience, and not enough like light,
portable, casual, use-anywhere, carry-everywhere touch-phones. The idea
behind the iPad is not as a laptop replacement, but as an additional device to fill
the spaces between the work-oriented desktop laptop, and fun/mobility-oriented
touch-phone, which netbooks haven’t done very well.

The comparison of an iPad and a PC netbook that runs a “full Windows operating
system” seems to me like comparing Apple’s to rotten oranges. I have a
suggestion: why don’t you try using one first, before you go off tearing it to
pieces? I’ve found in the past that anyone that has open-mindedly used both an
Apple and PC product (pick your flavour or poison) wouldn’t dare compare the
two. Forgive my informed bias, but the one appeals to the discriminating and
aesthetically inclined mind, the other to the masses.

“Once you go Mac, you never look back.”

But I fear all this may well be tending towards a moot “my-god-is-better-than-
yours” religious discussion than anything else.

Best,
Dalmazio

@tdbach: many good perceptions on the creation of personality in the machine
that Apple strives for. Indeed. But the meme that this is for the upper east side
market that owns original art misses the mark. Yes, visual and functional
elegance over clunky bare minimum functionality is something that is
seductive, and ultimately what we all crave as we are driven inexorably closer
into the heart of the machine.

Simply put: do you own an iPod? Would your kids be seen in public with a
Microsoft Zune? Are you listening to your LPs on a tube amplifier home hi-fi
set?

The dialectic between desire for the technological experience and the luddite
counter resentment of it all is burned into our DNA, but ultimately we all
embrace the advantages of the technology, whether as early adopters or once
the device becomes as commonplace and an expectation of living as every
other device that has become part of culture.

If you really, really hate Windows on your netbook, you can almost certainly load Ubuntu (Linux/Unix) onto it.  It will do pretty much the same things, it’s free, and you don’t have to put up with Microsoft’s evil ways and bloatware.

In regard to iPad, I think it’s nice that Apple is upping the ante on tablets; I look forward to cheaper knockoffs where my money and desires for function might just cross.

“Intersection of technology and liberal arts” indeed. Apple and Jobs are Soho and Greenwich Village, while Microsoft is Main Street USA. Apple’s stuff is clever, elegant, gallery-ready while Microsoft’s in determinably pragmatic and homely.

Apple is for people who pride themselves in owning original art; Microsoft is for people who would rather buy a print and use their money to get their kids Little League uniforms.

It has always been thus. Two cultures worlds apart. Applephiles sneer at Windows with unguarded disgust and ridicule; PCers resent Apple’s “cuteness” and impracticality. To Applephiles, PCs are just stupid; to PCers, Apple represents do-nothing elitism. Sound familiar? Oddly enough, these two camps don’t fall neatly into liberal and conservative molds, though. It’s a parallel universe thing, apparently.

What bothers me about Apple isn’t its technology per se – it strives for “magic” and generally achieves it, which is kind of fun. I’m more concerned with the social transformation Apple seems to want to lead. Apple wants us to fall in love with our machines. This has become almost an obsession for them, since their first PC. They didn’t engineer functionality; they engineered personality. It’s not what it does that matters but how it does it. And this philosophy only gained steam as their product lines drove deeper into personal-use technology, like the iPods and iPhones – and now the iPad.

To me, the lower-case “i” of their product names isn’t about the internet or integration or interconnection, but about the id and the upper-case “I”. Whether by intent or not, they are encouraging increasing isolation and self-centeredness. Their classic iPod ads, the ones that were plastered all over subway trains and billboards, showing silhouetted figure dancing with themselves to the music pumping into the earpieces, captured the idea perfectly. Screw the world. I’m groovin’ to the music. I’ll get around to you when I feel like it.

The iPad wants to further draw us into an “exclusive relationship” with a technology. It will work, too, much as the iPhone worked, for those who long for that sort of relationship. But what will keep it from wiping out the notebook or netbook market won’t be its price point or lack of feature. It will be its personality. For some of us, the offspring of the Apple family are just not our type.

The iPad could serve the user in practical ways that a laptop and smartphone might not.

First and foremost, it is a media player with a screen big enough to make viewing practical at more than arms length, with no keyboard in the way, and for more than one viewer. Yet, like a smart phone,  it is still light and thin enough to be held in one hand. There will be after-market solutions to let you temporarily mount, hang, velcro, stand-up this thing just about anywhere. On the front of your treadmill/exercise bike.  Behind a store or kiosk window. On a car or airplane seat back. Sure you can watch a video on your laptop on an airplane, but can you do it while eating your in-flight meal at the same time? Does the laptop keyboard leave you any work space on that tiny airplane desk for paperwork or a cup of coffee? 

It would be quick and easy to hang this thing from the inside of your open car hood to guide you step by step through a repair or maintenance checks without getting in the way or forcing you to squint at a tiny screen.  You’ll be able to whip it out and lay it on that little table at the cafe for a quick game of low-profile chess with the person sitting across from you. It can be passed around a conference table easily by people still holding a coffee mug in their other hands, or can be turned around by the holder to show an image or video to people sitting several feet away on the other side of a desk, while kept safely in the owners hands.  I see it as a great potential sales, presentation, teaching tool for use virtually anywhere, on top of it’s entertainment value.

You’ll need to use some imagination to begin to see the full potential of this thing instead of just looking at specs and feature sets.

it’s not a laptop. To keep comparing it to that does not make sense. I am
someone who loves the iPod touch and find it very useful. When I want to work on
graphics, music, film whatever…  I use my Mac tower. But when I am just doing
recreational computer stuff the ipod is a practically perfect device… if ONLY IT
WERE BIGGER. Thats what the iPad is. PLUS… I don’t have to dick with Windows.
Who wants to mess with that? Any laptop that runs Windows is still that… a laptop
that runs a crappy unstable OS. In my opinion as useless device.He hit the nail on
the head when he said “The rest of us are better off sticking to the less magical
gadgets we already own.”... there is NOTHING magical about WIndows.

Adding to my earlier comment, here’s another idea. Make the laptop’s screen removable so it works much like the iPad or Kindle when it’s on its own. That it folds means it would also be more like a book, with opposite pages both visible.

And why not add a detachable phone to the laptop package? 

One of Lenovo ThinkPad’s videos for its latest models (T410 and T510) gives a graphic of the various hardware components one might find on a real desktop coming together to form the laptop.  If they would make these components real, smaller of course, detachable, and where necessary able to fold (as I mentioned regarding the screen and keyboard), we’d have a truly remarkable machine. 

Apples could make a real step forward just by attaching a detachable iPad to a keyboard; the keyboard unit to contain extra hardware.

Trolls will attack anything. Even without facts at hand or personal
knowledge.  Vocal diarrhea.

Spew baby spew.

Excellent review.  Tablets, iPads, netbooks — all excuses for what a laptop should be. 

Give me an excellent screen and a truly ergonomic keyboard, both of which fold and shut for travel.  Make it with the same performance as today’s best laptops; for example, one of Lenovo’s latest ThinkPads includes a solid state drive and around 18 hours of battery life.  Make it as light as possible. 

Instead of trying to come up with gadgets we don’t need or really want, make the one we do need, the laptop, what it should be.

What a useless article. I love how he has a link to an ACER, that is 150.00 more
than the iPad entry. Like this clanky cheap piece of crap is any kind of
comparison to an iPad. Hell it STILL runs WINDOWS. The reason people buy
APPLE products is because they WORK! The reason Windows TRIES to mimic the
MAC OS is because the MAC OS WORKS… it makes sense… it is inspiring. As
Apple users we gladly pay the extra money for their products to further
support the research and development to ensure future products that are just
as ground breaking , just as sexy, and just as functional, and just as reliable.
People love to point fingers at Apples “failures”. Yes there have been a
COUPLE… but how many failures has Microsoft had? How many versions of
WINDOWS have actually worked as planned? Give me a break. Microsoft is a
company built on failures and good PR. Apple changed the face of computers
pretty much single handedly with the Macintosh and the Apple OS. They have
been the leaders of the personal computer realm since they entered. Apple has
not let up. When Apple makes a decision about a computer or product it
usually becomes the industry standard. You can scoff at the iPad. But as an
Apple user since the 80’s I see a use for the iPad… As someone who does not
want anything to do with the nightmare that is Windows , this device offers me
a solution to the netbook. Time will tell how the iPad does, but in my mind it is
priced right. The Kindle DX is 489.00 and it’s just a freakin book reader.

Are you going to wait for the Maxi-iPad?

The real test of whether Apple has come up with a breakthrough product that will successfully transform the user experience is, as always, if its introduction is met with the Greek chorus of wailing nay-sayers. Lo and behold, the Tablet has already met this criteria, from the usual whiners who know nothing about what it does or does not provide, since they’ve never actually seen or touched one.

Waaah waah, it doesn’t have this feature, it doesn’t do windows, it only whips but won’t frappe, it won’t replace my Fleshlight. And as usual, the true test isn’t to be found in its feature checklist or price point—but in what experience it provides
and what platform it supports for an as-yet-unknown breadth of applications.

In this case, it’s pretty clear that the core change is the breakdown of the cognitive disconnect between the user and the content delivery, bridging the essentially non-human and anti-metaphorical computer-to-human interface. Bet the farm that the iPad’s experience goes even farther in completing the connection between man and machine that was first suggested by the iPod and then the iPhone…both of which were of course condemned by the same noisy chorus.

The Steve spoke: “We want to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.”

Ignore the meaning of that and be left in the dust.

Typical Steve Jobs: Didn’t do his homework.

Over at HuffPo they found an old MadTV comedy sketch for Apple’s PC-connected sanitary napkin called….

You guessed it….The iPad!

TOO FUNNY!

Typical Steve Jobs.  Things it should do, he decides it doesn’t need to do—like play web sites that use Flash.

Typical Steve Jobs.  The first version is crippled as hell, nothing by Wi-Fi capable.

Typical Steve Jobs.  The later versions will ONLY work in EDGE/GPRS, then 3G on AT&T, which is already failing because it can’t handle the load of iPhones with the scant number of 10 million of them.

Typical Steve Jobs.  He knows he could serve up a platter of manure for $500 and the Applunatics will BEG for the privilege of ponying up.

Typical Steve Jobs.  Pretends his slick toys are actually business tools, when they are nothing but overpriced slick toys.  I’ll bet the battery is built-in and if it fails the day after you buy it, that’s just tough shit on you, just like the iPhone.

Typical Steve Jobs. Paranoid, egotistical, tyrannical.

He can keep his crappy toys.

This article is overcritical.  It is good that the price can be substantually under $1000.  I can see that the handling of the device may be very nice for web surfing and pass around photosharing.  To me the biggest caveat would be the likely difficulty of using the virtual keyboard for email.  I think it is ridiculous to in one breath complain about the price and in another want the inclusion of a camera (KISS, glad they left that off a device this size, but if it catches on with early adopters you will probably see an integrated video cam in the future).  It will be interesting to see how well the product does.