The iPad doesn't have to do as much as a laptop. It just as to do as much as people need it to do.
It’s no secret that I like Apple.
I like the simplicity. The design. How everything is intuitive.
No doubt, there was a lot of skepticism when Apple announced the much anticipated iPad. No Flash. No multitasking. No keyboard. Simply put, it didn’t live up to expectations.
Know what? Sounds just like the iPhone. And I would argue many of the same reasons the iPhone was successful will be why the iPad will be successful.
First, the iPad is simple. Those who are in the tech community take computer competency for granted.
The fact is, a lot of people still don’t get computers. How many of your parents could set up an email client? How about the WiFi in their home with networked printing? Hell, most people don’t know how to reliably adjust the margins in Word.
There seems to be this mentality that the iPad is somehow deficient because it runs iPhone apps as opposed to full size Mac OS X apps. Which is a valid argument if we say that more is better. But more isn’t always better. More is just more.
I remember when I was using Quicken to try to manage my finances. It was an absolute nightmare. Why? Was it because there was some feature that Quicken didn’t have that I really needed? Nope. Quite the opposite. It gave me more than I needed. I just got lost in the thing.
People don’t need to get lost. They need the basics. There’s not many day-to-day tasks that I can’t do on my phone. Search for an address? Check. Pay my bills? Yep. Check email, read the news, get the weather? Yes, yes and yes. I actually prefer to do email on my phone than on my computer. It’s faster and easier. And for 90% of people, that’s what they need. They don’t need to run Photoshop, develop a website, or make a pivot table. They just need the basics.
Second, the iPad is always connected to the web (well, the 3G iPads are). The impact of this has certainly been overlooked by many. Is your laptop always connected to the web? On the train, in the car, at the airport terminal? Unless you have one of those mobile broadband cards, the answer is probably no.
Think about what it’s like to constantly have information at your fingertips. Compare that to before you had a smartphone, when getting lost meant you had to bring out a map and waiting anxiously for that important email meant you had to be at home to receive it. If you had to choose between an always-on internet connection or the ability to do advanced spreadsheet functions, I’d be willing to guess you’d pick the connection (and apparently with iWork, you could do the spreadsheet stuff, too).
Finally, I think one of the big reasons the iPad will win is because Apple had the discipline to say no. To say no to Flash. To say no to multitasking. One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes highlights this:
It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
I’ll probably get a lot of flack for this, but Flash isn’t important. I know 75% of online video uses Flash. I also know that it’s not that hard to port Flash videos over to another format. It’s way too resource-intensive for things that don’t need to be that bloated. Besides, Flash would be an awful user experience on the iPad. Right now, Flash interfaces are designed for something the size of the mouse pointer, not the much larger size of your finger. That isn’t a user experience I want.
As for multitasking, I’m on the fence here. I understand that it doesn’t have multitasking because that leads to more crashes. And frankly, I’ve had periods where my iPhone apps crash much too frequently. So I realize I wouldn’t want more of that. Still, when you’re surfing the web, it would be nice to be able to listen to Pandora at the same time. Would multitasking be nice? Yes, as long as it was relatively crash-free. But it’s not critical for me. And I’m guessing it’s not critical for most people.
I’m not blind to the flaws. As opposed to the iPhone, which served as a replacement for existing cell phones that were absolutely awful, and the iPod, which replaced CD players that were bulky and required that you carry around a huge book of CDs, the iPad doesn’t replace anything. Most people don’t have netbooks, but everyone had a cell phone before the iPhone. Everyone had a CD player. Those were easy upgrades to understand.
When I hear criticism of the iPad, I can’t help but remember the criticisms of the iPhone and think about how far the iPhone has come. In the beginning, the iPhone was on a slower EDGE connection with no MMS, no copy/paste, no application development platform. It was, in many ways, simple and basic. It’s still simple today, but with 3G, MMS, and thousands of apps, it’s not basic.
The iPad will be the same way. It’s basic right now, because developers have not been building applications for a 10 inch screen. That will change, and I expect that developers will slowly unlock the full potential of a large, fast touchscreen device. Apple has shown a propensity to release very focused, basic products and iterate on them. The iPod and iPhone are the exemplars for this philosophy. The iPad will follow that same model.
Apple succeeds by making simple products that often do less, but do enough and do it better. That’s the first half. The second half of the success equation is creating products that replace something consumers already have.
Half of the Apple success equation is present in the iPad. Logical replaceability, however, isn’t as clear. Will people ditch a laptop for a more basic device? The answer to that question will be predicated not on whether the iPad will do as much as a laptop. Rather, the answer will lie in whether the iPad will do as much as people need it to do. Which, to be sure, is a very different standard.
