On the iPad
The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it's a device that does little to enable creativity. As just one component of several in a person's digital life, perhaps that's acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle.
The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people — perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free; everything that's been proven with the success of the iPhone, but more so.
I had a really weird reaction to watching the creativity-oriented parts of the product demo. Brushes looked like tons of fun with the big canvas, and since you're expected to start from blank white, it is perhaps excusable that the only practical way to do something with a picture you created is to, uh, email it, I guess. And Schiller's iWork demo made it clear that you can get presentations, documents and spreadsheets to and from the device—through a synchronization feature built into the corresponding Mac applications, not a feature of the operating system. (I wonder how much the external video adapter for presentations will cost, and what connectors it will support, and if it'll play HD videos purchased on iTunes, and if it'll work at all.)
I got especially queasy watching Schiller manipulate a Keynote presentation. All at once, I thought this was a revolutionary new way to edit a visual document like a presentation, and a horrifying way to be expected to create one from scratch. A presentation especially is a document made up of dozens of other documents from other applications: pasted text, photos, videos. With iWork and the iPad, the only way to get these assets to the iPad is by bundling them into a presentation on my Mac and sync'ing it over. iWork for iPad may be an OK way to tweak an existing presentation the day before an event, but all that lovely touch screen potential is wasted if I'm actually trying to make something.
I seriously don't mind that the iPhone is a closed platform, if only because its place is as a supplement to an existing open computing environment. It's not as functional as it could be, but there are obvious tradeoffs that work out pretty well. I'm excited about possibly getting an iPad because I fully intend to keep my desktop and laptop computers. But each Apple product tells a story of how Apple sees everyday people using computers. The iPad and its successors have the potential to alienate the mainstream consumer from the ability to create. Making things is just not part of the story.
A possible saving grace: the Internet. Much like its Netbook and smart phone brethren, the iPad is a brilliant web access portal. The Internet has not yet reached its potential as a place to create things, ironically for some of the same reasons the iPad won't: you can't easily push data between applications or convert formats. But unlike the iPad, the potential is there. It might take us another decade, but the same developments that are making it easier to live without keeping our data on a computer's hard drive will make it easier to use closed devices like the iPad as general computing devices.