“What the iPad can do is offer simplicity, not just ease-of-use, but ‘simplicity,'” Copeland writes. “Most people don’t get it and here’s why.”
“Being directly involved in the tech industry for over 25 years, I know what a computer can and cannot do. I know what I want a simple computing device to do for me. But I am a techie. I tinker, I play, I tweak… 95% or more of the population doesn’t (that percentage could be higher). They don’t care,” Copeland writes. “They want something that gets the job done and done fast (gets to the point) without having to learn for weeks or months before using the device.”
“We wouldn’t tolerate having to put the spark plugs in or tuning the car every time we go to the store to get eggs or milk. So why would we, on a computer, to just check our email? Think about what you had to learn to do that. (If you are a tech reading that last sentence, chances are you can’t think back that far (even if it was last year); you have forgotten. You are a nerd, like me. It’s in your DNA to forget back that far,” Copeland writes. “The rest of the population do remember the hassle of learning and being frustrated because they are still there.”
Copeland writes, “So, 95% of the population are not nerds or techs. They are everyday people like your brother, sister, mom or neighbour. They see the computer as one thing: an appliance to get a task done and most of their tasks consist of doing the following six things:”
1) Browsing
2) Searching
3) Email
4) Facebook / Twitter / Chat
5) Photos, video, music, media
6) Playing games
“They (this 95%+ of the population) really were never interested in anything more about what a computer can do. They want to do those 6 things the majority of the time,” Copeland writes. “So, imagine something that will do all those things (plus way more for the rest of us) without having to ‘learn’ how to use it. [Where] pressing a button where it turns on instantly (this is the ‘New Booting’); where the five things that are most wanted by most people can be seen on the screen; whereby touching the picture of one of those 5 things causes it to show up instantly?”
iPad “will revolutionize everyday computer use, and then some,” Copeland writes. “However, I believe there are 3 things missing, in these 3 areas: short term, 6-18 months; mid term, 3-5 years; and long term, 5-10 years. They are the following:”
• Short term: A Webcam
• Mid term: Allow the iPad to fold in half
• Long term: Voice recognition
Full article here.
4th thing missing:
Printing!!!
@Carbonodd
My first reaction to this site was to note its partisan stance. But following it revealed an uncanny knack on the part of the editors and some contributors, to nail the essence of a product and to predict outcomes for both the company and its competition. When contrasted with more neutral sites and places like CNBC, you get a far better grasp of the Apple phenomenon as a company, as products, and investment from MDN. So I guess the truth about a transcendent reality can sound partisan. The whole goofy thing about Apple being a religion, etc, I think is a misunderstanding by those who are either indifferent to, or actually hate computing, as if a strong preference for great tools cannot be explained otherwise. The antipathy toward Microsoft is not exclusive to Mac users. The truth is, Gates and Ballmer have done much to impede the progress of technology and do harm to others, while enriching themselves with inferior products and a predatory monopoly.
I know everyone thinks Microsoft is evil but lets face it: for business Office is the standard. I know its bloatware and most office users use only 20-30% of its functions on a daily basis but like it or not it’s a business standard.
So if Microsoft were to figure out a way to come up with a scaled down Office App for the Ipad, and allow you to print wirelessly to a wifi printer or to a network printer, they could charge $100 for the app and folks would buy it.
It might also sell a lot of I pads, as it would overcome on of the main objections business would have when employess requisition a Ipad for laptop replacement. IT can tick it off the Ipad as -“MS Office compatible”.
Just remember although we all like to hate Microsoft, things like Exchange and Office are standards, and millions of folks have to use them daily like it or not. So if Apple can ‘Borg’ those Microsoft standards, the better we all are.
@ grognard
“I know everyone thinks Microsoft is evil but lets face it: for business Office is the standard”
Yeah, and at one time Blood Letting was a standard medical treatment, and everyone knew the world was FLAT.
You can already fold it in half. It can be seen in video all over the web. The guy put it in the blender next…
Don’t worry, Microsoft is coming out with a folding tablet. Well, if it folds, it’s not a tablet, but Microsoft has that one thing covered.
It won’t be instant on. It won’t be fast. It won’t be malware proof. It won’t do your 6 things with ease of use. It won’t be an enjoyable experience.
But it will fold in half.
Direct printing for sure.
Yeah, I realize there’s then a “printer driver” issue and so I’m not apoplectic about it not being there yet – but there might be a way to at least, for example, include a “universal driver” on the iPad along with the ability to install a blue-tooth or wi-fi aware small program on a PC or Mac – which when invoked, receives and directs the iPad’s print output to the PC’s installed drivers and selected printer, whatever it is. Yes, I am talking through my non-programmer butt here, but the point is this should not be a problem Apple can’t solve.
And also maybe even a revolutionary feature to organize created documents, which Steve indicated earlier this week that Apple knows about: folders – but for more than home screen apps.
@ZuneTang
I am dismayed that your normally cogent prose is marred by an incomplete sentence. Perhaps you should compose your posts in Office in the future where, with grammarchechautocorrectspellcheckautothrowup and the like, are all turned on by default so as to drive you nuts, you won’t have us suffer such an indiscretion again?
“We wouldn’t tolerate having to put the spark plugs in or tuning the car every time we go to the store to get eggs or milk.”
Unless you own a Jaguar
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The iPad may be intuitive and easy to use, but it’s still not a stand-alone product. As long as you need a Mac or PC to sync them you are still chained to those pesky computers.
@Carbonodd
I’m serious — put down your iPad, back slowly out of the MDN door and never, ever look back. If you fail to do so it will not take long for you to become one of us! Once you discover that there is a company that makes great products that just work; a company that has as a philosophy that it is just as important to decide what to leave OUT as it is to decide what to put in; and then presents it in an award winning beautiful package — you will convert.
Leave now, or be forever clutched in the grasp of Apple.
@carbonodd
it all falls on deaf ears…or consider it water off a duck’s back. The level of indoctrination is very high here. It’s an orwellian nightmare
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> But such tribalism is common and requires slavish, unqeustioning devotion to the high priest and whatever pearls, real or imagined, (s)he casts before the swine…welcome to the realm of the fan boi.
As much as I hate windoze I have to use it for work. I hated carrying around the clunky Dell with missing keys. I transferred that machine into a parallels vm. I still was carrying a nice MacBook running parallels, bet still a pain to re login eveytime I shut the lid. Now I have jump app that let’s me remote control my vm from my iPad with nothing more than a gmail account to set it up. App was 10$. $0 monthly connection fee. Getting to use iPad for my work computer, priceless.
The iPad is an awesome first generation device, but if we keep up with this “it’s so good, how dare anyone criticise it” attitude, you are just dropping the standards we should expect Apple to live up to.
The iPad is missing heaps of standard features, and it’s not always for technical reasons. Apple will do cut corners where they think they can get away with it. Find out about Fonts on the iPad.
And btw, 10.7 is that much further away. Remember OSX? It’s the software your Mac is running on. You know, your Mac: the thing you plug your iPad into, to set it up?
How does that make the fans feel: iPad, the greatest peripheral ever made.
@ nicwalmsley,
If someone was to ask you what the heaps of standard features that the iPad is missing, you’d come up with a list of the standard features on your typical, beloved Windows Tablet.
iPad is all about the touch user interface, the media it brings to you and the Apps that run on it.
It is not missing its optional USB port, its optional physical keyboard or its optional card reader. It is not missing one or two cameras. It is not missing Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6. It is not missing an Atom or a Core 2 Dual processor. It is not missing a 250 GB or 500 GB hard drive.
It is what it is, an iPad. It is in a new category and it defines that category. As such, it is not missing a damn thing.
• Mid term: Allow the iPad to fold in half
That would be great! Two halfs the same size à la MB Air. View two pages side by side on the top, and have work space on the bottom! GREAT idea! the future of mobile graphics and work stations!
@Big Als MBP
It’s a first generation product. Of course it is missing stuff. Just ask Apple: they are releasing a major software upgrade in June, just 2 months after the hardware was released. No doubt they wanted to go to 4.0 at the same time as they released the hardware, but 4 wasn’t ready. No doubt there’s other features that they want in, that are not ready.
The doubt is, is Apple happy with the fundamental approach they took with iPad 1.0 – or do they want to see the basic design change in the years to come?
Apple led the way with the PC for 5 years, then they got swamped for 20. Same thing could happen with tablets.
If the iPad evolves into a into a portable touchscreen iMac, then we won’t find ourselves bitching about useless Windows tablets in 5 years or so.
If the iPad stays a peripheral, there will soon be a clunky Windows tablet that has removable batteries and runs it’s own operating system and can print documents and has video chat and wow you can even load files using your USB stick… well guess where the market will go. And where the market goes, the development standards will follow.
Or did we all just forget 1985-2005?
@ nicwalmsley
“If the iPad stays a peripheral, there will soon be a clunky Windows tablet that has removable batteries and runs it’s own operating system and can print documents and has video chat and wow you can even load files using your USB stick… well guess where the market will go.”
I know, right? Like all those PlaysForSure music devices that had removable batteries and ran their own OS and could play Ogg Vorbis files and made really great cappuccino. Do you remember how everyone bought those just cause they were cheap?
Oh yeah, that didn’t happen. Because those players we difficult to use or too confusing for most people. The iPod did one thing, and it did it better than anyone else, because It Just Worked. That is why the iPod won the music player war.
The only near competitor to the iPad, right now, is the lowly netbook. Netbooks do everything that laptops do, only badly. But darn it they do all those things. And people want to Do All Those Things, so naturally they’ll choose netbooks, right?
Well, probably not. Because the vast majority of computers users don’t care about 98% of what desktop computers can do. And there are infinitely more people who aren’t computers users yet, and they REALLY don’t care.
But a USB stick? Are you serious? Do you miss floppy drives?
The market will go where Consumers take it, not where geeks in love with feature lists wish it would go.
@ChrissyOne
I hear what you’re saying. I am thinking about getting an iPad. It’s just a bit crazy at the moment that people are so zealous about them. Not sure why you think USB is old tech? 32GB on a thumb drive isn’t handy? I use USB all the time, mainly to plug my peripherals (iPhone etc) into my Mac, mind you.
Didn’t Apple say that printing was coming in 4.0?
I think a fold-up version would be a deal-maker for folks for whom portability is important (i.e., a lot).
I was going to say it, but Scott Rose beat me to it:
“The computer for the rest of us.”
@nicwalmsley
My kids are in school. They are now starting to use Google Documents with their gmail account. Store their homework there while at school. Login and work on it at home.
USB flash drive is no longer being used. Collecting dust.
Do they need 32 GB for schoolwork. Nope.
Now I still remind them to copy all documents to our Mac hard drive for redundancy.
@ nicwalmsley
“It’s just a bit crazy at the moment that people are so zealous about them.”
It’s perfectly understandable to feel that way. There are some of us (myself included) that have been following this saga for a long, long time. I’ve been expecting a tablet since before the iPod came out almost a decade ago. The iPod, in fact, was supposed to be The Tablet, at least according to some Germans.
So the excitement you’re seeing isn’t all just last-minute hype. For some it’s the culmination of a very long road.
As far as USB goes… I personally don’t use thumb drives because I have my own server and Mobile Me, so I have plenty of connected storage. I do see the utility of USB drives, but in the case of the iPad… I kind of consider the iPad itself as the thumb drive. In any case, it’s certainly not a deal breaker for me. It sounds like, for the moment, the USB adapter that Apple sells in the Camera Kit is limited in what it can do. But these are just software issues, and they will be solved over time.
Agree with carbonodd. This IS a fan site, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I do however think MDN should change it’s name because they don’t even vaguely resemble any kind of news organization. It should just be called the Mac Fanboy Site. I salute the apple fans for their passion for anything apple (I have 3 macs , 2 iPhone, airport extreme and express, and a variety of iPhones (going back to a 2g and orginal shuffle). But the blindness that so many show here to anything non-apple is a little like drinking the purple coolaid. Look how those people turned out….
This is the most on-target evaluation of the iPad ever written. This gadget is the death of the Mac and the end of the era of a serious alternative to the hell of PCs. I’m in a funk about what all this means.
Surfing the net, tweeting (whatever?), and gaming is a ruined society lost at the hands of a bunch of fat people with 9 inch screens balanced on their bellies easily picked off like a row of chickens in a shooting gallery – a real one, not the digital version.