The Book of Brian

Unsurprisingly, Apple unveiled an exciting new product on Tuesday. Equally surprisingly, it was Apple’s vision of a tablet. And even more unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of debate concerning the device – it’s not impressive, it’s a step backwards, it doesn’t even support web standards, it can’t multi-task, etcetera and so forth. I’ve read and considered quite a few of them, but I’ve also got quite a few opinions of my own on the matter.

Firstly, there’s the big one. Flash support. Many people are citing the iPad’s lack of Flash support as the major irritating factor of the device. Without Flash support, they say, we’ll never be getting the full web experience. The issue is that these people are very short-sighted, and aren’t looking for the long term. In the future, Apple’s hoping (and pushing) for HTML5 to overcome Adobe Flash as the dominant multimedia method on the web. Apple’s also got a stake in this – as a major contributor to the WebKit project, which may I remind you is one of two browser cores that supports HTML5 (WebKit, and Gecko – found in Mozilla products). So Apple’s already spent some time and money working on this big new standard, do you really think they’d undercut all of that just to support a competitor’s product which only happens to be more widely used at the current moment? Apple’s not stupid. They know that the iPad will be flawed the moment it comes into the market, but it’s by design. Apple’s hoping, and perhaps correctly, that this flaw will become less and less noticeable and relevant as time goes on.

Secondly, there’s the multitasking issue. This one cites that while multitasking is at least marginally understandable on the iPhone, it’s nowhere near acceptable on a device that’s more PC than toy. To these people: what major new product will be released in June? What will this major new product do to differentiate itself between past versions of said product? The point I’m getting at here, of course, is that there’s going to be a new version of iPhone OS coming out soon, and there’s going to be a big keynote coming along with it. If they give away all of the iPhone OS4’s secrets before they’re ready to even officially unveil it (iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2), they’ll have nothing to talk about come June, now would they?

Thirdly, the lack of ports is one issue that I’ve been hearing a lot about lately. The iPad, if you haven’t noticed, has only three points of interest on the frame of the device. The power button, the headphone jack, and the iPhone/iPod port that makes it compatible with all accessories in the iPod ecosystem. This is, I believe, another instance of Apple looking forward. Apple only gets rid of ports when they believe they’re on their way out – the firewire port from all consumer products, modem jacks, DVI, etc.. Apple’s replacement for firewire was USB, their replacement for modem jacks was ethernet, and their replacement for DVI was DisplayPort. Their replacement for USB now? Bluetooth. Apple’s obviously including support for Bluetooth accessories, as evidenced by the fact that the device works with existing Bluetooth keyboards. Other devices are sure to follow, and Apple’s done nothing to rule that out. They are, however, making it painfully obvious to everyone that the optional USB port add-on only works, and will ever only work, on cameras. A world where Bluetooth hasn’t exactly caught on yet and where Apple has little push or pull.

There are a whole bunch of other complaints as well. It’s DRM riddled and therefor a closed device, there’s no built-in iSight, non-removable battery, etc. and so forth. Some of these I agree with, and others I don’t. However as long as we can jailbreak to make my device more usable, I will. There are a couple of issues that I DO have, however. The disgusting 4:3 resolution, a giant step backwards that makes doing basic, everyday tasks – like watching high definition movies – much less appealing. And… actually, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe the marginally ugly bezel? I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m enjoying what I’m hearing about the device, for the most part. I want it. I believe that this represents the future of computing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 9:22 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.