Unless you’ve been living in a cave that doesn’t get 3G reception, you’ve probably heard by now that Apple has a shiny new tablet called the iPad.
As far as I can see, the announcement does largely validate my earlier analysis. It’s not just a media player, it’s a device designed to do 75% of the useful things people do on the desktop computers, in a new and better way. And the long term goal of such a device can only be to try to shift the center of the computing universe away from Wintel.
There are specific indicators that this is what Apple is after.
iWork was announced along with the device. I said this would be a key early indicator. Creation of word processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents is the keystone of desktop computing. Isn’t the web more central to computing now? Yes, perhaps. But the web was already a multi-device platform; to the extent that the web is central to computing, that was already an example of the industry moving away from traditional desktop computing.
It runs iPhone apps. For some companies, this sort of compatibility would be taken for granted, but that’s not the case for Apple. iPhone apps are not going to provide the world’s best user experience on a device with a much larger screen. The typical Apple approach would have been to favor user interface purity over practical compatibility considerations. The fact that they went the practical route indicates they’re trying to remove as many barriers to adoption as possible.
The keyboard. I’m positive the optional external keyboard lies outside of Apple’s vision. As with the previous point, I think this is an example of Apple sacrificing its principles a bit to remove objections people would otherwise have to using the device.
The structure of the AT&T deal. Apple cut a deal with AT&T for reasonably priced wireless data services. But the iPad is only sold unsubsidized and unlocked, and even if you sign up for an AT&T plan, there’s no contract. Apple doesn’t want carrier lock-in to be a barrier to the adoption of this device, and doesn’t want to be beholden to outside parties for anything basic to the device. This kind of independence is essential to a flexible general purpose platform (imagine if Macs only worked with one kind of Internet access), and Apple probably had to negotiate pretty hard to get it.
More iPad analysis soon.
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