The iPad and the curse of being a Geek

Since this morning as I watched both TWiT's and GDGT's truly awesome coverage of the master showman Steve Jobs unveiling the new iPad I've been trying to some some kind of coherent thoughts about my feelings on the new device.  Someone on the TWiT coverage had the line that the iPad isn't a product you need but is a product you want. My friends and family were of course ribbing me about the device since I'm the resident fanboy and was apparently solely responsible for the bad name, their lack of excitement by the thing, etc. It's interesting to see how people like to teardown the king of the hill. Weird. I guess the first question I'll try to tackle first is do I want one?

This is where I feel like I'm a bit cursed by being a geek. I've always been a gadget nut, techie, computer geek, what have you. I generally consider myself a power user of OSX. The first thing that jumped out for me was when someone casually mentioned it is iPhone OS 3.2 not 4.0.  Which means, as many have remarked, this really is just a bigger iPod Touch with some redesigned UI for the build in apps. What that means is no multi-tasking. That's a deal breaker for me. It's just that simple, I actually jailbreak my iPhone so that I can get the ability to run background apps. Shortly thereafter I started thinking well why not Bluetooth but they want to charge for the keyboard dock. Or why not a camera, it doesn't run flash or TweetDeck, etc. But then I got to thinking if I weren't so geeky would these things be important to me at all? I really believe the answer is no. Of course many of those desires are born out of 15+ years of using what we've traditionally thought of as a computer and grafting those habits and paradigms onto this thing that is something new. I guess it's kind of an ignorance is bliss effect. All of that being said I'm still eager to check it out in the store and overall it is still tempting. I have felt for a while that if I had nothing else in the world to spend $500 on purely as a couch computer and this certainly seems perfect for that application.

Which bring me back to, as is often the case with Apple events, being more disappointed by what wasn't announced than what was. I think that it's certainly a quality device that represents Apple at their best, simple, polished in every aspect. I expect the iBooks Store will be a VASTLY superior experience for ebooks than Amazon's web based option for example. I've just always found the iTunes Store experience to be a very positive one, personally, and prefer it every time over something browser based. However I was really hoping for iPhone OS 4.0 news which would have impacted me directly as an iPhone user. There's a laundry list of things about the core OS that really need to be addressed. My big pet peeves are the notification system, multi-tasking, and the iPod app. The Unofficial Apple Weblog did a great series of posts about what needs to happen in general for iPhone OS 4.0 which I highly recommend. I suppose it isn't a huge surprise that we didn't hear more on the OS front as Apple will likely want to keep that for WWDC in the summer. However I'm approaching the point where WWDC is Apple's last chance to address these issues before the Google Nexus One starts to look even more attractive that it is already looking these days.

The game that everyone is playing post announcement is what's the market for this thing? Who will buy it? I have a couple thoughts my first thought and what I'm still sticking with is that I think for the iPad out of the box the prime market is more of a non-tech crowd. I explained it to my Mom (an avid netbook user, mostly surfs, etc) and it didn't take her long to declare she wanted one. Moving beyond that after hearing a lot of different people with a lot of different niche uses I think much like the iPhone success will depend largely on the apps. There's a lot of discussion about the idea that Apple has really created a multi-touch control surface with an SDK. Suddenly it's a Mixer, a lighting control surface, a Airplane cockpit companion, etc. I can see where there's some potential for revolution there although on the flip side, many people predicted the same for the iPhone and that hasn't materialized.

Bottom line Apple does what they do better than anyone and it will be exciting to watch the evolution of what at the very least is a cool piece of technology.