Insight VR

I consistently see the iPad dismissed as a nothing more than a “big iPod Touch.” I think this comes from the fact that people have difficulty distinguishing between and incremental change and a revolution.

I myself fall into this trap all the time. To illustrate, I’ll recount a particularly painful personal example. In college on of my good friends tried to convince me to take a database class from Jeffrey D. Ullman. The idea behind the class was that they had a database with a third of the text of the entire internet on it and all the links between those sites. “Think of all the cool things you could do with that!” my friend exclaimed.

I countered that with two arguments. The primary one was that I couldn’t stand Ullman. I had very high opinions of nearly all of my professors, but Ullman was a clear exception. I could go on and on about this, but the primary reason was due to interpersonal interactions in office hours. He seemed to have little tolerance for undergrads, or perhaps it was just me that he couldn’t seem to stand. In any case I readily admit that my experiences with the man informed my opinion of the course.

The second argument was actually relevant to the greater point of this post. I stated that you could use such a database to make yet another search engine, maybe one that was incrementally better than Alta Vista (my favorite at the time) but that is about it. Who wants to spend a quarter learning about that?

Of course it turned out that Ullman was merely sponsoring the course and that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were really doing the teaching. This wasn’t just a CS course about building a search engine, it was a chance to get in on the ground floor at Google and be at the forefront of a revolution. I not only missed it, I dismissed it as simply an incremental improvement. My lack of ability to extrapolate combined with my willingness to manually sift through several pages of search results to get what I wanted blinded me to the potential of what was right in front of me.

I only realized the enormity of my mistake a little over a year later as Google launched and provided what was clearly more than an incrementally better search experience. The enormity of the mistake has grown since then as Google has grown and become more useful.

So now I try to be a bit more humble, a bit less dismissive, and try to imagine how seemingly incremental changes can lead to a revolutionary result.

The iPad is a device that has revolutionary potential. This potential is masked by the fact that iPhones and iPod Touches are now commonplace. People are very familiar with their advantages and limitations. The “big iPod Touch” argument serves to highlight the limitations of current devices, point out where the advantages of those devices will be missing in the iPad, and fails to see the advantages an iPad might have over things we are used to.

For instance, iPhones don’t do multi-tasking of third party apps. Currently the iPad doesn’t either. But what does multi-tasking really buy you in a GUI that only allows one application to be front and center at a time? The commonly cited example is Pandora playing in the background. I admit that would be nice to have. But is that use case alone worth the overhead that allowing all third party apps to multi-task would cause? Maybe it will be in the future but for now Apple’s answer is clearly no. This reflects the philosophy of the device which is clearly simplify, simplify, simplify.

On the subject of things that the iPhone can do that the iPad won’t do it is easy to come up with items. The iPad won’t make phone calls. The iPad won’t fit in your pocket unless you have magically large pockets like Stephen Colbert. The iPad is (gasp) missing a camera. Well, at least as far as we know.

Of course the reasoning behind all of those design decisions is that this isn’t a device that is meant to be carried around all day in your pocket. Because of that there are uses that it is ill-suited for and Apple hasn’t focused on things that it would do badly.

Finally, there is the problem of not seeing what it is capable of that an iPhone is not. Oddly enough the “just a big iPod Touch” argument seems to deny the advantages that its bigness gives it over an iPod Touch. The first is that you tend to interact with an iPod Touch with either one finger or two thumbs and use presses or short swipes, because that is all there is room for. The iPad opens up a whole new world of possibilities for two handed gestures, using multiple digits at once, and gestures that go beyond swipes and pinches. So it isn’t simply a big iPod Touch, it is the first consumer device that allows for a real multi-touch experience. The screen real estate doesn’t just provide more room for input of various types, it provides a lot more room to display things. So there is room for richer interfaces than on an iPod Touch. There is room to put up a lot of information. Frankly I think there is going to be a market for scientific visualization and data visualization apps in general on the iPad and people are going to do amazing things in those spaces because of the screen size and ability to manipulate visual reresentations directly.

It is also “bigger” in terms of computing horsepower. So you can do more and have more responsiveness than on an iPod Touch. People will downplay this, but there is a real advantage to the illusion of directly manipulating objects with your fingers. Any lag harms this illusion. Give a system enough lag and you give up the illusion entirely and to the user it seems as though you are entering a command and hoping that the device complies rather than directly manipulating things.

Those that don’t attack on the “big iPod Touch” front attack on the “it isn’t a real computer” front. These people are blind to the disadvantages of the computers they sit in front of everyday, to the point that they trumpet even netbooks as superior to the iPad.

On current computers that utilize a desktop metaphor GUI there are a multitude of things that a user could potentially do at any time, most of which are useless, wrong, or even harmful. There are keystrokes the could press, or key combinations. There are menu items and other GUI objects such as windows, menus, buttons, and scroll bars. To many of us this all seems very natural since we’ve been using systems like this for 25 years and we don’t realize the mental overhead involved in using such systems productively. There are an enormous number of options available at any given time and experienced users simply filter the great majority of them out and then go hunting for them when they are needed. The iPad does away with huge amounts of this overhead. By only presenting one application at a time it minimizes how much windowing infrastructure there needs to be and how much users need to understand. By removing direct access to the filesystem it does away with an enormous amount of complexity and potential to do hard. Most of what users do with current filesystems is loose files. By reinventing the software installation process it does away with questions about where you want your application to live on your system and eliminates an enormous source of friction in installing new software.

These are all things that are second nature and therefore currently invisible to expert users of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Note that the people currently geeky enough to opine on the iPad tend to fall into the category of expert users of current systems. Because of this they are blind to the shortcomings of those systems and also highly aware of what they see as the limitations of the iPad.

But 90% of people are not expert users. Okay, that number can vary up or down depending on your definition of “expert users” but the great majority of people have little use for the features that the iPad seems to lack that can be found in other computers.

So what is it that most people want to do with computers today and in the future? First of all they want something that just works. The past 30 years in which personal computers have been widely available have taught people that computers that just work are fairy tales. Before you can make a computer work you have the overhead of software installation, virus concerns, network setup, etc. Not to mention concerns over disk space, RAM, and other requirements. We’ve become so accustomed to this way of doing things that we have a hard time imagining it being any other way, but given the choice we’d prefer to have things just work.

Secondly people want to use computers (or perhaps devices) to consume media. The people writing about the iPad are by definition media creators. They write their articles and blog posts and make YouTube videos. They appear to be in some sort of majority because we don’t see any output from those that only consume rather than create. But the secret of Web 2.0 is that 1% or less of users are creating content, or even commenting on blog posts. The great majority of that participation is useless and contributes nothing. So millions are reading, watching, and listening without creating anything. A device that allows them to do that with as little friction as possible is a dream come true.

If people are creating content it is in the form of tweets and Facebook posts. Something the iPad handles as well as if not better than a traditional computer. Besides, if you really want to create content a netbook isn’t for you either.

The iPad might have gotten a more thoughtful response by critics if the iPhone and iPod Touch didn’t exist. Without something concrete to compare it to critics would have had to consider it more carefully and imagine its possible uses. Instead they fall into the mental model of how they use current devices. This is a huge mistake. The set of evolutionary advantages that the iPad presents will result in a revolution. Take it from someone that missed one. In one, five, and ten years will look back and see this as the start of a new form of mainstream computing which will have reached into areas that we can’t foresee now.