
My verdict after one day of using the iPad - glower
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneDay.html
======
jsz0
I'm not quite sure why all these iPad articles are framed with the assumption
you're going to use the iPad _instead_ of something else. I've been working on
a project in Logic most of the night on my Mac with the iPad sitting on my
desk for browsing, music, and video. It's a fantastic setup. Nice break from
keyboard & mousing. The display is stunning and multi-touch web browsing on
this size screen is such a natural experience. Something about the portrait
view is very compelling to me. I popped it over to landscape for a bit and
some of the magic disappeared. I wonder if part of the appeal of the iPad is
simply that it's the first mainstream computing device to use portrait
orientation so effectively.

~~~
randrews
They're framed with that assumption because of the other articles that call it
"the future of computing". If something's the future of computing, it's
supposed to supplant the present of computing, right?

~~~
bombs
Why can't the future be something that augments instead of supplants?

~~~
pkulak
By definition?

~~~
swombat
Yes, because there totally aren't any sailboats around now that steamboats and
motorboats got invented.

And people definitely don't go and watch plays and operas live anymore now
that they can do so in their living room with a TV.

You need a better dictionary..

~~~
krainboltgreene
Sailboats are luxury items, dude. People aren't forced to use sailboats. In
fact, instead of 100% of ships being sailboats, I'd gander only 5% or less are
sailboats.

~~~
swombat
5% of the sailboat market is pretty significant - as is 5% of the computer
market. In fact, iirc, Apple has been making solid profits from round about 5%
of the laptop market.

Anyway, I was merely illustrating that "the future of" does not mean "the sole
replacement of".

~~~
krainboltgreene
And my counter point was that both your Opera/Theater and Sailboat analogy
prove his point.

Motor/Steam boats are now used where Sailboats were used, 100% of the time.

TV/Movies have replaced Opera/Theater for mainstream entertainment.

------
Osiris
I really like the last paragraph:

"I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day
and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I
just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at
some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to
use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. "

That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions
to really make this kind of product shine.

I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it
could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how
could they install them?

~~~
ojbyrne
Most notable omission is a camera. Skype video is the killer app for this
machine.

~~~
mos1
people keep saying this, and i keep thinking it'll be shot from a truly
horrible angle and will be really unflattering.

~~~
grinich
And a wobbly image. I'd like to see some good image stabilization using face-
tracking.

~~~
celoyd
Apple’s photo software already has face recognition and its video software
already has good image stabilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were
spin-offs of work towards precisely this.

------
modoc
Having played with my friend's iPad a bunch today I am extremely impressed. I
can't wait for my 3g one to arrive.

He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the
whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural."

My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the
computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery
life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.

~~~
MartinCron
That echoes my experience. No single WOW thing (well, maybe looking at my
photos, but that may be because my photos are awesome). Everything is very
fast and crisp and _right_.

The browser on the iPhone always felt like a last-browser-of-desperation
except for sites specifically tuned to it. On iPad, it's actually usable. The
sites that I work on all look great (with the exception of embedded flash
video, naturally)

------
ojbyrne
"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been
willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news
stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like
sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara
Falls."

It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news
"samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay
for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.

Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was -
consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything
else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero,
and that's what consumers will pay.

~~~
warwick
If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers
sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print
ad rates.

It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers
to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads
department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for
almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and
advertising with us goes for premium rates."

~~~
btipling
I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the
ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even
worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the
New York Times.

------
jamiequint
Reminded me of this Chris Dixon article:

"the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”"

[http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-
start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-
looking-like-a-toy/)

~~~
gloob
I feel that it's important, from time to time, to remember that plenty of
things that aren't the next big thing are also variously laughed at, ignored,
dismissed, and so on.

I'm not making any predictions about how the iPad will do (sitting and waiting
will get me better information than pulling a guess out of the air), to make
sure that's clear. Just reminding myself that it possible that perhaps Apple
will produce a product that won't change the world.

~~~
techiferous
"a product that won't change the world."

Like MobileMe? :)

~~~
bmalicoat
I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe, only problem is the cost
of course.

In the same vein though Apple TV isn't a game changer, but it could become
more relevant as time goes by.

~~~
techiferous
"I really enjoy the 'just works' aspect of MobileMe."

I was an early adopter and got burned. It never worked for me. After fighting
for hours with configuration and bad Apple support (which is
uncharacteristic), I realized that the time it would potentially save me was
being burned up in setting it up, so I abandoned it. In the end I ended up
losing $99 and gaining nothing. I'm guessing from what you said that they've
worked the kinks out now, though.

~~~
bmalicoat
Yea the launch was a disaster. They were definitely stretched too thin at the
time. I've heard some people have had issues still but it has been perfect for
me since I got it around the launch of the 3GS.

------
aaronbrethorst
"The usual fanboy rebuttal is that [the iPad] is not designed for what I do."

How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why
Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development
environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. _So what?_

Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my
mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an
iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.

~~~
kvs
Yes. iPad is for consumption not for production. Don't know when some of these
guys will realize it and stop making a big fuzz. I don't see the point of it.

~~~
webwright
Everyone realizes it. I think the contention is (right or wrong) that a pure-
consumption device isn't what people want or need (given the other things that
they have in their lives). It's redundant. It doesn't replace anything.

I think if they had multi-tasking it'd go a long way to shutting up this
criticism.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Hey Tony - Pity that seemingly everyone in Seattle is staying in tonight.
Crappy weather... Two things:

1\. You've probably forgotten more about this sort of data than I'll ever
know, but I look around at folks on laptops in cafes and see nothing but
Facebook or Gmail on Netbooks. I think we, as a class of users, are the
exception: most people on computers spend the bulk of their time consuming
information instead of producing it.

2\. Rumor has it that iPhone OS 4 will be announced at WWDC 2010 (big shock)
and will feature multi-tasking.

~~~
lotharbot
Facebook and Gmail both have production and consumption. A device that excels
at consumption and is inadequate for production will not serve as a
replacement for many people. It sounds like the iPad is adequate for at least
some limited typing, but it remains to be seen whether it's adequate for what
most users do.

The bigger critique, though, is multi-tasking. I like to be able to consume
music and webpages at the same time. A consumption device that won't let me
multi-task is inherently unsuited for my normal day-to-day use.

~~~
Maktab
To be clear, both the iPad and iPhone do allow you to listen to music and surf
the net or use other apps at the same time, but only if you use the iPod
application.

The problem has never been that the iPhone and iPad can't support multi-
tasking, it's that Apple has only permitted some of its own apps to multi-
task.

------
ErrantX
_It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too._

Hmm, I think he is possibly incorrect here. A lot of people do multi task; but
my parents close _every application_ when they start a new one. If they are
sending emails they close Word - and vice versa.

My gran did this, my brother used to do this till a few years ago, most of the
people on my uni course (electrical engineering) who were not computery people
tended to do this, all my friends generally do this as well.

Indeed the only thing I have seen people traditionally leave on is music
(which can be done on the iPad) and chat (which currently cannot).

------
ComputerGuru
Would it be rude to say that I don't care what _anyone_ has to say about the
iPad after only a single day of use? It's not a new laptop, it's a new mobile
device _entirely_. It'll take more than one day to really _get_ the iPad, for
better or for worse.

~~~
ovi256
Yes, and no. Let me explain: if it would be a new laptop, the differences from
existing laptops would be mostly subtle. A day may be too short to see them.
With a device of a new class, you'll feel the differences right away. Being
able to analyze and articulate them takes some time though, even if you do
that for a living. This is why I dislike all this rash of articles about the
iPad. They're all speculation, as the facts have not sunk in yet.

------
kwamenum86
My favorite paragraph:
[http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneD...](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/03/verdictAfterOneDay.html#p6)

~~~
CamperBob
The thing that nobody seems to acknowledge is that iTunes really has gotten a
lot better over the last year.

~~~
Tichy
How so?

~~~
CamperBob
The Quicktime-based GUI has become a lot more responsive, even as they've
added more features. That was my main complaint -- the idea that a 2D UI
should bring a 3 GHz processor to its knees.

