The iPad is a short-term disappointment and a long-term play for changing the paradigm of mobile computing. A lot of the smarter speculation pieces before today (
eg this
Gizmodo article) set forth the iPad as
notebook replacement rather than filling some Platonic niche between notebooks and smartphones (despite what Jobs himself said today). As many have argued (and the UMPC / MID arguably proved), there is no such niche, perhaps not even for Apple.
In terms of immediate reaction, the iPad is probably closer to the iPod rather than the iPhone. It was immediately apparent that the latter was a game-changer. Whereas the iPod just seemed like more overpriced Apple kit that didn't do anything other mp3 players already did. Thus its
infamous dismissal. Of course, over time, and in conjunction with iTunes, the iPod changed the entire music industry and perhaps paved the way for the rise of Apple 2.0 (the Apple whose share price stares down at me from $207.98, ouch!). And the hardware progressively evolved until we got today's iPod touch, the first mass-market handheld computer.
The current iPad is less capable than a netbook or a Windows tablet. It's uncharacteristically awkward for an Apple product (keyboard dock? ugh), painfully rev 1.0. It doesn't offer any of the JesusTablet functions some punters fantasized about. But over time, in conjunction with iTunes / App Store / iBooks / cloud-iWork, it could change mobile computing. Though I do think if Apple had retained its close alliance with Google, this product would have a much better chance (Google obviously has a far richer 'cloud' infrastructure). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this paradigm-shift is ultimately realised by Google / Android, not Apple.
As so often in Apple's history, the key thing is to look past the sexiness of the hardware (and perhaps its overpricing and overpromising) to the potential of the software and interface. This is where Apple has ultimately proven a game-changer in the past. The Gizmodo article and others start with the assumption that the desktop-metaphor graphical interface wasn't a good fit for mobile computing. Is this really true? And does an XL iPhone interface provide a superior alternative?
Edited: for what it's worth, for now I prefer a MacBook Pro.
😉 But I didn't even own an iPod until the nano.
