Is Apple Throwing Keyboard-Mouse-Trackpad Traditionalists Under The Bus?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
by Charles W. Moore Last week an as yet still in-development product called ClamCase came to my attention. ClamCase is an iPad case, of which there are many, but with a couple of unique features -- a clamshell form factor and a built-in Bluetooth keyboard that can configure the IPad as an ersatz laptop computer -- or more accurately a netbook stand-in.
ClamCase has certainly piqued my interest, although on sober second thought I’m inclined to the view that if I’m going to run a small computer that doesn’t support my production suite of Mac OS applications, I would sooner get a real laptop notebook running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Linux, with a proper keyboard and off-screen pointing device. Even with the ClamCase you’re still going to be awkwardly reaching over the keyboard for pointing, clicking, and dragging tasks.
As nighthacks.com's James Gosling finds after a week of iPadding the iPad is exactly as easy and as hard to pack around as a laptop, taking up takes up a hand or backpack slot - a little lighter, but not enough to make a difference, and it's a whole lot less useful than a laptop..
That said, I seem to be swimming against a considerably stronger current here than I anticipated. For a year or so as the pre–release iPad rumor phase ramped up, I found it very difficult to envision a touchscreen tablet device of any sort substantially challenging the astonishing market ascendance of the netbook, which was enjoying as recently as last July a mind-boggling 641% year-over-year sales growth rate according to Morgan Stanley and NPD Group data. That pace obviously couldn’t be sustained, but I was gobsmacked last week by statistics showing that notebook sales growth has not just slowed, but fallen off a cliff.
The reason? the iPad is the prime suspect, selling like hotcakes in the early going to the tune of 1 million units in its first month. I had expected the iPad to be a respectable market success, but nothing of this magnitude, and even confronted with the actual metrics, I still simply don’t get it.
In a research note last week, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty noted that netbook sales plunged in January, when Apple announced the iPad, and flatlined in April, after the iPad’s release, dropping off to 179 percent in December, plummeting to 68 percent in January and evaporating to a pathetic 5 percent by April.
Appleinsider's Sam Oliver reports that the March 2010 Alphawise survey of iPad buyers commented on by Katy Huberty found that 44 percent would purchase Apple's new device instead of a notebook, and for 27 percent of buyers the iPad will even replace a desktop computer, and that 41 percent will pass over buying an iPod touch now that they have the tablet. I find it a bit disconcerting that such a large proportion of users have standards that low, but the market is inevitably boss.
However, I perceive a schism developing between keyboard/mouse traditionalists like myself and touch aficionados with the iPad serving as a wedge. A recent Gartner Group report (“If Touch Works Everywhere Else, Why Not on PCs?”, available on the Gartner website at: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1324125 ) predicts more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens by 2015. “What we’re going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises,” comments Gartner research vice president Leslie Fiering,. “By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009.”
Gartner also notes that serious workers in the enterprise will be very reluctant to embrace the touch interface, and, projects that even five years from now in 2015 , fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises for mainstream knowledge workers will have touchscreens, with the overwhelming majority of slate, tablet and touch-enabled devices to will have a consumer focus.
“As with many recent technology advances, touch adoption will be led by consumers and only gradually get accepted by the enterprise,” says Ms. Fiering. “What will be different here is the expected widespread adoption of touch by education, so that an entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural.”
The imminent schism is illustrated in a chart in Huberty’s report showing device categories the iPad is expected “cannibalize”, showing that a whopping 27% of iPad purchases will be made instead of a desktop PC, and 44% in favour of a laptop, the latter figure I find especially dismaying as a consummate laptop aficionado. Like I said, I just don’t get the iPad as a computer replacement, at least for anyone who uses computers for serious work.
There's the lame virtual keyboard and lack of pointing device driver issues, and the iPad's woefully pathetic poverty of connectivity, its lack of multitasking support, and the constraints on user freedom inherent to the maddeningly locked down iPhone OS environment. As TUAW's TJ Luoma observed in an article last week, "The lack of a usable filesystem in iPad is already a big issue, perhaps the biggest issue faced by a number of people who are trying to use it for content creation and management.... Don't believe me? Take all of the files in your Home folder on your Mac and put them on your Desktop without any folders. Or create 'Saved Searches' for certain kinds of files, such as PDFs or images, and try using them exclusively for awhile. See for yourself if your exclamations are inspired by awe or anger."
The 64 dollar question at this juncture is the level of Apple’s commitment to continuing to supply competitive laptop hardware and keeping the Mac OS updated and contemporary. Uncertainty about these matters (to say nothing of the unresolved bugginess of OS 10.6 which Apple has seemed in no hurry to address (keeping my fingers crossed for the OS 10.6.4 update) has me for the first time seriously musing about what Linux has to offer, especially Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” release, whose GUI is the first-ever non-Mac example I deem easier on the eyes than OS X.
I’ll emphasize at this point that there is no danger of me defecting to Linux in the foreseeable future. I like my Mac hardware too much, and am somewhat dependent on dictation software, of which there is none of acceptable quality available for Linux.
I’m also addicted to Tex Edit Plus’s close AppleScript integration and certain particular text managing features I like, as well as elements of the Mac OS itself that I really would prefer not living without.
However, I wouldn’t be averse to installing Ubuntu 10.04 on a separate hard drive partition, if I had room on my HD, which I currently don’t with both OS 10.5 and OS 10.6 loaded up. With hard drive space being as cheap as it is these days, getting a bigger drive isn’t beyond condieration.
Lifehacker notes that but installing Linux isn’t exactly easy on Macs, since they don’t recognize it by default, but it is doable for the determined, having thoughtfully posted a step-by-step guide to making the installation experience as user-friendly as possible.
For the full tutorial, visit:
http://bit.ly/b3InrO
And of course there’s the option of buying an inexpensive PC netbook to experiment with.
In a recent essay, ServerWatch's Paul Rubens predicts that Apple will fade from relevance in the computing space as it focuses more and more on touch-based consumer iGadgets, and that if you're an old-school Mac fan, Ubuntu appears to be evolving into a computing environment that's as powerful, easy to use, and arguably more stylish than Snow Leopard. Food for thought.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/ubuntu_10_04_review/
The Register's Scott Gilbertson in a review of Ubuntu 10.04 called it a "Mactastic Experience," and reports that Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth wants Ubuntu to beat Apple's OS X on features and interface polish, and although it's not quite there yet, the version 10.04 release marks a huge leap for Linux GUI and advances Lucid Lynx well on its way to Shuttleworth's goal, and that this latest iteration includes quite a few new applications, features, and services that make Ubuntu seem more like user-friendly OS X than the Linux of the command line loving past and approaching what everyday consumers want in an operating system, boasting quite a few features Apple can't match and not insignificantly it's free.
Will Apple continue down the touch interface road, to OS X and the Mac’s disadvantage? Could Linux represent the future for serious computer users who can’t stomach the Windows experience? Beats me, but just sayin’.
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