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Is Apple Throwing Serious Portable Users Under The Bus With iPad? - The ‘Book Mystique

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

by Charles W. Moore

Okay, that may be putting it a bit harshly. However, Steve Jobs did say without qualification last Wednesday that the TypePad is “better than” either a laptop or a smartphone.

To which I am constrained to respond: better how, and for whom? I don’t doubt that there are some things the iPad will be better at than either of these established form factors, but there are plenty of aspects where the iPad — cool as it is, will emphatically not be ‘better” than a laptop at especially, for example, a whole spectrum of workaday tasks that serious users demand of their computing platforms. For example, PC World’s Cisco Cheng has compiled a list of 42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple iPad

Now, to be fair, web workers and other professional computer users are not the market the iPad is aimed at primarily, but there’s definitely an implication asserted that this new machine could potentially fill a crossover role for road warrior pro users, facilitating carriage of just one, light, compact and comfortable to handle device, rather than two or three, which is an attractive concept, so long as the replacement unit is up to the demands of the job.

Unfortunately, there are several areas where the iPad isn’t. I’m hoping that it will expand and evolve into a more satisfactory work platform as well as an entertainment and information reading machine, but it’s a long way from being there yet.

Photo Courtesy Apple

At this point, while it probably has plenty of processing power (estimated to be about 1 GHz, although reportedly the iPad’s A4 CPU is actually a system-on-chip integrating an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore with a memory controller’ can be clocked to about 1.3 GHz at the cost of “significant thermal penalty”) to do word processing and spreadsheets with ease Web browsing and email of course, and thanks to Apple’s provision of a special iPad edition of iWork — presentations as well. Also probably light duty image-editing provided appropriate software AND an adequate pointing device are available. Presumably there will be third-party productivity software solutions offered for the iPad as well.

The lack of multitasking capability is problematical, but the areas where the iPad falls down hard are input/output, connectivity and expandability. Neither memory nor data storage specifications are upgradable. You’re stuck with whatever amount of RAM Apple solders in (still unannounced) and no more, and whichever SSD capacity option you pick out of the three available, but if you go for, say, the $500 entry-level price-leader unit, you have 16 GB of storage capacity, minus formatting, forevermore, world without end.

As for connectivity, with no USB or FireWire ports, no Ethernet, and optional at extra cost additions needed even to download photos from a digital camera or for video out, and no SD card slot, these are all shortcomings that make the iPad definitely “not better” than what you get with any MacBook (save for in some instances the MacBook Air) or even for that matter the humblest PC netbook.

These problems are not unfixable. Neither the original clamshell iBook nor the one-generation aluminum MacBook shipped with a FireWire port initially. The clamshell eventually got one with that machine’s ultimate “Paris” revision in September, 2000, and FireWire support was restored to the 13 inch unibody aluminum ‘Book when it evolved into a full-fledged MacBook Pro at its first revision last June.

Keeping it real, I don’t expect to ever see FireWire on an iPad, but USB should be certainly thinkable, and a SD card reader slot should also conceivably be doable as well.

Indeed, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the iPad that cannot be remedied to satisfy those of us who could use a lightweight second computer for work tasks on the go.

The $69 (reportedly) optional charging and external keyboard dock eliminates what would have been a deal-breaker obstacle for many of us. There’s no way I can take a machine dependent on a virtual touchscreen keyboard seriously as a production tool. Unfortunately, Apple has only met us halfway on the input side of things, since the iPad incorporates no mouse support, although with the addition of an appropriate driver, there occurs to me no reason why Bluetooth mice shouldn’t work since the iPad supports Bluetooth. The fact that it isn’t there already makes one suspect that it’s more touchscreen advocacy stubbornness on Apple’s part than any technological obstacle to mouse support.

The way I would envision using an iPad is as a mobile platform for use on the road. For example, as it happens I’m typing this paragraph right now on my old Pismo PowerBook sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. The Pismo does a good job, but I can imagine an iPad being much cooler and nicer to pack around for this sort of duty, and I would even concede that the virtual touchscreen keyboard would probably be adequate for occasional short term input tasks like this. However, when I got home, I would want to be able to connect the iPad to its dock at a desktop workstation and interface with it via a real keyboard, which will be possible, and a real mouse, trackpad, or trackball, which at this stage of the game is not. I prefer to sit far enough away from the screen of my work device that pointing, clicking and dragging by touching the screen would be impractical, and at the best of times that sort of hybrid interfacing would be clumsy and inelegant.

Of course. I could just be barking up the wrong tree here, and perhaps Apple really doesn’t give a hoot whether power users embrace the iPad. As TUAW’s Erica Sadun observed last week, it’s primarily targeting the same sot of users as those who embraced netbooks, making them the only healthy-selling sector of the non-Apple PC hardware universe during this recession. As Sadun puts it, netbooks are about affordable convenience and mobility — small, insanely cheap, and providing just enough functionality to get a few things done without jumping into serious work that would demand a full-sized screen and keyboard. Aside from the “insanely cheap” part, pretty much the same could be said for the iPad.

Seattlepi.com’s Jason McC. Smith agrees, noting that the average non-professional, non geek-oriented consumer doesn’t care about multitasking, or modularity and customizability, or browsable flexible file systems with redundancy, journaling and distributed storage, and in fact prefer not to be bothered with any of that. Smith perceives a brewing predict that in this decade, we’ll see a split in computing, on the same scale as the microcomputer/mainframe schism of the 1970s.

Well, he’s probably right, but a truly work-worthy machine along the lines of the iPad is still a tantalizing concept, and if a rumor that bubbled to the surface earlier this week has any substance to it, there may be cause for hope after all.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler posted that according to a usually-reliable insider source, Apple may actually be hard at work on a second device, an ‘iPad Pro” if you will, bigger and much more like a Mac than an iPhone, with a screen maybe as big as the 15.4” one it currently uses in the middle MacBook Pro and running OS X 10.7 instead of the iPhone OS.

Siegler hastened to emphasize that this is a pure rumor that you should take with a grain of salt, but if there really is substance to this speculation, it would certainly make mouse input, multitasking, and countless other good stuff we love about OS X a given, and tablet computing a lot more attractive to those of us who do serious work on our Macs.

Personally, computer time is primarily not leisure time for me. I’m not a gamer, and the only game installed on my MacBook is the default OS X Chess app., which I’ve never used, even though I enjoy playing chess with live opponents on a real chessboard. I’m not a Facebooker or a Twitterer. Some 95 percent of my computer time is work time, so while I can grasp the attractiveness of the iPad as it’s been presented as an entertainment and social networking device, a work/productivity-tablet would really pique my interest.

But is Apple interested in serving that market?

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