iPad is Not a Toy. You Do the Math

Apple released iPad. Not too much surprise. It is a tablet and it is a lot like what the rumors said. Did I expect too much? Yes. Am I disappointed by iPad? Not really. Do I lose faith in iPad? Absolutely no! iPad is a great product. It is not just a big iPhone. It is not just a toy. It started changing how a computer should work for most of the things we use computers for.

During his presentation, Steve Jobs clearly defined the market of iPad - it is a "third category" mobile device between smart phones and laptops. This definition again brings back the question that everybody asked before - why do we need a third category mobile device? As for Steve Jobs' answer, the reason is that we need to do "key things" in a "far better" way. I totally buy this rationale. We really need this "third category". It covers the most important tasks, including reading emails, browsing the Web, listening to musics, watching videos, playing games and reading ebooks. It also covers a lot of scenarios where the first two categories are not good enough. These scenarios add up to a significant amount of time of using a computer. All these boil down to a simple math problem:

The reality is that "A" is becoming bigger and bigger and "C" is becoming smaller and smaller. Obviously, this leads to a more and more significant difference. So do the math, then you will realize that iPad is not just a toy, it is a serious and useful device for everybody.

One could certainly argue that even if the difference becomes bigger, I can still use either a smart phone or a laptop to cover it. Yes, of course you can, but iPad just makes it far better than a smart phone or a laptop. It is fast. It is convenient. It has a new human-computer interface, which matters the most.

The keyboard-mouse-monitor interface has not changed for decades. It has been working pretty well, but it is certainly not the ideal one. What iPad provides is a much better interface. In my opinion, the human-computer interface should be as similar as possible to what we do things in the real world, meanwhile leverage computing power to help us do things better. Take the photo app on iPad as an example. It makes photo piles and lets the user to spread/stack up a pile of photos. It is better than how iPhoto works. It is more natural and fun. In the meantime, it helps people share photos, make photo books, organize photos by tags, geographic information, faces and such, which traditional photo albums can not do. This is how a computer should work.

Many people think iPad is a content consumer. I don't think it is true. It is brilliant for Apple to port iWork to iPad, which makes iPad much more than a content consumer. iWork significantly enlarges the use case space of iPad. For example, think about high school students, or even college students. They can use iPad to take notes, read text books, write reports and make presentations. How cool is that?

Is iPad good enough for everything? One can easily come up with thousands of things that iPad can not do. It's true. I can come up with thousands of things that a laptop, or even a desktop can not do as well. Does it prevent me from buying a laptop instead of a super computer? No. Because a laptop is good enough for most tasks. The just unveiled iPad is not intended to replace everything. But for average computer users, it does most of their tasks in a much better way. As for the next generation, or the generation after... I think iPad will become the first thing to think about when somebody needs to buy a computer.

Thirty years ago, nobody could imagine that a computer can be put on a desk, until Apple released Apple II and soon IBM released 5150. Ten years ago, nobody believed that a laptop could be as powerful as a desktop. Today, most of my friends have only a laptop and a big monitor at home. It is way too early to conclude that iPad, tablets in general, won't be the next  mainstream personal computing device. Give it time, things will change. iPad has no doubt just started this change now.