No discussion about Apple’s products is without controversy. The company seems to engender intense feelings of extreme fanaticism on the one hand, while others avoid its products like the plague, all the while claiming its CEO, Steve Jobs, as the next anti-Christ.
For a long time now though, Apple has been focusing on delivering superior products targeting a wide audience. In doing so, it has evolved usability and interfaces and set the competition scrambling to catch up. Starting with the iPod, it shook up music distribution and consumption, spawning dozens of imitators. It repeated the exercise in the mobile industry, with the innovative iPhone.
It’s latest product, the iPad, arrived in Ireland last week (along with 8 other countries) and true to form, it has polarized opinion. But will it shake up the computing industry in the same way as it’s other products?
The detractors may say that the iPad is really an iPod Touch with a bigger screen. This is like saying that a Ferrari is simply a Reliant with a bigger engine. Such comparisons are superficial and purely physical. In fact, the size difference is the key. By having a larger screen, browsing websites, reading email, magazines, and newspapers, watching movies, keeping notes and even reading books is so much easier.
Having used the iPad for a couple of weeks now, it is clear that Apple have got it right. It is simple to use, completely hiding the complexity of modern computer platforms from the user. By completely abandoning the ‘WIMP’ interaction style, Apple has somehow indicated a different future for computing.
When you turn on the TV, it starts automatically on a channel and you can simply watch. This is consumer electronics – an ‘On’ switch, simple controls and it just works. The iPad is a giant step along the way towards such ‘consumer electronic’ style computing.
Like it or hate it, get used to it.
