Having once had a professional association with Apple and having lived through many such breakthrough Apple announcements in the past thirty years, my first reaction was, "Meh. It's a big fat iPhone." Which engaged me in so many offline discussions that I feel compelled to summarize them here.
I have one friend who's convinced that the iPad is the most revolutionary thing since the invention of the universe. (For the record, he felt the same way about the Segway.) Another can't wait to get his mitts on the SDK because he's convinced he's going to make a fortune writing apps for it. (Just like you did for the Newton and the iPhone? How's that working out for you?) A third, who surprisingly is a die-hard long-time member of the Evangelical Mac congregation, considers it, "really cute but basically useless."
Me, I've looked at the specs, and I see that it has a built-in mic, built-in speakers, a headphone jack, a SIM socket, support for DRM, always-on 3G wifi, and Bluetooth—and more surprisingly, no support for Java or Flash.
So first off: yes, it will function like a big fat iPhone, if that's how you want to use it. You will be able to use it as a speaker phone, if you must, but most people will use it with a Bluetooth headset.
Off-topic Sidebar:Now that my office is downtown, that's one of my newly discovered joys. When you see some scuzzy-looking fellow standing in a skyway corridor facing the wall and talking to himself, it's no longer possible to tell whether he's a crazy homeless guy or an IT professional with a Bluetooth headset. Hence my proposed solution to the homeless problem: give 'em all Bluetooth headsets. Then everyone can get back to politely ignoring them.Back to the iPad. The single most interesting thing about it to me, though, is that Apple has already made deals with Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill to provide books in ePub format for the (what else) iBooks app.
So figure the product announcement is now, actual deliveries start in three months, and for the next six months Apple's highly vaunted institutional sales force is going to be pounding down doors and signing exclusive deals with universities all over the country. Come next Fall, incoming students at many major universities will be "strongly encouraged" to buy an iPad (at the usual healthy student discount to ease the pain, but who cares since it's all daddy's or student loan money anyway) and "lease" their textbooks from the iBookstore (or more likely some cross-licensing deal with the U bookstore). Then, thanks to the magic of DRM and always-on 3G connectivity, at the end of the semester the "old" textbooks will simply disappear from the student's iPad, making room for next semester's textbooks, and the student will get a little message thanking him or her for being so green and saying how many trees and landfills have been saved and how much the student's carbon footprint has been reduced by using iBooks.
And over at Macmillan and McGraw-Hill there will be much rejoicing, for the profit-crippling used textbook resale market will effectively cease to exist, and over at Amazon.com there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, for a very significant share of the independent bookstore business revolves around brokering and reselling used college textbooks.
Your thoughts, comments, and observations, s'il vous plait?
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