A few thoughts on the iPad
February 16th, 2010 • Culture Briefings
There have been a few dismissals of the iPad. My Facebook feed was flooded for a few hours last night with friends calling the iPad an exaggerated version of the iPhone. While that judgement may not be far off the mark, I am personally quite excited for the iPad and the potential impact it can have on the content publishing worlds. So a few things off the top of my head:
New Markets – I think the main thing the iPad will do is unlock new markets and underserved audiences. I’m thinking my 50-yr old Mom or my 5 year old niece. The broad applicability and price points of this device will fill the niche for readers who want more than just books on their device and computer users who want a scaled down version of their PC. I’m curious to see how existing publishers will optimize for these markets and the platform.
Content: I’ve head some very smart people talk and discuss “the medium is not the message” argument. While I am not sure I even understand the more academic discourses on this topic, one thing is clear to me. The medium may not be the message, but the medium will certainly dictate and push for innovation in the deliverance and creation of the message. Much like what the iPhone did with the application community. I think it will be interesting to see as the iPad technology evolves, what kind of new markets and industries it decides to support. The strongest advantage the iPad has against the Kindle (sorry Nook – I’m not even sure, I should include you here in the competition!) is its iTunes network.
Over a pizza discussion with the team the other day, Justin bought up an interesting POV. He mentioned how the future should actually have been convergence of technologies into one device – but the iPad actually fragments this convergence. What are your thoughts about this?
Update: This news article re-affirms my initial thoughts about the iPad’s target audience: the middle-aged.
Hey Jinal!
So I finally got a chance to sit & catch up on your blog and I want to let you know that I agree with you on the iPad. Another market that people are not thinking about are people with disabilities. While I can’t speak for people who are physically disabled, I can make an observation about people with mental disabilities. My younger brother has fragile-x syndrome and this will really be a great thing for him. Right now, while he is fascinated by my iPhone, he finds it difficult to type on the smaller keyboard and often gets frustrated. He enjoys reading interactive books online and also watching youtube videos, but carrying around a laptop with a 3G card is kind of cumbersome. With the iPad and it’s built in 3G, we won’t have to worry about the bulkiness of a laptop, or quickly losing power on a long car ride. With the larger screen and the bigger keyboard, he will be able to use it without getting frustrated. The parent’s in my brothers class have an email group and when the iPad was launched, my dad showed me some and how excited the parents were to have a source of entertainment for their children that they would actually be able to use (sometimes finding computers a bit too frustrating).
I think that we will see a quick evolution of the iPad, just as we saw with the iPhone. It may never have all the features peopel want, but if they want a tablet computer, they should buy one, the iPad is not exactly that. But I’m not going to lie, if it had handwriting functionality, I would be in the front of that line!
-Neha