As I sat with a colleague the other night at an investor conference, the clock pushed past six thirty. At around that time, somewhere in San Francisco, Steve Jobs was unveiling the latest apple gizmo to the world. My colleague lent over to show me a text (on his iPhone) that he had received from a friend: "sounds like an apple sanitary towel" were the words that filled his screen. We both knew what the message meant. The ipad was here.
Once home later that evening, I went to apple and watched the apple infotorial video. That in itself is a bit of an event, the production so sleek it is akin to receiving your lovefilm dvd through the post. I just want to know how everyone at Apple is so camera confident, how they speak like super product promoters from another world. The opening Apple Product Director dude opens the video with; "its true, when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical". Wow. He is right; I do not understand fully how a toilet works. Magical. I start thinking I will be better off with a very late edition of match of the day. I do both, stick with the video but keep one eye on the events at Everton vs Sunderland. Magical.
I am impressed though with the video, with the explanation of the product, it seems pretty good. I go to bed and do not really ponder it further, night-night team-apple-innovation; you have only gone and done it again.
As I awake in the morning, I get a bit of a shock. The coverage, pretty much across the board, seems, erm... negative.
...rah - "it is an over sized iPhone... that does not make calls... with crappy memory too small for me but too big for you, it is no laptop, it is not even a moleskine diary, it is just a toy for people who do not know how to use computers"... on and on it went.
I think back to the iPhone, or the iMac. Did this happen then? I don't think it did. Is this the inevitable anything-but-apple backlash? Is this the pent up aggression of the die hard PC brigade? Is it people with nothing better to do? Is it a product of an overly critical society, forever damned by the great depression of the 21st century? Who knows, either way, people didn't seem to really like it.
Well, I do like it. I would just like to state at this point, I am not an apple aficionado. OK, so I have a mac or two and an ipod, but doesn't everyone? I like it for 2 main reasons:
1. It is truly portable. I have always felt the archetypal laptop has problems. It is fine on a solid surface, like a train table, but what happens if you are on the bus?? More acutely, it is pretty useless in the modern Darwin slouch position. I want to be connected whilst on my sofa, watching match of the day. My current laptop kicks in the fan after ten minutes at the moment, because no matter what the position, the air vents get blocked to some degree. May I take this opportunity to ask for a waterproof ipad, for the lilo in the pool, or for those less fortunate, the bath?
2. The apps look good. Some have been purposely developed for the ipad. The app market is radically changing the way we use the web, and at Google towers they must represent the biggest (or only) risk on a relatively bare risk slide. For us, our business is effectively a series of applications. Instant access platforms and hardware that support app use is great for our customers and probably pretty good for common web usage.
OK, so I said 2, but I am going to add in another here. I think the ipad will have success at reaching new markets, namely kids and old people (can you say old anymore?). At the same aforementioned investors conference there was a file sharing/comms site for the elderly. I mumbled to my colleague that I felt the challenge for old people was hardware rather than the current set of websites. The ipad can probably help in those markets, but as I am not currently in either of those markets I did not count it as a main reason.
Perhaps it is a shame that it does not make phone calls after all. Somebody mentioned that we could all have our one moment of being Dom Jolly. No matter how long I stewed over that idea, it never seemed particularly exhilarating.