If you listened to anyone but Apple, the new world-shaking product they introduced Wednesday was going to revolutionize existence itself. Apple, with its usual silence about the details of new products, had nothing to say. When the much-anticipated moment finally arrived and CEO Steve Jobs appeared onstage with the iPad, we finally got to see what his miracle creation could do.On the very first day came the criticism: It isn’t a cell phone. It isn’t a Macintosh with the OS X operating system. It has NO camera! It can’t multitask (run more than one program at a time). In short, it is not the miracle life-defining savior of humanity that was predicted by a salivating press.
Dang.
In spite of all that, the iPad does at least one thing that I think makes it worth the price—it runs the same applications as the iPhone/iPod touch. All gazillion of them. Recently two covers of The New Yorker magazine were drawn on iPhones with a little program called Brushes. If a full-blown magazine cover can be drawn on the tiny screen of a cell phone, imagine how much more can be done on the much larger screen of the iPad. I know at least one person who has had a hankering for the Wacom Cintiq computer which allows you to draw on a full-color screen directly, rather than using a graphics pad with a stylus and watching what you’re doing on a detached monitor. But the Cintiq costs at least $1,000 for its poor quality cheapo version and about $2,000 for its larger better version. Compare that to $499 for a basic iPad and $4.99 for Brushes. New Yorker, here we come!You just wait, the iPad will soon become the raison d'être for humanity itself. I’ll bet my Apple stock on it!
2 comments:
As soon as it can run Painter X with all the sensitivity of a Wacom, it's MINE!
Do you remember the hype preceding the introduction of the Segway Human Transporter? People with advance information on the product referred to it as "IT," followed by an awed moment of silence. The buzz was that the world would be forever transformed.
Of course a myriad of laws has hampered the spread of Segways. It was invented too late in history. As they say, if the ladder or hammer were invented today, they'd be banned as unsafe products.
I have not yet heard any rumors of bans on the iPad.
But there will be problems at Apple stores in New England, where "iPad" and "iPod" have the same pronunciation. "Dang! I asked for and iPad, but they gave me an iPad!"
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