The iPad, revisited

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?” —Steve Jobs

* * *

So said Jobs in a killer e-mail exchange with a Gawker blogger who wrote him to complain about…well, I’m not sure, exactly, but it seems the blogger was mostly upset with the the unusually harsh restrictions Apple puts on their iPhone OS platform, where they approve or disapprove every program in the App Store, and don’t support the common Web technology of Flash.

(Brief aside: Flash is lame, but the tech enables some cool stuff, like Hulu. It reminds me of the furor over Windows Vista’s built-in copy protection, which would constantly check your hardware for compliance when playing back certain kinds of copy-protected content. Well, that’s annoying, right? But now you can watch a Blu-Ray on Windows, while you can’t on OS X. Kinda the same deal. Not big enough for me to switch from an iPhone, especially since Hulu seems to want to block phones anyway, but Flash isn’t all bad.)

You should really read the exchange, because it’s hilarious how quickly the guy gets defensive about his, um, choices in entertainment. But Jobs’ quote (which I loved) about creating things struck me, because it helped me express why I was so disappointed by the iPad.

The iPad, to me, seems like a fantastic device for consuming content. Reading websites, watching videos, checking Facebook—the device was almost purpose-built for some of these functions. And it seems good for e-books, if you’re the kind of sucker who’s into them. But, particularly for someone who writes occasionally, the iPad seems horrific for content creation. I hate the typing experience, even though I love the touchscreen keyboard on the iPhone.

And in our universe there exist laptops, which are way better for some kinds of content creation with their built-in keyboards, and are only a little worse (and in some cases better) for most types of information and entertainment consumption.

But I’m rethinking for two reasons. The first was an article on Gizmodo by a writer who says he can replace his laptop with an iPad in part by typing with a Bluetooth keyboard. Fair enough. Maybe not ideal, but it’s at least an option. The second was Apple’s latest TV ad for the device, which allowed me to see the product as something with potential, rather than as a computer for morons.

It can do some cool things: like when the guy flips the iPad over to someone to show them what’s on the screen (much better than trying to huddle around a laptop), or my favorite, the sheet music application. If I were a musician, I’d kill for a device that would let me take all my sheet music everywhere. And then I guess they wouldn’t let me be a musician anymore.

So I am beginning to come around. On the other hand, it’s not like you can set your iPad on top of a stack of sheet music at night and have it learn it all by the time you wake up. So while the technology is slick, and the form factor has much more potential than I initially recognized, I still wouldn’t spend five hundred dollars for the thing as it is today. But I think I’ll no longer be shocked if the iPad becomes a huge success—if it hasn’t already.