Everything Changes
Saturday, April 3, 2010 at 04:46AM Today everything starts to change. None of us know yet whether it all changes for good or for bad but I feel fairly certain that the discussions we have about computing won't be like the discussions we had last year. The change won't be overnight, but it will come.
Amit Gupta wrote an interesting post comparing laptops to point-and-shoot cameras. His point being that the rank amateurs for whom they were intended are gravitating towards camera phones and the serious amateurs are being creamed off by low-end DSLRs.
Amit draws the parallel between desktop computers (DSLRs), laptops (point-and-shoots) and the iPad (cameraphones). The only wrinkle, I'd say, is that laptops aren't as squarely aimed at amateurs than P&S cameras, but I am aware that everyone I know who owns only one computer owns a laptop.
The analogy works for me because the power of desktop computers is edging downwards in price. Witness the 27" Core i7 iMac that I use daily for all my development work. People who provably need computing power can get it in a cheapish desktop machine. Those who need serious computing power can move up to the Hasselblad of desktop machines, the Mac Pro.
I'm a photographer of sorts too and, for years, I scoffed at camera phones. I was even more contemptuous of those who seriously claimed that a camera phone was "all they wanted". How could that be, when you couldn't fix colour balance, crop, retouch, etc.
It wasn't that cameraphone users didn't care, they didn't even care to learn enough about photography to know that such things were available to care about.
Today, I shoot more pictures with my iPhone than my EOS 30D.
An example which, I argue, may generalise quite well
At the moment, my family stock of computer hardware is as follows:
I use a 27" Core i7 iMac for development, photography and most of my computing life. I have a 15" MacBook Pro that I take to school and on trips and an iPhone 3GS.
The MacBook Pro is little more than a data cache: it has a copy of my Dropbox, a few cloned Git repositories, my synced OmniFocus database and that's it. I could recreate that setup in under 10 minutes on any Mac.
Carolyn, my wife, uses a 20" Core 2 Duo iMac and an original iPhone (her 3G met, shall we say, a watery end). She uses it for using the web, email, watching BBC iPlayer and producing the occasional flyer for her Mothers & Toddlers group.
April (age 5) has an iPod touch. I didn't exactly give it to her - it was at one time a development device - but it seems clear that it's now regarded as hers. She adores audio books and is quite partial to a game of Pickin' Time.
I can easily see us becoming a one-Mac, three-iPad family by the end of 2010. Carolyn's iMac will be gone. My 15" MacBook Pro will be gone. We'll both have iPads.
At School
When I go to teach, what do I use? The tools are surprisingly simple. I use Pages, Keynote, Safari, Preview to read PDFs. The only big thing I'll miss on the iPad is Apple Remote Desktop, but I can find an admin machine for that.
It'll be fascinating to see where the rough corners show up in using the iPad as a day-to-day teaching tool. I'll be writing it up here for sure.
On The Road
The iPhone has already changed my entire travel experience. In the Olden Days, the laptop was the most important thing to take, and everything was geared around finding ways to hook it up to power and internet during layovers between Glasgow and San Francisco. Those days have been gone for a while.
In the past year, I've found that I carry the laptop "just in case something happens", where that something rarely does.
I've needed a laptop in cases where I have to give a presentation. The iPad will handle that.
I've needed a laptop in cases where I have to reply to a lot of email. It certainly seems like the iPad will stand up to that better than the iPhone.
I've needed a laptop in cases where I have to code on the road. The iPad definitely won't handle that.
In all honesty, as my children have grown up, my trips are growing shorter. As my products and development processes have matured, I'm doing fewer emergency bug fixes. When I'm travelling, I'd really rather spend my time relaxing, hanging out with My People and occasionally keeping up with the world than holed up in a hotel hacking away.
The only time I've done Serious Work on the road in the past four years was during WWDC '08 when I was rushing to get Darkslide 1.0 finished for the opening of the App Store.
The one thing that I didn't have an answer about until today was The Photography Question. It turns out, though, that the iPad supports RAW images from digital cameras (I presume the same files as Mac OS X supports).
My most data-intense photography trip of the year is when I shoot the Scottish Ruby Conference. This year - last weekend - I came home with 873 RAW images from a Canon 7D and 30D. The 7D at full-bore produces RAW images around the 24MB mark. That's about 21GB of RAW images. That's not a huge chunk out of a 64GB iPad, and many modern DSLRs will now record a reduced-resolution RAW file that's more than fine if you're just going to Flickr (where 99% of my photos end up).
Assuming the iPad can actually handle that kind of load, performance-wise, then it could become a serious tool for review in the field.
The Future's Bright
As a user, I'm extremely bullish on the iPad. The iPhone turned into more than we ever thought it could be. The iPad will be the same.
Reader Comments (7)
I agree about the iPad's potential for photographers. But until Apple gives us developers better access to the photos stored on the device (including metadata, which is stripped by UIImage) and not just the UIImagePickerController method of "pick one at a time from the library", it's difficult to imagine how third-party developers could write serious organizing tools that mimic Aperture or Lightroom.
Admittedly, the iPad can meet the needs of simple people (except for those that want to watch a DVD - in that case, one can illegally rip a copy into iTunes on another computer and sync it over - ugh).
In the situations of others a MacBook can build and debug an application and play a DVD. So why carry an iPad when you've got a MacBook that does all you might want it to do when your iPhone cannot meet your needs?
The iPad has potential. Currently, the iPad is deficient. I am confused. How do I justify purchasing one just simply to touch webpages, rss feeds and email when it cannot do all that a similarly sized MacBook could do?
@Confused
No one wants to watch a "DVD". They want to watch a movie, or TV show. a DVD is just a delivery device.
iPads do not meet the needs is simple people. They meet peoples simple needs. I am a Microsoft .NET software developer. In no way will an iPad ever take the place of my PC. But the things I do on my PC because it's the only place I can do them, can now be done in better ways.
I can read a book on my PC, but hate doing it. I could read a magazine on my PC, but enjoy holding a real one more. I can check the weather on my PC, but what takes 10-20 seconds on the PC (resume -> Crome -> bookmarks -> weather), takes 3 seconds on the iPad (or iPhone).
I can do all these things on a PC, but why would I when I can buy something to improve my lifestyle?
It's funny. The simple things are the things we do many times every day. People only think about improving the hard things in life, when we do those things rarely in comparison.
Improving the things I do all the time, is justification enough for me.
I do not mean for the "iPad cannot play DVD" debate to deter from the topic of the original question I pondered: how can I justify purchasing an iPad to carry "on the go" when it cannot replace the MacBook that I carry "on the go"?
In my experience, most people who are "on the go" watch TV shows and movies via a DVD format using a portable DVD player or their MacBook. To therefore watch TV shows and movies on the iPad I have to stumble around wasting hours of time ripping DVDs or repurchasing content (which is probably not available) from the iTunes Store. Why would anyone who wants to enjoy TV shows and movies buy an iPad to replace their MacBook?
Fraser's blog entry indicates that when Fraser is "on the go", he first resorts to his iPhone to achieve something as easily as possible, whether it is to push or pull information. If his iPhone cannot do this elegantly, he hypothesises how he could use an iPad as an elegant replacement for his MacBook. But he runs into a problem: even though his iPad can do certain things "on the go" easier or simpler, the iPad cannot do everything that he needs it to do (for example, using Remote Desktop). Instead, he makes his work more complicated for himself by adding a third tier to the problem (in this case, the admin machine). Why wouldn't he just carry his MacBook?
Then I wonder really how much simpler certain iPad specific application are. For example, Pages. Are context-sensitve popovers really more simpler than intelligent use of keyboard shortcuts?
The iPad does not improve the lifestyle of someone who is reading a book or magazine because it makes no sense to spend hundreds of dollars on a device that allows you to buy and read expensive electronic books and magazines rather than simply spending less money buying a magazine or buying/borrowing a book off the shelf.
I am confused. I still struggle to see how I could justify purchasing an iPad. The iPhone is just as effective at pulling and pushing information quickly and when more complex interaction is required, the iPad is incapable of doing specific things which people still want to do.
@Confused
As someone who has used an iPad, all I can say is sit down with one for an hour or so, and then rethink your points.
And for remote desktop, I use iTap RDP client. It works very well. If I want to watch TV or movies, I can stream from Netflix, ABC, TV.com, Youtube, and soon to be Hulu.
As for books. Again, please play with an iPad and then form your opinion about it. It's one of those "have to see" kind of things.
The only real argument I see, is the price one. If you can't justify the price, please don't buy one. But for people who can, it makes perfect sense as an additional tool to help improve your lifestyle.
For example, I know many people who have a cleaning service, and yet I know of no one who can't clean there own house. For me, I can't justify the cost when I can just do it myself. But that does not make them "wrong" for utilizing something that benefits there lives. Same goes for the iPad. It's not going to be everything for everyone, but for those who it does work for, it's great.
Thanks MrMafoo, I will seek to use one soon.
I agree that the iPad excels at certain consumption tasks, like light gaming, reading, browsing, and video, but I fail to see how it will replace the laptop. In its current state, it just can’t completely replace the capabilities of a desktop/laptop operating system. You seem to be implying that the laptop is not so portable, and it’s not so powerful. Yet when I (personally) consider both portability and capability, the laptop seems far more useful than the desktop and the iPad. In other words, the desktop and iPad are terribly deficient at either portability or performance, while the laptop almost matches the portability of the iPad and performance of the desktop.
Your solution is to ditch the laptop, and keep the desktop around for when you need that extra power. But won’t you now find yourself in situations where you’re on-the-go, yet unable to complete something on the iPad? Or you’re working on your desktop, and now unable to leave?
I realize that interacting with an iPad is far better experience than interacting with a traditional PC, and I’m sure iPad class devices of the future will be far more capable than what we currently have, but right now I just can’t really see how I would personally be able to limit myself to the iPad when I’m not at my desk. To each their own.