My iPad time capsule
A friend asked me if I was planning to get an iPad. I started answering “I haven’t decided yet…” and then, without even an inflection on my voice, before ending the sentence I added to it “…why I will buy it“.
In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode…
In my defense, I believe that whatever reason I would concoct at this point (and believe me, I have read books worth of postings and discussions about this issue), by the time I am using it and depending on it, I will discover that, all along, I was blind to the most powerful reason to get it, and that such reason was the “naked emperor in the room”.
So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time. We’ll see how I do in a few months, when I already have it and depend on it:
- CAPTIVE ENTERTAINMENT – I spend a large enough amount of time captive in planes, trains, and hotels; I also like reading, movies and music (almost as much as my iPhone games) a whole lot. One-plus-one equals $500;
- A GREATER WAY TO USE EVERNOTE – Everybody who knows me knows that I am a fanatic of Evernote. I have written in this blog a couple of times how, being able to maximize my use of only Evernote is a pet project. Well, I see the iPad as more portable than my laptop and more comfortable to annotate on (in the extended sense of what is a note for Evernote). Yes, I know that I will miss the camera, but I also know that the second iteration of the iPad will have it, and in the meanwhile the iPhone will fill in;
- I LOVE WRITING BY HAND – Yes, I am an old f#rt, I still love hand-writing, and I believe that the gap between ink and interpreted ASCII text is quickly going away. So much so, that I have bought every reasonably different implementation of tablets, all the way from the three Newton generations, to the Nokia tablet (so close, yet so far), to the frustrating Windows tablet (which, if Microsoft had not been so anti-innovation, would probably dominate the category today) to the iRex e-readers you can also write on (very badly implemented by iRex, but intriguing). They have all fallen short, and I have complete faith that Apple will crack that nut open;
- CONFIDENCE IN APPLE – I have for months told everyone who asked me about the iPad that when it came out, it would prove that it was a market creator, like other legendary Apple products were. It would do so by finding an activity that is not only compelling, but also unthinkable of in other devices (like, say, listening to music in an iPod, or playing a game in an iPhone, or similar). I would’ve loved it for Apple to make that application obvious in the pre-release, but that hasn’t yet come through; yes, we already know that watching a movie in it, or using the Calendar for appointments, will be something else… but not a category-creating experience. I was hoping that Apple had found a killer social app that would justify the tablet (if something new is about to happen, almost certainly will be in this domain)… I still have confidence that a killer app exists or will emerge soon: either Apple knows, and is not talking yet, or the brilliance of the engineering in the iPad will be so compelling that somebody else, an app provider probably, will create a new category (like Aldus on the first Macs).
Can’t wait to comment on this post four months from now…
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 11:10 am and is filed under desktop tools, gadgetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.