Like a lot of my friends, I anxiously awaited the announcement of this new Apple Tablet with a great deal of trepidation. And that trepidation was not disappointed. Which is to say, I was left after the big announcement feeling unfulfilled and disappointed. I wasn't sure exactly what this new 'iPad' thing was trying to be, but I knew that it wasn't what I was hoping that Apple would reveal.
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What exactly IS this thing?
Steve Jobs started his pitch by describing the two current prongs of their mobile initiative: phones and laptops. These are two extremes, with more differences than similarities. They run different operating systems, have different developer kits. One is a true computer, the other is a very ambitious telephone. The laptops have a powerful, flexible OS, integrated keyboards, wi-fi, massive hard drives, massive processors, and massive power needs. The phones, on the other end, have a concentrated OS, with the focus on minimal interfaces, and limited but targeted functionality: apps on the iPhone don't usually do very much, but they do it well and efficiently. Laptop applications, especially ones that have been around for a while (I'm looking at you, Adobe Creative Suite) have terrible legacy-bloat and memory management, gobbling up RAM and hard drive space like Junior Mints at a double-feature.
This promise of a new product channel, fitting somewhere between these two, bridging this gap between hardware-enabled bloat and a limited but focused micro-machine, is something I'd been looking forward to. Sadly, what we got was simply a souped-up iPod Touch.
Yes, it's basically an iPod Touch, but with a bigger screen
Ebook readers have been the rage among the uber-nerdy tech users for years now, but the Amazon Kindle really lit a fire under this nacent market. And since its release, tech prognosticators have been seeing the imminent release of a challenger from Apple. Longtime Apple users like myself, however, have been hoping for a tablet-computing solution from Apple ever since we saw the ModBook debut at MacWorld 2007. With its Wacom-enabled screen, this after-market iBook modification had some serious drool-factor, and it remains the only authorized tablet form-factor featuring Mac OS X. The Modbook compromises none of the functionality of the iBook (and now MacBook) hardware that it's built on, except the loss of the integrated keyboard, but that was no matter to me since I've been using an external keyboard with my laptop for years now anyway. This is essentially the hardware I was personally hoping for from today's event - a superportable laptop with pressure-sensitive stylus input (as well as the multi-touch technology that is so handy), and the ability to double as a second monitor for another computer, a widescreen video and dvd player, and since it could run any of the great eBook and comics reading applications currently available for the Mac (including the Kindle's own software, someday), it would automatically be the best eBook reader on the market.
The device revealed by Apple this morning has many shortcomings when compared with other tablets on the market. But the biggest fault, in my opinion, is that it's been tied to the iPhone OS. This smaller, sleeker OS was designed for the limited storage and processing power available on the portable phones. It wasn't designed for larger applications. The operating system alone is enough to push this device closer to the iPhone than the laptop on the spectrum of portable devices - sleek and speedy, but with limited flexibility of function.
The design of the iPad, it seems to me, is practically an acknowledgment from Apple that the iPhone and iPod Touch are simply not good enough for doing a lot of what people are doing with them. Watching TV and video from the iTunes store, reading the news feeds, even browsing basic websites - the iPhone is so bad at doing these things that Apple felt they needed to introduce a new device just for them. Because at its core, that's exactly what the iPad is: a device for doing the things that are too cumbersome to do on your phone. It's certainly not powerful enough to do any heavy computing. And based on the screen specs, with its 1024x768 pixel resolution, I feel the closest laptop comparison that could be made would be with a mid-2000's iBook (and even then, the iPad would be found lacking).
Some friends of mine were arguing today that the beauty of the iPad is not what it's capable of today, but what it'll be capable of in five, ten years. Sadly, though, I fear that as long as it's saddled with this operating system, it's never really going to be capable of much more than it already is. One of my problems with this is that I feel like the technology exists to make the iPad so much better than it is, why does it feel like we just took a giant step backward? Excepting the iPhone OS and the multitouch interface, I don't see anything about the iPad that couldn't have been rolled out four or five years ago.
I'm not only complaining about the iPad, though. For what it is, and for the apps that were shown off today, it looks phenomenal. I do believe that Apple can do, with their iBooks app and store, for books and magazines what they've managed to do for music and movies with their iTunes store. I fully intend to develop a digital version of Ellie Connelly for this device, once I'm able to pick one up. My disappointment lies completely in the fact that the iPad is not the Tablet Computer for which some of us have been hoping for the last several years, but rather an iPod Touch, a device that merely aspires to be better than my phone. And at that it only succeeds because of its larger screen.
If you disagree with me, and want to prove me wrong, feel free to send me an iPad! I'll gladly check it out and see in what ways it's as good as (if not better than) my MacBook.
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(click the image for a larger copy)
In my search to rediscover what it was that originally made me want to become an illustrator, I revisited a number of the children's books I enjoyed so much way back in the day, and the illustrations that really sparked my imagination and held me in such thrall. I was an avid reader back then, and my literary diet was comprised largely of selections from the Weekly Reader Book Club and some of the novels of Roald Dahl. I remember being so familiar with James and the Giant Peach that I could rip through the book in less than two hours by the time I was eight years old.
What I do remember really picking up from his work was the way he used shadow explicitly. Characters in his illustrations were not defined by their contours, as they are in comics, and in most of my work, in fact, but rather they were defined by their shadows. Even on this cover image from his work on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the character of Willy Wonka is shown as a grouping of dark shapes made of hatched lines; a tall block for the top hat, a wavy block for the jacket, the shadows on his pants and face, his shoes, his cane, all without any contour lines whatsoever, separated and defined only by changes in their value. Even the face of Charlie Bucket is shown without contour lines to define his eyes, nose, cheek, or hair. Even the 'line' defining Charlie's mouth is actually a series of short stippled lines marking the shadow of his upper lip.
