What is it about the iPad that has people so riled up? Both the media frenzy building up to Wednesday’s announcement and the almost equally frenzied denouncement of the device by most media outlets have been pretty irrational, even given the intense debate that normally crops up between the Microsoft and Apple camps (for my attempt at a level-headed look at the device, see my other site).
I think in both cases, it has to do with Apple’s failure to “get the tablet right.” The tablet PC has been around since the early 2000s, and while many people are drawn to the idea of a PC they can write on and interact with as they would a pad of paper, the concept has never really gone mainstream. This is in part due to the higher cost of tablets versus normal PCs and laptops, but it has more to do with the fact that the concept has never lived up to its promise.
The media circus leading up to the iPad’s announcement was generated largely by the hopes that Apple, seemingly infallible when it comes to mass-market gadgets, would finally make a tablet that fulfilled the concept’s supposed promise, and that those must-have features would trickle down to their competitors’ products as they often do.
Think what you will about the company and its products, but would the smartphone market be so competitive right now if not for the iPhone? Would Dell and Sony be making such attractive laptops without the example of the MacBook to show them that people will pay a little more for something with style? Maybe the company that pioneered and popularized the MP3 player and so many other fixtures of our lives could make a tablet that worked.
Hence, the extreme disappointment when Steve Jobs hopped on stage Wednesday with what is essentially a giant iPod Touch. People who had been so hopeful that the iPad would change the tablet for the better had their hopes dashed, and lashed out all the more because of it.
Apple has its adherents, which guarantees the iPad an audience. Maybe the device will even have enough time to grow and become the product that people wanted. What I find more likely, though, is that people have no idea what they wanted the iPad to be. And now, with most PC manufacturers releasing tablets to counter what they thought would be another must-have product from Apple, we’re about to get hit with a wave of devices that are just slightly updated versions of tablet PCs that we already haven’t wanted for years now.
In fact, maybe we don’t want tablet PCs at all.
