What kinds of tasks do you accomplish with your laptop or desktop?
This question of course depends drastically on your profession. If you are a programmer or a designer, you manipulate large graphic layouts, multiple text files, command lines, and tons of browser tabs. If you are a writer, you type for hours in a word processing application. If you are an accountant, you practice MS Excel zen, maximizing automation.
What I’ve described above is a small sample of professional computing scenarios. In the future, new products will change these markets. The iPad will not.
I predict that the iPad will gain a serious foothold in a market that I will call “home computing.” I do not mean professional computing done at home. I am instead referring to activities like emailing, watching videos and tv shows, reading the news, using social networking software. You could call this “couch computing” as well. I believe this activity set represents a huge percentage of use scenarios for laptops and desktops today.
The iPad is perfectly equipped as a couch computer. Lets talk about its biggest problem though: typing. Undeniably, the iPad keyboard is still nowhere near as good as even the smallest laptop (netbook) keyboards. Sure, you can plug in a bluetooth keyboard to your iPad. I think it is unrealistic though to expect users to do this in order to make their iPad into a typing machine. There are just to many steps required to make serious typing possible (set up your keyboard, prop up the screen, find a table) such that almost everyone would rather just pull out a laptop and open it. I predict that the blue tooth keyboard will almost never be used in conjunction with an iPad.
iPad and keyboard: needs a table, why not just use a laptop?
The answer: the iPad isn’t for typing, at least not with its current keyboard arrangement. But it’s ok. How much do people really type in an average session of non-professional use of their computer? I have absolutely no idea for sure. But from what I’ve seen, people really don’t need to type that much. Short messages are the norm, as in Twitter and Facebook. And with the embedded social linking that many apps now provide (digg, facebook, mixx, and a billion more), users can shoot content to one another without having to type or even copy and paste a link.
So maybe, the iPad isn’t worse than a laptop for home computing. But how is it better?
First, apps are better than applications. Installing an application is a traumatic experience for the average user. It could have a virus. It could be hard to set up. It could be sitting in a downloads folder that the user can’t find.
Installing an app is super-easy. Touch the screen, and there it is, ready to work for you.
Starting from the moment of the first touch, the experience of using an iPad is better than that of a laptop. The iPad doesn’t turn on like a computer. One slide, and its functionality is there for you, unlike a laptop, fans whirling, screen creaking open, load bar creeping to completion.
An iPad can be taken up and set aside with less effort than a laptop.
Touch is better than mouse selection for all but the most precise text/graphics manipulations. Touch beats a mouse for traversing graphical/textual space, creating object associations (drag and drop) and pressing buttons (as long as they’re large enough).
All of the aspects above contribute to making people happier while they are using an iPad. This happiness may be tempered by the occasional frustration, mostly in the typing department. But I feel the iPad will be taken up enthusiastically by a large population of users who type very little, and may even change the typing habits of other adopters. In the long term, I predict that the iPad will lower the amount that we type, especially as designers invent new interactions that transmit information without a keyboard.