What is the iPad for?

Now all the hype has died down and the dust has settled, the main question that everyone’s asking is ‘What is the iPad for?’

The ever funny and insightful Charlie Brooker phrased it well in his article this morning, iPad therefore iWant:

Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.

Over at MacVideo.tv less rhethorical questions were being asked. In an article entitled Apple iPad: Who’s going to buy it, What’s it for? the blogger terms the tablet ‘The third device you never knew you wanted’. And yet he concedes:

A host of rational, intelligent people will buy the iPad because they know that Apple makes beautiful, desirable things.

Don’t believe me? Read this Tweet from MacFormat’s Chris Phin (one such rational, intelligent person) which perfectly sums up the anticipation the potential of an upcoming Apple product can incite:

“Do I want an iPad as a replacement for my MacBook Pro? No. Do I want one as a replacement for my iPhone? No. Do I want one? Yes.”

The fact is, when it comes to the questions of ‘why buy an iPad’, Apple doesn’t even need to answer, just as they didn’t need to answer with the iPhone. By opening the platform up to third party developers with third party apps, they’ve outsourced the problem to a whole host of hard working entrepreneurs eager to offer a solution.

Time for a confession: I actually held out until last Spring to get an iPhone, admittedly quite late for someone professed to be enthralled by gadgetry.

To begin with, I didn’t really get it. Perhaps it was the name that threw me. When I heard about the iPhone, the first thing I thought was do I need a phone that I can listen to music on and take photos with- given that I already had a camera phone and an iPod with ample storage space?  (Perhaps this is why they went for something non-specific this time around- maybe iPad, invoking notepads and sketchpads was chosen to conjure the idea of playfulness and creativity, whilst iSlate or iTablet could have sounded more prescriptive.)

But the app store changed all that. Did I want a GPS/pedometer/calorie counter with streaming radio and a word processor? Yes. And if it could also play Sonic the Hedgehog and (long defunct) PC game Myst, did that make it even better? What if I could also read books and magazines and RSS feeds on it? And order food and use it as a remote and wireless mouse for my iMac?  Would it make my life more fun and efficient?

Okay, I’m probably slightly over-stating my point. And even if you do take my point, as far as the iPhone goes, it’d be fair to ask that since I now have an iPhone why do I still need an iPad? I don’t know yet. I don’t think anyone does. But I trust that with all those software minds working day and night to think of innovative and creative ways to prize money from my iTunes account that the day will come when I do need an iPad, and it will make me happier and more efficient. How can that be a bad thing?

Read more like this:

• The Future of Publishing
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• iPad: the headlines
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