Bits & Pieces

On Thursday night, Charlie Rose interviewed the Wall Street Journal/All Things D’s Walt Mossberg, The New York Times’ David Carr and our Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington.  These are three smart guys, but they are all, to one degree or another, tend to believe in Apple generally.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing on this blog should be construed as investment advice.

(from Hoggworks Studios)

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing on this website should be viewed as investment advice.

Steven Frank (of Panic Software) has penned a thought-provoking essay on the history and direction of personal computing, analyzing where the iPad might fit in to the bigger picture.  He notes the relatively short history of personal computing (as compared to other technologies) and hypothesizes that big changes are coming. Overall a great essay.

In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”

Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”

The Old World

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

The New World

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

Talk about great product placement:

Nope. (Click the image on the target page for a full view.)

Fraser Speirs seems to be on to something important about the negative reaction in certain tech circles regarding the iPad. He argues that the device is actually the first solid attempt to make computing simple. And simple computing scares technologists who unconsciously rely on technological complexity to maintain their social and economic status, while paying lip service to ease of use for the tech-challenged masses.  A great essay worth reading in full. And some of the comments are good as well.

Excerpt:

For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

***

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here.

Playing with this machine is like eating Doritos. It’s hard to stop.

-Brian Caulfield, of Forbes, describing his reaction to hands-on quality time with the iPad. The reactions of those who have used the device are all glowing.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

Stephen Fry:

I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced [the iPad] to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of “not impressed”, “meh”, “big deal”, “style over substance”, “it’s all hype”, “my HTC TyTN can do more”, “what a disappointment”, “majorly underwhelmed” and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, cut and paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the “game-changing” effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass and GPS enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

Disclosure: I am long in AAPL.

Update: And here is Mossberg’s written summary of his first impressions.

My preliminary thoughts are that it is not a revolutionary product, but more of an evolution from the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The new processor seems very fast, so the performance will be better than either. The starting price ($499) is very attractive.

Unlimited data for $30/month without a plan commitment is alluring. I also think that you need to touch/feel/use it in person to get the full experience of the device. Finally, it could compete well against net books, while protecting Apple’s profit margins. Oh, and the Kindle is dead and the name iPad is silly.

What was most important to the stock market today: price.  When the device was first announced, the stock fell, but it rose quickly when Steve Jobs announced the $499 starting price.

However, because the iPad (as least as I currently understand it) is not revolutionary, I doubt it will define a new category. And the goal of Apple, as stated several times today, was that this is a whole new type of device. Not yet.

Apple has now posted the video of the launch. You can watch the whole thing here.