The iPad has arrived. Praise the Lord and pass the applications!
OK, that may be a little over the top (ya think?), but it’s hard not to get a little carried away by the combination of Apple hype, first adopter frenzy and the slavering attention the media pays to both. The thing is, it looks as if the iPad might be everything it’s supposed to be—and that’s quite a bit—and it surely will be better when, as past experience tells us will happen, Apple works out the bugs, beefs up the apps and comes out with the next generation product in six months or so.
Peel back that Apple a bit and you can actually see the seeds of innovation growing at the core of a company that’s also toying with the notion of Apple TV. Can the whole TV be that far behind the little TV that is iPad? It’s innovation built on interactivity, but in the end it seems like Apple knows exactly what it has: a supplement to the TV—like the computer or the smartphone—but not a replacement.
You have to feel a little badly for the good folks at Microsoft. And not just because it wasn’t that long ago that they’d get the same kind of iPad frenzy going just by releasing a new version of Windows. Microsoft has always struggled a bit with the boundaries between computing and television. Yet try as they might, they’ve never been able to complete the great leap from functionality to entertainment.
Apple, it would seem, knows what the iPad is. But more importantly, they know what it’s not. It absolutely is yet another step toward giving viewers rapid and bigger screen access to mobile video. But in the end, nobody at Apple is saying that this is a substitute for the 10-foot experience that is television.
So amidst all of the iPad hype, one of the most important lessons we can learn from from the device’s launch is the continued interest in big-screen interactivity. Apple is doing the cable and CE industry a favor by expanding the horizons of users interested in tapping into the wealth of the Internet and more traditional media. Eventually, as almost everything does, it will come back to the big screen in the family room, bringing with it a wealth of interactive television applications that were probably there already but just needed to be nudged to the fore.
