With all of the hype leading up to the ipad release culminating in Valleywag's bounty offer, it was hard not to follow suit and anticipate how awesome a touch screen tablet from apple would be. I know that I was anticipating it's release. The marketing succeeded. It had my attention. After a few weeks of hearing about it, I thought to myself, "if it is an Apple Mac Computer with OSX on it, I'll definitely be in the market".
After reading the articles and news reports about what an IPad is, however, I don't think it's for me. Sure, it's nice looking.. ultra portable, has a vibrant screen, and responds to touch.. like an iTouch. Unfortunately.. it's /too/ much like an iTouch. In fact, it's simply a larger, faster iTouch. Take an iTouch, stretch it out.. and you have an iPad. I know iTouch and iPhones are all the craze now.. but I refuse to get one for various reasons. Here's 3 of them.
1. Apple wants to say what I can and can't run on the iPad.
Ahh, the app store. The App Store is one of the biggest examples of a single content clearing house. There are a number of benefits to this approach for Apple and relatively few for consumers and developers. Apple can say what you can run on a device that you purchase. If you install something un-approved, you void your warranty. For consumers, this means that there's a single place to go to get content on their iphone. It's searchable, sufficient for general use, and virus free. The problem isn't that the App Store exists. The problem is that it's the /only/ way to do things. There's no way to download your app and run it(except javascript browser apps) . One argument that could be made.. is that it reduces piracy for apps. Piracy is a huge problem with PC/Mac applications so that /seems/ to make sense.. until you search the term 'Iphone App Piracy' on google. Headlines like: Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million to Piracy, and New Iphone App Piracy Statistics reveal try before you buy myth . The articles show that, in this case, a single content clearing house is failing to prevent piracy. Sure, it could be argued that, if the iPhone wasn't jailbroken, then all app piracy would be stopped. However.. if the iPhone was not locked to the App Store, developers would have a better ability to secure their applications from piracy. Crackers can always 'break' their DRM schemes.. so, what would at least slow the crackers down is diversity of techniques. Crackers can currently.. simply pull the app from their jailbroken iphone with a 'certain app cracker' and put it on an app aggregation service. The simplicity of this makes cracked app publication easy for an average user.
One comment on a forum:
I keep getting an error when trying to crack any application.
The error starts with:
"/var/stash/Applications.SZDqB9/----------/De---ptApp.sh: line 166: 75 Done od -A n -N 4096 -t......"
Please help. Cheers
The comment demonstrates that an average user is running the cracker app and asking for support on a forum.
One app publisher's piracy story: Tap-Fu
"As another side note, the wait time for Tap-Fu to show up on the various sites from the time of release was about 40 minutes."
This demonstrates that the piracy argument is pretty lame.
Next, what happens if Apple decides to close down the App Store? I purchased an IPod Nano when it came out several years ago. Not a whole lot of work has gone into ipod games :). They actually used to exist. What happens when the next big thing is something different? How bloated is Itunes going to get?
2. iPhone apps for a tablet based personal computer are not as useful as personal computer applications.
This one is pretty much a given. Applications have been around on the personal computer for decades. Companies have poured millions of dollars into applications to make them useful. We're starting all over again for the iphone and iPad. This may be good for apple and competitors of the market leaders in the industry, but this isn't necessarily good for users of the apps. Pretty much, for a word processor, you have iWork(coming soon), Quickoffice, DocumentsToGo and gOffice. As far as I know, the open source alternative, OpenOffice will not be available on the iPhone 
3. It's hard to get user and document files onto and off of your iPhone/iPad
Most blog posters mention that one of the only 'official' ways to get user files, like word documents onto your iphone is to put it on your Apple iDisk. Yay, more $$$ for Apple.
In Conclusion, iPad is not a Personal Computer. I was really, really, really hoping that it would be one. For the person who has everything, another 'gameboy' would be great. The iPad is a bit more like a cross between a digital assistant/business assistant and game console then a personal computer. The marketing for the device was effective in getting me interested that it was going to be released... but the actual device itself doesn't suit me well. For more info on the iPad, please visit Apple's iPad website.
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