Articles

Home » Articles

has only 4 GB of storage, doesn’t have a touchscreen, doesn’t run apps, doesn’t have e-mail, music, and so on, and so forth. The iPad’s price is the one aspect of the device that few pundits have complained about; in fact, the pricing has Wall Street and other financial analysts doing cartwheels.

You don’t even have to compare the iPad to other companies’ similar products to see how good a deal it is. The 16 GB iPad costs $300 more than an 8 GB iPod touch. That $300 gets you twice the capacity, a much larger and higher-quality screen, a more powerful CPU, better Wi-Fi including 802.11n, vastly improved battery performance, a built-in speaker and microphone, and, eventually, access to a host of apps designed to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen and higher performance. A 32 GB iPad has the same $300 price difference compared to a 32 GB iPod touch, as does the 64 GB model. Once you tack on an additional $130 for 3G wireless the price difference widens, but so does the device’s utility — access to wireless broadband anywhere there’s an available 3G network, which, as iPhone users already know, is invaluable.

Debra compares the fully kitted-out $829 3G-enabled iPad to “a powerful compact laptop that runs a full-fledged operating system and multi-tasks and that has USB and SD and Ethernet connectors, 4 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of storage.” The “full-fledged operating system” she’s talking about isn’t OS X, however, and the laptop she’s talking about definitely isn’t manufactured by Apple. That might not make a difference to a lot of people, but if you’re already in the “Macs cost too much” camp, it’s no wonder the iPad doesn’t hold much appeal compared to that Windows Home Edition running, plastic, bargain-bin quality laptop from Dell or HP that’s almost certain to stop working in two years or less. Yes, I recognize the extremely fanboyish sound of that sentence. No, I don’t apologize for it. Cheap laptops are exactly that: cheap. Call it elitism, fanboyism, Kool-Aid drinking, whatever: I’d much rather put up with the iPad’s shortcomings than those of the “powerful” but oh-so-cheapo laptops of other manufacturers.

9. It’s locked in

“You have to buy your apps from the App Store,” Debra notes. Yes, you do: from a store that has over 140,000 apps available, most of them for free, and capable of doing almost anything. Hate the App Store for some reason? Fine. Jailbreak the thing and use Cydia instead. Apple may not want you to do this, and they may go out of their way to prevent it, but if you’re of the jailbreaking mindset already, that’s not going to stop you, is it?

A very vocal minority of people love to complain about “vendor lock-in” when it comes to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, even though those same people have likely been playing around with video game systems from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft for decades — all platforms with “vendor lock-in” even more pervasive and insidious than that of Apple’s platform. What these people don’t seem to realize is that same vendor lock-in is precisely what keeps Apple’s portable platforms from being riddled with viruses, malware, and apps made of more crap than code. “Security through obscurity” may be a valid(ish) argument to fall back upon with the Mac, but with 75 million plus people using the iPhone OS, it’s a very high-profile target for virus writers. That same “walled garden” that Linux proponents and “open internet” evangelists whine about is what keeps the iPhone platform from being an unusable nightmare. Yes, the App Store approval process has in many cases been a pain in the nether regions, but things are improving — apps that might have once taken days or weeks to get approved are now getting through the approval process in a matter of hours. Has the App Store’s “lock-in” affected sales of the iPhone one iota? No. In fact, sales of the iPhone took way off after the App Store’s arrival.

Yes, “Apple as gatekeeper” gets the George Orwell fans riled. But someone has to keep the gate, because the instant the iPhone OS becomes a truly “open” platform like some people are espousing, that’s the same instant the Russian mafia remote-hijacks your iPhone from a basement in Vladivostok because you just had to download that “Siberian Honeys” app from the dark alleys of the internet.

Other aspects of dreaded “lock-in” that Debra’s concerned about are riddled with falsehoods. “You can’t run Skype to make phone calls,” with the iPad, she claims. “We wouldn’t want to cut into the iPhone market, after all.” Say what? That must be news to the Skype team, who’s already investigating an iPad-specific Skype app. It must be news to Apple, too, who no longer restricts the use of VoIP over 3G. “Nor can you download Flash to install on the browser, which means you won’t be watching those YouTube videos.” Say what again? Since when is the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad incapable of watching YouTube videos? Oh right: since never. No, you can’t put Flash on the iPad, but according to our informal poll, 75% of people planning on buying one either don’t care or are outright glad Flash isn’t making an appearance.

What about hardware “lock-in?” Debra says that “you can’t even remove and replace the battery yourself,” which has been true of every single iPod since 2001 and hasn’t stopped people from buying them by the millions. She goes on and says, “if you were flying to Australia and wanted to bring along an extra battery for the extra-long flight, forget about it.” Um. A two-second Google search for “iPhone external battery” might have been a good idea. Plus, speaking from personal experience, if you stay awake for a full flight across the Pacific Ocean, you’re going to have a lot more pressing issues to worry about than your iPad’s battery, like the fact that you’re going to feel like you got run over by a truck after the plane lands. Take it from one who knows: Trans-Pacific flights are best spent in blissful unconsciousness.

10. The network

Yep, the iPad’s 3G connection is only available on AT&T’s network… if you live in the United States. If, like me, you live in what’s known informally as “the rest of the world,” this argument against buying a 3G-enabled iPad holds no water for you. But let’s stick to the States for a moment and analyze Debra’s argument against AT&T’s network. No, AT&T isn’t everyone (or possibly even anyone)’s favorite US network, but the pay-as-you-go, completely contract-free plans available for the iPad are very compellingly priced. You can get 250 MB of data for $14.99 (not the $20 Debra claims in her article), which is more than enough for casual data usage. 250 MB doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, but that’s what my iPhone plan started out at here in New Zealand. I never once went over 100 MB or so of monthly data usage until I started using iPhone tethering, and I’d consider my data usage fairly robust. The “unlimited” AT&T plan at $30 a month is an even better deal, and even if “unlimited” only means 5 GB, you’re not going to burn through that much data unless you’re using the connection every waking hour of the month.

Debra’s argument against these plans is that it’s another bill to pay on top of your cell phone bill, but that’s the beauty of the iPad plans: without a contract to commit to, you can cancel the plan whenever you want. If you start out with the $30/month “unlimited” plan on the iPad, only to find out your usage isn’t topping 250 MB, rather than being locked in to that plan for another 23 months, you can downgrade to the $15 plan. If you find that you don’t need the 3G coverage at all, you can always buy the Wi-Fi only iPad. “Here’s wishing you good luck on finding those Wi-Fi hot spots,” Debra says in response to that idea, which sounds about right for us in New Zealand, where free Wi-Fi is about as rare as gold, but makes much less sense in the US, where free Wi-Fi is usually only a library or café away.

If you absolutely must have 3G on the iPad, absolutely must not use AT&T, and are prepared to spend twice as much for the privilege of going with Verizon, you always have the option of hooking the iPad up to a MiFi (possibly — we’ll have to wait until the iPad’s actually released before we know if this will work or not). Additionally, just because the iPad isn’t available on Verizon right now (now now NOW) doesn’t mean it never will be; Apple and Verizon are reportedly “still talking” about bringing the iPad and/or iPhone over to the network.

We’ve come to the end of Debra’s ten points, but not to the end of mine. My final point, the one that sums up all of this: like the Mac, like the iPod, and like the iPhone, the iPad is not for everyone. It’s not even for me — despite all the words I’ve just spent defending it, I’m not buying an iPad until next year at the earliest, and only if I decide against replacing my current, aging MacBook Pro with the same computer rather than an iMac/iPad combo.

The bottom line is that the iPad can’t be all things to all people. It’s not meant to replace a full-fledged Mac or PC — it’s meant as an ultraportable extension of a larger device, and one with a far simpler and more intuitive interface, a “computer for the rest of us,” if you will. And make no mistake: for every Debra Littlejohn Shinder, for every “open internet” geek who screams “vendor lock-in” every time Apple’s name is mentioned, for every “no multitasking, no Flash, no sale” techie, for every dismissive pundit who shrugs and says, “It’s just a big iPod touch,” there’s at least one person who has been waiting for a device just like the iPad, and those people are the ones who will make it a success. Whether you like it or hate it, the iPad is indicative of the future direction of computing.

But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say we can cook up a portable computer far “better”