The Hybrid Tablet Temptation by Jean-Louis Gassée
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The Hybrid Tablet Temptation by Jean-Louis Gassée In no small part, the iPad's success comes from its uncompromising Do Less To Do More philosophy. Now a reasonably mature product, can the iPad expand its uses without falling into the hybrid PC/tablet trap? When the iPad came out, almost four years ago, it was immediately misunderstood by industry insiders - and joyously embraced by normal humans. Just Google iPad naysayer for a few nuggets of iPad negativism. Even Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, couldn't avoid the derivative trap: He saw the new object as a mere evolution of an existing one and shrugged off the iPad as a bigger phone. Schmidt should have known better, he had been an Apple director in the days when Jobs believed the two companies were "natural allies". I was no wiser. I got my first iPad on launch day and was immediately disappointed. My new tablet wouldn't let me do the what I did on my MacBook Air - or my tiny EeePC running Windows Xp (not Vista!). For example, writing a Monday Note on an iPad was a practical impossibility - and still is. I fully accept the personal nature of this view and, further, I don't buy the media consumption vs. productivity dichotomy Microsoft and its shills (Gartner et al.) tried to foist on us. If by productivity we mean work, work product, earning one's living, tablets in general and the iPad in particular have more than made the case for their being productivity tools as well as education and entertainment devices. Still, preparing a mixed media document, even a moderately complex one, irresistibly throws most users back to a conventional PC or laptop. With multiple windows and folders, the PC lets us accumulate text, web pages, spreadsheets and graphics to be distilled, cut and pasted into the intended document. Microsoft now comes to the rescue. Their hybrid Surface PC/Tablet lets you "consume" media, play games in purely tablet mode - and switch to the comfortable laptop facilities offered by Windows 8. The iPad constricts you to ersatz folders, preventing you to put your document's building blocks in one place? No problem, the Surface device features a conventional desktop User Interface, familiar folders, comfy Office apps as well as a "modern" tile-based Touch UI. The best of both worlds, skillfully promoted in TV ads promising work and fun rolled into one device. What's not to like? John Kirk, a self-described "recovering attorney", whose tightly argued and fun columns are always worth reading, has answers. In a post on Tablets Metaphysics - unfortunately behind a paywall - he focuses on the Aristotelian differences between tablets and laptops. Having paid my due$$ to the Techpinions site, I will quote Kirk's summation [emphasis mine]: Touch is ACCIDENTAL to a Notebook computer. It's plastic surgery. It may enhance the usefulness of a Notebook but it doesn't change the essence of what a Notebook computer is. A keyboard is ACCIDENTAL to a Tablet. It's plastic surgery. It may enhance the usefulness of a Tablet, but it doesn't change the essence of what a Tablet is. Further — and this is key — a touch input metaphor and a pixel input metaphor must be wholly different and wholly incompatible with one another. It's not just that they do not comfortably co-exist within one form factor. It's also that they do not comfortably co-exist within our minds eye. In plain words, it's no accident that tablets and notebooks are distinctly different from one another. On the contrary, their differences — their incompatibilities — are the essence of what makes them what they are. Microsoft, deeply set in the culture of backwards compatibility that served it so well for so long did the usual thing, it added a tablet layer on top of Windows 7. The result didn't take the market by storm and appears to have caused the exit of Steve Sinofsky, the Windows czar now happily ensconced at Harvard Business School and a Board Partner with the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm. Many think the $900M Surface RT write-off also contributed to Ballmer's August 2013 resignation. Now equipped with hindsight, Apple's decision to stick to a "pure" tablet looks more inspired than lucky. If we remember that a tablet project preceded the iPhone, only to be set aside for a while, Apple's "stubborn minimalism", its refusal to hybridize the iPad might be seen as the result of long experimentation - with more than a dash of Steve Jobs (and Scott Forstall) inflexibility. Apple's bet can be summed up thus: MacBooks and iPads have their respective best use cases, they both reap high customer satisfaction scores. Why ruin a good game? Critics might add: Why sell one device when we can sell two? Apple would rather "force" us to buy two devices in order to maximize revenue. On this, Tim Cook often reminds Wall Street of Apple's preference for self-cannibalization, for letting its new and less expensive products displace existing ones. Indeed, the iPad keeps cannibalizing laptops, PCs and Macs alike. All this leaves one question unanswered: Is that it? Will the iPad fundamentals stay the way they have been from day one? Are we going to be thrown back to our notebooks when composing the moderately complex mixed-media documents I earlier referred to? Or will the iPad hardware/software combination become more adept at such uses? To start, we can eliminate a mixed-mode iOS/Mac device. Flip a switch, it's an iPad, flip it again, add a keyboard/touchpad and you have a Mac. No contraption allowed. We know where to turn to for that. Next, a new iOS version allows multiple windows to appear on the iPad screen; folders are no longer separately attached to each app as they are today but lets us store documents from multiple apps in one place. Add a blinking cursor for text and you have... a Mac, or something too close to a Mac but still different. Precisely the reason why that won't work. (This might pose the question of an A7 or A8 processor replacing the Intel chip inside a MacBook Air. It can be done - a "mere matter of software" - but how much would it cut from the manufacturing cost? $30 to $50 perhaps. Nice but not game-changing, a question for another Monday Note.) More modest, evolutionary changes might still be welcome. Earlier this year, Counternotions proposed a slotted clipboard as An interim solution for iOS 'multitasking': [...] until Apple has a more general solution to multitasking and inter-app navigation, the four-slot clipboard with a visible UI should be announced at WWDC. I believe it would buy Ive another year for a more comprehensive architectural solution, as he'll likely need it. This year's WWDC came and went with the strongest iOS update so far, but no general nor interim solution to the multitasking and inter-app navigation discussed in the post. (Besides the Counternotions blog, this erudite and enigmatic author also edits counternotions.tumblr.com and can be followed on Twitter as @Kontra.) A version of the above suggestion could be conceptualized as a floating dropbox to be invoked when needed, hovering above the document worked on. This would not require the recreation of a PC-like windows and desktop UI. Needed components could be extracted from the floating store, dragged and dropped on the work in process. We'll have to wait and see if and how Apple evolves the iPad without falling into the hybrid trap. On even more speculative ground, a recent iPad Air intro video offered a quick glimpse of the Pencil stylus by Fifty-Three, the creators of the well-regarded Paper iPad app. So far, styli haven't done well on the iPad. Apple only stocks children-oriented devices from Disney and Marvel. Nothing else, in spite of the abundance of such devices offered on Amazon. Perhaps we'll someday see Apple grant Bill Gates his wish, as recounted by Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson: "I've been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years," he told me. "I will eventually turn out to be right or be dead." Someday, we might see an iPad, larger or not, Pro or not, featuring a screen with more degrees of pressure sensitivity. After seeing David Hockney's work on iPads at San Francisco's de Young museum, my hopes are high. -- [email protected] @gassee .