It will be available in 60 days, 90 in England, and will be priced lower than expected. If it is going to have a transformative effect on media consumption, we are going to begin to feel that effect quite quickly. Or so one would think.
Given the iPad is a device which is poised to have such a dramatic effect on media consumption in the long-run, it is curious that they left so much of its potential open in terms of the default apps which were packed in to the iPhone.
I look at devices like the iPad, and wonder what kind of technological world our children, so called Generation Z, will inherit from the type of devices which are now being created. Surely devices such as the iPad will engender a very deliberate set of assumptions and beliefs regarding the way people interact with technology.
At a moment when the analysis seems to be focused entirely on speculative tasks, let's explore how we can ground Apple's iPad, and technologies like it, in something practical. When tomorrow's generation are painting and decorating, they will no longer need to derive their inspiration from the big pile of magazines in the corner of their living room.
These magazines, useful for one day in 365, are ephemeral, transient, and take up space. Yet we feel we should have them, as their content is important. We don't need them there now, but we are prepared to allow the space they take up to be sacrificed for the utility which we will derive from our future usage of them. This is understandable, but impractical.
It may seem like a small change, but a generation which has instant access, quite literally, at its fingertips, will be a quite different generation to that which did not. We used to consider that someone was erudite if they had spent a number of years accumulating knowledge and expertise which they could deploy at the precise moment which it was required.
Given that this information is all now on hand, people will come to rely more on an ability to recall data from the system. Ability to focus, and knowledge of the best places to look, will become the most important facets to consider. These are fundamental changes.
Which, when we come back to the iPad, makes it curious that all Apple gave us was a hastily thrown together app for the New York Times. While an app for the New York Times was an uncontroversial choice for demo (the Google Maps demo for the iPhone, similarly, told us how to find Starbucks), it also failed to highlight the potentially far greater opportunity which would come from providing a business model for magazines.
Whereas newspapers have done a fairly good job, in terms of design at least, of transitioning their 'look' online, this is something which cannot be said for magazines. Magazines, when faced with the challenge of online, tend to say, with few exceptions 'This is who we are, this is some of our content, but for the real deal, you'll need to buy the magazine.'
Part of this is a limitation with HTML and CSS. It's just more difficult to recreate something like SUPER SUPER Magazine, or the New Yorker online. Print calls for a variation in style that few Online designers have the ability to do justice. Even if they could, it would not 'feel right' on a screen.
The iPad seems to get around some of those limitations. It would even feel more natural flicking through a magazine on an iPad. No zooming. No scrolling. Every magazine searchable, and neatly tucked away within iBooks. The technical limitations are not even particularly massive with regard to achieving such a goal.
It seems that, then, there are 100,000 apps for just about anything, but not magazines. For a device which, by its very design, will eventually come to change the way we think about media consumption, one might think that the iPad's ambitions are rather humble.
Christian Lindholm / Partner and Director @ Fjord
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