Grant Diggles

Why you should wait on buying the Apple iPad

// March 28th, 2010 // Personal Views, Technology

I’d like to preface this blog post by saying that I love Apple products. Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. have been innovative and persistent in bringing a stable and dependable technology platform to millions. I own several Apple products myself and have enjoyed countless hours of trouble free, productive hours using their products. With that said… I’ve got some concerns with the upcoming iPad, here’s why:

Not a MacBook, not an iPhone

So what the hell is it? I could understand the validity of the iPad if it at least did some of the basic features of either the iPhone or the MacBook, but it doesn’t do either very well.  I remember watching Steve Job’s keynote on the iPad and I thought, “if he just made it smaller and more portable, it would be more useful because it would easier to take everywhere with me, oh wait, that’s an iPhone/iTouch” and “if it only came with a stand and maybe an external keyboard so it doesn’t have to be on my lap or laying face up on a table all the time, that would be more convenient, oh wait, that’s a Macbook”. It seems that the iPad is trapped in a “not-good-at-anything” vortex, where Apple decided to take all of their bad ideas and shove them into a glorified iTouch. You have to accessorize the crap out of it to get some conveniences of a laptop, and yet given its size, it will never be convenient to travel with or powerful enough to do much of anything, dooming it to be “that novelty thing” that doesn’t get out of the house much. Based on Apple’s website, here are some of the more notable (or not-so-notable) features of the iPad:

HARD DRIVE

The largest hard drive you can get with the iPad is a measley 64 GB’s of space. Apple specifically emphasizes iPad’s ability to offer a unique, touch based experience in sharing and viewing various types of media. At the largest 64 GB hard drive, you are quite limited in how many pictures you can even keep on the thing, let alone all of the hard drive space your music, applications, books, videos and other media will consume. Enter Apple’s wireless hard drive, Time Capsule. Tack on another $300 and stay within 100 feet of the hard drive and your problems are solved. Of course, now the iPad is more expensive than the MacBook… and significantly less powerful.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Offer a larger hard drive (which they will, but you’ll have to buy another iPad), throw in a complimentary first year .mac/.me account for the 10 GB of hosted hard drive space, offer a discount to purchase one of Apple’s Time Capsules.

WIFI and 3G

Obviously, your internet experience would be quite limited without connectivity to the World Wide Web. Apple gets it right here with the Wifi, and the 3G option is also useful for those of us on the go all the time. Unfortunately, we are forced to link arms (once again) with the infamous AT&T network. If paying AT&T the astronomical fees for the iPhone isn’t bad enough, you can also add another $30 a month for 3G on the iPad. There goes my kid’s college education…

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Existing iPhone subscribers get a significant discount from AT&T for 3G service on the iPad. Kind of a “thank you” for overpaying them all these years. And no, I don’t consider $30/month a discount.

MULTITASKING

What multitasking? Yup, the iPad can only do one thing at a time. I love the AT&T/iPhone commercial where they bash the Google Droid for not being able to make an appointment in the calendar program while talking to someone on the phone at the same time. Very witty… you need 2 Droids to do what an iPhone can do by itself, get it?! But I can’t help but wonder how I am going to listen to music on my iPad while at the same, browse the internet, read a book or view my pictures. Guess I’ll just have to go buy 2 iPads (get it?!)!

What amazes me the most, is that my iPhone and my laptop can multitask just fine, Apple has the technology… but apparently Apple wants me to think that the iPad is a “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price” (their words, not mine), but NOT allowing me some very basic functionalities. In Apple’s defense, it’s my understanding that you can now listen to music and use the iPad… so that’s good.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Make the iPad multitask, obviously. Also, apologize to consumers for leaving this feature out in the first place as all it has accomplished is to strike fear in the hearts of Apple lovers everywhere that Apple’s innovative days are over. Seriously though, its like building a car and forgetting to put wheels on it, then expecting people to buy the car and then, later, be willing to buy another car (car 2.0) that finally comes with wheels.

CAMERA

Probably one of the biggest disappointments with the iPad is that it is not equipped with a camera. The ability to video chat on the iPad would’ve been one of the coolest features, allowing people to walk around video conferencing with others (instead of making phone call in some circumstances) like we’re all on Star Trek. So many uses… gone. But don’t worry, I’m sure Apple will be more than happy to put a camera on the next version of the iPad in order to sell up to consumers, forcing us to buy ANOTHER iPad from them even though we already own one (which Apple will expect all of us to do).

NO DATA PORTS

Okay, so let’s pretend that I just took this amazing video footage of my children and I really want to share this footage with a friend on my “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price” (their words, not mine). Like many of us, we carry things around like FlipCams or some other sort of media capturing device that requires you to upload your media via USB or FireWire. Unfortunately, you’re outta luck with the iPad cause you can’t do any of that on the iPad itself. You have to accessorize the iPad with their “iPad Camera Connection Kit” and/or you have to have ANOTHER product that you can sync with the iPad (similar to the iPhone) to move media over to the iPad. For the cost of the iPad, is it too much to ask for even a single USB port? So far, this isn’t feeling very “magical and revolutionary”.

ACCESSORIES, ACCESSORIES, ACCESSORIES

Since the iPad does so few things so badly, Apple has been good enough to provide us, the consumers, with a disturbing amount of proprietary accessories for the iPad to bring it into the realm of a mildly viable piece of technology. It seems to me that Apple is doing with accessories, what Microsoft did with Operating System versions… confusing us. Here is a listing from their website, with prices:

iPad Keyboard Dock – $69
iPad Dock w/o keyboard – $29
iPad 10W USB Power Adapter – $29 (one is included in the box,. but this one has a longer cable)
iPad Dock Connecter to VGA Adapter – $29
iPad Case – $29
iPad Camera Connection Kit – $29

Now granted, this may not seem like a lot of accessories when you look at them listed out, but imagine carrying these things around with you. If you think your laptop case is bulky, what until you start lugging all of these things little gadgets around. “…I would love to pull those pictures off your camera Stan, but I forgot to bring my iPad Camera Connection Kit, did you happen to bring yours?”

For a company that has been leading the way in providing sleek, no hassle design to all of their products, the iPad is completely counter intuitive to Apple’s reputation with accessory offerings that you “have to have” to actually use the product. I thought accessories were discretionary income items…

THE NEXT GENERATION

I’m not talking about Star Trek here (even though I was earlier in my post), I’m talking about the “next” iPad release. I can’t help but compare Apple to other companies that use proprietary technology and sleazy marketing strategies to weasel every last penny out of the consumer, enter Sony Corporation. Apple WILL probably end up adding a camera to the iPad, they WILL offer bigger hard drives, they WILL probably include a data port, etc, etc. but Apple will offer SOME of these features in different versions of the iPad in the future. What does that mean to you and I? Open up your wallets folks, Steve Jobs just hasn’t made enough money.

If you can exercise any discipline here, I would wait on the iPad until several more versions come out. It seems that the iPad will have too many uses to really be considered a glorified iTouch, but is too limited to really be considered a trimmed down computer. That’s my 2 cents…

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