Since today is the announcement of the third iPad, I thought it would be fun to resurrect this thread and see how our initial reactions to the iPad measure up to reality two years later. Some VGC reactions:
Just a big iPod Touch: Even iOS enthusiasts like NiKKoM and myself fell prey to this one. Of course it's a big iPod Touch! What else would you model a touchscreen computer after? By stripping out 25 years of desktop cruft, Apple made a computer which was more accessible to new users. Now my mom is suddenly emailing everybody and getting most of her news from the web. Even the technologically adept seem to appreciate the lean-back simplified interface for a computer designed to be used almost anywhere in almost any position. I still feel there's room for imrovement in how iOS handles file management, even in the third party apps I've used, but I manage to get plenty of things done with my iPad anyway.
No Flash: Turns out nobody really cares about Flash. Hundreds of millions of iDevices have sold without it. Chrome for Android doesn't support it. Nearly all of the video on the web doesn't require it. Even Adobe has stopped developing mobile Flash. We can argue about who really killed Flash, but you can't deny the fact that it's dying.
iBooks!: Oddly the part of the iPad announcement that seemed to gather the most enthusiasm here turned out to be least successful. iBooks has mostly been a tool that publishers have used to gain a little leverage over Amazon, but Amazon still rules ebook retail. The iPad seems to have had a stronger impact on other forms of publishing, particularly magazines and comics. Next in Apple's sights is textbooks, so Apple seems to be willing to keep taking shots at transofrming different facets of the print industry.
No mulittasking: Well, it quickly did get a limited fashion of multitasking, and it seems to be all the device really needs. The screen isn't really big enough for serious multitasking, so what was really needed was backgrounding for communications and audio apps and fast task switching for everything else. The result is that performance for the foreground app and device battery life is conserved. Mission accomplished.
Not enough storage: Hello cloud services. They seem to be getting tacked on to everything nowadays and the starting price is free. Almost everything on my 64GB iPad is backed up, plus a lot more content which I can access whenever I have network, all for the price of $0.00 per month.
Needs a keyboard: No, it doesn't. Well, maybe if you write for a living you might need an external keyboard to get at all that fancy punctuation, but experienced touchscreen typists can get 100 wpm with good enough grammar and punctuation.
Netbooks are better: Turns out they aren't. The netbook market has collapsed and taken the companies that bet heavily on it with them. Lenovo won't even sell them anymore. In fact, PCs as a market seem to be contracting... unless you take the view that tablets are PCs, in which case, they're becoming more important than ever before and Apple is now the largest PC manufacturer in the world by units and revenue.
Personally, I've never seen a gadget get adopted by the people in my office as fast as the iPad. It's staggering. Faster than smartphones, faster than iPods, faster than PCs. Maybe people are just more readily accepting of the latest gadget than they used to be. Or maybe touchable, portable displays are an idea which has been long awaited.
