Response to iPad by the Technologically Advanced is Future Shock

[gibbz]

A good read from Fraser Speirs (via Seth Weintraub) that details the reasons why the tech elite are so boisterous in their opposition to the iPad. I think he is spot on in describing the bigger picture of the iPad and why it should be a success.

Please read the short article and discuss your opinion of the piece. Please refrain from "the iPad sounds like a tampon" statements. There are oodles of other threads for those.

excerpt:

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

 

[MikeyTree]

I agree completely. That's a great article.

My Dad's not a computer person, to put it mildly. He's very intelligent and successful, but couldn't care less about learning to use a computer. I could see him using and loving an iPad though. It does everything he needs it to do, and is simple and intuitive to use.

What he needs is to be able to:
1) Read emails, and respond to them.
2) Read documents that his secretary, business partners, and other people send him. Pages, Numbers, and any of the many pdf-reading apps satisfy this need.
3) Upload photos from his camera. The optional camera attachment interface does this.
4) Occasionally look up stuff on the internet.

He'd probably also upload his CDs and a few audiobooks into it.

The iPad could do all of this for him.