We all know the standard gadget life cycle. Product announced. Excitement! Product released. Purchased! When it arrives, you slip it out of the box with trembling, nay, slightly damp fingers, and settle back to enjoy the warm feeling of it changing your life completely, paying for itself and possibly even making you feel sexier.
Then you get bored, stick it on the shelf and forget about it. A few months later, you look back on it with scorn, weariness and probably dismissiveness. In case you haven’t worked it out yet, yes – this month I’m talking about the iPad again.
Except not in the way you might be thinking, because it turns out that Apple’s latest toy is the long-awaited exception to the rule. I bought one when it was launched, fully expecting to regret it by roughly, well, now. Instead, I find myself using it more and more, not for new purposes, but as a replacement for what I used to do. It’s now my TV, thanks to videos and iPlayer compatibility. It’s increasingly my book library, now that I’ve gotten myself slightly addicted to the Kindle app. It’s what I check when I wake up in the morning to see the latest news stories and email. It’s usually the last thing I put down at night, before slipping away into blissful insomnia.
What’s interesting about the tablets that are coming out now is that none of them are speaking to me in a compelling way. Video calling? Don’t care. 3G? Not worth the money, at least for me (especially since by the time you read this, I’m hoping that my Android phone will finally have Froyo for portable Wi-Fi fun).
No, what’s great about the iPad is that it gets out of the way. You don’t ‘use the iPad’, just you do the thing you want to do, whether it’s checking mail or watching a video. Technically, no, it’s not doing anything that a laptop couldn’t, except that it does it without being a laptop. This means I never worry about charging it, for instance. I plug it in regularly, of course, but never really think about it. I don’t have to wait for it to boot up, or come out of hibernation. I can’t overstate the importance of this, because it’s been making my regular PC feel slow and outdated, never mind that its dual-core processor and gigabytes of RAM could crush the iPad with a thought.
Here’s another thing I love about it. The battery is so good, I recently got through a transatlantic flight – some nine or 10 hours of it – watching movies. Everyone around me had their tiny little screens with canned content and lousy headphones, being interrupted constantly by stewardesses butting in to sell duty free or similar irrelevances. I had several seasons worth of TV, movies, games and books just sitting there, ready to go. As laptops blinked off around me, worn out and exhausted from too much Microsoft Office, Bejewelled and other primitive applications, my entertainment kept on rolling. I only switched it off to remind myself what boredom felt like. Hint: it’s being stuck on an aeroplane for 10 hours without an iPad.
It’s that flight – not multitouch, the App Store or the other big-ticket selling points – that now defines the iPad for me. It’s not magical, as Steve Jobs would have us believe. It’s something better. It’s reliable in a way that none of my PCs can claim. It’s the new Volkswagen of computing, even if Apple does talk it up like a Ferrari.
In the interests of fairness, a few knocks. Having to sync with iTunes is stupid, Pages is rubbish, typing on a touchscreen is as much fun as tap-dancing on a bed of nails. It’s a bit heavy for the way you have to hold it, even though it could definitely be worse, and the accessories are priced somewhere between ‘stupid’ and ‘crazy’.
There aren’t many such game-changing moments that I can remember. The Nintendo Wii lost its appeal quickly, to the extent that I can’t build up any excitement for Sony’s Move or Microsoft’s Kinect. Windows 7 is close, I suppose, mostly in the sense that it works better but I don’t really think about it. I certainly can’t say I was excited to get my hands on it, or that it’s changed anything about how I work.
Going back further, the only thing in recent years that comes close is the original iPhone, which turned me from someone who never actually carried one into someone who hated to be apart from it – if only because it meant not having the internet in my pocket whenever I needed it. Plus, it was a great phone if you didn’t like being annoyed with phonecalls, because nobody could ever get through to you!
What will the next true game-changer be like? No idea, but it clearly needs to come from someone other than Apple. Even its ego must have some limits…