The iPad – how disappointing

Yesterday was Apple iPad day – and what a let down it was.  After all the hype it turned out to be just a big iTouch.

What Apple (usually) does really well is take something that already exist and make it sexy and so much easier to use.   It turned MP3 players into iPods.  It turned phones / PDAs into iPhones.  So there was me waiting for it to turn the laptop / netbook into … what?  Well basically something that solved all the usability problems of having a screen that is separated from a keyboard and doesn’t give me an inutitive data entry tool (i.e a pen) and requires bolt-on connectivity – so that I have one device that allows me to do all the things the connected citizen needs to do – i.e. produce stuff, consume stuff and share stuff.

The iPad is basically just a jumped-up media consumption tool.

Why is it that no-one – a tech company like Apple or a service company like Google – seems to have gotten their heads around that fact that media has changed?  We therefore have a bunch of tools and services out there that allow us to either consume stuff, OR share stuff, OR produce stuff – but nothing that allows us to do all three – the Mythical One Place and the Mythical One Device.

I know why the Mythical One Place (essentially the Social Media App) doesn’t exist – that’s because Google and especially Facebook don’t really want it to exist.  If you could Do Facebook without going to Facebook, that would force the realisation that Facebook is a service or infrastructure, not a media property.  And its valuation and current revenue model is based on it being a media property.  But it’s not so hard in the device space – which is why I was hopeful that Apple might have really introduced something new.  And they haven’t.

Update: it appears as though Hitler agrees with me (couldn’t have really put it better myself Adolf)

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