They Fucked Up The iPad

Except this time it isn’t Apple that is doing the fucking up, which, considering the litany of complaints that normally surround new product launches (iPhone price drops, arbitrary app store denials, choosing AT&T) is really saying something. Apple has found a way to represent both the best and the worst of the world as it is today, particularly around technology.

Nope, Apple did good and time will bear it out. At the end of the summer, we’ll all be huddling around our Twitter screens for images of the next generation iPad with camera’s and G-d knows what else. And they’ll just keep improving it. Expect iPads to be around for a long time.

So who fucked up the iPad? The media companies. They basically phoned in their offerings. But before we get to that we should take a brief look at Apple’s success and failures.

First The Best, Then The Rest

Apple has produced some revolutionary devices starting with iPod, proceeding to the iPod touches, the new Macbooks, and of course, the iPhone, which is perhaps the most successful gadget ever built in terms of sales, functionality and its sheer impact on the wider culture. Their commercials are prime time affairs. Apple has done things with engineering that simply weren’t possible a decade ago. They have created new possibilities with their inventions and their radical thinking.

They’ve also developed a simple, no-brain way to buy media and applications with iTunes and the App Store. They have enriched thousands of developers with their App Store and given rise to a whole new industry of app developers. Making those around you rich is an age-old way to be influential and to remain that way.

It is said that after Steve Jobs delivered the iPhone to market, he immediately though of what next. What next was what everyone can’t stop talking about, which is the iPad. After conquering the world of mobile communications with the iPhone, which, lets be really honest is basically a perfect device, from a design and functionality perspective, Steve was already hatching plans for a tablet. And Moses came on down from the mountain and he brought with him a tablet.

My prediction is that Apple will find even more success and make themselves even more important in our culture with the Apple iPad. They won, and they won big. It doesn’t matter whether they are first to market or if it has a camera or 3g capabilities or if this or that element sucks. As a whole, the iPad is a huge win.

What They Get Wrong

Apple closes off their applications and source code so that all applications must be written to their specifications. Unlike open source projects, like Google’s Android, which allowa anyone to write and develop (and radically innovate), Apple chooses to keep their process hidden. There are arguments for an against, but at the end of the day, Apple is wrong to not go open-source the result of which is their products and the applications and utility of those products will never be as good as it possibly can. It really is a shame, but in the grand scheme is small fries.

Apple Didn’t Fuck Up the iPad

The brain dead dinosaur media companies did. Amazing how arrogant they were thinking that people would pay MORE money for retro-fitted content. It is clear now that the media companies didn’t exactly break new ground with their iPad applications. Sure, Wired Magazine did some cool stuff, but for the most part, magazines are simply putting their same old print media and exporting it to this new quite revolutionary device. Here is Giga Om’s Mathew Ingraham:

Sure, Wired showed some ads with rotating cars, and the New York Times showed some video playing in its demo of an iPad app. But apart from a couple of little filips like that, they all look pretty much the same as the web sites that they’re based on — and part of the problem with mainstream media web sites has always been that they replicate the same user interface metaphors that appear in the printed versions of their products. Paving the cow paths, that’s called. It sure isn’t a way to be creative or innovative, or to find new audiences.

There is more. MediaWeek’s Lucia Moses filed this piece this week, documenting severe push back that content providers were seeing from their customers:

Magazines are pinning their hopes on the iPad and other, forthcoming tablets and e-readers helping offset a decline in circulation and ad revenue. But as the early feedback shows, they may be paying the price for the industry’s longstanding practice of charging steep discounts for subscriptions. As a result, consumers are well aware of the per-issue discrepancy between subscriptions and single issues.

As one customer of Time magazine’s app ($4.99 single issue) wrote, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re … passing the savings on distribution and raw materials to themselves. I can get 56 issues of the paper version for $20. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

Jeff Jarvis also chimed in with a reaction that goes to the heart of the content creation versus content production debate that has risen up over the iPad. Many have talked about how the iPad is basically a device for consuming news, movies, music, books and coached it in a way that said this was an overall good. The content creators, bloggers, musicians, features writers etc. have complained that content creation is not so easy on the iPad. There is no physical keypad, and the thought of banging out 1000 word posts on the iPad isn’t exactly catching on. Here is what Jarvis said in a post titled, “Where Creativity Goes to Die”

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

My thoughts are these: The iPad isn’t going to save any business models that shouldn’t be saved in the first place. The belief that consumers are going to pay a premium for content that they can get for free on the web, or for much cheaper in print, is dead on arrival. Shame on the media companies for trying to snooker us into doing so. It really does exhibit their arrogance for all to see. If you want people to pay extra money then you are going to have to show them something they have never seen before and its gotta be better.

That being said, it is early in the game and even an old-media hater like myself sees glimmers of hope in what certain media companies have been doing lately. The New York Times in particular has been slowly turning the ship around making it much easier to share and comment on specific articles, for instance with their Times Reader and Skimmer applications. In the meantime, here is a video that it cost me nothing to embed here. Enjoy!

Image Source: Richard-G on Flickr

Tagged as: Apple, iPad, Technology Review