Do You Have An IPad?

The other day in deep frustration trying to get some project done I kept poking at my iMac screen. "Where is the app, why aren't you doing anything I shrieked?" That was when I realized this wasn't my iPad, it was my iMac. (In fact I am fighting my iMac as I write this.) I use my iPad about 80% of the time now.

Tim Cook needs to consider two things:
1. Making the screens on laptops and iMac's touch sensitive. Jobs said famously "no one wants to reach across their keyboard and touch the screen. Here's a surprise Steve, YES WE DO! Sadly Microsoft has done this with terrible tablets, worse laptops and even worse software. I wouldn't touch their new OS 10 for months after the release. Apple has followed the same playbook. It took three weeks and three updates to give us the OS we should have had the day the iPhone 6 launched. Cook needs to note that yes the mighty Do fall. The list of the fallen is long and deep. Another debacle like that and even the faithful lose, well, faith. If Jobs were alive a whole bunch of employees would be looking for jobs.

2. The other option would be to make the iPad so close to a laptop you wouldn't need it anymore. A couple of ports, click on cover and keyboard, maybe a bigger screen and if the weight were kept reasonable, you would never need a laptop. I have written columns on my iPad using a Bluetooth keyboard. I can't import photos so its back to the iMac but you get the idea.

The Unveiling of the iPad

The beauty of the iPad is that you don't have to hunt around tool bars, applications; you find the icon, touch it and it launches. It takes seconds where if you are using you computer program, say Word, it takes forever. I've timed it up to 5 minutes. That is unacceptable.

Our fingers are so much faster than any mouse. You touch and something happens. You click your mouse to one, two, three or more additional steps before you have a program to use.

This was apparent when samples of the original iPad were taken to retirement homes. It didn't take them any longer than a kid to figure it out. They loved them and many refused to give them back. There were scuffles I guess. Do you blame them? There are times when a mouse confuses me.

Within a week after the release of iPad 1, a YouTube video when viral when a family videotaped their two year old given an iPad for the first time. After a bit of inspection, poking of buttons, it was up and running in two minutes and and she was playing games the parents had installed. At 2! I remember a few weeks later going through the TV department at Target where a gaggle of kids was leaning on the platform filled with TV's. Bored, I watched them swipe the screen and when nothing happened turned to look at the sales lady. The sales lady had to turn away she was laughing so hard.

There is concern that the pace of sales has slacked off. Well, how many DO we need? We do need them but we are going to spend up to $900 for incremental updates. Work on the software. Give us exciting and useful things to use on it.

I have noticed most of my doctors are using them now and enterprise is more and more adopting them. Did you know that every priest in the Catholic Church has one and it has everything they will ever need to conduct a service of any kind in any language. Since it has wi-fi built in they are never far away from updates. United adopted them a few years back and put the information of every airport in the world on them. Now rather nearly 100 pounds of books it weighs two pounds and they put them in a messenger bag.

David Pogue famously said at the 2007 MacWorld when the iPhone was revealed, "The iPhone would change everything." How right he was. Now if Apple will ask us what and where we want to go.