my name is mwd

I’m ashamed to say that, like a lot of people last night, I caved and watched the live news feeds of the Apple event, thanks to Matt Wood’s excellent MacMash (even if I only came in 33rd on the keyword bingo :). And thus was we given the iPad, which seems to have quite a mixed reaction, but I think is quite important. I’m going to rant a little, but if you want the quick version of my point, watch this advert from 1984, but replace each occurrence of the word “Macintosh” with “iPad”:

Computers, even my beloved MacBook Pro, are still too complicated for general use. When all you want to do is read some web pages, check your email, process your holiday photos, and play a few games, why do non-technical users still have to worry about the file system? Why is Finder or Explorer still the default interface? There’s lots you can mess up in a file system. For those of us savvy enough on the Mac we’ll use something like QuickSilver or LaunchBar to bypass the file system, but that’s because we’re techies who know how to seek out things, or indeed we know they exist to start with.

To me, what the most important part of the iPad launch presentation was when Steve Jobs described the aims at of the product before it was revealed. It’s that attention to detail that’s meant previous tablets were clunky toys – they were just your existing, annoying for non-technical people, Windows UI. Even Mac OS X, which is a lot better in the user friendliness stakes than Windows, wouldn’t translate to something with not mouse or keyboard. You need to marry the hardware and software well. The iPad is designed to let non-technical people do the few tasks they want without the main of managing a full computer.

It’s the computer for the rest of us, again.

Sure, it’s no good if you want to do complex tasks like programming, and if you want to run many apps at once. But outside those of us know either like to know a deep knowledge about computers, who wants to be exposed to a computer’s complexity when they’re just checking email and websites over breakfast? I recently converted my parents’ household to all Macs, but clearly I started that process two years too early, as this is exactly what I got my Mum an iMac for – to let her process her digital photos, to keep in touch by email, and to let her surf the web. It’s not that she’s not smart enough to understand a full computer – she is, but why should she when it shouldn’t be required to do those tasks? There’s more fun things in life to be getting on with.

As CTO at Camvine I always argue that our job as a technology company is to take the complexity of technology away from the user – let us solve that, that’s what we’re good at. Let the user just get on with what they want to do, and then let them get on with the rest of their life. That’s exactly why I think the iPad, whether it’s a success or not, is a step in the right direction.