Making the Google Chrome Speed Tests
Today Google released a new beta build of their fastest version of Chrome to date for the Mac, Linux and Windows. From the Google Chrome Blog:
Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.
Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, weintroduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can nowsynchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while inincognito mode.
Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.
To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.
Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.
The video that was made to illustrate how fast Chrome has become is phenomenally cool:
Flash and Horses
Notice a similarity?
HP to kill Windows 7 Tablet Project
Hewlett-Packard has killed off it’s much ballyhooed Windows 7 tablet computer, says a source who’s been briefed on the matter.
The device was first unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 in January and was supposed to hit the market in mid 2010. But our source tells us that HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system and has terminated the project (something CrunchGear mentioned months ago).
HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for it’s slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system.
So what will HP use as an operating system? Look for Google-powered devices, which have already been announced. And HP really does seem determined to make a go of the Palm WebOS. They said how important it was to them yesterday, and they will likely experiment with porting it to a slate-type device.
Will WebOS emerge as a successful operating system for tablet devices? That seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google. To get traction from third party developers with WebOS HP will need to sell a lot of units. And it’s not clear what they’d gain from all that effort, anyway. HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems.
Lets see....JooJoo tablet? Dead. Microsoft Courier? Dead. HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead. And the assumed WebOS alternative for the HP Slate? Given that they only acquired Palm yesterday, they'll be lucky to ship something by late Q4 2010, probably Q1 or Q2 2011...right about the time that the iPad 2nd Gen comes out. Apple, yet again, has a huge lead on everyone else with a new product category.
Steve Jobs on Flash
This morning, Steve Jobs posted an essay on Apple.com putting forth his reasoning for not allowing Adobe's Flash format to work on their iPhone OS series of products (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch):
Thoughts on Flash
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Second, there’s the “full web”.
Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
Fourth, there’s battery life.
To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
Fifth, there’s Touch.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
Conclusions.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Steve Jobs
April, 2010
First of all, I agree with pretty much everything Steve said. In the past few months, Gruber has had several posts on this topic that has done a very good job of articulating Apple's reasoning behind it's actions. Just this morning, after Jobs posted his essay, a few great comments have been said by a few people I respect that I wanted to link to.
Steve Jobs makes the case against Flash on iPhone OS. Cogent, detailed, straightforward, brutally honest. No prevarication. Read the whole thing, but there are a few choice bits. First, Apple couldn’t include Flash on iPhone OS now even if they wanted to:
...
While you’re reading it, think about how little wiggle room the whole thing leaves for Adobe to respond.
A letter from Steve Jobs about why they don't allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads. (Notice he specifically uses the harsher "allow" instead of the much softer "support".)
...
Jobs sort of circles around the main issue which is, from my own perspective as heavy web user and web developer: though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn't possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash. For 95% of all cases, Flash is, or will soon be, obsolete because there is a better way to do it that's more accessible, more open, and more "web-like".
Adobe should refocus their iPhone-deployment goal on the future of Flash:
Establish Flash (the tool) as the premier tool for creating rich HTML5 content, the same way Photoshop is the premier tool for image manipulation and Illustrator is the premier tool for vector drawing. Adobe is in the tools business, first and foremost.
Make Flash (the tool) cross-compile between Flash Player binaries and HTML5/Javascript. Then use Flash Player as a legacy compatibility layer for browsers that don’t fully support the necessary standards, including Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Of course, I expect this to happen right after Apple allows iPhones to install apps from outside of the App Store. So… never. But it’s nice to wish.
Steve Jobs' open letter "Thoughts on Flash" is a win for the open web, and a logical and well-articulated discussion of why Apple won't allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Hooray.
I’m a little irritated that all those preaching about Flash are ignoring the history — how we got here — so this is by way of filling that in.
There was a time when lots of browsers didn’t have Flash installed. On the downside, any attempt to use video was a crapshoot, and you might end up in the Pure Hell of the real.com website. Also, there were a lot fewer amusing lightweight games. On the upside, there were a lot fewer squirmy obtrusive ads.
Flash filled an real need; for a lightweight portable graphics programming environment, and for an ubiquitous reliable video codec. That, plus a lot of determined marketing by Adobe, got us to the status quo, where it’s assumed that every computer has a Flash player installed.
Does the need still exist? That’s an open question. I personally run with a Flash-blocker in my browser, and find this improves my experience of the Web. It seems unlikely to me that, in the mobile space, Adobe is going to be able to repeat their success in finding an unmet need, meeting it with Flash, and convincing everyone to ship their solution.
I got off the plane a short time ago and found my inbox and voice mail were full of questions about the open letter Steve Jobs posted about Flash support on the iPhone and iPad. It’s a well written letter and outlines in the clearest and most direct way yet why there’s no Flash support on the iPhone or iPad. I suggest you read it yourself but it comes down to two issues, technical and business. Jobs lays out his case well although I’m sure there will be endless debate about each word used as folks attempt to read between the lines. So, what does it mean?
1. Don’t expect Flash anytime soon on the iPad or iPhone. If that’s a deal breaker for you, than these aren’t the devices for you. Apple is going to preserve the app experience as they see fit as that’s a core differentiator for the platform. It was Steve’s last point and it’s the one that likely matters most.
2. Like Steve, I have not seen Flash work well on a mobile device. That doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t. Adobe needs to not respond to Apple with words but rather actions and showcase shipping devices and how well they can run Flash. I’m especially interested to see how Flash works on Tegra 2 based devices.
3. The digerati can debate open and close and Apple’s motives (and they will) but none of that matters. This is the age of the connected consumer and the mass market adoption. If enough of Apple customers are frustrated to the point of not buying Apple devices, perhaps Apple will reconsider their position. Fact is, the lack of Flash does not appear to have slowed down Apple sales in the slightest. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Apple’s customers, being viewed as valuable, are causing major content stakeholders to re-tool their content to make it available on Apple’s mobile platforms.
Twitter launching new @anywhere platform for websites
Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced during his Keynote Interview today at South By Southwest Interactive, that Twitter is rolling out their new @anywhere platform.
It integrates Twitter accounts into your website. When users click a link, they can follow your writer, see her latest tweet, etc on your site. This information is provided by small modal overlay popups. This is an obvious value-add for content/media websites. Twitter is launching with 10,000 sites including NY Times, Huffington Post
From the Twitter blog:
When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.
We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere. Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!
When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.
Later in the interview, Evan was asked what he thought about his company, with regards for openness. Evan responded by saying that they had a lot of discussions at Twitter of whether to use the word 'open' or 'transparency'. His conclusion was that, "A window is transparent but a door is open." He said that they always try to proceed down the road of openness. We have of course seen this with how 3rd party developers are able to use the versatile Twitter API to use twitter in many ways, from 3rd party apps to social media mashups with other services, such as Foursquare or Gowalla.
Who Wants an iPad?
Shortly after the iPad was released, a few of my non-Apple using friends started asking me what I thought about it. Rather than present my arguments for it in 1 or 2 sentence bits over instant message, I promised them I would write a post, here, giving my reasons. Thus...
Let me first throw some facts at you:
- iPhones and iPods Touch in use today: ~ 60 million (Apple has sold over 70 million, but I’m assuming that not every device sold is still in use).
- iPhones sold in the first year (Q3-4, FY 2007): about 1.4 million. For most of this time, the price started at $499, but nearly everyone bought the $599 model.
- iPhones sold in the second year (FY 2008): about 11.6 million, over half from Q4. Most sales in FY 2008 were the better, cheaper iPhone 3G.
Alan Kay, regarding his reaction to the iPhone in January 2007:
When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
Before I go into my particular opinions on the topic, I wanted to list all of the articles that I drew from when writing this. As I am a horrible writer, you'll probably get much more from just reading all of these articles in full. Not all of the authors of these articles are in agreement, as many of these articles were written in response to previous articles by other authors this list. I know that not many of you will take the time to read them all, as it would take several hours, but I really think you should. It is worth it. In chronological order: QGNRKXYiNBETyfcZkxra
Design is Important
When NASA built the Lunar lander, as Andy Ihnatko quipped on MacBreak Weekly recently, there was this break-through moment when they were trying to figure out how to save weight. There were many design problems in the design when finally someone said, "Why don't we just take out the seats? "Wait," another responded, "We've got to have seats for this thing!" Well, no you don't. This isn't an aircraft we normally build, this is a spacecraft that operates in almost no gravity. As soon as they removed the seats, they realized almost all of their other problems went away. All because they were trying to design this thing to make it like every other thing ever built, without stopping to think, do we really need all of these things.
When Apple builds a product, they step back and ask themselves: what do we see as the need of the customer in which we want to fulfill with this product. Apple does not try to add more features to their products than their competitors so as they will have more bullet points in a chart on the back of the box. Apple also does not compete on price. They are unabashedly unapologetic about this. They think very carefully and very hard about who their products are designed, what features they have, and how they work. They do not, willy-nilly, throw features at a product when those same 'features' could detrimentally impact the user experience. Design is not just color, rounded corners and shiny metal - which is what most non-Apple people think of when they think of Apple products. Apple designs their products and then engineer their products to fit that design. Microsoft/Dell/HP/Acer/HTC, et al. engineer their products and then throw a bit of rudimentary design decision at those engineered products. If those designs have to change to fit the engineered product, then so be it. This results in convoluted UI, inconsistent UI from application to application, and design be committee which results in a horrible user experience for the end users. Geeks have figured out how to get around these issues because we tend to be the type of people who like figuring these things out; we're also smarter than the average bear (when it comes to things with chips in it). Please do not confuse this with good design.
Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco of Slashdot fame, famously wrote in 2001 when the first iPod was released:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.Because, you know, the Creative Nomad has done so well.
The iPhone is a shrunken, stripped-down iPad
People who have actually held this thing in the demo room at the iPad event say that their opinion of this device, when seeing it on stage at the event - whether their initial impression was good or bad, changed positively when actually holding one in their hand and using it. People who have actually gotten their hands on this device say, you know, this is something different. In one of Marco Arment's pieces (and Marco was not at the event and has not actually seen a physical iPad yet) he wrote: SyAOMJLnHwrw9wXuum2E
I thought this recent episode of the Charlie Rose Show on PBS with the technology columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg, New York Times business reporter David Carr and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington was a fairly balanced coverage. Both Carr & Mossberg have actually held and used iPads.
A choice line that really stuck with me from this video that the New York Times's David Carr makes regarding the iPad: SYxAPmulOFq3EDncoLT3
On the iPhone, and now the iPad too, once you have the device in your hands and begin to use it to do whatever-it-is-to-do-what-you-want-to-do you forget that you're holding a device in your hand at all. I cannot say that I would ever feel that with a blackberry, netbook (haha) or god help me, a windows mobile phone.
But it doesn't have a camera, or Flash, or an ice cream maker!?!?
Anytime something new comes out that we haven't had time with, we're past this prologue. We're always going to use the vocabulary and use cases of previous things. Remember when the iMac first came out and it didn't have a floppy and everyone flipped out about it? Strangely the world didn't end. People don't like change and most change is incremental. No matter what the change is, big or small, there is always a point when a lot of people collectively freak out. A lot of the arrows people are shooting at the iPad are falling way short. Either because it is not germane to the kind of audience that would use this or they're leaving out really important facts. RE: the Flash topic: Flash started out as this goofy thing for having little rich media applications on web pages. And then the next thing we knew, it had taken over the whole world and people started making whole sites out of it. It became a way for a designer to build a whole portfolio on the back of a company . People think Flash ==, right?. That Flash is the equivalent of streaming. Remember when Real Player used to be our only choice for streaming too? Do you see many pages that are using Real Player now? I sure as hell don't. If you look at things like Jilion's SublimeVideo HTML5 Video player that they posted two weeks ago, which uses proof of concept HTML5 & javascript, you'll see that it is possible to host videos while doing a lot of the rich stuff that you can't do with straight HTML and normally would use Flash for. [Update: When I first started writing this Jilion only supported Chrome or Safari (aka WebKit browsers). However, in the middle of writing this, they added Firefox support because Firefox doesn't fully support all of HTML5 yet. As for IE? It might support HTML5 in a few years when Microsoft finally concedes that Silverlight is gong to fail.] It just goes to show you that evolution happens. I'm so sick of this,
When the iPad announcement was made, Lee Brimelow's, Platform Evangelist at Adobe for Flash, reaction to the iPad was geared towards emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that. Now while that is amusing, this is even funnier: Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. There only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu. Oh, and it turns out, there is a fair chance that Hulu will just develop a native iPhone/iPad app for their site. So all that remains, from Adobe's example is Farmville. See? Apple is doing the world a favor.
Steve Jobs, took part in an open town hall event internally at Apple HQ two days after the iPad was released. While no reporters were in the room, Wired had several sources who reported what was said at the meeting. When one employee asked Steve about Adobe & Flash, Wired paraphrased Jobs' response as:
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
I want to make the point that geeks care about flash, non-geeks do not. Non-geeks who have iPhones are used to that already. People have forgotten that we've been here before with the iPod and the iPhone already. There was much gnashing of teeth when the iPhone was $499 in it's first year and it couldn't do things like copy & paste or run native apps (remember, the app store came out a year later, in 2008). Many people cited reasons such as this as to why no one would buy an iPhone. People flocked to the iPhone and iPod because of attention to detail and design. They didn't know that was the reason they loved these products. They loved these products because they were so easy to use and worked so well. That was the result of Apple's attention to detail and design. Marco Arment wrote a wonderful piece on this called "Feature checklist dysfunction". Remember in the heyday of the iPod when the Sansa had a much cheaper, and feature-filled product when compared to the iPhone? I do not recall ever having seen a Sansa being used by anyone in pubic. I couldn't walk 100 feet cross campus (I was still in college) without seeing a half-dozen iPods. Sansa had a product that was dramatically cheaper than an iPod and could do more than an iPod, yet the iPod sold better. Why? The total user experience of the iPod - from iTunes on your computer to walking around with one in your pocket, just worked. The Sansa was built by engineers for geeks. The iPod was not. And the geeks, by-in-large, still bought the iPod because they too enjoyed a product that emphasized working well over bullet-point feature lists on the back of their box.
Who Apple Is Targeting With The iPad
In the first year the iPad's release, your early adopters will buy it. People who bought iPods in the early part of the decade eventually graduated to Mac computers and iPhones. This is because they've grown to like Apple's attention to detail in their products from the hardware to their software. These people will also buy iPads for close loved ones (spouses, parent's and kids) or they will use them in public places such as coffee shops, work meetings, the subway, in class or in a plane. Non-iPad owners will see them and ask to try them out or perhaps venture into an Apple store to try one themselves. The iPad will spread virally, just like the iPod and iPhone did before it. I've been criticized by friends sometimes as a hypocrite for bashing Apple during the '90s, eventually buying an iPod and in 2006 switching to Macs. I would say that evolution, by definition, is hypocritical. If we all run our life by fear of hypocrisy then, really, how are we better than sea anemones or pine trees? We all have to learn and evolve. People who refuse to change so they can trumpet the fact that they aren't hypocrites are really missing out. Sometimes better things do exist, and sometimes things that used to not be so good, change into good things. The iPhone sold 1.75 million phones in it's first year. I predict the iPad will sell 750,000 - 1 million. The iPhone sold 11.6 million in its second year. Care to make some guesses as to what the iPad will do in it's second year?
This will be the perfect parent computer. I gave my Dad an iPod Touch in August of 2009. He had been interested in an iPhone for a while but due to crappy AT&T service where he and my Mom live, they were unable to get one. When I explained what the iPod was, and asked if he wanted one (Steff bought a new MacBook Pro and got a free iPod Touch with it) he was game. Since then, he's come to love his Touch and uses it for several hours a day. The UI is easy to use. It's intuitive. He's fairly computer illiterate. He loses icons off of his Dock on the Mac. He doesn't quite get the concept that little blue dots under icons on the Dock mean the application is running, etc, but the iPod touch is super easy for him to use. He browses iTunes and downloads tons of apps (the free ones, he still doesn't want to pay for any) but there are tens of thousands of free apps on the iTunes store. He loves it. He is, however, 56 years old. As he ages, he has a harder time of reading things on that small of a screen. After the iPad event, he called me to ask me about it and after I explained it would do everything his iPod Touch does + has a bigger screen + is faster and will hold more data because it's hardware is better, he immediately wanted to know when it would be available to buy. A lot of geeks write off the non-geek market as if it doesn't matter. We all get so caught up in reading Engadget, and Gizmodo, and Techmeme and we forget that, by-in-large, the tech community despite it's dominate web presence, is less than 20% of the population in the real world. Could this be the device that that other 80% buys because its inherently intuitive, maintenance free, and accessible? When my Dad wants to check the weather, he opens his iPod touch. He presses the Weather channel icon. He then presses 3-day, or weekend, etc. On a computer (Windows or Mac) he needs to open his browser. He needs to either do a Google search or go to a weather website. The then needs to type in his zip. Never mind the site is polluted with annoying flash ads, or has a horrible UI. My Dad is smart enough to do all of those things. But it is much easier for me (and him) to hand him a 500$ device (like when I handed him the 200$ iPod Touch) and tell him that, in about 10 minutes, you'll figure out how to use 80% of the features of this device on your own. You know what? He will be able to do just that. And I think most other people would be able to as well. That is killer.
The Designed Computing Experience
This could be the first truly modern computer. This could be the first truly modern OS ever released (if you discount the iPhone as not being a computer itself - which I think it is). The iPhone was Apple's putting it's toe in the water to see how this concept might fly with consumers. Everything else has started from a leftover OS design or leftover hardware design and built off of that. If the one feature Apple can sell the iPad on is: this is the computer that doesn't freeze, doesn't crash, you turn it on and it will work, it will do things you expect it to do and it doesn't expect things to be done like in the past 20 years just because that's the way we've always done it. One of the things on the iPad, now discovered in the publicly released SDK documentation, is you do not have direct access to the file system. However, every time you need a Word file, it will show you every Word file present on the entire system. You can then edit them, email them, or share them in other ways (on the iPhone you can SMS, email, or tweet, etc). That is a fundamental change in the computing experience. I think the computing experience with an iPad will be full of things like this. Oh no, I can't configure a new printer! Well...it will just sense the places that you can print to and configure it for you (OS X already does this with Bonjour on my Macs).
The practice of your tech illiterate co-workers or relatives coming to you because they "lost" that file they saved or downloaded (because the particular application they were using chose to either save it on the desktop, documents, or the previous folder that was browsed to depending on the developer of that app's preferences) will become a foreign concept (thank god). You want to work on a document? Open the document app and all of those documents types are available to you. Does it take features away from geeks who want complete control over every check box, radial button, or drop down menu they're used to? You bet your ass it does. But you know what? I don't care. I am sick and tired of dealing with the process of doing and not enough of the product once done. When I want to sit down with an iPad, I want to read a book, listen to a podcast or music, browse the web, write a blog post, check twitter, take notes in a meeting, play a game, update my Netflix queue, check my RSS feeds... I could go on all day with this list, but wait, these are all things I already do on my iPhone! But now I can do it on a larger screen when at home on the couch, in bed, at work in a meeting, in the coffee shop, on the subway....all places where I currently use my iPhone at but I sometimes wish I had a larger screen. If I want to do those more complex tasks? I have a desk at work with 2 computers on, and a desk at home with 3 computers. When I'm walking? or in the car? in the mall? I use my iPhone.
My point? Everyone who buys an iPad will buy one to solve a personal want or need that not necessarily everyone else who buys an iPad will also have. People should not assume that just because the iPad doesn't appeal to them, that it wont also appeal to everyone else. Remember that crazy 1st generation iPhone that couldn't run native apps, had no cut and paste, and didn't have 3g? News flash. It didn't fail. The iPad wont either.
Future Shock
"Future Shock" by Fraser Speirs. This article is simply amazing. Read it.
Some choice quotes:
For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".
It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.
In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.