The iPad is paper

The moment you actually look at an iPad, you realize it isn’t a computer at all. It’s paper.

This is not a device to do your work on. You don’t use it to program, or to write your term paper. No, it’s certainly not a device for the technorati. Which is great news for the technorati (although they don’t yet know it). Because it means that “computers” have finally made the great leap to a true consumer item, and therefore the cultural reach of your computer program (if you understand the terrain) is about to vastly expand.

I’m not saying that we’ll all be using an iPad in the future. Google will soon be coming out with its higher-resolution Android based competitor, with a built-in camera. Then Apple will leapfrog over that. Meanwhile some other company, perhaps HP, will do something different, and the battle will be on.

But it won’t be a battle between competing computers. It will be a battle over something much more interesting.

In the early days of the automobile, you couldn’t drive unless you were also a mechanic. To start your car in the first decade of the previous century, you needed to turn a big crank. If you didn’t do it right, the crank would spin back hard and perhaps break your arm. The monstrosity that was an early car was marketed as a dream of universal personal transport, but those early versions were anything but. The dream was of fun, but the reality was work.

And I would argue that the presence of the keyboard, the very fact that a notebook computer is a clamshell that needs to be opened, is a signifier that it is not built for fun, but rather is primarily a work device — much closer sociologically to that big old computer that sits on your office desk. Microsoft’s valiant attempt nine years ago to come out with a tablet PC was doomed not through any individual failure of concept or execution, but because it was a computer. Whether or not it came with a keyboard, it was still fundamentally a machine for knowledge workers to get their work done.

But the iPad is the first of a series of devices that are precisely not about getting work done. It’s not the iPad itself that is exciting, it’s the bold statement by Mr. Jobs and company that is inviting us to play with and consume information — not as an adjunct to work, but as a fundamentally valid activity in its own right.

When I look at an iPad, I don’t see an iPad. I see a device that doesn’t exist yet, of which the iPad is merely a harbinger. I see really cheap flat tablet shaped displays strewn around the rooms of houses and workplaces. I don’t care which tablet is which, because they are all interchangeable. I don’t need to bother taking a tablet from one room to another, because my data is all in the Cloud anyway.

If I’m reading the day’s news, having a video chat with friends, or seeing a film, and I want to go to another room, or across town, I know there will be another tablet there. When I pick up this new tablet, its built-in camera will recognize my face, and I will be able to resume whatever activity I was engaged in before.

This is not a computer. This is paper, the way we’ve always dreamed it would one day be.