Back in December, here’s how I concluded my piece on what I expected from Apple’s then-still-unannounced tablet:
If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.
After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.
The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.
Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts.
The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is.
The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack. Thus, many of the things you do are faster, or at least feel faster (which is what matters), on the iPad than the Mac. Like, for example, launching applications. The built-in apps, and many of the third-party apps I’ve been using the most, are ready to use within a moment of launching them. (Games tend not to load instantly, but that’s true on high-power consoles like Xbox and PS3, too.)
There’s something fundamentally strange about how fast the iPad feels considering how underpowered it is versus a modern PC or Mac. How can a computer with so much less CPU speed feel faster? What Apple has done is re-think several fundamental aspects. The iPad was designed from the ground up with a different set of priorities. I think Tim Bray summarizes it well:
For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is unreasonably fast. I suspect this accounts for a whole bunch of the “Wow!” reaction the iPad obviously provokes.
Since there’s no free lunch, I think it’s really important that we understand what they sacrificed to get that performance. My bet would be on some combination of windowing and virtual memory. I tend to work on lots of things at once, but in fact I look at things in rapid succession, my eyes can really only focus on one thing at one time. Given sufficiently fast switching, maybe we all ought to be getting less WIMPy.
The iPad (and iPhone OS across all devices) does indeed lack virtual memory.1 The only memory is honest-to-god RAM. RAM is fast, virtual memory is slow. The tradeoff is that without virtual memory, the iPad can do far less at once, but what it does do is never going to require hitting virtual memory. Without a windowing system, drawing is simpler and faster.
Apple has made other significantly different tradeoffs as well. Battery life on the iPad is simply stunning. Reviewers across the board are getting real-life results that beat Apple’s promise of 10 hours of battery life. This is a function both of software (which does less and works hard to keep the CPU from drawing power while the iPad is being used) and hardware — iFixit’s teardown shows that, internally, the iPad looks more like a battery with a computer than a computer with a battery.
The iPad, so far, never gets warm. Browse a bunch of web sites. Play some video. Play a game. It still feels as cool to the touch as when it’s turned off. It is also dead quiet — no fan, no humming, nada. This is the future of computing.
The iPad was designed with an entirely different set of priorities than Macs or PCs. Someone may well produce a worthy iPad rival in the next year, but it’s not going to be something like HP’s Slate that runs Windows 7, an operating system that epitomizes the traditional set of computer design priorities.
The iPad is also eminently affordable. $500 for this thing seems hard to believe. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it at double the price. But clearly there were tradeoffs involved to hit this price point. Build quality is not one — the thing feels perfect in hand. But it only has 256 MB of RAM — perhaps the single biggest hardware weakness of the device (see the section on Safari below). It is super high-quality, but clearly designed for the mass market. Anyone who thinks Apple only makes high-priced products has completely lost sense of reality. “Affordable luxury” is the sweet spot for mass market success today, and Apple keeps shooting bulls eyes. In fact, the only thing that makes my heart ache regarding the iPad is when I start imagining a hypothetical Pro model — imagine what Apple could put in an iPad that cost as much as a MacBook Pro. (My dream iPad Pro: double the display’s pixel resolution and include a gigabyte or two of RAM.)
Affordability presents itself in other ways, too. Nothing is included in the box other than the power adapter. The dock and case are separate SKUs, and it doesn’t even come with headphones. It’s like buying a Honda, not an Acura — the base model is not “well-equipped”.
$500 is affordable but not cheap, and the iPad does not feel cheap in any regard. The build quality is outstanding. The brushed aluminum back makes my plastic iPhone 3GS feel cheap. The iPad takes more cues from the current iMacs than it does from the iPhone. The seam between the glass and the aluminum is nearly perfect. It’s just one piece of aluminum and a piece of glass — there is no superfluous chrome bezel between the glass and the backing as there is on all iPhones and iPod Touches to date. Even without turning it on it looks and feels a step beyond the iPhones and iPod Touches we’ve seen to date.
One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for. This was not so for the iPhone. The answer to the question of what the original 2007 iPhone was meant for was right there at the bottom of the iPhone home screen, in the “dock”: phone, email, web, music and video. The other apps were icing on the cake. The four apps in the dock were what Apple designed the iPhone to do.
The iPad also has a “dock” on the home screen, and the default apps in that dock are clearly important: Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod (which, on the iPad, is only for audio). But some are treating the iPad as, fundamentally, an e-reader. Others as a gaming device. Others as a movie player. None of those things are represented in the iPad’s default dock apps.
The truth is that the App Store is the killer app. The iPad is meant for anything that can be represented on a 10-inch color touchscreen. Back in January when we were playing the “What’s Apple going to name the tablet?” game, my favorite, by far, was “Canvas”. I’m not saying here that Canvas would have been a better name than iPad, but the word conveys perfectly what the iPad is.
The iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
As did Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer:
Steve Jobs said about the iPod that “it is all about the music”. With the iPad, Apple has done the same for personal computing as it has done before with the iPod: it made technology go away. But if the device is gone, and the operating system is gone, what is left?
The iPad is an empty canvas that invites us to imagine what is possible. It inspires our imagination and it makes us want to create, because never before were we able to create software that was so close to the user.
The iPad hardware and OS are profoundly humble — they put all the focus on whatever app it is that is open.
One thing that is very iPhone-like about iPad is that when you first take it out of the box, it wants to be plugged into your Mac or PC via USB and sync with iTunes. In some ways, that’s understandable. USB syncing is how you load your iPad with music and videos and transfer over stuff like your email accounts, and, if you’re not using MobileMe, your contacts and calendars. But, on the whole, it feels retrograde. It creates an impression that the iPad does not stand on its own. It’s a child that still needs a parent. But it’s not a young child. It’s more like a teenager. It’s close. So close that it feels like it ought to be able to stand on its own.
Android devices do not have this problem. You can sync an Android device with a desktop computer via USB, for transferring things like music and videos, but you don’t have to. Out of the box, a Nexus One is ready to go. Google’s big advantage here is that they’re using online services as primary data stores. The Google Way is to use Gmail for email and contacts, and Google Calendar for events. You just tell your Android device your Google ID and password, and your email, contacts, and calendars start syncing over the air.
Apple has MobileMe, but because it’s a paid service, they can’t (or at least won’t) assume that all iPad owners are going to use it. But then even those of us who do use MobileMe get stuck with a first-run iPad experience that involves a tethered USB connection to a computer. The Apple Way is to assume that your primary data stores for these things are locally stored on your Mac or PC — Address Book, iCal. At the very least, these things ought to be able to sync between iTunes (on your Mac or PC) and your iPad over your Wi-Fi network. Third-party iPhone OS apps like Things do a great job with this — there’s no reason iTunes and the iPhone OS shouldn’t too.
On the iPhone (and iPod Touch; assume from here out that when I say “iPhone” I’m referring to both), app icons on the home screen sit atop a plain black background. On the iPad, they’re spaced further apart, which is why I think Apple has added wallpaper — making the iPad home screen look a lot more like a Mac or Windows desktop. The default wallpaper shows a sunset skyline of a mountain range in front of a lake. There’s a meteor shower in the sky. And the streaking meteors look, at a glance, like a series of severe scratches on the display. It’s a curious choice.
It’s a lot like the iPhone’s, but, it’s different. Because it’s bigger, there are no pop-up indicators showing which key you hit as you type. They’re not necessary. The feel, overall, is pretty much like typing on a really big iPhone.
If you’re in a position where you can set the iPad down on your lap or a table top, it’s not too hard at all to type with all your fingers when the iPad is in landscape (horizontal) orientation. Now, to me, it’s nowhere near as good as even the worst full- or nearly-full-size hardware keyboard I’ve ever used. You can’t just rest all eight of your fingers on the home row keys, and you can’t feel where the key cap edges are. You have to look at the keyboard a fair amount as you type. On a hardware keyboard, I hardly ever look at the keys. But for a touchscreen, it’s good.
In portrait (vertical) orientation, I can type on the iPad using just my two thumbs, as I do on my iPhone. I have relatively large hands, though — I don’t think most people can do it. The keyboard in this layout is way too small for me to type with all of my fingers, though. In portrait orientation most people will type using one finger, I expect.
Now, the funny thing is, in general, bigger keyboards are easier to type on than smaller ones. That’s why big laptops are easier to type on than compact ones, and, indeed, that’s why the landscape iPad keyboard on the iPad is easier to type on than the portrait one. But at a certain point, the curve flips around and smaller becomes faster. I type much faster on my iPhone using the smaller portrait orientation keyboard than the wider landscape keyboard. In both modes, I use just my two thumbs. With the smaller iPhone keyboard, my thumbs have to travel less from one key to the next. People who aren’t very proficient at the iPhone keyboard, or who have very large thumbs and therefore have trouble precisely tapping the smaller keys, may well prefer the iPhone’s wider landscape keyboard. But for me it’s not even close. I never type in landscape on my iPhone.
And in fact (and this is the aforereferenced “funny part”), I type faster on my iPhone than I do on the iPad. That’s especially true for when the iPad is in portrait mode, which puts the keyboard size in a no-man’s land — too small to eight-finger-type, too big to thumb-type. But it’s also true for when the iPad is in landscape mode. I’m hopeful that this is just a factor of experience and muscle memory — I have nearly three years of experience typing on the iPhone, and, as I type this sentence, only two days experience with the iPad. Last Friday I watched Andy Ihnatko eight-finger-type on his iPad — which he’d been using for over a week — and he was typing pretty goddamn fast.
One problem I’ve run into is that Apple has subtly changed the layout of the keyboard from the iPhone’s. On the iPhone, the Delete key is on the lower right, above the Return key. On the iPad, it’s in the upper right corner, and the Return key is next to the L key. The iPad adds a right-side Shift key.
The iPad layout makes perfect sense — both these keys are now where they reside on traditional hardware keyboards. Their weird positions on the iPhone are a compromise forced by the extreme lack of space on the iPhone display. Apple has also added a new key to the iPad keyboard’s numeric/punctuation mode: Undo. It’s a good idea — I have the feeling most iPhone users don’t know about the system-wide shake-to-undo gesture, and even for users who do, the iPad is harder to shake (and, when docked, downright silly to shake). But this new Undo key moves the period and comma keys over to the right by two positions. The iPhone keyboard layout is so firmly ingrained in my mind that these changes are problems for me — I keep hitting the (new to the iPad) right-side Shift key when I mean to hit Delete, and I keep hitting Undo when I mean to type a period. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure, but I find it interesting that my iPad typing muscle memory is based on the iPhone keyboard, not regular keyboards. I think this is because, overall, it really does feel like a big iPhone keyboard.
I don’t have (and did not order) the iPad keyboard dock, but I have been using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m using it to type this entire review. Pairing (via the iPad Settings app) is easy and quick. And it works great. Several essential text-editing shortcuts from the Mac OS work system-wide on the iPad: Command-Z, -X, -C, and -V work for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Command-A works for Select All.
You can use the arrow keys to move the insertion point. Option-Arrow keys work to move the insertion point one word at a time. Command-Left/Right moves the insertion point to the beginning/end of the current line; Command-Up/Down moves the insertion point the start/end of the current text field — which, in the case of something like Pages, is the beginning/end of the entire document. Holding down Shift extends the selection range, and works in conjunction with the Option and Command keys as expected. (Some of Cocoa’s long-standing Emacs-style text editing shortcuts work too: like Control-K (kill) and Control-H (backspace).)
Certain of the function keys on the Bluetooth keyboard are useful on the iPad. The brightness keys control the iPad’s display brightness. The volume (and mute) keys work. The playback buttons — play/pause, next, previous — all work to control the iPod app.
By default, once you’ve started using a hardware keyboard, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears, which is great, because the full display is now available for displaying content. But if you want to use the on-screen keyboard while a hardware keyboard is active, you can toggle it using the hardware keyboard’s Eject key. The Esc key dismisses the auto-complete suggestion — it’s like tapping the little “x” next to the suggestion under the current word you’re typing.
While a keyboard is connected, you can wake up the iPad by hitting any key — completely bypassing the iPad’s slide-to-unlock screen. Very nice.
The iPad is fundamentally a touchscreen device. You absolutely do not need a hardware keyboard for it. But if you’re hoping to do any amount of serious writing with it (and, for obvious vocational reasons, I plan to), you’re going to want one. There are a few places in the iPad UI where I really wish the keyboard was useful but it isn’t. For example, Safari location field suggestions. On the Mac, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list of suggestions. On the iPad, you must use touch to select from the list. Since you’re already typing if you’re entering a URL, this is just begging for arrow key support. (Ditto for suggested results from the Google search field in Safari.) The Esc key does not dismiss popovers, but that’s probably OK. It’s only possible to invoke popovers via touch, so it seems OK that you must dismiss them via touch as well.
The Tab key can be used to switch between text fields; Shift-Tab goes in reverse order. (When using the hardware keyboard, I do find myself hitting Command-Tab, without thinking about it, when I want to switch to another app; it does nothing on the iPad.)
The iPad display is, overall, wonderful. Colors are bright and (unlike the Nexus One’s OLED display) accurate. Photos and videos looks great. Touches seem precisely accurate. The glass feels good. Viewing angles are shockingly good. You can lay the iPad flat on a table while you eat or drink and it looks just fine at a decidedly skewed angle — far more so than with the iPhone. This IPS stuff is the real deal; here’s to hoping for an IPS display in this year’s new iPhones.
The only complaint I have about the display is that the pixel resolution isn’t all that dense. The iPad’s 1024 × 768 display has a resolution of 132 pixels per inch. The iPhone’s 480 × 320 display has a resolution of 163 pixels per inch. The difference isn’t huge, but it’s definitely noticeable. Type looks crisper on the iPhone than the iPad, and type rendering falls far short of even newspaper-caliber resolution, let alone glossy-magazine caliber.
(Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough, just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones.)
The iPad is so good as a web reader, that, if you’re a web junkie, everything else the iPad does is just gravy. It’s good. I’m so used to Safari on the iPhone, though, where the toolbar is at the bottom, that I’m having a hard time getting adjusted to the toolbar at the top. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision on Apple’s part. In fact, the iPad HIG is quite explicit that iPad toolbars should go at the top, not bottom — which makes me think Apple thought about and tested this and has concluded that the top works better for the iPad form factor. It’s just that I use Safari on my iPhone a lot, and I am really used to the button placement.
When you create a new page in Safari on iPad, text focus goes to the Google search field by default, rather than the URL location field. That’s a change from both desktop and iPhone Safari. I’m finding this hard to get used to, but I can see how this might be a better design for typical users. It makes the default search engine all the more essential to the web browsing experience, though.
Zooming and flicking are essential to the experience, just like on the iPhone. Flicking is how you scroll, no surprise. The zooming, though, may come as a surprise. It wasn’t too long ago when 1024 × 768 was considered a large display for full-size web browsing. But: what matters on the iPad (and iPhone) is not the pixel count of the display, but the physical size. 9.7 inches diagonally is a bit small for a non-zoomed web browser. But the action of zooming — whether through double-tapping or pinching — is so smooth, fast, and natural that it feels better, not worse, than old-school desktop web browsing.
There’s one severe problem in Safari for iPad, though: memory crapping out. MobileSafari for iPhone has always allowed you to open up to eight pages at a time. It tries to keep them all truly open, in RAM, so that you can quickly switch between them. But when it runs out of memory it starts flushing some of the pages. It doesn’t forget the URLs for those pages, and, in recent versions, it saves a static thumbnail image of the rendered page, but when you switch back to those purged pages, MobileSafari must reload the page — thus, you must wait both for the contents of the page to download and for the page to actually render (which — the rendering — often takes longer than the downloading). It’s very noticeable. Switching between unpurged Safari pages is instantaneous. Switching to a purged page takes as long as opening it from scratch.
Wolf Rentzsch, linking to this complaint from Peter-Paul Koch, wrote a brief technical overview of why Apple might have designed MobileSafari this way. (Keep in mind that iPhone OS does not use virtual memory; thus RAM is severely constrained.)
This purging problem got a lot better with the iPhone 3GS. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G only had 128 MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256. MobileSafari’s ability to keep more pages in memory is probably my single favorite aspect of the 3GS.
The iPad also has 256 MB of RAM. But, in my use, iPad’s Safari isn’t able to keep nearly as many pages open as I can on my 3GS. In fact, sometimes it seems I can only have one, and every page I switch to gets completely reloaded. This is more than just annoying — it can lead to data loss if you have unsubmitted form data sitting in an “open” iPad Safari page. I’ve run into this posting items to DF from the iPad — my posting interface is a web page form. When I want to link to the current page, I invoke a bookmarklet which opens a new page with the title and URL fields of the posting form set to the title and URL of the page from which I invoked the bookmarklet. Often, though, I want to switch back to the page I’m linking to copy another URL or a bit of text to quote. Twice so far, when going back to the posting form, it’s been purged and must reload from scratch — in which case I lose anything I’ve already written. I never run into this problem on my iPhone 3GS when switching between just two open Safari pages.
The problem is also severe for AJAX web apps, which tend not to be designed with full page refreshes in mind.
I hope this can be improved significantly in an iPad software update, but I worry that it’s endemic — that because the iPad screen is so much larger than the iPhone’s, that MobileSafari must allocate significantly more memory per page for the framebuffers. 256 MB of RAM simply may not be enough for MobileSafari to keep more than two or three pages in memory. If so, Apple really needs to consider some sort of caching or serialization scheme rather than completely flushing away purged pages.
I wrote the entire 4,828-word first draft of this piece on my iPad using Pages.2 I didn’t use any of the formatting or layout tools — I used it as a text editor rather than a word processor. It’s quite serviceable. What I like best is that it opens very quickly. Switching between, say, Pages and Safari and back to copy-and-paste a URL feels more like switching than quitting, launching, quitting, relaunching. You don’t need to (and can’t) save manually. Whatever you do in a document simply persists automatically. When you go back to the list of documents, they’re presented as big thumbnails — very much like the list of open web pages in Safari.
Pages’s toolbar and ruler are only visible when in portrait mode. In landscape mode, all of the chrome disappears. It’s just a full-screen editing view, a la WriteRoom. I’m writing this piece in this full-screen (landscape) mode, with my iPad propped up on a table in Apple’s iPad case. It’s a nice setup, and I can genuinely imagine leaving my MacBook at home for trips in the future, with the addition of a few missing iPad apps (like, say, a good SFTP client).
But when I say there’s no chrome in the landscape mode, I mean none. Pages has a decent simple little find and replace feature, but it’s only possible to invoke it in portrait mode. (I must have hit Command-F a dozen times so far, to no avail.)
There are already complaints piling up that the iWork apps don’t support the complete feature set of their current Mac counterparts — open a file created in a Mac version of Pages/Numbers/Keynote on your iPad and certain document features may be removed. (The iPad apps prompt you with an alert telling you which aspects of the document have been changed or removed.)
Another way of looking at it though, is that the iPad iWork apps are to their Mac counterparts what the iPad as a whole is to the Mac — simpler, more focused, but in some ways faster. Pages launches and is ready for input far quicker on my iPad than on my MacBook Pro. Writing this review, I’ve been switching back and forth between Pages and Safari. It doesn’t feel like quitting Pages, launching Safari, copying a URL, quitting Safari, and re-launching Pages. It feels more like switching — it only takes a moment after tapping the Pages icon on the home screen to be back where I was in my open document. (My only complaint is that you lose the insertion point when leaving and coming back to Pages — the document re-opens to where you left off, but you must tap the screen to place the insertion point. When switching several times, that becomes slightly tedious.)
This is obviously not even close to a full review of Pages, but I can say without hesitation that it’s easily worth $10.
There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing.
Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep.
What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. When I read a bunch of new email messages using my iPad or iPhone, when I next sit down at my Mac, those messages are marked as read in my inbox. I don’t have to do anything on the Mac for that to happen. That’s just how IMAP works. I can add a new calendar event on my Mac, then walk away from my computer, take my iPhone out of my pocket, and the event is there. I can add a note to that event using my iPhone and a few moments later the note will be synced to the event on my Mac.
Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.
The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac:
Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad.
Open the file on my Mac and make changes.
Save.
Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB.
Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad.
Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app.
Sync.
Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’s “My Documents”.
And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertantly make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document.
The bottom line, obviously, is that there is no way that anyone is going to use these iPad apps in the way I describe above.
As-is they’re only useful to me in two ways. First, I can imagine using Pages on the iPad to compose original new documents — posts for Daring Fireball — while I’m using my iPad. I’ll either finish them there and then copy-and-paste the result into the web-based posting interface for DF, or, I’ll send the draft to my Mac for further editing (which is what I did for the piece you’re reading right now). I can also imagine creating finished Keynote decks on my Mac and then moving them, once, to my iPad, and taking only my iPad with me to the presentation — i.e. using Keynote, Numbers, and Pages on the iPad as viewers for finished documents. (And, conveniently, they’re viewers that can make edits if you notice a mistake or want to make a last-minute change or addition.)
But there’s no possible way to use these apps as clients alongside their Mac counterparts on an ongoing basis.
The sort of over-the-air syncing I’m imagining for iWork is, admittedly, a difficult problem to solve. But the bad news for Apple is that their top competitor in this space has a solution: Google Docs. With Google Docs, there’s no making copies, importing/exporting, manually invoked syncing, or USB tethering involved if you want to edit a single instance of a spreadsheet from multiple machines. You just make changes on one machine, and when you next look at that document from another machine the changes are there.
The workflow for iWork is downright antediluvian. It’s not just pre-Cloud, it’s pre-network. It’s effectively the “Who’s got the latest revision of this file?” workflow of the days when we moved files from one machine to another via floppy disks.
What in the world is iWork.com for if not for solving this problem? At least iWork.com lets you avoid having to physically tether the two machines via USB to get a document from the Mac to the iPad (or vice versa), but it’s no better than file sharing through iTunes conceptually. When you send a file to iWork.com (from either Mac or iPad) you’re pushing a copy, a snapshot of the document from that moment. After making subsequent changes, you’ve got to push those changes to iWork.com all over again. And to get them on the other device, you must manually import — making just another copy.
What you ought to be able to do is specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document. iWork.com doesn’t serve any such purpose today.
I predicted it’d be crummy to run non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps on the iPad — like Classic apps running on Mac OS X — and I was right. It’s OK for games — they look jaggy, but jaggy games aren’t that uncommon. But regular (non-game) apps just look and feel weird. When you run them pixel-doubled text doesn’t scale dynamically — everything is pixel doubled. It’s a good way of proving that the iPad is not “just a big iPhone”, though.
The only iPhone app I find myself using on my iPad is Simplenote, for copying and pasting bits of text to and from my Mac and iPhone. Needless to say, I’d love an iPad-optimized version of Simplenote.
The iBooks app is free, but doesn’t ship with the iPad by default — you have to download it from the App Store. Apple hasn’t explained why this is so, but there are several reasons I can think of. For one thing, e-book rights are managed on a country-by-country basis — it seems likely that the iBooks store won’t be available in every country where the iPad will soon be sold. Making it an App Store app will also allow Apple to update the app on its own schedule — built-in system apps only get updates along with the entire system.
So in some ways, the iBooks app is on equal footing with other e-book readers available in the App Store, particularly Amazon’s Kindle app. But iBooks does get some special treatment — the first time I launched the App Store app on my iPad, it prompted me with a dialog box asking if I’d like to down the free iBooks app. It’s impossible to miss. The iBooks app also has display brightness controls that are not available through public APIs.
Winnie the Pooh is included as a free sample, and the choice is genius — it’s a beloved story, a good read, and best of all (from Apple’s perspective) it can’t be read properly on the Kindle because the color illustrations are a big part of the experience. No book on the Kindle will ever look this good. The Kindle has its own advantages — its books are generally cheaper, its selection bigger, and e-ink works better in bright sunlight — but Winnie the Pooh epitomizes the iPad’s advantages.
iBooks’s page-turning animation is delightful — it doesn’t just track your finger-swipe precisely, but even renders the type faintly in reverse on the other side of the “sheet”. The practical minded can simply tap the right and left edges of the screen to turn pages.
Amazon’s iPad-native Kindle app is good, too. Oddly, to my mind, it is superior to their recent Mac app in every way. It looks better, feels better, renders text better, and has more features. I say this is odd because the iPad was announced just two months ago; Mac OS X was announced over a decade ago. I suspect part of the reason the Mac version is so crippled is that they were more worried about keeping Mac users from un-DRMing Kindle content than they were about making the Mac app an actual good-to-use app.
The Kindle doesn’t do animated page-turning, but that’s not a big deal. Reading is great. And the Kindle’s ace-in-the-hole, of course, is the far larger selection of e-books in its store — hundreds of thousands versus Apple’s tens of thousands. I bought When the Game Was Ours, a new book by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It is not available in the iBooks store.
So Kindle’s advantage is library size (and, secondarily, price per title). iBooks’s advantage is the color display. I’d be shocked if every single piece of advertising Apple produces for iBooks doesn’t focus entirely on screenshots of books with color illustrations, photos, and video. I think it’s going to be easier for Apple to improve the iBooks store library than it will be for Amazon to create a Kindle hardware model with a color display. I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones. Kindle has a better chance of long-term success as a software platform than a hardware one.
Update: Several readers report that some Kindle ebooks do contain color when displayed on color-capable devices like the iPad. Good to know. Also, you can turn on page-turning animation (which is off by default) in the Kindle app’s “Info” popover. (But the animation sucks compared to iBooks’s.)
Given that most iPad-native apps in the store right now were developed using only the simulator by developers without access to actual iPads, you might expect apps to be buggy and UIs to be awkward. I’ve found the bugginess to be true, but the UIs are actually good. I think the physical prototypes developers jury-rigged for themselves paid off, design-wise. There’s no question that UIs are going change rapidly in the coming weeks now that developers have the real deal to measure the feel of their apps against, but for the apps I’ve been using the most, they’re pretty damn good already.
As for the bugginess, I’m not saying it’s inexcusable or even surprising — the SDK simulator is not a perfect simulation. Several of the bugs I’ve reported are only present when the apps are running on actual iPad hardware.
On the whole, though, the quality of iPad apps on day one is better, by far, than I had expected considering that developers had to build them in the dark, as it were.
Prices, so far, are significantly higher than for iPhone apps — but still far cheaper than category equivalent Mac apps. For example, NetNewsWire is $10 (and going to $15 in May); Things is $20; and OmniGraffle is $50. No doubt there are going to be wildly popular 99-cent iPad apps, but it’s also shaping up as a serious platform for serious tools. Games are a bit more expensive, too, but, to me, reasonably so. ★
Technically, the iPhone OS has “virtual memory”, but it doesn’t have swap files. What’s running has to fit into physical memory. And in layman’s terms, swapping RAM to storage is virtual memory. ↩
The final word count is just short of 7,300, so admittedly I wound up writing quite a good chunk of it in BBEdit on my Mac. ↩
Matt Richtel:
Faced with withering criticism for its spotty iPhone service, AT&T blames in part a shortage of cellphone towers near homes and businesses. But it has a solution: put a miniature cell tower in your living room.
There’s a catch, though. You have to pay for it. And that is making some customers angry.
And rightly so — it’s using your broadband connection to improve AT&T’s network. AT&T should be paying us to install these things, not the other way around.
I can’t wait to get rid of these clowns.
Optional Flash-fallback for non-HTML5 browsers in Jilion’s upcoming HTML5 video embedding library.
Khoi Vinh on the Popular Science iPad design:
And they’re repetitive, too; over and again, it’s the same basic format in which a layer of type slides pointlessly against the backdrop of a fixed image. That repetitiveness does little to counter the general feeling of placelessness throughout the app; the navigation is well-meaning but fussy at best, but honestly much closer to incompetent. (As we get out of the gate with iPad publishing, can we just very quickly impose a moratorium on displaying instructions on how to use reading interfaces? If you need to explain it, we should all agree, then the design isn’t doing its job.) I got lost and frustrated repeatedly, and then I got bored.
Agreed fully.
Placelessness is a huge problem. With a paper magazine, newspaper, or book, you know where you are and how much remains based on the pages in your hands. The Popular Science iPad app is visually interesting and impressive, but you get no sense of place, and, worse, I’ve found you don’t even get a sense of where there is scrollable content. It’s more like an interface for a touchscreen magazine from a science fiction movie than something that’s actually done right.
(If I were hiring someone to design an iPad magazine, I’d sell a kidney to hire Khoi Vinh. I’m not sure how much of a hand he’s had in the design of the NYT Editors’ Choice iPad app, but I’m absolutely in love with that app. That app has changed my morning reading routine. It has little sci-fi wow factor, but it is graceful, placeful, and feels like The Times — the Times I know and love, as someone old enough to vividly remember what it was like when being a news junkie meant getting your fingertips stained black every morning — in a way that the nytimes.com web site never has.)
Paul Miller reviews the JooJoo tablet for Engadget. It stinks. It’s fast, though, but — shockingly — Flash video performance is horrendous:
Software issues aside, the JooJoo actually happens to be quite speedy thanks to its 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB solid state drive. It only takes about 7 seconds to boot and toggling between the menus is snappy. WiFi speeds were also quite fast with it taking 11 seconds to load Engadget and 8 seconds to bring up NYTimes.com.
But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA’s Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video (or for doing… something). Unfortunately, the software just isn’t there yet. Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won’t have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a “work in progress” by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. In one of the biggest moves of irony, JooJoo has actually implemented a hack for YouTube where you can view a video in Flash or in “JooJoo” mode which is a straight playback of the MPEG video file every YouTube video harbors. What does this remind us of? HTML 5, albeit with a less elegant implementation. This of course only works on YouTube right now, though JooJoo says it plans on supporting other sites in the future. Watch the video below for yourselves to see all this Flash tragedy play out.
(Ironically, Engadget’s video demos are only available in Flash. Why would a website devoted to leading-edge gadgetry continue to embed video in a format that can’t be played on the best web-reading gadget? If your video doesn’t play on the iPad, you’re like Steve Allen mocking the lyrics to rock-and-roll songs — an anachronism.)
Baseball, the sport for math geeks. (Via Kottke.)
The Vanderbilt Republic’s Kickstarter project to raise $5000 to process the film from their documentary trip to Cambodia last year ends tomorrow at noon eastern. They’re close, but not there yet. If this project is unsuccessful, there’s a real danger that this film will stay unprocessed and begin to disappear.
See photographer George Del Barrio’s piece at The Huffington Post for more, including new video footage.
Adam Engst nails it:
The hardware is so understated — it’s just a screen, really — and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
That’s the best description of the iPad experience I’ve seen yet.
So much for me saying (just today) that Apple’s App Store apps don’t make use of private APIs.
That said, I’ll bet this is more about the short development cycle of the app and the fact that this is the first release of the iPad. The first release of the iPhone, of course, didn’t have any public APIs at all.
Nintendo’s U.S. president Reggie Fils-Aime:
“Clearly it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.”
The best review from an iPad skeptic I’ve seen. Maybe skeptic isn’t the right word, but clearly he’s unconvinced that it’s the next big thing.
This is a minor point in his piece:
And pragmatically, experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don’t become platforms. There are exceptions but it’s remarkable how often it works this way.
I think that’s only true historically. I don’t think it’s true any more, especially in the mobile space. And it was never true for consoles, and the iPad in some ways is like a cross between a mobile device and a console. But, all that said, I’d love to be able to develop for the iPad on the iPad. Especially if it were a HyperCard-like thing, where the output looked native to the iPad but was based on WebKit behind the scenes, thus allowing the apps made by the thing to be openly distributed and shared with other iPad users.
Re: the last on Apple and private APIs, here’s video of Bertrand Serlet from WWDC 2009. Apple doesn’t disallow the use of private APIs out of spite; they disallow it because their private APIs are not fully baked.
Thoughtful and reasonable.
Update: Although, I don’t understand his position on private APIs at all. I suppose he means not that Apple should document and allow the use of every single SPI on the system, but rather that Apple’s own apps shouldn’t be able to use private APIs if third-party developers can’t. My understanding though, is that Apple’s App Store apps do only use the public APIs. The built-in system apps — which run in the background, among other things — are obviously in a different class. Third-party developers will never get to write system-level apps for iPhone OS.
Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design:
Frankly, as the adoption rate of iPhone increases and if iPad follows suit, it will become increasingly difficult to argue in favor of a starting point other than iPhone OS. The NPR iPad app, for one, provides a much more pleasant user experience than NPR.org.
The reason, I think, is that even if the people building iPhone apps would prefer, on general principle, to be building cross-platform open mobile web apps instead of banking on Apple’s closed proprietary platform, there’s no way to build cross-platform web apps that provide the same quality of user experience. The NPR iPad app is indeed terrific, and I don’t think it could be replicated as a mobile web app — at least not with the same amount of work, and not in a way that’s cross-platform.
Jeremy Bernstein recollects his time playing chess with Stanley Kubrick, while writing a profile of him for The New Yorker. (Audio excerpts from his interview with Kubrick are still available on YouTube.)
If you’ve got an iPad (or the SDK simulator), check out the iPad-optimized version of Apple’s iPhone OS developer docs. It’s an iPad-style UI implemented in HTML/CSS/JavaScript — it even has popovers.
Update: Peter Hosey explains how to enable this display mode in a WebKit-based browser on your Mac.
And the JavaScript behind this thing is a fork of PastryKit.
Video by Brad Colbow analyzing the art direction of three magazines’ iPad apps: Time, GQ, and Popular Science. Time and GQ both only work well in landscape — they lose much of their design when held vertically. (GQ looks particularly bad in portrait orientation.) Popular Science works equally well in both orientations.
I’ll add that Popular Science also has a better meta design than Time. Time and GQ is selling each issue as a separate iPad application. I’m not sure who Time thinks is going to spend $5 a week for a new Time app, but my guess is that his name is Joe Nobody. But regardless of per-issue pricing, who wants a separate app for each issue? Shouldn’t part of the advantage of digital distribution be that you can carry around many back issues? Who wants a page full of Time icons on their home screen?
With Popular Science (as well as GQ), there’s one app, and all issues appear inside that one app. That’s clearly the right way to do this.
Update: I originally wrote that GQ was like Time — one app per issue — but it’s not. It’s one app with in-app purchasing for subsequent issues.
Good overview from Liza Daly regarding how iBooks handles ePub files.
Update: More from Liz Castro.
Apple:
Apple today announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3. These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores. Apple also announced that iPad users downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day.
That means it outsold the original iPhone on day one. And the numbers don’t include pre-sold 3G iPads.
Oy.
Invitation-only press event Thursday at Apple’s Town Hall.
John Patrick, former vice president at IBM:
When we introduced the ThinkPad in 1992 it seemed like a huge deal just to get everyone at IBM to agree with the name. No one, certainly not me as VP of marketing at the time, had any idea that more than 30 million ThinkPads would be sold. The iPad will surely sell multiple times that number but more important the iPad will change the model of personal computing — not immediately and not for everyone, but for many millions of people the PC will begin to look like a dinosaur.
Joe Clark on iPad critics:
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.
Update: Fireballed. Change link to temporary cache for now.
Paul Thurrott:
Anyone who believes this thing is a game changer is a tool.
Apple:
The USB ports on Apple computers provide 5 V (Volts) and 500 mA (Milliamps) to each port, regardless of whether the port is USB 1.1 or USB 2.0. This is in compliance with USB specifications. On some newer Intel-based Macs, such as the MacBook (13-inch, Late 2007), when a device requiring more than 5V and 500mA is connected, the port with that device connected to it becomes a high-powered port capable of offering up to 1100 mA at 5 V. That port will continue to operate as a high-powered port until the device is removed.
Excellent, comprehensive review. I agree with almost every word. Love this bit about Safari:
There’s just something about surfing the Web using Safari on the iPad. It feels different, somehow. Apple’s marketing pitch says “it’s like holding the Internet in your hands,” and while that’s a little bit cheesy, it’s not far off. There’s just something different about holding that Web page in your hands, rather than seeing it on a desktop or laptop PC, or on a tiny iPhone screen. Tapping on links doesn’t feel the same as clicking on them with a mouse. It’s a good feeling.
5-star review. Worth noting: PCalc is a universal binary — the iPad native version is included with the iPhone version.
Flickr set featuring signage from “Tea Party” rallies.
Joshua Topolsky:
And one other item of note — Apple chose to place the headphone jack at the top of the device. We don’t know about you, but we think the idea of draping our headphone cord across the screen or snaking it around back is a tremendously bad idea. And guess what? In practice, it kind of stinks. Why the company didn’t opt for putting the plug in the logical place — say, the bottom of the iPad, or the side even — is a mystery that will undoubtedly haunt our every waking moment.
But the top of the iPad is the side half the time. It’s meant to be held horizontally just as often as vertically. Perhaps the headphone jack placement isn’t optimal for listening to music in the background, but it seems pretty good for watching video. And putting it on the bottom means you wouldn’t be able to use headphones while it was docked.
If you really want your headphones plugged into the “bottom”, just turn your iPad all the way around so that the home button is at the top.
I’ve seen numerous complaints today about the iPad not charging via USB, only via the power adapter. According to Apple:
Some USB 2.0 ports and accessories do not provide enough power to charge iPad. When this occurs the message “Not Charging” appears in the status bar next to the battery icon.
It works for me via the built-in USB ports on my MacBook Pro, but not via my USB hub. Apparently some Macs have built-in USB ports that aren’t “high power USB 2.0”, though.
Update: This is not a bug or error on Apple’s part. It’s a factor of just how strong the iPad battery is. It’s closer in watt-hour capacity to a MacBook Air battery than to an iPhone battery. More from Dan Frakes here.
Those of you still without iPads might want to grab some tissues.
Steve Swasey, Netflix:
We wouldn’t invite you to dinner without planning to serve dessert.
The iPad’s twice as fast as an iPhone 3GS, and appears to have the same amount of RAM: 256 MB.
Good prediction at the end.
Well said.
Hourlong iPad discussion on Clayton Morris’s Gadgets and Games show with Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Mike Rose, Ross Rubin, Natali Del Conte, and your humble narrator. Pretty good, I thought.
Update: Direct link to the .mp4 version.
“You’re not buying an unnecessary electronic device — you’re buying a family.”
My thanks to The Little App Factory for once again sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Rivet. Rivet lets you stream your movies, photos, and music from your Mac to your Xbox 360 or PS3. It integrates with iTunes and iPhoto (and Aperture); changes and additions on your Mac are instantly visible on your console.
This week only, DF readers can save 25 percent with coupon code “DARINGFIRE2010”.
Good to see Microsoft having just as amazing a weekend as Apple.
For journalists on deadline.
Joel Johnson:
I’m glad the Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards. I’m glad it encouraged a generation of kids to tinker and explore. I’m also glad that I don’t live in the fucking ’70s and have to type in programs from a magazine anymore.
Here’s a bit from Cory Doctorow’s piece today against the iPad (and the overall state of Apple product design):
Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.
Such is the march of progress. 40 years ago you could open the hood of your car and see and touch just about every component in there. And you had to, because many of those components required frequent maintenance. To properly own a car required, to some degree, that you understood how a car worked. Today, you open the hood of your car and you see a big sealed block and a basin for the windshield washer fluid. You can buy a new car, drive it for years, and never once open the hood yourself.
That’s the iPad.
Alex Payne wrote about this back in January:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today.
Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world.
They have a point. The iPad (and all other past and future iPhone OS devices) are not open in the way that the Apple II was and Macintosh is. But there have always been closed computing devices. My first computer? An Atari 2600, which my family got for Christmas when I was around six. I loved it. I devoted untold hours to it.
Yes, I also soon learned about personal computers — Apple II’s and Commodores and the Texas Instruments TI99 and even some from Atari. And you could type your own programs and they would run. And so of course my friends and I typed in our own programs and ran them. Joy!
But it never even occurred to us that in theory, we could also create programs for, say, the Atari 2600. We knew it was a “computer”, but it was a different type of computer. One where all of the software was made by faceless unknown professionals using magic beyond our ken. We had no idea how 2600 games were programmed or made or designed. And for all practical purposes, we had no chance whatsoever, none, to make our own.
We also had a sense that our programs, the ones we wrote in BASIC, were not “real” programs — the ones we bought (and, uh, sometimes didn’t) with commercial games and word processors were not written using BASIC. They were made — and distributed into retail channels — using, again, magic beyond our ken.
The iPad and iPhone are closed compared to personal computers, yes. But they are remarkably open compared to so many kinds of computing devices. Here’s an email I received today from Sam Kaplan:
I am 13 years old and a big fan of your site. I just made an app called iChalkboard. This is my second app, but my first iPad app. It allows you to simply sketch things out. Check it out: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ichalkboard/id322491414?mt=8. If you need any more info or a promo code, feel free to ask.
I hope you like it as much as I do.
He’s 13 years old and he has created (with the help of his friend, 14-year-old designer Louis Harboe) and is selling an iPad app in the same store where companies like EA, Google, and even Apple itself distribute iPad apps. His app is ready to go on the first day the product is available. Not a fake app. Not a junior app. A real honest-to-god iPad app. Imagine a 13-year-old in 1978 who could produce and sell his own Atari 2600 cartridges.
Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.
And, App Store aside — which, yes, requires access to a Mac and a $99/year developer account — what about the iPad and iPhone as web clients? There are no limits imposed by Apple on web apps targeting iPhone OS devices. When I learned to program in the 1980s with BASIC, the interface of our programs was monospaced (and on some machines, all-caps) text. Just text. If we had color it was limited to 16 shades.
If you could go back and show my 10-year-old self an iPad — millions of colors, video, photographs, gorgeous typography, a touchscreen interface, networking (wirelessly!) — and offered to let me write web apps for it in exchange for my agreeing never to touch an Apple II again, I’m pretty sure I know what the answer would be.
Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained. ★
Any other teenagers (or younger?) out there with iPad apps hitting the store, please let me know. ↩
I missed a few subtle points in last week’s piece on the escalating contention between Apple and Google.
The first is that what I’m talking about is outright hostility, not just mere competition. We’re well past the point where there’s any question whether Google and Apple are rivals, specifically in regard to Android-vs.-iPhone, and soon Chrome OS-vs.-iPad. Of course they’re competitors. That’s good, and a normal aspect of capitalism. I’m saying there’s something else going on, something more vicious. Outright hostility. The difference between rival and enemy.
The other thing I neglected to mention, and I think it’s important, is that this is all taking place at the executive and upper-management levels. The engineers — at both companies — are neither prepared nor relishing this. I have sources at both companies (more at Apple than Google, unsurprisingly, but more at Google than just about any company other than Apple), almost all of whom are engineers and none are “executives”, and the word that keeps popping up regarding this situation is “weird”. That there’s a meeting at Apple where Google comes up, or vice versa, and the managers are talking about waging war — vicious, angry talk.
Outright hostility just doesn’t feel right to the engineers at either company. It is weird. There are decided and very obvious cultural differences between the two companies. Apple engineers tend to think Google makes ugly (but effective, smart) software, and they’re suspicious of Google’s “we want all of your data” strategy. Google engineers see that Apple doesn’t get the web — or at least the web as a software platform — and consider that quaint, and they’re flat-out offended by Apple’s autocratic control of the App Store. But, on the whole, the engineers at each company like each other. There are a lot of Apple engineers who use Google services and a lot of Google engineers who use Apple computers.
Neither company has cultivated an internal culture like, say, that of the Microsoft of old — an “us against the world” mindset, where you know when you sign up for the gig that the goal isn’t merely to succeed, but to destroy the competition.
This is a generals’ war. The rank-and-file at Apple and Google aren’t looking for battle, or even expecting it.
On the other hand, Google is not as monolithic a company as Apple. Much attention has been drawn to Steve Jobs’s comments regarding Google at an internal Apple “town hall” meeting a few days after the iPad introduction in January. In particular, the second-hand paraphrasing reported by John C. Abell at Wired. As Abell reported it, and as most other outlets have picked it up:
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says.
After I linked to Abell’s report at Wired, a source who was at the town hall meeting told me:
“He actually said ‘teams at Google want to kill us.’ He never said it in a way that made it sound like the whole company did. Mostly just the Android team.”
After my piece last week, another source from Apple emailed me to reiterate that Jobs, at the Town Hall, was emphatic about there only being “some teams” at Google that want to kill the iPhone, not Google as a whole. That, yes, Jobs sounded furious about it, but that it was clear that his anger wasn’t directed at Google as a whole but rather Android in particular.
That alone could make for something ugly, though. ★