The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness

On Thursday, I set my iPad up for the first time with the fold-out case and Bluetooth keyboard. And I got walloped but good by Nostalgia. Nostalgia that was chunky and green.

The heartbreaking fate of the lovable Newton is exemplar of everything that is wrong at an Apple without Steve Jobs, and why a customer reaction of “Is that it?” can be a product designer’s best friend.

Take a little trip in my time machine

We can’t pretend to understand the present without first understanding the past. In this case, Apple’s past:

1998: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The Newton.

2010: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The iPad.

One an unmitigated, iconic flop, the other destined to be a success of Biblical proportions.

What a difference a decade makes.

What a difference a Steve makes.

The unbearable lightness of being steved

Steve brutalizes any attempted whizzbang without a real purpose. He’s so famous for it that he’s got his own verb.

Cutting-edge tech, fabulous, intuitive, friendly interface, lovable design — none of it matters, and nobody knows that more than Steve.

The Newton had all of those things and more. To own a Newton was to love it. It had the smile factor unlike anything else, since the original Macintosh.

The Newton was too ahead of its time. The final version, the MessagePad 2100, was released almost exactly a decade earlier than the first iPhone.

And so when Steve came back to Apple, he steved the Newton.

now, the technical problems were nothing

Critics slammed the Newton for being overpriced, for not having enough software, for the green screen, for the handwriting recognition’s imperfections, and for its chunky design — well, they didn’t get it then, and they sure as hell don’t get it now.

The problem with the Newton wasn’t any physical or technical problem. Those are easy to surmount. The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it.

There was no mental slot in people’s heads that the Newton could glide into.

Nothing like it had ever existed before. It was revolutionary. It was a total surprise.

the ipad has technical problems too, but it doesn’t matter

Today, of course, it’s an entirely different story: we’re all intimately familiar with the concept of the little computer in our pocket. We fell repeatedly for watered-down Palm handhelds which, in reality, we used rarely; we replaced them with iPhones, which we use too much.

Now the same critics who shit-canned the Newton for the wrong reasons are shit-canning the iPad for the wrong reasons.

The iPad, though, unlike the Newton, is going to win, and win on an epic scale.

Nevertheless, the shortsightedness of punditry is evergreen. Instead of praising the iPad, critics express their disappointment, because they expected more. They expected a genre buster. They expected something they’d never seen before, something beyond their imagination. Something revolutionary.

They’re disappointed that the iPad is so… well… unsurprising.

Therein, of course, lies the genius.

the ipad is barely a surprise at all

The design, delivery, and timing of the iPad couldn’t be more different than the Newton. The iPad wasn’t a surprise at all. It’s the capstone in a family of devices.

There’s a cozy, pre-existing slot in people’s brains that the iPad fills quite nicely.

“Oh,” they say. “It’s a big iPhone.”

It doesn’t matter if they utter that phrase in distaste. That little sand grain of dismissal becomes the core around which will form a pearl of understanding.

“Trying to deal with email on the iPhone is tough. The screen’s too small.”

“I wish we could both work on this at the same time.”

“I’d like to sketch concepts with touch, but I keep running off the borders.”

Ding ding ding.

Steve knows, better maybe than anyone else, that you don’t just slap a product out there and hope it will succeed. You have to prepare people for it, first.

And it’s better that people misunderstand a product, at first, than not understand it at all.

the “of course” model of innovation diffusion

People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it immediately if their worldview doesn’t already have a readymade place for it. And their worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before.

Steve expertly wields the powerful tool that is the feeling of recognition.

That feeling tells us, hey, I’ve been here before, and good things happened, and people were nice to me. Recognition is a poor man’s wisdom. It helps people decide whether to buy. Without recognition, they won’t even entertain the question.

So, because one Steve is worth a zillion other CEOs, Apple paves the way to the future by giving us devices we can understand today, in order to create more revolutionary (but still recognizable) devices tomorrow.

Do you doubt that the iPod was laying the groundwork for the iPad all along?

the takeaway for you, the designer

The question becomes not Why is the iPad so obvious? but rather, What’s next that we’ll consider obvious by the time it comes?

And How can I be the one to do it or take advantage of it?

And, How can I use the feeling of recognition to introduce my next product?

Intrigued? My personality-based recommendation system suggests that you also try my previous essay, Don’t Listen to Le Corbusier — Or Jakob Nielsen.

[...] Read the complete article on cheerful. [...]

This essay has everything in it! Nostalgia, tongue-in-cheek humor, and great insight! Thanks for writing and for the questions.

[...] the original post: The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful Posted in Ipad | Tags: critics-express, disappointment, genre-buster-, imagination, Ipad, [...]

Just sent the link for this to the other partners in my startup, even though we’re not a tech company. The point about obviousness is obvious. . . once you read it!

i disregard all that “just a big iPhone” crap on grounds of sample size. I only hear it from geeks on Twitter. Not one person who’s seen my iPad in person, in real life not the Internet, has done anything but want one of their own.

Great essay! Any chance of subscribing via email?

Brad, sure, with feedburner — here. Subscribe to Cheerful by Email

An insightful essay that shows the critics can get it wrong (just like how they did with the iPhone). Cannot wait until the iPad is sold internationally (specifically, here in Australia!).

Like previous comments, I am definitely going to take to heart the concept of ‘obviousness’ and apply it to our startup.

I played around with an iPad for the first time last night. I am not saying I didn’t like it but seriously you guys, it’s an giant overpriced iPod touch.

Thanks Amy! I honestly looked for an email option with feedburner before asking, but couldn’t find it. Well, there it is after all.

Wow, quite an interesting approach at looking at the iPad. This begs to wonder what the next device will be. Hopefully it won’t just increase in size

William, theamazingipad.com

[...] second One: “Oh,” they say. “It’s a big [...]

Very good read.

The other and perhaps defining aspect of the iPad is the fact that you are holding and touching it directly to enter the computing space that for the most part has been mediated by keyboards and mice while sitting at a desk. Now you can have that experience by just touching the device to enter all of the computing spaces it may offer while sitting/lounging comfortably. You are interacting more directly with the device and as a consequence with that which it shows you be a game, a document to read, a movie or the web to browse. No mouse, keyboard or stylus required. To touch something is to become part of it. To understand it.

Many of the digerati complain that it is to simple forgetting that technology becomes high-technology when the technology begins to disappear. I believe that the iPad is the first step in that direction for computing.

[...] the 3gig of comics.. [2010-04-27 22:10:20] jriga iPad A Staggering Work of Obvious: RT @JamesYount: cheerfulsw.com/2010/ipad-a-staggering-work-of-obvious/ [2010-04-27 22:10:14] tchtrx Sonic freebie: New, free SoundHound music-ID app for iPhone, iPad [...]

[...] Amy Hoy: “The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness” So … Apple paves the way to the future by giving us devices we can understand today, in order to create more revolutionary (but still recognizable) devices tomorrow. [...]

Jason, what would be your “just right price” for this “overpriced oversized iPod Touch” (I’m assuming you think the Touch, starting at around $200, is “appropriately priced”)?

At double the storage (8 vs 16 gb) and 4X the screen size, the entry level iPad is 2.5X the price. Seriously, that’s “overpriced”? I guess your comparing it to a cheap netbook

“The problem with the Newton wasn’t any physical or technical problem. Those are easy to surmount. The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it.

There was no mental slot in people’s heads that the Newton could glide into.

Nothing like it had ever existed before. It was revolutionary. It was a total surprise.”

I don’t really think that was the problem with the Newton. The problem was that, for most people, it didn’t do anything useful, and, of course, that it didn’t really work that well.

Really liked the article, it’s nice to read something where the author has actually thought about the subject. To the person above, claiming that the iPad is a big iPod touch are you being ironic? If not – you seemed to have missed the point about the obviousness of the iPad.

I agree that the iPad will be huge, I don’t have one yet (I’m in the UK) I can hardly wait.

Hari

The big problem with the original Newton was buggy software and weak hardware. If Sculley had waited for the second version as the first Newton, it could have been successful.

Anon, I used and loved my Newton. Many a Newton owner kept his/her NMP alive long after they were supported — to the extremes of developing custom software to sync, and using adapters to connect them to USB-only Macs. I personally thought the handwriting recognition worked extremely well, and I have terrible handwriting.

Hari, thanks And you’re going to love your future iPad! We got ours shipped from the US. I was skeptical, but I should know better by now than to be skeptical about Apple’s touch products.

DocB is right on – the touch part is key, and Amy seems to be saying that the iPod, which we control with our thumbs, by touch, led the way.

The Newton was like a notebook metaphor, where you scribbled notes and drew diagrams and whatnot – but you also pushed buttons and typed out words and managed drop-down lists with that stylus. With the iPad, touch is everything. With the Newton, the stylus was some things and other things at the same time.

Thanks for sharing your old Newton experiences, Amy.

After a year of enjoying what the iPhone brought, I started occasionally running into limits; “oh, I can’t, the screen is too small.”

At that point I was quite ready indeed.

[...] worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before.amy hoy gets down to the actual ipad/newton comparison and sez something applies to big green change (via smarmboy) [...]

I’ll put my money on an iTV. just like the iPad only bigger so you can watch TV broadcasts easily.

[...] The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful 27 04 2010 The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it. via cheerfulsw.com [...]

The Newton was a technological marvel, but it was full of problems. Much of it was technological. It was way too expensive and didn’t communicate with anything else. It was slow, and the handwriting technology never really worked all that well. The Newton may have been ahead of its time because the technology needed for it simply didn’t exist.

The original Palm succeeded where the Newton failed because the Palm took care of all the points the Newton missed. The Palm was cheaper and more importantly, it connected to your computer and synced with it. The Palm also solved the handwriting problem by using Graffiti. It was a compromise writing alphabet that made it faster to enter in stuff, and easier for the Palm to understand.

Because the Palm connected to your computer, it synced with your desktop which meant that it didn’t have to be backed up (the information is on your computer), and the computer made it easier to enter data.

Many people found their Palms invaluable. To me, it was my brain on two AA batteries.

Jobs killed the Newton not because it fantastic and he didn’t have anything to do with it, but because it was a financial drain on Apple. It had been a money losing device and Apple simply didn’t have the resources to see it through.

The iPad is successful now because the technology has caught up to what the Newton should have been. The iPad is larger, yet lighter and cheaper. There’s an Internet now you can connect to. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Email, Flickr, and all the other social networking sites.

I tell my kids that when I started working with computers 40 years ago, we could have built an iPod. We had digital to analog chips. We had static RAM chips. We had LCD screens. So, why didn’t we build an iPod?

The answer is that our iPod wouldn’t have been pocket sized (unless you have one of those pocket forklifts. And, it would have costed you about $3 million. The iPod came out just as portable hard disk drives dropped in price and size. A year earlier and the iPod wouldn’t have been possible.

Sadly, this was Newton’s problem — it was way too far ahead of its time.

I’m not sure I buy the “cozy, pre-existing slot” argument. For the iPad, it may work, but I think it falls apart with the iPhone.

The iPhone seemed blindingly obvious after it was introduced—”how come nobody made a phone like this before?”. But until the minute it was out, gadget freaks and opinion leaders poo-poohed the idea of a phone running a stripped-down Mac operating system, a completely new interface, and no keypad.

It’s obvious that we were ready for better cellphones, but Apple’s interpretation of that better cellphone was like nothing we expected.

So, yes, we were primed for the iPad, but we were not primed for the iPhone.

lol, the iPad isn’t overpriced, if anything its underpriced! I can’t imagine how they can afford to produce all that hardware for such a pittance!

My God. Does it hurt? Does it hurt having Steve’s body part jammed so far down your throat you can hardly breathe for worshipping it? Does it hurt trying so hard to be hip that you came up with THAT as a headline? Get out out the self-referential hipster chamber. You’ll feel better.

Great insightful post. As mentioned earlier, I also think the ‘just a big iphone’ comment is misguided. The bigger screen will profoundly change many of those experiences and tasks we did on the small iPhone.

[...] 01:24:19] BrianTRice #ipad #newton "The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness" cheerfulsw.com/2010/ipad-a-s [2010-04-28 01:24:14] WunDaii RT @touchAholics: ‘Ultra Kid’ – A Platformer from the Devs of Ravensword Coming to [...]

“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.” – Adam Engst

DocB & Newton Poetry:

I totally agree that touch is crucial for the experience! But a person can only cover so many points in a single essay I actually have essays on touch, specifically, and iPad apps vs web sites (like the eBay App vs eBay.com) coming up, so I hope you’ll come back and share your thoughts with me on those, too!

Adam,

Remember those silly pictures of “Here’s MY iPhone” — an iPod Photo rubberbanded to a Blackberry?

The iPhone had a user experience that people weren’t entirely accustomed to — but the idea of a PDA Phone meets iPod wasn’t that far off the beaten path.

Of course, the user experience is was revolutionary, not evolutionary… but that “Oh, well, duh” helped it get its foot in the door, I’m sure!

Dru, I loved that post of his, too. Really loved it.

Dave, nobody has ever thought I was cool enough to call me a hipster before. How sweet of you!

[...] out this article. ‹Previous Post Guardian article about ‘Exile on Main [...]

Genius post, Amy. Spot on. The iPod succeeded because it was a great device and people understood where it fit: “A 1,000 songs in your pocket.”

iPhone succeeded because it was a great device and people understood where it fit: “The Internet on a cell phone.”

iPad will succeed because it’s a great device and people will (eventually) understand where it fits: “Touch media and the Web.”

The Newton failed because it demanded too much of you. Consumers were tired of the gadget onslaught of the late 90s with so many PDAs. These were things people were not used to having with them all the time and only appealed to the geeks and pedantic.

When mobile phones became so common (and the user experience so bad), people were used to carrying their phone everywhere and the iPhone presented them a better one-of-those. The Newton was not a better organiser, it was a different organiser than everybody was used to (the calendar on the wall).

The iPad demands nothing more from people than their money. It is a better Facebook, a better eBay, a better Amazon than their current one. It is a better version of what they are already doing rather than asking them to adopt the not-Internet or mind-probe or something different than what they already access. They will come for the Internet and stay for the apps. And thus, a new mindset will be born, ready for a new place in their lives to fill.

The iPad is just the beginning.

The iPad can be perfectly “magical” unto itself, and yet still a disappointment, because of how starkly it reveals the havoc that Jobs’ refusal to offer a home-media device has wreaked on Apple’s product line. If Steve weren’t determined to make Apple a media-distribution company, there’d be a $500 Apple DVR/media/backup server under our flat-screen TVs, and the iPad would be not just its remote control but its natural extension into our laps and our social networks and out the door. But since he doesn’t want us to own and share our content, he won’t put HDMI and a big drive in the same box, so we have the Apple TV with no storage, the Mac Mini with no HDMI (and therefore no CableCard slot), and the Time Capsule with no video out. And, without the right answer to “but what’s the iPad for?”

Hey Dave:

My God, it must hurt — your being so miserable. I hope you get over it, in this lifetime!

Amy: Discovered your wonderful place on the web (and your gift for writing) while doing my daily reading of John Gruber’s blog. Kudo’s to both of you for being, uh, insightful and veracious.

Nic, You should do what we do: take an old Mac, hook it up to a Drobo, and install Boxee. Boxee is great, plays every format you can stick on it, you can back up to it, and you can add Air Video on your iPad/on the Mac to stream your content over the wireless network to your iPad and convert it on the fly.

Works great for us… and no need to rent stuff from Apple.

Apple’s