The question of whether the iPad is for content creation or just for consumption has more or less been beaten to death. As far as I’m concerned, it’s for creating and consuming. That said, I think the iPad out of the box is better suited for consumption than for creation.
Nick Bilton for the New York Times:
The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation. The keyboard on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typing anything over 140 characters. There isn’t a built-in pen for note-taking, either.
I’d have to agree with that, at least in part. The iPad isn’t “difficult to use for creation”, but using its built-in input methods – using your fingers to tap the screen and type on the virtual keyboard – for typing anything more than a tweet or scrawling some notes is far from great.
Jim Dalrymple commented on Nick Bilton’s article:
Really Nick, you can’t create things on the iPad? What about the musicians who record songs and albums, the artists that make amazing digital paintings, the authors who write books, or the millions of consumers who create memories with movies and photographs.
Yes, Jim, there probably are authors who have written books on the iPad. But I’ll bet you a case of your favorite beer they used an external keyboard. And the same goes for artists, who probably used a stylus or brush for creating their paintings.
I wouldn’t go as far as Bilton and say that Apple “doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a creator, but more of a consumer”. That’s just stupid. Apple regularly features apps in the App Store that are specifically for creation. Apple sees the iPad as their interpretation of the “post-PC” era, and surely “post-PC” doesn’t mean “post-creation”.
What I do think, though, is that Apple wants us to use our fingers and multi-touch for all (or at least most) of our interactions with the iPad. Admitting that a stylus or a physical keyboard works better for many tasks would be admitting multi-touch is flawed.
Potentially Related
- Small MacBook vs. the iPad
- iPad tunnel vision
- iPad as a laptop
- iPad in the enterprise
- Get A Free iPad 3
