The web is full of opinions about Apple’s new tablet ‘computer’, the iPad. With all that buzz and information at hand I can’t help but put my own opinion online. Because it’s my own opinion and nobody else’s it’s just fair that I offer some information where I’m coming from here:
- I’m a content user of Apple products. I’ve owned Apple notebooks for many years now and I thoroughly enjoy the Mac user experience on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X.
- I’m using an iPhone 3G for almost a year now and I like it very much, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. I’ve spent a small fortune on applications from the App Store, a lot of those are fun games.
- I’m a software engineer and technical consultant by day. I deal with software technology for a living.
- Although I enjoy using Apple’s Mac OS X a lot, I spend even more time in front of computers running GNU/Linux with a 100% Open Source software application stack.
So here we go. I’ll give you the short version of my opinion in just one sentence, if you don’t like it you won’t be forced to read on through the rest of this. In my humble opinion, all Apple did was to super-size the iPod Touch and give it a new name. Basically. Add a microphone, tweak the underlying software a bit to take advantage of the bigger screen but basically the iPad is a bigger version of the iPod Touch at almost the same price (ever wondered if the iPod Touch will now be getting much cheaper to compensate for this?!). So what’s the buzz? Because the iPad is basically just a bigger and better version of the iPod Touch, it shares all of its disadvantages that didn’t matter as long as you compared the iPod Touch to other media players. The iPad however will have to measure up against so called netbooks and other tablet PCs. And when you do that, you’ll be utterly disappointed.